Man and Beast

It Would Hardly Seem Likely that a man who spends every day watching ringdoves building their nests or bees gathering honey or mother rats nursing their newborn pups would be particularly well qualified to analyze the human psyche, prescribe ways to better mental health or advise mankind how to minimize the likelihood of nuclear war. Such, however, is apparently the case. In the past few years, the scientific study of animal behavior has emerged from relative obscurity into the glare of worldwide attention, and its practitioners, once viewed as harmless bird watchers, are now regarded as scientist prophets at whose feet modern man sits all atremble, waiting for the word. The reason is that in studying doves, bees and rats, along with hundreds of other species, zoologists and animal psychologists have recently made a number of discoveries that seem filled with profound implications for mankind. And since today we are in all sorts of trouble--personal, social and international--we are pathetically eager for any new understandings about ourselves that may hold the key to salvation. If those who study man--psychologists and sociologists--have not been able to tell us what we need to know, perhaps we can find it out from those who study animals.

But what they have been telling us is scarcely comforting. The school of animal-behavior studies that has suddenly had great impact on our thinking is known as ethology. The immensely popular books of Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey and Desmond Morris are based mainly on ethological research, which holds that man is the most brutal and uninhibitedly aggressive of all animals and that these traits are genetically built into him. Ethologists believe that animal behavior is, to a great degree, chemically encoded in those long twisted chains of thousands of molecules that we call genes and that are the determiners of the biochemical processes in every cell of the body and, therefore, of the physical traits of the whole creature. Everyone agrees that it is the genes that make the fertilized ovum of, say, the mosquito grow up to be another mosquito, rather than a butterfly, swallow or rhinoceros. The ethologists, however, go much further, maintaining that the genes prescribe not just physical traits and behavioral tendencies but behavior itself, down to its finest details. The exact way a dog scratches its ear, the particular melody sung by the nightingale, the distinctive sequences of head bobbing, tail wiggling and other movements used by each species of duck during courting and the fierce but usually bloodless fights of rival male elk are all programed in advance within the genes.

So far, so good. But the ethologists argue that man, too, though he is born more helpless than any other animal and has to spend nearly the first quarter of his life acquiring the skills he needs to live the rest of it, behaves largely in accordance with genetic commands. In other words, he is largely governed by inborn instincts and, even if they don't prescribe the precise songs he sings or the exact ways he goes about courting, they do make him innately and inescapably selfish, suspicious, acquisitive--and murderous. Where other predators kill their prey but rarely their own kind, man is said to be an instinctive killer who is particularly savage toward his own species. He is not just a beast but the beastliest of all; he is, in the words of one ethological writer, "the cruelest and most ruthless species that has ever walked the earth."

Oddly enough, we seem to be fascinated by and receptive to this depressing news about ourselves. A century ago, one good Victorian lady, upon hearing the new theory that man was descended from the apes, cried out, "Let us hope it is not true--but if it is, let us pray it will not become generally known!" In contrast, not only have we accepted the theory that we are the worst of beasts, we enjoy seeing it presumably verified.

When Konrad Lorenz tells us, in On Aggression, that a hereditary "hypertrophy of aggression," coupled with an evolutionary lack of inhibition against killing our fellow man, makes us far more savage to our own kind than the wolf is to other wolves, we devour his every word and his book becomes a runaway best seller. When Robert Ardrey says, in The Territorial Imperative, that we are innate enemies of our own species and that, far from hating war, we really find it "outrageously satisfying," we all but cry amen and make his book a household word. When Desmond Morris writes of man as The Naked Ape, whose intelligence will never be able to rule his "raw animal nature" nor control his biological urge to aggression, we make his charges the stuff of cocktail conversation, smiling bitterly and dolefully, as if to say, "How true."

But a large number of those engaged in animal-behavior research disagree with the hard-line ethological view. Many zoologists, biochemists and animal psychologists reject the theory that most behavior is preprogramed and stored in the genes. They agree that, for biochemical reasons, animals have built-in "tendencies" to behave in certain ways but that these are specific and automatic only in lower animals; the higher the animal on the evolutionary scale, the more its tendencies are shaped, developed and organized into behavior by its interactions with its environment. A cricket will chirp, given the right conditions, without ever having heard it done; a human being, despite his tendency to use language, has to learn every word of the language he speaks. The most vigorous opponents of the ethological view of man-- including anthropologists Ashley Montagu and Margaret Mead, philosopher Susanne Langer and a number of distinguished zoologists and animal psychologists--insist that even if insects and lower animals are largely guided by instincts, man himself is almost instinctless and, in any case, has no instinct to kill his own kind.

