Evolution vs Creationism

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Exactly, humans naturally and instinctively do this. The ability to have a social hierarchy that is both horizontal, ie concerned with the people around us, and also vertical, ie concerned with the ancestors and higher powers, is part of the conceptual abstract thinking that our ancestors were under selective pressure to obtain. However, conceptualizing things does not guarantee that they exist. Right now I can conceptualize Santa, a being whom I was raised to believe lived at the North Pole and who gave children presents if they were good, coal if they were bad, and who somehow came down the chimney despite most houses in Australia where I was raised having no chimneys. I can explain in detail a lot of things about Santa, everything from the way he looks to the way he sounds, and possibly the way he smells since I assume he smells like an old man with a weight problem. Now, common sense says that there is no such thing as Santa, despite the fact that the majority of Western culture being raised to think that there is a Santa and despite the fact that we continue to pass on the tradition from one generation to the next knowing full well that it is not true. Also, a lot of people, I think the majority, are taught to believe that they have some sort of guardian angel looking out for them, despite there being not a shred of evidence supporting this. People die, are hurt, suffer and the like all despite supposedly having a guardian angel, and people who believe in them and people who dont suffer the same things on a more or less equal frequency. Yet, I have heard this being said countless times "Thanks to my guardian angel I survived this or that", or something along those lines. The belief is passed on from generation to generation without any evidence supporting it. This is the same as souls and higher powers, they are constructs of the mind, instinctively thought up to explain the world around us or to help comfort us.

There is nothing wrong as far as I am concerned with having gods or higher powers, I myself have more gods and goddesses than I can ever hope to learn about. All of them are nothing more, however, than small personalized aspects of the One, or That. It is That which I am seeking to understand more about, and one day I hope to understand fully That, science is just a means to an end for me. Yet, I realise that even this inexpressible Oneness of the universe is not an actual real being of any sort, but rather it is just an anthropomorphized sense of wonderment and awe. Nothing wrong with anthropomorphizing things so long as you keep it in context and know that it is just a concept in your mind that has no reality outside of your mind.

I highly recommend this issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: ‘The sapient mind: archaeology meets neuroscience’ compiled by Colin Renfrew, Chris Frith and Lambros Malafouris, if any of you can get your hands on it. It has articles written by experts in the fields of neuroscience, anthropology, paleontology, cognitive science and more, and it talks in depth about the issues currently being discussed here.

 

Good luck, Nataraja. I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about when you say "The One or That". I think I do understand what you are saying as long as you stick with the premise that we are animals and not some creature created in the image and likeness of some supernatural being.

In my early years I was influenced by Christian Science theory. "All is Infinite Mind in all Its infinite manifestations." We, humans, other animals, plants, earths, suns, the whole universe are One because we are manifestations of the One Mind.

I was never taught to believe in Santa Claus. This is a fairly recent development in concept and is based on a historical character. Around which myth was woven just as the Greek and Roman gods and demi gods developed.

Of the 6 billion people in the world the majority believe in some form of divinity and have some form of religion. It seems that humans in general need religion and need to believe in something greater than themselves.

What the future holds I have no idea and I won't be around to find out.

 

YOU MEAN THERE'S NO SANTA CLAUS!?!?!

I'm crushed, dismayed, depressed and heartbroken. I'm going to find a corner and cry.

 

Nataraja, then you are defying your instincts just by disbelieving. You are living proof of exactly what you claim cannot happen.

On top of that, your assumptions around instincts are poor at best. Language is not instinctual to humans. We don't make up our own if we aren't exposed to it at an early age. On top of that, I've already given you examples of people who defy instincts. You can't look at man and say everything he does is instinct simply because you want to believe we are guided by our instincts. That's circular reasoning. There is a set definition for instincts in psychology, and mankind is the only animal I know of that can resist and defy those instincts. Other animals may be guided to odd behaviour through manipulation of those instincts (by man), but instinct still rules.

And here we go again. At least I can admit that my beliefs are just that. You cannot prove the randomness of evolution any more than I can prove guidance. By their very nature, either one could appear as the other. No matter how patterned or organized the system is, you can always call it random because, by definition, random can produce anything. Likewise, no matter how mixed up it seems, I can always claim a super-intelligent guiding force behind the whole complex system, simply because we know subtle guidence for complex systems often seems random to the untrained eye.

