However, while the whole life process of ants and bees is fixed down to the smallest detail by rigid, hereditary instincts, the social pattern and interrelationships of human beings are very variable and susceptible to change.
It was the hall-mark of his aristocratic birth, the natural outcropping of many generations of fine breeding, an hereditary instinct of graciousness which a lifetime of uncouth and savage training and environment could not eradicate.
It was difficult to realize that they had gone; down through ages of darkness, cruelty, and ignorance, until their hereditary instincts of culture and humanitarianism had risen ascendant once more in the final composite race which now is dominant upon Mars.
This amazing transformation is ingrained in the players' genes, like the hereditary instincts that make swallows return to Capistrano or salmon swim upstream to spawn.
The hereditary instinct of obedience to her sovereign was strong within her, and the bonds of custom and society held her in their relentless shackles.
Like Darwin, he began with the premise that flowers were adapted to ensure cross-fertilisation, and added his own premise that most insects were not "limited by hereditary instinct to particular flowers".
Probably because it possesses an excellent hereditary instinct for working sheep and cattle, selection on the basis of usability was being carried out spontaneously, which has resulted also in the balance of its look.
Frequently, Terhune references atavism, attributing Lad's calling upon hereditary instincts to the presence of "a strain of wolf" in the brains of all collies.
But he was crafty as well as tenacious, and he had the Boer horror of being cut off--an hereditary instinct from fathers who had fought on horseback against enemies on foot.
It transmitted knowledge of the principle to the young - a hereditary instinct.