What is it that makes instinct? How is it that most animals have the ability to identify predators and prey without prior knowledge? How does a bird 'just know' how to build a nest or seduce a female with a complex mating ritual? These complex, innate behaviours are unexplainable by Mendelian inheritance. To date there is no agreement as to how these and many other innate behaviours were first encoded into an organism's genes, nor how they are inherited.
The Trauma-Encoded Emotional Memory (TEEM) theory postulates that within the DNA code of eukaryotes, there are not one but two distinct modes of inheritance. One being the mendelian-inherited expression of genes through their transcription to RNA and translation to protein in accordance with the central dogma; it is this system which we understand to be reponsible for the evolution of phenotypic traits. The other involves elements of noncoding DNA (ncDNA), formerly known as 'junk' DNA, which are inherited in a non-Mendelian fashion and may be responsible for the evolution of behavioural traits.
In metazoans, ncDNA is present as a relatively large proportion of the DNA code and numerous studies have now shown that these noncoding regions are highly conserved in a wide range of species. This has further led to the proposal that the amount of ncDNA present in an organism's DNA is a more valid measure of the organism's behavioural complexity than the number of protein-coding genes. TEEM Theory, or Teemosis, suggests that these noncoding regions of DNA are environmentally acquired units of adaptive information expressed as emotion and are the basis for emotional responses, innate behaviour and instinct.
Wheras protein-coding genes are largely resistant to environmental effects, the Teemosis Inheritance System (TIS) is triggered by non-lethal environemtal stressors. Any event brought about by an environmental stressor, usually a negatively associated event such as a predator attack or misadventure, but also positive events such as a mating event, which produces an emotional response of sufficient intensity to temporarily destabilise the homeostasis of the central nervous system and stimulate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis will increase the mutational activity of transposable elements, or transposons. This mutational activity may involve the duplication, deletion, rearrangement, and transposition of nucleotide sequences in ncDNA into new sequences which correspond to the stressor emotions. The new sequences of nucleotides do not behave as triplet codons as in those of the Universal Genetic Code, but rather behave more linguistically as rearrangeable units of 1 to 6 nucleotides in length. Each event which triggers the TIS produces its own unique linguistic sequence.
The Teemosis hypothesis argues that all instincts and innate behaviours in animals are ancestrally genetically encoded and heritable elements of ncDNA which are expressed as emotional responses to certain situations. If confirmed, the TEEM theory has the potential to create a paradigm shift in our understanding of the functioning of ncDNA, behaviour and genetic diseases which is nothing short of revolutionary.