Again, you dismiss the spiritual as impossible without even really considering it, you then define everything as physical, even if you can't categorize it in such a grouping, and then try to use that to 'prove' that there is no spiritual. You rely quite heavily on your own assumptions and circular reasoning.

 

That is pretty much exactly it. I follow the hindu school of thought called Advaita Vedanta to the best of my abilities, having no guru it is hard. Science is just one of the many ways in which I seek to understand Brahman. I also meditate, smoke cannabis (the holy plant of Shiva, btw), dance (since dance is active meditation), and DJ psychedelic spiritual melodic trance, Goa Trance to be specific, in order to gain insight into the inexpressible Oneness of That.

Completely way off topic...but...


Sheyba - Ganesh

 

Wow, some really deep stuff in there Nataraja, especially in post #239. Now I get what is meant by the Invisible Gardener, and I suddenly remember hearing about it in uni.
I liked the Continuity Hypothesis too. It makes sense that socio-cultural behaviour can be passed on through the community, and isn't hard-coded into our genetic structure.
One argument that I haven't heard creationists use often, is that of our existence, perception, and consciousness. No matter how accurately science can describe the make up of the world around us, our physical bodies, and the wiring in our brains, it still seems miraculous. The fact that we can experience our existence this way, will probably remain a mystery beyond the realms of human scientific explanation.
Just think of the vastness of it: For 10 billion years there was so much space & matter, but nothing to experience it. Life started on this planet, but it would still take another 3.7 billion years before we could percieve any of it. In another 5, the sun will have expanded to swallow up the earth, but intelligent life will have ceased to exist way before then. To think that our perception is limited to one (or more?) tiny pockets of life and habitability in such an astronomically large space, filled with infinitely large distances of cold nothingness - it's just mindboggling! Nataraja, you describe it perfectly when you say:

But still. I can get where you're coming from, but it seems like a leap of faith is required. Belief in science is necessary, and this gives me pause. I haven't let religion explain away theories of nature through faith, and I'm not going to start blindly following science, only to explain away miracles through faith. Our existence, awareness, perception and consciousness remains as miraculous today, as it was when religion first came into being.
If an eloquent preacher were to use this, and hammer home the miraculousness of our existence, then I'd be dumbstruck. I couldn't directly counter his argument.
Fortunately, the old-fashioned rhetoric of the 'soul' is used, and I don't associate this with the 'miracle' I just talked about. Most preachers today describe the soul as a not-yet-validated ticket into a place called heaven, and that just seems silly.
NOG, if by a soul you mean 'the miraculousness of our existence', then I recognize it as more than just an abstract concept. But much like I can't be sure you have a soul, we can't be sure either, that our pets don't have a similar form of awareness.

Well, at least scientists can admit that they don't and won't know the answers to all questions. Religion promises you will know it all, when you go to this place called heaven. Or was it just that God knows all? Anyway, the possibility of answers being beyond our reach, is denied. As for the process of evolution: We have documented how mutations are random and unguided. We can even make predictions about mutations. Genes want to survive, and that is the only driving goal in evolution - no conscious guidance involved, just chemistry.

 

Well exactly, coineineagh, socio-cultural behaviour can be passed on through the community. Just take a look, for an example off the top of my head, at the Sumerian pickaxe, a humble tool in all respects, yet essential to life on the river plains of southern Mesopotamia. It was invented so long ago that they forgot who actually made the first one, and it was such an important part of their lives that since they could not remember who made the original one, it just had to be a gift of the gods. To them it was an example of divine providence, guiding the chosen people of the gods towards a greater good. I would fully give you rep for all your posts, but I have to spread the love a bit more.

The very reason why I am studying biology. Even at the molecular level it seems miraculous, and yet at the same time it isnt, it is completely natural. I stand in awe every time I go outside and see the life around me, consciously aware that each and every single organism I see is made of pretty much the same building blocks as I am.

Yeah it is...have you never heard of the people who are raised in isolation, or perhaps raised by other animals, and yet still have a primitive language of their own that they have invented? Language is very much instinctual in humans.