Each side in this quarrel accuses the other of spouting scientific humbug; each asserts that the other's views are dangerous to the human race; and each accuses the other of political bias in its science. Some ethologists charge their opponents with rigid adherence to a liberal and egalitarian ideology that makes them refuse to admit man's nastiness and the inherent differences among races. And some anti-ethologists see their opponents as Neo-Calvinists and social reactionaries whose views on man lend support to racist and fascist ideologies.

Great issues are thus at stake. If man is largely controlled by his instincts and if his behavior is encoded in his genes, man and his future can only be regarded with pessimism; man must then be viewed as innately dangerous and brutal and dealt with accordingly. If the poor, the indolent, the criminal, the greedy and the sadistic are acting according to their hereditary inclinations, there is little point in trying to change them: We might as well forget about compensatory education, welfare, equal job opportunities, rehabilitation of convicts and preventive mental-health programs. And if mankind is innately aggressive and war-like, it is absurd to suppose that he can ever become peaceful and loving toward his fellow man--or even that he would like to be.

But if man is not instinct-controlled, or if his instincts are amorphous and do not result in specific behavior patterns--if, in other words, he has a highly educable and modifiable nature--then it is possible to be hopeful about him and his future, despite his wretched history. One can believe that poverty is rarely the fault of the poor and that with better opportunities, they might become productive and useful; that crime is largely a product of social and psychological conditions that can be modified and perhaps eliminated; that sadism, greed, ignorance and psychosis are not inevitable expressions of our nature but forms into which that nature has been forced by circumstances. And, finally, one can even believe that it is still possible, if unlikely, that man may find ways to live in peace and to realize his ancient dream of loving and being loved by his fellow man.

Great issues, indeed. But neither the ethologists nor the other students of animal behavior seem, in their daily work, to be dealing with such matters. Their research generally looks scientifically pure, aloof and sometimes even pastoral. Some researchers, for instance, are basically naturalists, albeit with a modern touch. They observe animals under field conditions, recording and analyzing their sounds, tabulating their actions, their behavior in groups and as individuals, and making computer analyses of the data to discover meaningful patterns. One dedicated young zoologist lives alone for months at a time in the savannas of south-central Kenya, watching various members of a troop of vervet monkeys and nothing their every act of eating, defecating, grooming, fighting and copulating, until he begins to perceive the social structure of the troop. Other scientists observe and virtually live with particular species of insect, fish, bird or mammal, until they recognize every gesture, every nuance of sound and behavior--until, indeed, they could advise the young stick-leback, pigeon, gorilla or gerbil how best to fight off its rival and woo its mate.

While observing animals in their native habitat, some researchers tinker with one or more of the natural conditions, hoping to find a cause-and-effect relationship to behavior. A team in Antarctica captured penguins at Cape Crozier, took them 180 miles away to the middle of the perfectly flat, featureless Ross Shelf Ice and released them, to see if the birds could find their way home and, if so, how. They could and did, apparently by using the sun; under cloudy skies, they blundered around, but under clear skies, they would look up, seem to think a bit and then waddle off toward Cape Crozier. One mystery was thus solved, but another and larger one appeared: How do the penguins know about the use of solar guidance? Two contrasting theories exist: (1) Something in their genes makes them automatically use the sun as a directional guide; and (2) Some conditioning that occurs during their growing up has made them associate the sunward direction with water and food. Thus, penguin navigation, itself a trivial matter, touches upon the central issue (continued on page 114)Man And Beast(continued from page 82) in animal psychology--the meaning of instinct and the mechanisms through which instinctive behavior is manifested.

Some researchers have removed animals from the field and studied them in the laboratory, introducing unnatural conditions to try out the hypothesized mechanisms underlying behavior. Among ducks and many other birds, the young follow the mother faithfully about within a few hours after hatching. Lorenz was curious as to why this happens; he therefore divided the eggs laid by a goose into two batches and had one batch hatched by the mother and the other by an incubator. The goslings hatched by the mother saw her first and followed her wherever she went; the others saw Lorenz first and followed him, even when they saw their mother nearby. In popular terms, they "thought" Lorenz was their mother; in scientific terms, they had been "imprinted" with his image. (Ducklings have been imprinted to follow wooden decoys, a football and a green box containing an alarm clock, any of which looks good to them if it is the first thing they see.) Imprinting in animals seems to be the fixing in the memory of an image at a time when the nervous system is undergoing a special stage of maturation. By studying it, ethologists learn something about nature's invention of devices for survival: If ducklings don't follow the mother shortly after birth, they will be abandoned and die. More importantly, ethologists learn something about the critical periods of maturation in the nervous system--a subject that has meaning for human parents as well.

