The Instinct Fallacy

by Joey Lawsin

Scientists claim that instinct is inborn or innate. This is totally a misconception. An Instinct Fallacy.

Originemology suggests otherwise. Every action and reaction is always experienced and learned first. They start as pieces of information then subsequently become mechanical when the experience happens the next time around. When repeatedly encountered, they become automatic. The repetitive behavior now becomes instinct; an Instinctive Behavior.

The philosophical interpretations of Instinct by Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Paley, Darwin, Lorenz, Lamarck, Wallace, and Descartes have remained popular and widely accepted around the globe. Today, their conceptual theories will be put to the test based on the principles behind Originemology and The Codexation Dilemma [4].

1. Thomas Aquinas reasoned that although animals do not know their future, instinct is planted in them by the Divine Intellect to guide their lives in the future. Instinct is understood as blind, innate urges instilled by the Creator for the welfare of his creatures.

2. Reverend Paley as well used the instinctive behavior of animals as proof for the existence of a God. He argued by emphasizing these behaviors could not possibly have been the result of any instruction provided during the lifetime of the organism but were designed by a divine. Thus he described how moths and butterflies deposit their eggs in the precise substance, that of cabbage for example, from which, not the butterfly herself, but the caterpillar which is to issue from her egg, draws its appropriate food. The butterfly cannot taste the cabbage--cabbage is no food for her; yet in the cabbage, not by chance, but studiously and electively, she lays her eggs. This choice cannot in the butterfly proceed from instruction. She had not teacher in her caterpillar state. She never knew her parent. There is no opportunity either for instruction or imitation. The parent race is gone before the new brood is hatched. From this passage, we see that Paley put great emphasis on the "unlearnability" of complex behaviors that are essential to the survival and continuation of a species since if the animal has no way to learn such important behaviors, the origin of the behaviors must lie in God.

3. Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather, found an alternative to the providential or divine view of instinct. He emphasized the role of sensory experience in the development of behavior. He believed that all behavior was based on the experience and intelligence of the individual organism. But this explanation fared less well with behaviors demonstrated immediately after hatching or birth.

4. Lamarck's understanding of instinctive behavior was intimately tied to his theory of evolution - a concept of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. For him, changing environmental conditions forced organisms to change their habits to survive, and changed habits involved the increased use of certain body parts and systems accompanied by the decreased use of others. According to his theory, if a particular source of food is no longer available, what is it in the environment that instructs the animal to adopt a new effective behavior to feed itself? What makes the transmission of instructions from behavior to biological structure?

5. Charles Darwin supposed that the habits an animal might adopt to cope with a shifting environment would, during the course of generations, slowly become instincts, that is, innately determined patterns of behavior. Instincts in turn would gradually modify the anatomy of an organism, adapting the creature to its surroundings. Thus, habits that persisted over many generations, such as eating berries that were beneficial to the survival and reproduction of the species, would be "inscribed in the heritable structures of the brain."

However, one particularly thorny problem remained, that of the evolution and behavior of the neuter insects such as the Hymenoptera order of insects which includes bees and ants together with some wasps and flies. Many of these insects live in a well-structured society where their survival depends on a specialized division of labor among its members, reflected in different castes such as the queen, drones, and workers in a beehive. Particularly intriguing and troublesome for Darwin's theory of natural selection was the fact that the worker caste in these colonies often comprises sterile insects that therefore cannot genetically pass on their instinctive behaviors to the next generation of workers.

6. Alfred Russel Wallace's viewed each bit of morphology, each function of an organ, each behavior as an adaptation, a product of selection leading to "better" organisms.  He reasoned that if natural selection can select only behaviors and abilities that are advantageous to the species, natural selection could not be responsible for such "latent" intellectual and musical abilities since they served no purpose in their native environment. Therefore, the human brain and the intellectual and moral qualities that it confers could only be the work of a divine provider.

7. Konrad Lorenz, as suggested by his definition of ethology, was primarily interested in finding an evolutionary explanation for the instinctive behavioral patterns characteristic of a species. For example, it was brought to his attention that greylag geese that were reared by humans would follow them in much the same way that naturally hatched goslings waddled after their mother. Lorenz confirmed these findings for the greylag goose and extended them to a number of other birds as well. This pattern of behavior, resulting from a type of bonding with the first moving object (usually the mother goose) seen by the bird, he called "imprinting," and it is for this finding that Lorenz is still best known today.

