Harmony and Conflict in the Living World - Alexander F. Skutch [83]
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The Transfer from Instinctive to Intelligent Guidance
Even in the more intelligent of contemporary animals, intelligence appears at best to play a minor role. In complex innate patterns of behavior, the main features of which are little subject to modification by reason or learning, it intervenes chiefly at the more flexible articulations, where freedom to adjust to variable circumstances is of greatest value. To advance much beyond this point, intelligence needs a number of special conditions, which are found in humans alone.
In the first place, intelligence requires organs to make its insights effective. Hoofed animals appreciate protection from rain; but if it ever occurred to a horse or a cow to build of poles and leaves a simple thatched shelter, such as a human with primitive tools can make, their limbs are useless for such operations. Second, because the number of fresh insights that come to an individual in the course of its life is likely to be small, and the amount of information it can accumulate by its own unaided efforts rather limited, some means of transmitting such acquisitions is of the greatest importance. Although the example of elders may help the young animal to learn, speech is the most effective means of conveying information. Finally, only the decay of compelling innate patterns of behavior can make an animal free to introduce innovations into its lifestyle. The loss of these genetically transmitted patterns would leave the animal without vital guidance if its opportunities to learn from others of its kind did not simultaneously increase. Only in a social animal with adequate means of communication are the conditions for any considerable growth of intelligence realized.
It would be wrong to leave the impression that intelligence could ever supplant the whole innate equipment signified by the term instinct in its broadest sense. This includes those motives, drives, or internal tensions that, with or without external stimulation, set the animal in motion. In general, while weak these impulses or internal stresses require some stimulus or enticement from outside to release the appropriate activity, but when strong enough they
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may start a train of movements in the absence of external excitations and even of the conditions necessary for their fruitful performance. In animals with a full complement of instincts, these appetites and drives initiate behavior that flows through definitely channeled courses. Of these innate patterns, we retain only remnants, insufficient to guide us through life. Some students of human behavior regard sleeping as an instinct; and since without instruction babies can learn to walk, this might also be classified as an instinctive activity, like crying, sucking, and grasping some support to avoid falling, although these seem to be hardly more than reflex acts.
Compared to the breadth and richness of detail of those beautiful, full-flowered innate patterns that guide a bird in winning a mate, building a nest, and rearing its young, surviving human instincts are at best poor remnants. But if we have lost nearly all the innate equipment that steers an animal through its varied activities, we retain without much impairment the appetites, impulses, and drives that demand satisfaction. Indeed, we have acquired many new incentives to action. Since intelligence is a guide and never a motive power, without these innate, nonrational appetites and drives the most rational animal might never take a step, think a thought, or speak a word, for it would lack the vital impulse to act. Even our most abstract intellectual activities are instigated by special impulses or appetites, often springing from those depths of our being to which conscious intelligence can scarcely penetrate.