Every single thing that a man does is natural for man to do because to do otherwise would be against the nature of man. Our nature is for the most part hard-wired into our brains. Studies with identical twins seperated at birth and raised in diverse environments confirms this. Or, how about a woman hearing the cry of a baby who is not her own and reacting to it? I have sisters, and a mother, and I have many female friends, and they all instinctively act in a very similar manner around babies. Or how about people who are born with the instinct to play musical instruments? Or people who are born with the instinct to make art? Human instinctual behaviour is incredibly diverse, and for the most part psychology misses the point of this because of its grounding in Western culture. A classic example is when psychologists ask native people to put four things into two categories; spade, axe, saw and log, with the native peoples continuously putting 'axe saw log' into one category and 'spade' into the other until the befuddled psychologists ask them to arrange them the way stupid people would, and the natives then make the two categories as being 'axe saw spade' and 'log'. The only school of thought in psychology that has the right idea is evolutionary psychology.

The very act of defying base instinct is itself instinctual behaviour. In human consciousness there are differing levels of commands, with some top level commands being able to suppress lower level commands.

You have got to be kidding me. Occams Razor anyone? Or the Invisible Diligent Gardener perhaps?

Scientists know how evolution works. It is an entirely natural process. One of the fundamental parts of evolutionary theory is that it is not goal orientated. This is stuff you learn in first year biology, its pretty straight forward. Anything which favours survival and reproduction is beneficial, and hence will be passed on to successive generations. However this isnt always a guarantee. For example, a lot of the native birds of New Zealand evolved to be flightless, which is wonderful if you have no reason to fly, ie absence of predators and conservation of energy etc. Yet add humans to the mix, and along with them their mammalian introductions. Suddenly an adaptation which was favourable for perhaps a million years or more is now utterly worthless and even detrimental to survival. You cannot say 'Oh but thats how Mr Designer intended it to be, praise the power and wisdom of letting flightless birds die '. Theres no sense in making things more complex than need be by the addition of spirits and souls which add nothing at all to the equation, its analogous to insisting that an equation just has to be '5+5+0+0+0=10' and refuting '5+5=10' as ignoring the mystical power of the 0. It is just not helpful or beneficial to evolution to have any room for non-science non-testable opinions in the theory.

I dont dismiss the spiritual as being impossible, I am an incredibly spiritual person. I have spiritual experiences every single day. I am in constant awe of the amazing-beyond-words-and-beyond-all-description universe that we live in. To say that I dismiss the spiritual as impossible is to miss the point of most of what I have been saying all this time. Yes, I am a physicalist, yes I am spiritual. They are not mutually exclusive. What I do dismiss in actuality is 'metaphysical spirituality'. It adds absolutely nothing to our understanding on a realistic level. If metaphysical spirituality added anything of merit to science then I would embrace it, yet it doesnt add anything of merit to science. If a scientist asked 'What is it that makes us who we are?' and came to the conclusion 'Well it just has to be a soul', do you not see how that is just a dead end conclusion? It doesnt lead to finding out how the brain works, it doesnt lead to understanding how the brain creates the mind. Its just a dead end.

Really? Nothing Ive said, unless stated as being such, is just my own assumption. I wouldnt bother wasting my time posting my own assumptions and faith statements here, no point and Im not interested in the slightest in doing unnecessary things. On the contrary, your beliefs cause you to rely heavily on your assumptions.

 

Umm, no, new studies have shown that is not true.

seems you need to read up some

Well that seems to fly in the face of what the people dealing with these children think.

Just look up the case of Danielle Crockett (now Dani Lierow).

Again, apparently not.
http://www.bio-medicine.org/biology...than-previously-believed--study-shows-6683-1/

You should read the whole article as it is very interesting

That has got to be the dumbest thing ever written here(and as the holder of the IotW plaque, i'm an expert!). "Every thing you do is instinctive, even if it goes against every instinct!" Umm, no. So its instictive to jump off a 200' cliff even though all of your insticts are scraming at you "just WTH do you think you are doing!?"

@coin, i just couldn't let it pass

So for things you believe in the ends justify the means? Hmm, i believe that democrats are bad for the country, so by your reasoning i am well within my rights to kill off all democrats.
Or someone who believes that those who break the law can't be changed so they are pefectly within their rights to kill all crooks.
Or the people that believe that everyone has to believe as they do or they can kill you(certain muslims come to mind)

 

Said the idiot of the week...

I never said ""Every thing you do is instinctive, even if it goes against every instinct!""

