#innateness

Your genes aren't the blueprint that dictate how you'll develop. They just create the specific tools your body uses, and the effectiveness of said tools/whether or not they'll actually be created/etc are highly complex processes.

All those tools are all dependant on everything from the temperature inside the womb during critical stages of development, to epigenetic tags in the parents that somehow make their way into the germ line cells & change the toolbox.

Genes arent omnipotent.

Green and vervet monkeys live on either side of Africa and their evolutionary paths diverged 3.5 million years ago, and yet the two species share a hard-wired vocabulary when faced with danger, clever experiments have shown. The new research, published Monday, sheds light not only on how primates -- including humans -- respond to threats, but also on the building blocks of language itself.

Vervet monkeys in the savannah of east Africa utter three distinct cries depending on whether they spot a leopard, a snake or an eagle, their three main predators. Fellow monkeys who hear the cries but cannot see the peril react accordingly: the leopard call sends them scurring up a tree, a snake call prompts them to stand motionless on two legs, and the eagle cry makes them scan the sky while seeking shelter.

It's as if a sentinel is shouting, "Freeze, it's a snake!", or "Get off the ground, it's a leopard!"

The discovery thirty years ago of these unique warning cries sparked debate as to whether they were like primitive words, noted Julia Fisher, head of the cognitive ethology laboratory at the German Primate Center in Göttingen, Germany and senior author of a study in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

It also raised the question of where they came from. Did young vervets learn them through imitation, were the cries genetically imprinted? To deepen their understanding, Fisher and colleagues set up an experiment with a community of green monkeys in Senegal which they have been observing for more than a decade.Like their distant cousins across the continent, green monkeys also emit specific danger calls for big cats and snakes, and react accordingly. But because the raptors in their neighbourhood pose no threat, anything like the vervet "eagle call" is simply not in their repertoire.

Even when the scientists tried to scare the green monkey with dummy birds, it didn't work. "Any attempt to get them to vocalise in response to model eagles failed utterly," said Fisher. But then she had an idea. "We decided to bring in a drone and fly it over the green monkeys, to expose them to something potentially dangerous in the air that they had never seen before," she explained. The drone flew at an altitude of about 60 metres (200 feet) over the unsuspecting animals. Once the monkeys spotted it, the response was immediate: they gave alarm calls and scurried for cover.

Not only was the cry different from the response to leopards or snakes, it was "strikingly similar" to the eagle alarms of East African vervets. "Despite 3.5 million years of evolutionary divergence, the call structure stayed essentially the same," Fisher noted. In the vocabulary of evolutionary biologists, in other words, the danger cry was "highly conserved."

The fact that the green monkeys reacted to a drone and not other large birds native to the area suggests a subtle but important distinction, Kurt Hammerschmidt, also from the German Primate Center, told AFP. "The alarm call is not linked to eagles per se," he said by phone. "It seems to correspond to a broader category: 'things that fly'." To see what the monkeys might have learned from the drone fly-over, the scientists followed up a few days later with a second experiment. They hid a loudspeaker near a lone monkey that was looking for food and played back the sound of the drone. "Upon hearing the sound, the animal looked up and scanned the sky," Fischer said. Subsequent tests showed that a single exposure to a new threat was enough for the monkeys to know what the sound means, showing a remarkable ability to adapt. 

They reference familiar justifications: neuroessentialist pseudoscience that the prefrontal cortex doesn’t stop maturing until 24; but also that all trans care is self-harm (“mutilation”) and cannot be consented to; and that doctors push hormones and suppressants on patients and lie about how efficacious they are (when essentially all the trans people I know can provide personal testimonials to the opposite).

They discuss openly how starting with under-18 bans was strategic. Some excerpts:

Shriver: “If we are going to stop this for anyone under 18, why not apply it for anyone over 18? It's harmful across the board and that's something we need to take into consideration in terms of the endgame."

Click: "That's a very smart thought there. I think what we know legislatively is we have to take small bites.”

Schriver:” I'm not saying anything in the way of dismissing what you're saying about children and puberty blockers, that's all very valid and necessary, I'm just saying moreover in addition to that, we have to be looking at the endgame simultaneously, maybe even using that to move the window to say that this isn't just wrong 0-18, it's wrong for everyone and we shouldn't be allowing that to happen."

I’ve included full quotations below from their Twitter spaces discussion, which was automatically posted and discovered by Erin In The Morning. Later in the discussion they seem to realize they should be discussing this offline. It’s hateful stuff.