"Instinct or innate behavior is the inherent inclination of a living organism toward a particular behavior."
I was just interested in knowing, how Instinct is is passed from one genaration to other? Memory seems not being transfered.
[Note: I do not claim to be an expert in this, and am merely speculating wildly.]
I would suppose that the mode of transfer depends entirely on what specific instinct is being considered. The term "instinct" seems to be much too broad for your answer to have a single, or even general, answer. I many cases, Sideroxylon's explanation could certainly be valid, but I am not sure that it covers all forms of instinct.
For instance, the example with the bees could be classified as an instinct through which a beneficial outcome is only incidentally reached through a behaviour which is essentially unrelated to the actual event, but which still solves the problem. That is, if the explanation offered is correct, then the bees would eat this form of fouled wax even in cases where this was not the result of a foul brood, for instance in an experimental setting. The instinct to eat the fouled wax therefore could be said not to have anything to do with the existence of foul broods at all. In fact, the action as such need not be an instinct at all, but a learned behaviour in which the bee will eat things that taste pleasant to it, but where each individual bee would have to learn that fouled wax tastes good. Conceivably, there may be bees in the same hive that don't think fouled wax taste good -- though I have no idea if there are -- which, if true, would show that it is a learned behaviour, or is at least a behaviour that has elements of learning.
Regardless of the specifics of this example, this seems to me to be a different class of instinct than, for instance, contraction instinct in sea anemones or in our own arms when touching a hot plate, or for instinct relating to relocation in case the immediate environment is somehow inadvantageous. This could be a class of instincts that are chemically bonded to an ordinary process within the organism, which causes the organism to react when exposed to a chemical or physical imbalance.
This class of instincts could have both learned and inherited elements, which could even reinforce each other, but the instinct itself need not be necessarily related to the stimuli. For instance, if a cell- or organ-level system within an organism bases its functionality on a certain ion balance, any environmental factor which disrupts this balance may cause the organism to relocate, whether this is a novel factor or a "known" one. The purportedly instinctual reaction could then be an expression of a more general class of instincts -- which are more easily explained in terms of inheritance -- triggered by a novel factor.
Related to this is of course instincts that are caused by a release of chemicals from one individual that serves to warn other individuals. The contraction or relocation instinct this triggers may very easily be explained within the framework of inheritance, for instance by assuming that muscular control of an organism is related to a large number of receptors, each of which can trigger the opening of ion channels, which in turn will cause the muscle to contract. If predation of one individual somehow releases a chemical substance for which all other individuals of the species have muscle-related receptors, this could cause contraction of muscles, causing the non-predated individuals to close shells, hide in burrows, or similar. On a macroscopic level, we might see this as clams hiding in the presence of a predator, whereas on a molecular level, this is simply a muscle contraction caused entirely by a chemical stimulus. It is trivial to understand how such a system might have evolved, even in the absence of inheritance of memory.
This system could of course be expanded to include the examples above. A human arm retracts from a hot plate because of biochemical processes which can be explained evolutionarily, whether or not the specific individual or its direct ancestors have any kind of memory of hot plates. Similarly, hiding or relocation instinct could be caused by changes in light, movement, sound, temperature changes, gravitational changes, or any other change which has the capacity to interact with the organism's nervous system (if any). In these cases, the release of a compound (for instance) that causes a behavioural effect would be analogous to that in the free-living example above, but be contained within the individual.
However, I have the feeling even these explanations would cover only a subset of the possible actions that would be covered by the term "instinct".
