Thank you for the reply.

You mention examples of imprinted complex behavior that is learned. "Presumably any innate behaviour is in some sense or other DNA encoded, or is so to some degree". The issue is,
how does this imprinted behavior become encoded in DNA?  

Lamarck is not an easy person to pin down, and so I should put my question independently
of him: is there a permanent (vs. epigenetic) inheritance of behavior? I assume that "permanent" means genetic encoding, and I gather the real issue is not so much the fact that organisms
inherit complex behaviors, but finding a mechanism that can explain how behavior can influence
DNA the first place.

Often arguments are made that a complex organ that is functional as a whole cannot be
readily explained in Darwinian terms (natural selection) because the emergent whole contains
more information than that held by its constituents. In the social sciences this issue
comes up in criticisms of functionalist explanations, which describe a functional system
in terms of unobservable extrinsic functional properties of its parts that depend on their relation
to the whole, but which fails to explain how something can have a functional property before
that whole that emergences from its its functional properties. 

I had speculated about such a mechanism and unfortunately was not clear. You note that
embryonic development is subject to outside influences. True, a newborn comes into the
world with, say, some basic ontology (it seems knowing the difference between categories
of things and individual things, causal relations, seeing self as another other, etc.). But
humans are an animal with a long period of dependency on parents, and so come into
the world with rather generalized abilities, as beings very able to learn quickly. Most
animals (chickens vs. crows, for example), come into the world with rather hard-wired
intelligence suited to a rather specific niche. To keep things clear, it seems best to speak
of chickens rather than human embryos. 

I assume these more specific hard-wired behaviors are encoded in DNA, originally through
natural selection. However, it often seems these specific skills are just one choice among a
range of equally functional adaptive possibilities. Just how a wasp builds its nest must be
explained by genetic rules that go beyond mere adaptation to specify just how that function
will be instantiated. Mere functionality would only need a broad notion of nests. The choice
of mud over some other building material may be adaptive, but not the exact form, which
to a degree is non-adaptive information hard-coded in genes.

You point out that it is unlikely that skills developed by a child will be passed along to its
descendants. True, but if the inherited ability of the child is an open ended flexible
intelligence, your point follows from this. But the behavior of the wasp is hard wired
and is passed along in its genes. It seems that the specificity of a nest design goes
beyond mere being a functional response to the environment.

There are studies (you will have to pardon my ignorance of matters biological - not my
field) of a correlation between environmental complexity or variability and genetic
mutational frequency. That is, in a challenging environment, more genetic mutations
will be generated to provide a wider probability distribution for "expression". Is this in
agreement with your understanding?

If this be true, then the development of a particular organism can select among the
possible cells those which are most adaptive. I'm not sure if totipotent stem cells offers
an example. In any case, this would accommodate Darwinianism and Lamarckianism,
but there are problems with it. For one thing, E. coli replication and that of eukaryotes
is quite different, and it is difficult to understand how in the latter there can be feedback
to influence encapsulated cell replication during ovum formation. The issue here then
becomes, how can acquired behavior influence the development of the ovum?

Let me try to put my question this way. Except for random mutations, a zygote has the
same chromosomes at its parents, but following fertilization, it must replicate. This
replication carries out rules that are carried in genes. But genetic rules don't specify
unequivocally the outcome of replication, but are only rules that are subject to contingency
or circumstance (proteins) that affect the outcome. Assuming that the replication can
and does involve some genetic variation, and that the rate of mutation is influenced by
proteins and ultimately by circumstance, so the question becomes, can the behavior
of the parent during the growth of the embro somehow influence or select which variant
possible replication is favored, so that the resulting cells are a function of the parent's
behavior?  My sense is that while no such mechanism is known, the observable results
suggest there probably is some such mechanism.

Haines