In another experiment, an American animal psychologist built a community for Norway rats, complete with unlimited supplies of food, water and nesting materials, and allowed the rat population to grow until it was far denser than ever occurs in normal circumstances. The results were startling: Some of the males became bullies, others became homosexuals and cannibals and yet others became withdrawn neurotics; the females began to abort or take poor care of their young; and infant mortality rose as high as 96 percent. Since all the physical wants of the rats were satisfied, this pathology could only mean that excessive social interaction was to blame. Rats are not mean and from this study one cannot lean to conclusions about our own urban life, but at least it suggests that the interaction needed by social animals has its limits and that beyond those limits it produces a variety of behavioral disorders.

Some researchers have castrated cocks to see what becomes of their sex drive and their aggressiveness (not surprisingly, both markedly diminish); some have transfused the blood of a mother rat into the veins of a virgin rat to see if the hormones and other substances in it would stimulate the virgin's responses to young rat pups and make her behave like a mother (they did); some have raised monkeys in isolation, apart from their mothers and friends, and later introduced them, as adults, to normal monkey society to see how they fared (very badly; they were fearful, hostile, unable to mate--and never got better).

Such studies are, for the first time, yielding down-to-earth explanations of some of life's great, enduring mysteries--mother love, sexual attraction, the homemaking urge, competition and cooperation, intelligence, kindness, aggression, et al. These are obviously matters of immense intellectual interest--and of self-interest, as well, for if we understood them thoroughly in lower animals, we might understand them somewhat better in man. We are faced with self-extinction from many sources, all of our own making: overpopulation, the selfish despoiling of our air and water, the potential incineration of man in a nuclear war. It might be--and any hope is worth pursuing--that we could learn something from animals that would enable us to save us from ourselves.

In fact, however, most of the animal-behavior researchers are not seeking insights into the larger mysteries of human nature. Most of them, like other scientists, are so fascinated by some small mystifying phenomenon they've noticed that they are willing to spend years exploring it just for the pleasure of discovering what makes it so.

"I got into ethology because it was intellectually intriguing," says Dr. William Dilger of Cornell University. "I've spent ten years studying nest building in one species of bird because I was fascinated by the fact that all females of that species prepare and carry their nesting materials in the same peculiar way, even if they've never seen it done by others. I wanted to find out how that works and I think I have. But today people want ethologists to come up with answers to the big questions troubling mankind; they think we have the answers up our sleeves. I'm not at all sure we do. And I rather resent it--it's disturbing to have such responsibility thrust on one. Ethology used to be fun but not very important; now it's become important but not nearly so much fun." For better or for worse, that's the way it's going to be. The study of animal behavior will never again be a quiet backwater of zoology. Men now fervently hope, and almost demand, that animal-behavior researchers help them understand themselves and one another; and, given the present human condition, who can blame them?

Before drawing any conclusions about man, however, the first order of business is to find out how things really work among other animals, resolutely avoiding the tendency to read human feelings and motives into what they do. Anthropomorphism is a classic error: From primitive man to Pliny, from Shakespeare to the modern dog fancier, men have ascribed human sentiments and aims to their animal friends and foes. If the brown thrasher sings a long and melodious song at the close of a glorious summer afternoon, he must be rejoicing at being alive on such a day; if the stag and his rival lock horns and struggle until exhausted, it's because even peaceful beasts are willing to kill each other under the influence of jealousy; if the female cat painstakingly washes her kittens, it's because, brimming with mother love, she is taking good care of her babies; if baboons live in primitive oligarchies, it's because they, like us, need family life and friendship and are willing to pay the price of submitting to wise leadership and social regulation.

But all schools of contemporary animal-behavior study try to avoid the anthropomorphic fallacy. They start with the fact that the animals are incapable of symbolic--that is, linguistic--thinking or of emotions based in large part on cultural values. Instead of speculating as to what they might be feeling, the scientists stick to what is empirical and provable: the actual actions of the animals, the measurable changes in their bodies associated with those actions and their demonstrable survival value for both the individual and the species.

