In Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene he explains how different animals have genes which have the ability to control their parents behaviour. This may be by the way of a young chick's squawking with its red mouth open causing an instinctive affect in the parent to feed it. Genes that are stronger at persuading this kind of behaviour in their parents survive in the gene pool.
I'm beginning to understand Dawkin's theory in practical terms, the demarcation between awake and asleep has disintegrated to a point that I don't know whether I'm doing one or the other. Last night I was having an unpleasant dream about Kayla, my cat in the UK, then I awoke (or so I thought I had) and started thinking why I'd not seen Kayla for ages and then I realised that was because I am in Thailand, and then I awoke again, to Bamboo squawking. Sleep seems to come in small insufficient slots and then you wake up feeling guilty for sleeping, it's such a strange feeling it's difficult to explain. Work is now at home and the work I get paid for has become my hobby, when I'm at work I feel I should be home.
Dawkins went on to explain mimicry, this is when a creature from a different species can trick another creature from a different species into thinking it is from the same species for a reason beneficial to the fraudster. A good example of this is how cuckoos convince birds of other species that their eggs belong to the same hatch until the cuckoo becomes big enough to chuck the rest of the eggs and chicks out of the hatch so that the dummy parent is exclusively feeding one child that isn't even his/hers and also happened to murder all of his/her most recent offspring.
In this sense human parents have the ability to use mimicry to stall the child's crying. This is colloquially known as selling a dummy and let me tell you, at this moment in time I am very tempted.
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