DNA, Behaviour Patterns and Ancestral Memory

I don't think there is a straight translation from DNA to behaviour patterns. Too many of the explanations for observed animal behaviour, particularly human behaviour, speculate how an adaptation could have evolved without considering how that explanation could be tested, and what results is a "Just So Story", albeit one heavily infused with scientific rhetoric - Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" is a good example of this.

Regarding "ancestral memory", Jung actually placed his "collective unconscious" very firmly in a Darwinian framework, which is often overlooked; it is instead seen as some kind of occult idea, which is mistaken.

The idea of common or collective archetypes comes from the fact that we share a common ancestry, and we have similar minds, so that (for instance) you can assume that the experience I have of thought, or self-awareness, is the same as yours because we have a common biological history. Jung's ideas about the mind are an extension of this.

Jung places the archytpes here as "conceptual matrixes" or "patterns" behind all our religious and mythological concepts, and indeed, our thinking processes in general, as they have evolved. So for Jung, there is a kind of "ancestral memory" in the way our mental processes have evolved, not quite an ancestral memory, but a commonality from the ancestral mind:

Quote:

The contents of the collective unconscious are represented in consciousness in the form of pronounced preferences and definite ways of looking at things. These subjective tendencies and views are generally regarded by the individual as being determined by the object -- incorrectly, since they have their source in the unconscious structure of the psyche and are merely released by the effect of the object.

In terms of recent scientific work done to verify these ideas, the book "ARCHETYPE REVISITED: AN UPDATED NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SELF (2002) by Anthony Stevens is a good introduction.