When one objectively studies the singing of birds under natural conditions, for instance, it becomes clear that one major function of bird song is species recognition; through distinctive songs and calls, the males and females of each species are able to locate one another easily and reliably. An even more important function is the male's use of song to establish his own territory. In many species, male birds attack or avoid one another during the nesting phase, using their characteristic song as the way of warning one another to stay at a distance; the result is a useful spacing out of nesting sites, giving each mating pair a chance to raise its young without interference. It is not as romantic an interpretation of bird song as that of the poets, but it is verifiable--and verified.

Territorial warnings are valuable and common throughout the animal kingdom. Many kinds of male fish wear bright colors that warn their fellows away from their chosen feeding ground; free-roaming dogs and cats urinate in many places to mark their own domain; antelopes rub their faces against branches, releasing scent from facial glands and advertising their ownership of the area. (continued on page 179)Man And Beast(continued from page 114) None of the animals has this purpose in mind, as far as anyone knows; the animal may mark in one way or another simply because it feels good, but the survival value of such behavior for the species makes it an evolution-chosen trait.

Animals who intrude upon one another's territory are in for a fight, but it is a fiction that such fights are motivated by fraternal blood lust, like that of Cain. A species that had a tendency to kill its own kind would be at a serious disadvantage in the struggle for survival. A male animal fights an intruding rival of the same species not with murderous intent but merely to drive him away, so that the defender will not have to coexist with him in an area too small for the two of them. Not that the territorial defender thinks this through; as far as ethologists can tell, he fights simply because the rival's size, shape, smell and behavior arouse alarm and anger--some say instinctively, others say partly due to learning in the form of youthful mock combat. In any case, the defender seeks first only to frighten the intruder off by making hostile gestures and noises; if this fails, the two do fight--usually in a ritualized fashion that means neither death nor even harm to the loser. Male cichlid fish seize each other by the lips and push and pull for hours, until one gives up, folds his fins and swims away. Stags, wild goats and male mountain sheep engage in ferocious combat, but neither combatant uses its sharp horns to pierce the other; instead, they smash their horns against each other and push, butt, strain and struggle, until one is exhausted and gives up, the victor making no effort to inflict a wound when the loser turns to leave.

So it is throughout most of the animal world: The same animals that will fight other species to the death will engage each other in fierce but primarily ceremonial and harmless struggles ending either in flight, with the victor not pursuing, or in surrender, with the beaten one giving some sign of appeasement--a cringing posture, the turning away of the head, a rolling over on the back or some other form of exposing himself to the mortal blow. But it is never delivered; the act of appeasement ends the fight.

The appeasement gesture itself is a particularly important evolutionary development among animals that live in groups, where the loser cannot run away except at the cost of isolation. Among baboons, for instance, a defeated male will "present"--that is, offer his rump, like a female, to the victor; the latter may choose not to use the proffered rear, but the gesture alters his mood and ensures peace. The sending out of a sexual signal is, in fact, the most effective of all neutralizers of the aggressive impulse. If the female of the species looks much like the male, then she must offer stimuli that bring about changes in the emotional status of the male territorial defender, so that he does not attack her but mates with her. Whether the female does so by means of a sound, an odor or a series of movements, one need not assume conscious intent on her part--most certainly not at the lower levels of evolution and probably not even at the higher ones.

An example: A small tidal-zone fish known as the goby stoutly defends his territory against intruding males by turning dark, opening his mouth threateningly and puffing out his throat; these failing, he attacks and bites the interloper. But if a gravid female comes near, her condition provides him with various stimuli that modify his behavior, the most important being a chemical she exudes due to her gravid state. The scent of it radically changes his reactions: He turns light, rather than dark, and instead of attacking, he fans the water with his tail, makes grunting noises and leads her to a shelter he has built, where she lays her eggs and he then releases sperm over them. Without her chemical signal and his response to it, the species would perish, but neither the signal nor the response is intentional or deliberate. Both are purely automatic, as Dr. William Tavolga, a zoologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, proved by plugging up the noses of male gobies--who thereupon attacked gravid females just as if they were rival males. But let no one sneer at the dim-witted goby; do we not continually read in advertisements that such and such a perfume will inspire passion, or even love and marriage, in the gentleman of one's choice?

