From the moment that an animal is born it has to make decisions . It has to decide which of the things around it are for eating , and which are to be avoided ; when to attack and when to run away . The animal is , in fact , playing a very dangerous game with its environment , a game in which it must make decision--a matter of life or death . Animals' ability to act reasonably is believed to come partly from what we may call "genetic  learning" , which is different from the individual  learning that an animal does in the course of its own lifetime . Genetic learning is learning by a species --animals of the same kind--as a whole , and it is achieved by selection of those members of each generation that happen to act in the right way . However , the role of genetic learning depends upon how similar the future environment is to the past . The more important individual experience is likely to be , the less important is genetic learning as a means of getting over the problems of the survival game . Because most animals live in ever changing evironments from one generation to the next , it is not surprising to find that very few species indeed depend wholly upon genetic learning . In the great majority of animals , their particular ways of acting in a new environment are a compound  of individual experience added to the action patterns animals are born with .That is why animals can survive . Very few species depend entirely on genetic learning because_.
each generation has its own way of learning their environments change all the time they can act reasonably on their own it takes their whole life to learn