• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 565 0

but remember man was once no better than them and yet he came under sudden pressure to get better and better, while they did not. A well-trained humanist is already scoffing at such sophistry. Only people can make tools, as well as use them. Only people can use grammar as well as vocabulary. Only people can empathize as well as feel emotion. But this sounds uncannily like special pleading. I find the instinctive arrogance of the human sciences thoroughly unconvincing because so many of its bastions have already fallen to the champions of animals. Beaten back from position after position, the humanists simply pretend they never intended to hold them in the first place and redefine the retreat as tactical. Almost all discussions of consciousness assume a priori that it is a uniquely human feature, when it is patently obvious to anybody who has ever kept a dog that the average dog can dream, feel sad or glad and recognize individual people; to call it an unconscious automaton is perverse.

The Myth of Learning

At this point the humanist usually retreats to his strongest bastion: learning. Man, he says, is uniquely flexible in his behaviour, adapting to skyscrapers, deserts, coal mines and tundra with equal ease. That is because he learns far more than animals and relies on instincts far less. Learning how the world is, rather than simply arriving in it with a fully formed program for survival, is a superior strategy but it demands a bigger brain. Therefore man’s bigger brain reflects his shift away from instinct and towards learning.

Like just about everybody else who has ever thought about these things, I found such logic impeccable until I read a chapter in a book called The Adapted Mind by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby of the University of California at Santa Barbara.3 They set out to challenge the conventional wisdom, which has dominated psychology and most other social sciences for many decades, that instinct and learning are opposite ends of a spectrum, that an animal that relies on instincts does not rely on learning and vice versa. This simply is not so. Learning implies plasticity, whereas instinct implies preparedness. So, for example, in learning the vocabulary of her native language, a child is almost infinitely plastic. She can learn that the word for a cow is vache, or cow or any other word. And likewise, in knowing that she must blink or duck when a ball approaches her face at speed, a child need have no plasticity at all. To have to learn such a reflex would be painful. So the blink reflex is prepared, and the vocabulary store in her brain is plastic.

But she did not learn that she needed a vocabulary store. She was born with it and with an acute curiosity to learn the names of things. More than that, when she learnt the word cup, she knew without being told that it was a general name for any whole cup, not its contents or its handle and not the specific cup she saw first, but the whole class of objects called cups. Without these two innate instincts, the ‘whole object assumption’ and the ‘taxonomic assumption’, language would be a lot harder to learn. Children would often find themselves in the position of the apocryphal explorer who points at a never-before-seen animal and says to hi local guide: ‘What’s that?’ The guide replies: ‘Kangaroo’, which means, in his own language, ‘I don’t know.’

In other words, it is hard to conceive how people can learn (be plastic) without sharing assumptions (being prepared). The old idea that plasticity and preparedness were opposites is plainly wrong. The psychologist William James argued a century ago that man had both more learning capacity and more instincts, rather than more learning and fewer instincts. He was ridiculed for this, but he was right.

Return to the example of language. The more scientists study language the more they realize that hugely important aspects of it, such as grammar and the desire to speak in the first place are not learnt by imitation at all. Children simply develop language. Now this might seem crazy because a child reared in isolation