Even territorialism and courtship seem commonplace before the miracle of animal mother love. As we said earlier, which of us has not marveled at the mother cat, who knows without training that she should wash her newborn kittens and also knows when they are old enough to be on their own and therefore cuffs them away as if to help them get started? But those who have analytically studied mothering in cats have less romantic explanations of their behavior. The mothers lick their newborn young not because they know it's a good and healthful thing to do but because the young are drenched in placental fluids containing chemicals the mother has just lost and needs to replace and that, therefore, probably taste good to her. Nor does she "know" when her young are ready to be on their own; the young simply get so large that their suckling and playing are uncomfortable to her and she reacts naturally to pain and irritation.

Similarly, the group life of baboons superficially resembles life in primitive human societies; moreover, watching baboons tend their young, fight, play, fornicate and defend themselves, it is difficult not to attribute human feelings and ideas to them. But dispassionate scientific observation dispels the anthropomorphic fallacy. Baboon mothers do care for their young, but baboon society ignores sick or wounded adults; they are simply abandoned as the troop moves on. Dominant males pair off briefly with females in heat, but there are no long-lasting alliances and nothing like family life, not even of the polygamous variety. Communication is largely a matter of gestures, and deals only with immediate situations (there is no passing on of ideas or history); and the major social activity is not work, play nor sexual behavior but grooming--the picking of insects and dirt out of one another's hair. And this is probably an instinctive impulse based on biological need. Observers have noted that a baboon who is away from his group even for a day or two will return heavily infested with ticks and other parasites he cannot remove and that would soon seriously affect his health.

On the importance of studying animal behavior functionally and without anthropomorphism, all sides agree. They disagree sharply, however, about the actual mechanics underlying the behavior they see and about the implications of that behavior for mankind. At one pole, as we have already seen, are the ethologists. The word ethology has caught on with the public (almost as much as ecology) and has come to mean almost all kinds of animal-behavior studies; but among professionals, it still signifies, in Lorenz' own words, "the study of innate behavior; the study of species-specific drive activities." Lorenz, codirector of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Seewiesen, Bavaria, virtually founded the specialty of ethology two generations ago and remains its principal figure.

The basic tenet of ethology is that by far the largest part of what animals--including man--do is instinctive. For each bit of behavior, there is a blueprint stored away in the nervous system and passed on within the genes of that species. External stimuli and experiences do play a part--but mostly as releasers, or actuators, of the fixed action patterns genetically programed within the animal.

In the years between the two World Wars, Lorenz and his students, reacting against the limitations and artificiality of laboratory experiments in rat psychology, turned to the study of many other species under natural conditions, where each has a repertoire of complicated acts specific to its own kind--acts that seem to appear automatically when the animal needs them and without having learned them in any sense comparable with that of behaviorist psychology.

The female digger wasp of the species Pepsis marginata, for example, when ready to lay an egg, goes in search of a host for it and unerringly picks out a tarantula of the species Cyrtopholis portoricae (no other species of insect, not even any other species of tarantula, will do) and digs a hole in front of it, attacks it and finds a chink in its armor through which she stings it into immobility, then drags it into the hole and lays her egg in its abdomen, finally covering the hole over--all without ever having seen any of this done.

A complicated procedure such as this is made up of many small separate acts, and the ethologists think it is the separate acts that are specifically gene-produced and inheritable. As proof, they point out that in hybrids, these small acts are recombined, even as are colors, markings and other hereditary traits. Lorenz' own favorite subjects of study have been ducks and geese, each species of which goes through a courtship procedure involving a whole series of gestures and signs (the bill shake, the head flick, the tail shake, the grunt whistle and others). In each species, the sequence of acts is specific and invariable; but in hybrids, the sequence is altered, some acts appearing earlier or later, some disappearing, some changing form, all in predictable ways--presumably corresponding to the altered configuration of gene loci in the chromosomes.

Each species, therefore, has a complete set of genetic blueprints for behavior that serves to satisfy its four great drives--hunger, fear, sex and aggression. Circumstances may modify somewhat the precise behavior of the creature, but they cannot change its essential nature; the deer will never be a tiger, the hawk will never be a cow.

The aggression of animals toward their own kind, however, is held in check by inhibiting mechanisms such as the ritualization of fighting, appeasement gestures and the like. In man, unhappily, the brain has outstripped the rest of his biology; appeasement is no safeguard when killing is too quick, too easy and too impersonal to be stopped by the animal gesture. The beast within us is incompetent to handle the tools of murder the man within us has invented.

