How can visual and other sensory information be transmitted by genes?

Question

As we learned from those viral videos –look up “cat cucumber” if you haven’t seen them–, cats seem to be hard-wired to be scared of cucumbers and other objects that resemble snakes.

Behavioural aspects of animals are somehow hard-wired in our genes/brains, but, in this example, what triggers the behaviour is a visual stimulus: the sight of a cylindrical elongated green shape.

How can genes encode the idea of a green cylinder? Does this mean there is a one-to-one correspondence between genetic information and the experience of seeing greenness and cilyndricalness? Wouldn’t this mean that qualia are reductible to computable information?

Does genetics have a concrete answer to this question? How do the different philosophy of mind schools of thought explain it?

Answer 1

There are even more striking examples of what you describe as “visual information” encoded directly into the genetic code — the orchid and the wasp for instance…

At the very least it should be easy to see that the genetic code must minimally encode an organisms own bodily structure — itself a kind of spatial model — and in fact such a structural model is directly encoded in so-called HOX genes, which are instructions that tell an organism how to assemble and arrange its parts with respect to one another during growth and development.

Answer 2

I am very interested in this question, but it seems more biology/anthropology than philosophy.

Not all cats have this response. It's speculated to be about fear of snakes, so likely colour is not critical but a certain shininess and appearing suddenly in a cat's most vulnerable position that a predator snake would choose to attack from. A logical experiment would be to correlate different ancestral cat populations responses, and presence of snakes in their home range. I can't locate it now, but I think one of the domestic cat ancestors comes from an island, which would possibly have less snakes.

Another case is battery-farmed chickens that have never been outside, will still seek cover when a raptor silhouette passes over them, but not other types of bird.

Humans can experience this with spiders, you may have experienced it yourself. I love spiders, but, if one moves in my field of view it jumps out at me, I feel very aware of it.

So, the classical evolution argument, goes this must be a very slow process of animals that randomly have certain fears surviving more often. Spiders are probably the most ancient land animal, they have been a risk to humans and all ancestor species almost everywhere tropical. It's plausible there is an ancient 'circuit', and different conditions can trigger it. Jonathan Haidt has shown experiencing epidemics as a teenager can make people lastingly less positive towards strangers, so this kind of thing is definitely plausible.

Trypophobia was only coined around 2005, the fear of clusters of small holes. Unlike the spider movement awareness thing which is very wudespread, it seems quite variable, some people immediately know when they hear about it that they have this phobia, others can't even understand people having it. So it might be an interesting edge-case to explore. Heritage? Childhood experiences? Other factors?

Hygiene has been more critical to female human reproductive success, than male, because infant mortality has historically been so high and childcare overwhelmingly done by women. That doctors didn't save more people than they killed until the 1890s, is linked to poor sanitation around corpses. The clinical benefits of handwashing were discovered by comparing childbirth wards with male doctors to midwife-only wards. The medical profession was extremely resistant to this knowledge, while midwifes were practicing it without a research basis. Women become hypersensitive to smell during pregnancy, which may also be linked to hygiene issues. It's an area that could be tested and investigated.

Another intrusion of biology into what we think we have reasoned our way into, is covered here: How do ethicists tackle the question "Is it immoral to have sex in public places?" Is it possible to use rational and empirical ideas to answer? Sex in private seems to help us cooperate. Likely we had a mix of bonobo and chimpanzee strategies, and uniquely among hominids developed private sex essentially for game-theoretic reasons. This is an another area, with a fairly defined timescale (after hominids diverged from apes), that could be investigated.

We do a lot of post hoc reasoning, we feel an answer, and then reason our way to justifying it. These kind of 'biological intrusions' into our minds, must be profoundly impacting our reasoning, in ways we likely have blindspots for. In ways that go beyond normal considerations of cognitive biases. Because our instincts accumulate collective intelligence, intelligences about communal social and long term being, that an individual could not arrive at. And society is profoundly shaped by that. EO Wilson's eusociality and multilevel selection may be a way in.

Very interesting topic, super keen to hear any other clues. Perhaps modern work on AI simulations of protein folding, might begin to provide the tools for really understanding how data goes into genes, and back again.

Answer 3

Genes do not code for that kind of information; they code for protein construction which play a role in different cellular functions.

I don't believe visual information can be inherited. What I suspect is happening is that, when cats perceive the cucumber it changes their brain chemistry. That change in brain chemistry is functionally related to the perception of the cucumber. It's actually the change in brain chemistry--not the perception, itself--that sets off an instinctive reaction. In other words, the cat's body is "programmed" (not by genes, but other biological information) to react when a certain brain chemistry is "achieved" in the brain, or certain chemical conditions are met. That's probably what accounts for the "fear" reaction. The cat experiences the results (i.e., qualia) of the chemical reactions (the programmed ones in response to their initial perception). But this doesn't mean cats can't eventually learn not to be afraid of cucumbers and change the brain chemistry, or that the perception is self was programmed.