Catching up here:
1. Jovaro, I am only aware of two instincts humans have, off the top of my head: sucking and grasping, which are instincts in the infant. We don't even have the instinct to be afraid of fire! Witness how many little kids play with it and get burned. So you think sucking and grasping can be controlled? Or let me know if you are thinking of something else you consider 'instinct.'
2. Helix, blinking your eye, etc. is NOT 'instinctive'. It is no more instinctive than the beating of your heart or your breathing. With blinking and breathing you have some voluntary control, but when you forget or otherwise cease to consciously control either, your autonomic nervous system takes over. Your body's ability to function in and of itself is not considered instinct. Instinct is part of a reaction to something outside the body which is built in to the organisim and is inviolable. For instance, the type of nest a bird will build is instinct. They are all the same for each species. No individuality and they do not need to be taught. Salmon swim to the place of their hatching by instinct. No individuality and they do not need to be taught. This is instinctive behavior and a far cry from blinking an eye!
3. If girls put on makeup because of some kind of instinct, then ALL girls would do it (who had access to makeup). And we would do it ALL the time. Neither is the case. Prettying up oneself is evidently not instinctive! It is learned behavior.
4. You may have a point about humans being instinctively social, but even that can be argued against. Note the hermit, for instance. Some of us humans actually seem to prefer living life much more on a solitary basis than the rest of us.
5. Is survival a human instinct? How, then, is suicide explained?
6. On My Way, 'lashing out' may be a first response, but because many others do not react that way, you would have a hard time labeling it as instinctive.
7. Helix, are you aware of any known time that a male octopus stops pursuit of food to court a female octopus? Or were you making that scenario up? Please answer this question.
8. Helix, you wrote, "By the way: A gene is (to put it simply) a hereditary piece of genetic information that determines a particular characteristic in an organism. " I'm afraid that definition is so far out of date that it is almost embarrassing. We have found that it is almost always a combination of genes that is responsible for any given trait, and, as well, that the timing of expression in the play of those genes is just as important. It is much, MUCH more complex than what you have stated.
9. You then stated, "Those that are most adapted to their surroundings produce the largest amount of offspring and that particaler set of genes has a greater chance of appearing in later generations. " And that is also wrong. There is no genetic law that says the individual best suited to his or her environment will even be fertile, let alone have MANY offspring. This idea of being well-suited to one's environment somehow having something to do with fertility is fallacious.
10. It is not a gene which evolution claims can become a permanent part of the gene pool of a species, but an ALLELE, or variation of a gene. There is no known way for a de novo protein to be formed by a cell, let alone a de novo gene!
11. About the similarity of other primate genes to man's. That is something that made me laugh from the first. First of all, the way this was measured is bizarre. I don't have time to go into it, but it was bizarre to make that claim regarding the tests that were used. Secondly, as I stated before, it is not simply the genes, but the interplay between them, and even more, the timing of expression. This last is controlled by something which is RADICALLY different in humans and other primates: the 'junk DNA'. This junk, as I pointed out in another thread in this science forum, is not junk. These are regulatory sections of the chromosomes. To give a picture: Two piles of bricks. They are 99% alike. However the directions for assembly are different. One becomes a fountain and the other a fireplace. The directions made all the difference, not the bricks themselves. Same idea, roughly, with the genes and the regulatory sections. The one thing the bricks, and genes, have in common was a common maker in each case.
12. Emotions that 'pop up' have to be deciphered by the individual in which they pop up. C.S. Lewis had an interesting picture explaining this: a man stomach will lurch when confronted with a horrific scene. But there is that exact same lurch when he sees something in a sunset or piece of art which stirs him deeply, or hears something in a symphony or a child's voice which causes that response. The man knows from the situation what that lurch 'means'. Thus, his intellect is at least as important as his physical response -- and the intellect is not instinctive! Actually, the lurch in the stomach isn't, either. No child feels it. They are curious about gory scenes as much as revulsed by them -- it depends on the kid. And a beautiful sunset or lovely piece of music or art is not nearly as interesting, in most cases, a a candy bar! You need to be very careful about what you call instinctive!
13. If being a vessel for our genes were the most important thing, birth control would never have caught on!
14. Finally, Helix, I would be very interested in talking to you twenty years from now, when reality has challenged the ideas you are getting from books.