From such evidence and theorizing, ethologists are almost bound to draw gloomy and misanthropic conclusions, for the dismal record of history and the sorry state of the present world must be direct reflections of man's innate nature. Here, for instance, are the acerbic comments of Eckhard H. Hess, a distinguished animal psychologist at the University of Chicago. "As an ethologist," he says, "I believe that man is an animal--not a better kind of animal but merely a more complicated one. A lot of liberals and intellectuals -- even in the biological sciences--try to deny this evidence, because it contradicts their ideological notions about the equality and the perfectibility of all men. In the do-gooder way of thinking, any discussion of the genic constitution of human beings and their behavior is supposed to smack of racism, and that's very bad, while anything that blames environment is very good. But to deny the biological basis of man's behavior, you have to overlook or deny 99 percent of what we know about biology today."

At the pole opposite the ethologists are those students of animal behavior who take their direction from the late Dr. T. C. Schneirla of the American Museum of Natural History. His disciples, who can be found at Rutgers, Johns Hopkins, the University of North Carolina and other institutions, espouse the developmental view. They disagree with Lorenzian instinct theory almost in toto; they regard the idea that the genes incorporate fixed action patterns as primitive and simplistic. Even in low-level creatures, they claim, behavior patterns arise out of a continuing dialectic between biological tendencies and experience; they develop out of the interaction between genotype and environment and do not exist preprogramed within the genotype, awaiting only the signal of the right releasers to turn them on. Schneirla studied tropical army ants at close range and noticed that even though the ant's behavior is largely metabolic and automatic, the newly hatched workers stay close to the colony for a few days and seem to flounder around; it takes a while before they become proficient tasks. Even for them, therefore, behavior is not totally instinctive.

Everyone knows, moreover, that cats "instinctively" kill mice, but one researcher observed the behavior of growing kittens and concluded that this so-called instinct is the complex end product of an almost inevitable series of learning experiences based on biological tendencies. The kitten automatically pays attention to moving objects; this leads to playful chasing, which leads to seizing and biting, which leads, in turn, to tasting blood--each experience providing new gratifications and building toward the mouse-killing pattern. If, however, a kitten is carefully conditioned not to chase or bite mice, or misses the crucial steps at the critical period of its development, it may never become a mouser but remain indifferent toward mice all its life.

Much the same is true of mother love. In several laboratories, researchers have been studying mothering in rats and cats and find it to be a complicated phenomenon assembled out of earlier experiences, physical needs and elemental gratifications yielded by the mothering acts themselves. The mother cat, for instance, licks her own nipples and genitals during pregnancy, because they are swollen and feel uncomfortable. This not only helps the mammary glands develop but prepares her to lick her newborn young, who taste the same as her genitals and are, as we saw earlier, wet with the fluids she needs to restore her own chemical balance. The initial licking is an essential first step that leads to others: It stimulates movement and internal functions in the young and conditions them positively to her, and vice versa. The young, now aroused and hungry, begin random and reflexive nuzzling and sucking of the mother and only accidentally come upon her teats; they learn, however, and day by day get better at it. Their suckling relieves the mother's own congestion and continues to make them pleasing to her; she, too, learns, grows perceptibly more adept at caring for her young as time goes by and is distinctly more skillful with a second litter than with the first.

Summing up these and other experiments by developmentalists, Dr. William Tavolga--the zoologist who played tricks on the male goby fish--says, "The whole concept of instinct is superfluous. Certainly, we see plenty of stereotyped behavior in every species, typical of that species, that seems to appear automatically as the creature grows up in its normal environment. But is it instinctive? Not in the way Lorenz means; for at every level of organization, from the amoeba to man, behavior develops out of the interaction between the cytoplasm and the environment. You cannot go directly from the DNA molecule to a specific piece of behavior, and there is no special or separate category of behavior that can be called instinctive."

On the basis of such evidence and theorizing, the developmentalists draw radically different conclusions from the ethologists about the grand design of animal behavior and especially about the nature of man. In a review of Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative, the distinguished psychologist J. P. Scott wrote that it presents a "simple-minded," "uncritical," "adolescent," "oversimplified" and "largely erroneous" picture of human nature. In another book review, Schneirla wrote that Lorenz' On Aggression is based on "dubious assumptions" and presents a "naive" and "outdated" view of human nature. Ashley Montagu, editing a volume of rebuttals of ethology, goes furthest of all: "Man is man because he has no instincts," he writes; "everything he is and has become he has learned, acquired, from his culture." This view is shared by some very unlikely bedfellows: anti-Communist liberals and anti-liberal Communists, pacifist intellectuals and violence-addicted Maoists, pot-smoking hippies and bespectacled scholars, all of whom believe that man is not inherently aggressive or selfish and that his present character is wholly a product of a bad system; to change him, one need only change it. They disagree only about what changes to make. Some "only"!

