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Imprinting 

By: Decomposed in POPE IV | Recommend this post (4)
Thu, 25 Jan 18 5:32 AM | 75 view(s)
Boardmark this board | POPES NEW and Improved Real Board 		Msg. 42718 of 47202
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I'm taking a Coursera class on chickens right now and just heard something about how chickens learn that I think is really interesting. It's called "imprinting" - the fact that a chick must be exposed to certain things very early in its life or it may not develop properly. What follows is word-for-word from today's lecture:

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Animals can imprint on different types of queues such as visual queues, like a moving mother hen, or a moving person, as we've just heard.

They can also imprint upon auditory queues, like a hen's call. And they can also imprint on odors.

Modern poultry such as hen chicks and broiler chicks or meat chicken chicks are hatched artificially, and they are reared without adult chickens. So they tend to imprint upon one another. This may mean that they are not learning appropriately, for example, what is right to peck at. So, for example, trying to identify what is and isn't food. And this may have implications for their behavior later in life - such as whether or not they develop feather pecking.

It's also important that where people are rearing breeding birds that they rear the males and females within sight of each other so that they learn who is an appropriate mate.

The video on imprinting ends there - which is perfect since it's that very last sentence that I think is so important: The instructors says that it is important that the chicks grow up seeing the opposite sex so that they know who is an appropriate mate.

REALLY??? What would qualify as an "inappropriate" mate? Naturally, it would be a bird of the same sex.

Do human babies imprint? Of course they do. And if they aren't exposed sufficiently to the two sexes, they can imprint incorrectly... perhaps viewing their own sex as an appropriate one for mating.

This is fascinating. To me, it sounds like a plausible smoking gun explaining why we have homosexuality.




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Gold is $1,581/oz today. When it hits $2,000, it will be up 26.5%. Let's see how long that takes. - De 3/11/2013 - ANSWER: 7 Years, 5 Months

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