The case against evolution

by George Barry O'Toole

§ 5. The True Significance of Instinct

A third class of facts commonly cited as evidence of bestial intelligence are the remarkable phenomena of instinct.[14] The beaver acts as though it were acquainted with the principles of hydraulics and engineering, when it maintains the water at the height requisite to submerge the entrance to its dwelling by building a dam of mud, logs, and sticks across the stream at a point below the site of its habitation. The predatory wasp Pompilius is endowed with surgical art, that suggests a knowledge of anatomy, inasmuch as it first disarms and afterwards paralyzes its formidable prey, the Lycosa or black Tarantula. Another predatory wasp, the Stizus ruficornis, disables Mantids in a similar fashion. One of the American Pompilids, the black wasp Priocnemis flavicornis, is an adept in the art of navigation, since it adopts the principle of the French hydroglissia (an air-driven boat which skims the water under the propulsion of an aeroplane propeller). This insect tows a huge black spider several times its own size and too heavy to be carried, propelling its prey with buzzing wings along the open waterway, and leaving behind a miniature wake like that of a steamer. It thus avoids the obstacles of the dense vegetation, and saves time and energy in transporting the huge carcass of its paralyzed quarry to the haven of its distant burrow. Spiders like the Epeira, for example, are endowed with the mathematical ability of constructing their webs on the patterns of the logarithmic spiral of Jacques Bernouilli (1654-1705), a curve which it took man centuries to discover. The dog infested with parasitic tapeworms (Taenia) evinces a seeming knowledge of pharmaceutics, seeing that it will avidly devour Common Wormwood (Artemisia absynthium), an herb which it never touches otherwise.

In all these cases, however, as we have previously remarked, the illusion of intelligence is due to the combination of teleology or objective purposiveness with sentient consciousness. But teleology is nothing more than a material expression of intelligence, not to be confounded with subjective intelligence, which is its causal principle. When the cells of the iris of the eye of a larval salamander regenerate the lens in its typical perfection, after the latter has been experimentally destroyed, we behold a process that is objectively, but not subjectively, intelligent. In like manner the instinctive acts of an animal are teleological or objectively purposive, but do not proceed from an intelligence inherent in the animal, any more than the intelligent soliloquy delivered by a phonograph proceeds from a conscious intelligence inherent in the disc. In the animal, sentient consciousness is associated with this teleology or objective purposiveness, but such consciousness is only aware of what can be sensed, and is, therefore, unconscious of purpose, that is, of the supersensible link, which connects a means with an end. “Instinct,” to cite the words of Wm. James, “is usually defined as the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends, without foresight of the ends, and without previous education in the performance.” (“Principles of Psychology,” vol. II, c. xxiv, p. 383.) Hence the unconscious and objective purposiveness, which the human mind discerns in the instinctive behavior of brutes, is manifestative, not of an intelligence within the animal itself, but only of the infinite intelligence of the First Cause or Creator, Who imposed these laws replete with wisdom upon the animal kingdom, and of the finite intelligence of man, who is capable of recognizing the Divine purpose expressed, not only in the instincts of animals, but in all the telic phenomena of nature. Such marvels are not the fortuitous result of uncoördinated contingencies. Behind these correlated teleologies of the visible universe there is a Supreme Intelligence, which has “ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight.” (Wisdom: XI, 21.) “And this universal geometry,” says Fabre, in allusion to the mathematics of the Epeira’s web, “tells of an Universal Geometrician, whose divine compass has measured all things. I prefer that, as an explanation of the logarithmic curve of the Ammonite and the Epeira, to the Worm screwing up the tip of its tail. It may not perhaps be in accordance with latter-day teaching, but it takes a loftier flight.” (“Life of the Spider,” p. 400.)

But, though the teleology of instinct is wonderful in the extreme, the element of psychic regulation is so subordinate and restricted, that, far from postulating intelligent control, certain scientists go so far as to deny even sentient control, in the case of instinctive behavior. Animals, in their opinion, are nothing more than “reflex machines,” a view which coincides with that of Descartes, who regarded animals as unconscious automatons. “The instincts,” says Pawlow, “are also reflexes but more complex.” (Science, Nov. 9, 1923, p. 359.) The late Jacques Loeb was a protagonist of the view that instincts are simply metachronic chain-reflexes, in which one elementary process releases another, each preceding phase terminating in the production of the succeeding phase, until the entire gamut of concatenated arcs has been traversed. Hence, John B. Watson, the Behaviorist disciple of Loeb, defines instinct as “a combination of congenital responses unfolding serially under appropriate stimulation.”