Most of the people working today in the field of animal behavior take positions somewhere between these two poles of thought. The emerging view of animal-behavior researchers is that the entire nature-nurture, innate-learned, instinct-experience issue is outmoded, if not meaningless; some behavior is purely innate, some entirely learned, but by far the largest part of it results from interactions between genotypic tendencies and environmental influences.

Young squirrels, for example, begin to handle, gnaw and crack nuts by way of natural response to their feel and small but have to learn by trial and error how to put these several activities together in a useful sequence. Many birds make the right nest-building movements without seeming to require a period of experiment; but they use the wrong materials at first, the right ones later. Songbirds, as they reach maturity, will sing their characteristic song, but inaccurately and incompletely, unless they hear others of their species singing. Monkeys reared in isolation climb and swing like other monkeys but cannot socialize, play or mate, because these complex patterns require much learning. Learning is not all, however: Such monkeys cannot be socialized later on, because they have passed a critical period, during which certain maturational changes take place in the nervous system that are essential to the socialization process.

To understand how the genotype and the environment interact and, therefore, to understand the emerging answer to the ancient nature-nurture puzzle, one has to look closely at animals; even then, he may miss it unless he is lucky. Dr. William Dilger, the Cornell ethologist, regards the nature-nurture issue as a nonquestion but is himself a perfect example of a man who has found an answer to it in one species, partly by years of dedicated observation and partly by accident.

Long ago, in studying another problem altogether, Dilger was using as his laboratory animal a species of tiny green African parrot known as the peach-faced lovebird, which, along with the unusual "loving" behavior of mated couples, has another curious trait: The female of the species cuts out strips of leaves or thin bark with her bill, tucks the strips in among the feathers of the lower part of her back and carries them in this fashion to the place where she is building a nest. Dilger says:

Every female lovebird does it the same way, whether or not she's ever seen other females doing it. I had a rather naively instinctivist view of things in those days and it looked to me like a perfect example of an innate, fixed action pattern, a part of the animal's genotype. I even used it in my lectures as a classical example of instinctive behavior.

Then a kind of accident happened in the lab here about ten years ago. We were raising a bunch of females and a young lab assistant of mine took care of them and gave them food, water, grit and whatever they needed. Lovebirds don't build nests when they're young, so he didn't bother to give them nesting materials and didn't think to mention it to me. But although young birds don't build nests with the material, they do play with it--they run under it, pull it around, peck at it and other things of the sort. Finally, they reached breeding age and we paired them--and, to our surprise, not one of those birds could cut out strips and tuck them into her feathers. Not one of them ever managed it. They were simply incapable of it. They showed a great deal of interest in the stuff, but all they managed to do was demolish it. Something hadn't happened to them, between the ages of six months and a year, that should have happened. They had missed experiences they needed to have in order to form what I had taken to be a completely innate behavior pattern. They have only a core of response to the situation--a crude, imperfect action with the nesting material that requires experience to modify. They improve their behavior a little the next time and this leads them to modify it a little more the time after that, and so on, until they have acquired the final pattern.

I did some modifying of my own--this whole experience was a key factor in my shift away from the strict ethological viewpoint. I've been studying lovebirds ever since and seeing things I had never noticed before. I've been able to break down tucking behavior into nine separate neuromuscular components--all of them innate--and do things to the birds to see which of the nine are modifiable by experience, which need experience to result in useful behavior and which are essential to other components. I've deprived them of nesting materials at different stages of their lives, I've given them materials but shaved the feathers off their back and rump, so they can't learn to tuck, I've let them learn to tuck and go through nesting and then shaved off their feathers. From it all, I've gotten a clearer idea of the way in which one species of bird, is constructed out of crude genotypic tendencies as they are modified, perfected and pieced together by experiences gained from the environment.