What I said was "The very act of defying base instinct is itself instinctual behaviour.", which can also be said "Humans instinctively act against their base instincts". Reason why...machiavellian intelligence. It is beneficial to our survival to mask our instincts when the need arises. You misreading what I say, and then misquoting what I say, has got to be the dumbest thing ever written here. I am clearly talking about higher and lower instinct levels. Certain instinctual behaviours can suppress others. For example, altruism. And not just simple altruism, but altruism towards strangers who do not share many similar genes. It is an instinctual behaviour to preserve your own life, yet people can suppress that behaviour to save the life of another person who is not a close relative, which is in itself counter productive to the survival of the genes you carry. Yet that act of altruism is itself an instinct that comes from the unique way in which humans form social connections with each other. Of course we can also go the other way and instinctively switch it off when we lose our temper.

Again with the comment regarding scientists knowing how evolution works and it being an entirely natural process. Misquoting me is not going to make you any less of an idiot of the week. When I said that scientists know how evolution works I was well aware of there being competing models of how evolution works, I am an evolutionary biology student after all. What I was implying however was that scientists know that it is an entirely natural process with no divine intervention or guidance. Your quote about yeast cells adds nothing to the argument because it doesnt disprove that evolution is an entirely natural process, nor does it disprove that scientists know how evolution works as a natural process without divine guidance or divine intervention. For the scientists to even do that study they need an understanding of how evolution works, and they do. However, this does not imply that we know every single detail about how evolution works. Also, I am a supported of the competition model as well as the punctuated equilibrium model.

Also again with the twins comment, you seemed to have missed the point again. I never said that twins will do everything exactly the same, I never said that they will both always be artists or both always be musicians. All I implied was that the close genetic similarity of twins has an impact on how they behave, even in diverse environments. Also, I got my information on twins from Psychology by Peter Gray which was my text book from 4 years ago.

In regards to language being instinctive, there are proven areas of the brain that are the source of language, Broca's Area, and also proven areas of language comprehension, Wernicke's Area. Its hard-wired in to the brain, it is instinctive.

I also have to say that you took the comment made by coineineagh concerning conservation completely out of context with the way you applied it to democrats, crooks and muslims. You are switching levels again, taking something about conservation of biological diversity and applying it to completely unrelated things. Tsktsk. This adds nothing to the argument at all, all it is is you misrepresenting the opinion of coineineagh. If what you said was to do with biological diversity and not democrats, crooks or muslims (while they are organisms they have nothing at all to do with what coineineagh was saying), such as 'The end results do not justify the means when it comes to conservation because...' then that would have actually added something to the argument, and it would not have just been some almost random comment.

You quote mine, you misrepresent what other people say, and you switch argument levels...

 

Yeah martaug, your last bit was a load of hyperbolism. With conservation, my beliefs are unimportant. It's the world around us that needs to be protected, that's all.
About the twins and language: The older that twins get, the more differences will creep in, that makes sense. Isolated children will develop growls and snarls, maybe to communicate with local wildlife, maybe not. The fact that we don't recognize any language pattern doesn't say much.
And the thing you mentioned about yeast cells is about our previous assumption of the 'survival of the fittest' being adjusted to 'survival of the fit enough' in cases of low selective pressure. The reason selective pressures were low, is that the yeast was probably plate-grown on a rich medium. Survival of the fit enough is relatively old, so the 'new discovery' probably refers to this process being first documented in yeast, or something. In any event, I think it illustrates the randomess of evolution even more.
Planned, guided evolution would suggest successive replacements of the population structure, leading to a planned outcome. Early evolutionists, even Darwin, were still slightly thinking in terms of design. So how do you propose that multiple diverging populations within yeast is a sign of intelligent design?

 

Who mentioned ID? Not me, all of my posts were directly debating specific arguments posted by our local cannibis smoker nataraja.

To both coin & nataraja, the examples listed for the idea behind your comment(the end justifying the means) was intentionally the most extreme, to show just were that kind of mindset leads. For a less extreme example, lets say i belong to the church of elvish wonder - whose tenants state that we should live in harmony with natire & using wood to build anything is wrong & harms the world around us. Using the idea that you espouse it would be perfectly alright for me to burn done all houses made of wood(since i believe it is bad for the world) as long as noone is harmed.

Coin, you really need to read the whole article, they had expected to see a succession of mutations one after another as each mutation took over the culture wiping out all non mutation cells. This wasn't what they got, the initial mutation in partA allowed it to grow more than the mutation in partB. However, partB didn't die off, it mutated again. It still had the 1st mutation that hadn't been beneficial but had developed a 2nd one that had. In some circumstances the initial beneficial mutation died off after the cells with the less beneficial mutation changed again. They weren't seeing the expected A)1 mutation - ok everybody adapts it or everyone with it dies off, B) ok new generation lets try it again.
Instead they were getting multiple mutations at once that in some circumstances were in response to other mutations.