Another example of Lorenz's conception of an instinctive behavior is the egg-rolling behavior of the greylag goose. When the goose sees that an egg has rolled out of her nest, she stands up, moves to the edge of the nest, stretches out her neck, and rolls the egg back into the nest between her legs, pushing it with the underside of her bill. This behavior depends on what Lorenz called a "fixed motor pattern," that is, a pattern of activity in the central nervous system of the goose that is released or triggered by the sight of the egg outside the nest. In other words, it is a specific fixed response released by a specific type of stimulus. The purpose of this instinctive act is clearly to return the egg to the security of the nest, and it is easy to appreciate its value for the survival of the species.

When we consider animal behavior, we are first struck by what appear to be two quite separate categories of actions. One category consists of complex behaviors that all the individuals of a given species are somehow able to perform without first experiencing the behaviors performed by others and without being in any way guided or instructed in them. Thus a mother rat will build a nest and groom her young even if she is raised in total isolation from other female rats. Usually, the evolutionary significance of such behavior is quite clear. In the case of the mother rat, it is not difficult to see how building a nest to keep her pups warm and secure and keeping them clean increases their chances of survival, thereby enhancing her own reproductive success and the survival of her genes. The behaviors involved in the spider's spinning a web, the beaver's constructing dams, and the honeybee's sculpting a honeycomb are additional examples.

The other type of behavior consists of those acts that appear to result from an animal's particular experiences, and it is here that we notice striking differences across individuals of the same species. The circus shows us what dogs, bears, horses, lions, tigers, and elephants can do given the special environment provided by the animal trainer. Dogs do not normally walk upright on their two hind legs, and bears are not to be seen riding motorcycles through the woods or seals balancing beach balls on their noses in the Arctic. Yet these creatures can perform these and other unnatural acts if provided with a special type of environment. Similarly, whereas all normal children manage to walk and talk without formal instruction, this is not the case for reading, writing, and mathematics skills, the development of which normally requires many years of formal schooling.

Two interrelated questions have to be considered in attempting to understand instinctive behavior. The first deals with the origin of the behavior itself and the second with the propagation of the behavior to a new habit. It is important to address both of these questions separately, but the most satisfactory answer to each turns out to be very much the same. It boils down to systemic instructions and vitalic materials.

The mix of natural material and spontaneous instruction may seem like an odd combination to us today, but when seen from Lawsin's own perspective it makes rather good sense. Certain instinctive behaviors could not be explained by the Lamarckian model simply because he had no way to conceive how they could have developed originally as habits. Other instinctive behaviors, such as the expression of emotions through facial or postural means, appeared to have no functional value. Since natural explanation is no explanation at all for the development of traits, Darwin reasonably concluded that they must have resulted from the inheritance of useless habits accompanying with more useful ones. And definitely, the philosophical views of Aquinas, Paley, and other philosophers who believe that instinct is a divine creation are totally scientifically misguided.

Instinct is a process. It is not inborn but inlearned. Newborns do not possess any information in their minds. A baby's mind is totally empty with knowledge. Even the very first primitive human beings do not have any information in their brains as well. They need to acquire information first from what their senses see, feel, smell, taste, and hear. Even the ability of thinking could have not occurred to them yet eons ago.

The primitive knowledge that our prehistoric ancestors minimally possess definitely came through long observations and daily interactions with the environment. They copied and imitated the ways and habits of some animals that live side by side with them. They observed how birds fly, how fish swim, how wolves howl, and how other animals find food. They probably copied how beavers construct dams or how birds construct nests or how animals live in caves. They probably put into their mouths what other animals eat and eventually learn how to use their teeth and mouth. They probably observed how some animals kill for food, that they imitated this technique to survive. They probably saw how some animals make love that they learned how to produce babies. These acquisitions of information from the environment mold the minds of our primitive ancestors to become thinkers. Subsequently, as they repeatedly mastered these adapted natural behaviors, eventually, knowledge, understanding, and intelligence evolved from generation to generation. The Dawn of the Homo Sapiens instinctively sparked the Rise of Humanity.


Reference:

[1]Paley (1802/1902, pp. 336-337).
[2]Lamarck (1977, pp. 170-171).
[3]Darwin (1859, pp. 242-244).
[4]Lawsin (Evolution of Creation, 2000).
[5]Aquinas (1265-1273/1914, p. 460).
[6]Lorenz (1981, pp. 236-237).
[7]Wallace (1867, p. 51).