Site Archive: The "A" Files
A Column by Charles Miller
I mentioned in my last column that "instinct" could be an uncomfortable and politically incorrect subject when pursued to its "logical depth." Here's why.
"Instinct" is a popular throw-away term used by science to address behavior (in animals or humans) that simply cannot be explained in a scientific way. Science probably has no more of an idea of the true nature of instinct than does a lay observer. How does any given "instinct" develop to enhance the survival of a species? Popular science would have us believe that instinct requires thousands of generations to become ingrained in the genetic blueprints of a species. This conveniently explains why our domesticated pets, for example, exhibit "wild" behavior from time to time: "Oh, that dates back to when their ancient ancestors were stalking the savannahs. It's just instinctive behavior." So, what happened with the thousands of years of domestication? Survival-wise, domesticated pets live healthier and much longer than their wild cousins--why hasn't Nature totally discarded their wild instincts in favor of domesticated instincts? "Well, instincts take tens of thousands, even millions of years to develop. They can't just be switched on and off in a mere few thousand years." Oh, yeah?
Here's one of my favorite anecdotes that draws into question the long-term acquisition of instinctive behavior: Everyone has heard of the annual return of the swallows to San Juan Capistrano, California. More than a curiosity of migratory behavior, it's a longtime tourist attraction for bird-lovers and romantics from around the world. Over a hundred years ago, promoters saw a wonderful opportunity to increase tourism, by bringing newfangled electric power and lighting to Capistrano--to that end, a few miles of uninsulated power line was strung up all around the town. Well, to the horror of the promoters and tourists alike, when the swallows returned the following spring, they were killed by the thousands when they flew into the power lines (it was a much less sophisticated technology back then, with several narrowly-spaced wires). The birds had never encountered high-voltage wiring before and so flew blindly into the 19th Century equivalent of a giant bug-zapper.
Of course, a few thousand dead swallows weren't going to stand in the path of progress, so the electricity stayed, and here's where it gets interesting: The following spring, with electrical lines still in place, tourists and promoters were expecting another grisly spectacle (so much for romantic Capistrano); but, amazingly, this time hardly any birds were killed. The swallows appeared to make a conscious effort to avoid the electrical wiring.
And therein lies the mystery--a large number of these birds were not even born the year before, and the ones that had survived the previous year's holocaust never actually came in contact with the power lines. So how was the necessary survival behavior--instinct--conveyed to a new generation of swallows? And how did it only take one year to manifest?
I've related that little story before, and I typically get an onslaught of mail from skeptics who, among other things, deny the event ever happened. Well, not only did it happen in San Juan Capistrano, but the same sort of incident occurred all across the Third World when electricity was first introduced. Many different species of birds apparently acquired new survival instincts in less than a generation. This flies in the face (pun intended) of dogmatic Science and accepted instinct theory.
One explanation could be that these birds somehow rationalized and communicated a complex survival scenario to their offspring, and their offspring wisely heeded the warning. That, of course, would entail the birds being possessed of some pretty advanced reasoning faculties (heck, humans have the most advanced reasoning of all, and our offspring seldom heed our warnings). An even more metaphysical explanation is that birds live and learn as a communal entity--a "mass mind"--which disseminates valuable survival information to the entire species on extremely short notice. As improbable as those two explanations may seem, they still offer a better answer to rapidly acquired whole-species behavioral changes than does accepted instinct theory.
So far, I've only chatted about the "uncomfortable" aspects of instinct as they apply to the animal world. The "politically incorrect" bit necessarily applies to human instincts. Of course, we could discuss for hours whether or not the "reincarnation" phenomenon is a human manifestation of neuro-genetic memory. For my money, and to be brief, I think reincarnation is a neuro-genetic memory, a survival tool that actually allows us to learn from our collective human past.
But my contention that "racism" may also be a human instinct is the one that usually draws a storm of criticism from all corners--probably because we in 20th Century Western Culture prefer to believe that racism is a bad habit or something that we can extinguish with a little social discipline. If we were to accept that racism is a survival instinct--left over, perhaps, from hundreds of thousands of years ago when several different species of human were competing against one another for survival--then we would also have to accept that racism as an instinct may defy the social engineering of one or two generations (thus lending to the angst of many civil rights activists, I can imagine).
Anyway, from there we could go on to ask if mass-suicide and mass-murder (and war) are throwback human instincts, and I think there's a very good likelihood that they are, in the same way that some animal and insect species instinctively wax suicidal and homicidal at times, usually to decrease their own populations in order to conserve natural resources.
Of course, just mentioning any of these possibilities in today's Western Culture is enough to cause the hair stand up on every politically correct (narrow-minded) neck, and is enough to get you branded a "hate-monger" or some other preposterous label. So much for freedom of speech, even when it's a casual and objective musing.
Copyright 1999 by The Anomalist