[edit] I see where some of the confusion on nataraja's part may have come from.
I meant to post the quote from nataraja
"Scientists know how evolution works."
not the 2 lines of "Scientists know how evolution works. It is an entirely natural process"
That could make it seem i was arguing against evolution being a natural occurence. I wasn't i was just arguing against the belief that it is completely understood.

Oh nataraja, i also put your comment just behind the "dumbest comment" comment

 

Actually, since mutations are random its possible for a population of organisms to develop different adaptations to cope with stress. Not to mention, due to yeast being a simple microorganism that is able to grow into large numbers quickly and thus collect mutations quickly, we see evolution in an accelerated rate. If anything, the article seems to strengthen the arguments of evolution.

 

I really really really dont smoke all that much, like once every few months, if that. Probably most people on here smoke way more than me, Im just completely open about it.

I wasnt arguing that it was completely understood, I was arguing that it is understood sufficiently enough to know that there is not any sort of divine guidance or divine intervention. Of course we still have a lot of things we dont know fully about evolutionary theory, but we know how it works. Random mutations, random fertilization, genetic drift, sympatric speciation and allopatric speciation etc etc. This is what I was arguing for, nothing more.

Fair enough. Probably will teach me the valuable lesson of not staying up all night posting here while extremely tired and exhausted in hot weather...which I am still doing now. I should go to bed but that will mess up my body clock even more, so Im going to stay awake for another 10 hours or so...

I do admit that my clarity has not been good in a lot of the posts since the Obama inauguration as I had to stay up all night to watch it, and thats just totally messed my brain up. I could definitely do a lot better...

edit...

Anyway, I have just read this article by my favourite, and most influential, lecturer at my university;The Evolution of the Human Mind: Darwinian Science or Creation Myth?, and I have to admit that it slapped some sense back in to me in regards to empiricism and various other things I had already studied but had somehow forgotten, such as the work of Andy Clark. This article actually made me seriously consider going back to cognitive science, which I would in a heart beat if it wasnt so 'Turing machine this' 'Chinese Box that' at my university. It seems that every time the lecturer who wrote this critical notice runs classes on evolutionary approaches to human minds and human nature, the university makes him change it to something else. Shame really. Anyway, his name is Dr Derek Browne, click the link to go to his staff profile. He is one of my heroes

Basically this article by Derek Browne is what I have been stumbling with explaining clearly, having to resort to my memories of classes 2, 3 and even 4 years ago, I have long since thrown away my notes, but still kept the text books.

Another article by Derek Browne that may be of interest is: Konrad Lorenz on Instinct and Phylogenetic Information, which I havent read, Im too tired...Im going to lay down for a bit...

 

Oh i figured from the way you talked about it that you were going through a quarter bag every other day!
I figured you were a reincarnated rastafarian

 

Too bad he isn't a Pastafarian, the bonafide religion of the atheists (oxymoron, I know).

martaug, I didn't read the article, but from what you wrote, and what was in the link, it seemed more to support the chaos theory, than any kind of plan or goal behind evolution. I mentioned Intelligent Design in error, since the focus has now shifted from that failed hypothesis towards the question whether there's a plan behind evolution.
But from what I know, the nature of evolution theory makes it unreconcileable with conscious planning towards a desired outcome. It is chaotic, and we see no evidence of a force steering it.
As for why these yeast cells displayed so many differing subpopulations, with mutations that randomly survived, were outcompeted, and persisted: As said before, low selective pressure, little contact/mobility on a growth plate, and of course the huge population size involved, will have contributed to this. Of all these, the population size will be the most influential, since a rich medium plate will contain more yeast cells that there would be humans if earth were the size of Jupiter. And as Faye mentioned, the short reproduction cycle of yeast allows us to witness natural selection at a much faster rate.

 

Yeast contamination - the scourge of every cancer researcher.

 

Haha, no not at all. It is just a tool, not something I abuse.

No, Ive clearly stated I am a devotee of Shiva and that I try to follow the Advaita Vedanta school of hindu philosophy to the best of my ability sans a guru. Cannabis is the sacred plant of Shiva, and it is used as a tool in the aid of sadhana.