Recently, I've been studying the same interplay in the case of the lovebirds' courtship procedures. Ethologists have generally considered courtship rituals of birds to be strictly instinctive, and it is true that all male lovebirds do the same things when courting females, even without having seen them done by others. The male has to give the female a lot of signals and get certain positive signs back from her before she'll accept him. We have descriptive names for the things he does--"switch sidling," "squeak twittering," "displacement scratching," "head bobbing" and so on--and every male does them, and they always work. But if you really live with the birds, you begin to see differences. I had cages of them right here in my office for years, so that I could see them all day long, no matter what else I was doing. After a long while, I began to see that the novice male makes a lot of mistakes. He does all the things he should do and they look perfect, but he doesn't know when to do them; his timing is no good. The female looks as if she's just sitting there; but actually, she's giving him very subtle signals that mean "Stop!" or "Not now!" or "Come on!" If she fluffs her cheek feathers slightly, she's agreeable; if she compresses them, she isn't--tiny things like that. It's very hard to recognize--hard for the male bird as well as the human observer. But he has to learn, because if he rushes in when he shouldn't, he'll get nipped. An experienced male won't make that mistake. So, once again, even in a seemingly innate and rigid pattern of behavior, there's a lot of learning, a lot of genotype-environment interaction.

Lovebirds vary their responses a little; men vary theirs a great deal. More so than any other animal, we are able to modify our reactions to the stimuli we encounter; indeed, we build entire cultures out of those modifications. Less so than any other animal are we provided with ready-made fixed action patterns to satisfy our drives or forced by metabolic processes to respond to stimuli in predictable ways. Each animal has its own diet; men have scores of them. Each animal has its own coital position; we have 10, 20, 100. Each animal preens or grooms itself in a species-specific fashion; we have innumerable ways of doing so. Each of the social animals has a relatively unvarying form of group life; we, in our brief time on earth, have created everything from the Athenian city-state to communistic dictatorships.

It is true that, like other animals, we are impelled to action by hunger, fear, anger and sexual desire. But we are not directed by instinct to take specific actions in order to satisfy those drives. The actions one might call instincts in the clam are not only simpler but different in quality from those one might call instincts in the lovebird and radically unlike those often referred to as instincts in man. This is not to say that the study of animal behavior can teach us nothing about ourselves. It can and will, even as the study of animal physiology can and does contribute much to human medicine. But even if one thoroughly studies the skeleton, nervous system, blood and tissues of the rabbit, he is not qualified to diagnose and heal the ills of man; their similarities are instructive, but their differences are crucial.

Above all else, we have learned from animal-behavior studies that the more complicated an animal is, the less its behavior is rigidly programed by the genotype, the more its behavior is developed through experience. The conclusion that man's instincts are very much like those of lower animals is unjustified and misleading. What the evidence justifies instead is the conclusion that man's instincts operate on a level very different from those of most other animals and do not result in specific, predictable, stereotyped behavior patterns.

The clinical experience of every psychotherapist and psychoanalyst since Freud indicates that human beings have only the most amorphous and undifferentiated kinds of instincts and that our training within the family and outside it is what makes us either heterosexual or homosexual, monogamous or polygamous, sybaritic or ascetic, convivial or reclusive, combative or passive. We do not automatically become any of these things; we express our sexual "instinct"--one wishes there were another word for it when referring to man--in whatever way we are taught. And without teaching, we can do almost nothing: In some orphanages, where children get almost no individual attention other than feeding and changing, many of them are unable even to walk by the age of three or four. So much for man's instincts.

Yet for want of a better word, let us agree to call man's genotypic tendencies instincts--while insisting that this means something very different from instincts in lower animals. Man may be innately and instinctively aggressive in the sense that he is chronically restless and irritable; in need of change and excitement, challenge and difficulties; quick to anger when frustrated, and to strike out--or feel the desire to do so--at whatever limits him, threatens him or presses in upon him. But man is not programed and his aggressive drive can be directed in many ways and serve many different ends. One man uses it to become Nero but another to become Marcus Aurelius; one man's aggressive instinct makes him Hitler, another's makes him Gandhi.

The record of man's inhumanity to man is horrifying, when one compiles it--enslavement, castration, torture, rape, mass slaughter in war after war. But who has compiled the record of man's kindness to man--the trillions of acts of gentleness and goodness, the helping hands, smiles, shared meals, kisses, gifts, healings, rescues? If we were no more than murderous predators, with a freakish lack of inhibition against slaughtering our own species, we would have been at a terrible competitive disadvantage compared with other animals; if this were the central truth of our nature, we would scarcely have survived, multiplied and become the dominant species on earth. Man does have an aggressive instinct, but it is not naturally or inevitably directed to killing his own kind. He is a beast and perhaps at times the cruelest beast of all--but sometimes he is also the kindest beast of all. He is not all good and not perfectible, but he is not all bad and not wholly unchangeable or unimprovable. That is the only basis on which one can have hope for him; but it is enough.