 

No, I haven't. In fact, I have heard of a number of cases of 'wild children' and if they were found after about 5 years of age, they were never able to learn any human language as more than symbolic references. That means they learned 'Dog' means that big furry thing, but never got to "See Spot run! Run, Spot, run!" Decades of work were insufficient to teach them language. The human brain is wired to have the ability to learn language at an early age, yes, but language is not instinctive.

Different definitions of 'nature'. Ok, I see your point, there. I just disagree with your definition.

No, they haven't. As indicated by Martaug's post, twins raised seperately show no more behavioural similarity to each other than do random strangers. After just a few years, they even look different. Genetics doesn't even hard-code for our physical make-up, but rather defines growth patterns in relation to different stimuli.

Oh, I'm not arguing that there are instincts. We agree there.

Doesn't happen. You're confusing a natural talent that may potentially be developed and trained, but that by itself is nothing, with inherrant, ingrained instinctual behaviour. For humans, I'm not even 100% sure that walking is instinctual, though I think it is. Do feral children walk before exposure to humanity? I don't know that I've ever read one way or another, or if I did I don't remember. The point is, if you took Mozart as a baby and never exposed him to music, ever, until he was 20, and then put him in a room with a piano, he wouldn't be an instant musical genius.

You obviously haven't studied any psychology in the west recently. Sociology recognized that flaw about, oh, 30 years ago I think. Give or take.

I do understand your point, but you're wrong. Your problem is you have defined all human activity as instinct, when it isn't. That's not what instinct is. You may as well say that all humanity is blue, because you have defined 'blue' as meaning 'composed of organic molecules'. The vast majority of human activity is socialized, meaning we learn it from others, not instinctual, meaning we would do it even if we hadn't seen others do it. When sociology and psychology are looking for human instincts, they look at a broad variety of societies at various levels of development and global interaction. They look at the US, Japan, African tribal cultures, cultures in the jungle that only met other humans 10 years ago, etc. When they all share a common behaviour (like crying), we can safely say it's an instinct. When they don't (like blushing in reaction to being nervous), we say it's socialized, or a learned behaviour, not instinct.

Ok, Occam's Razor. Which is simpler, that a random system of coin tosses produced 10^23 heads in a row, or that someone placed them there? The odds of evolution producing complex working systems over just, what 3.5 billion years, are astronomical. And don't even get me started on the posibility of life itself being random in origin. Occam's Razor says there should be a guiding force behind it, simply because the odds of it happening randomly are so high. Hardly concrete, sure, but you asked for it.

Really, that's why there's billions of dollars of research going into it every year, because we already know the answers?

Agreed, though I think our definitions of 'natural' may not match.

Wait, wait, are you using the theory to try to prove the theory? Isn't that like saying, "We know evolution happens because the theory of evolution says it does"?

Ah, but how can you prove that a system is random? How can you prove that the mutations that occur are random, and that it's pure chance that the first bacteria to evolve resistance to drug X isn't squished between two rocks? Mutation, according to your theory, is 100% random, and even survival is heavily random. Prove the randomness.

Ah, but in higher math, those 0's become very important. Anyway, I'm not trying to add to evolutionary theory, I'm just trying to get you out of the thought process that 'science is everything, science is God'.

That's only true if you stop there. If you then continue to ask questions, growth continues unabated.

Ok, if they aren't your's then they're someone else's. The point is, several of them have already been corrected, or at least pointed out as groundless. Assumptions have been made.

Care to give any examples?

 

This isn't specifically directed at NOG - but more of a general comment:

Do we really have more than 1 or 2 examples of feral children existing? Especially ones that aren't old enough to walk? I mean, it's completely inconceivable that a child of less than 2 years of age could survive on its own - even if it lived in a climate that death from exposure wouldn't be a possibility. My son is 17 months old, but there's no way he'd be able to feed himself if he was left alone in the wild. I'm just not convinced that feral children are a good source to use for arguing whether or not behavior is instinctual. For one, there's so few examples, and secondly, the youngest a child could possibly survive on it's own in the wild would be when it is 2 or 3 years old, and by then things like walking and simple speech should already have developed. The thought of a child not yet old enough to walk surviving on it's own seems quite impossible.

 

Here is a link to a list of feral children that claims the stories to be confirmed. eralchildren.

Please note that many of the children in more modern times were confined and abused by adults.

Assuming that these stories are accurate and properly documented it would seem that walking and speech are not instinctual to humans.

Read further and make up your own mind.

edit: oops, I forgot to note that some of the stories were discovered to be hoaxes.