But, if Darwinian anthropomorphism sins by excess, Loeb’s mechanism sins by defect, and fails to account for the indubitable variability of instinctive behavior. For, however fixed and stereotyped such behavior may be, it manifests unmistakable adaptation to external circumstances and emergencies, as well as subordination to the general physiological condition of the organism, phenomena that exclude the idea of fatal predetermination according to the fixed pattern of a determinate series of reflex arcs. As Jennings has shown, synaptic coördination in the neural mechanism cannot be more than a partial factor in determining serial responses. The state of the organism as a whole must also be taken into account. (Cf. “Behavior of the Lower Organisms,” p. 251.) Thus an earthworm may turn to the right simply because it has just turned to the left, but this so-called “chain-reflex” does not involve an invariable and inevitable sequence of events, since the earthworm may turn twice or thrice to the left, before the second reaction of turning to the right comes into play. Any animal, when sated, will react differently to a food stimulus than it will when it is starved, by reason of its altered organic condition. We have something more, therefore, to reckon with than a mere system of reflexes released by a simple physical stimulus.

The second type of variability manifested by instinct is its capacity for complex and continuous adjustment to variable environmental circumstances. Thus predatory animals, such as wasps, crabs, spiders, and carnivorous mammals, accommodate themselves appropriately and uninterruptedly to the changing and unforeseeable movements of the prey they are engaged in stalking, giving evidence in this way of the regulation of their hunting instincts by sensory impressions. Whether this element of psychic control is based upon object-perception, or simple sensation, and whether it involves a sensual impulse, or is merely sensori-motor, we have, naturally, no direct means of ascertaining. But the presence of some sort of sensory regulation is evident enough, e.g. in the prompt and unerring flight of vultures to distant carrion. Moreover, there is a close analogy between our sense organs and those of an animal. Particularly, in the case of the higher animals, the resemblance of the sense organs and nervous system to our own is extremely close, so much so that even the localization of sensory and motor centers in the brain is practically identical in dogs, apes, and men. Moreover, the animals make analogous use of their sense organs, orientating them and accommodating them for perception, and using them to inspect strange objects, etc., e.g. they turn their eyes, prick up their ears, snuff the wind, etc. Again, analogous motor and emotional effects result from the stimulation of their sense organs, and brutes make emotional displays of anger, exultation, fear, etc., similar to our own. Hence it is to be presumed that they have similar sensuous experiences. The analogy, however, must not be pressed further than the external manifestations warrant. With brute animals, the manifestations in question are confined exclusively to phenomena of the sensuous order.

Another indication of sensory control is found in the repair-work performed by animals endowed with the constructive instinct. C. F. Schroeder, for instance, experimenting on certain caterpillars, found that they repaired their weaving, whenever it was disturbed by the experimenter. Fabre, too, discovered that a Mason-bee would plaster up holes or clefts marring the integrity of its cell, provided that the bee was actually engaged in the process of plastering at the time, and provided that the experimenter inflicted the damage at the level, and within the area, of the construction work on which the bee was then engaged. In a word, if the damage inflicted could be repaired by a simple continuation or extension of its actual work of the moment, the bee was able to cope with the emergency. There are other ways, too, in which the animal adapts its constructive instincts to external circumstance. Fabre tells us that the Bramble-bee Osmia, which builds a train of partitioned cells in snail shells or in hollow reeds, will victual first and then plaster in a partition, if the reed be narrow, but will first plaster a partition, and then introduce honey and pollen through a hole left unclosed in the partition, whenever the reed is of greater diameter. This reversal of the procedure according to the exigencies of the external situation does not suggest the chain-reflex of Loeb. (Cf. “The Bramble-Bee,” pp. 214-217.) Another kind of adaptation of instinct to external circumstances consists in the economical omission of the initial step of a serial construction, in cases where the environmental conditions provide a ready-made equivalent. “The silkworm,” says Driesch, “is said not to form its web of silk if it is cultivated in a box containing tulle, and some species of bees which normally construct tunnels do not do so if they find one ready made in the ground, they then only perform their second instinctive act: separating the tunnel into single cells.” (“Science & Phil. of the Organism,” vol. II, p. 47.)

Driesch’s analysis of the constructive instinct shows that these facts of adaptation or regulation fit in with the idea of sensory control rather than with that of a chain-reflex. In the supposition that the successive stages of instinctive construction are due to a chain-reflex, consisting of a series of elementary motor reactions a, b, c, etc., in which a produces the external work A and, on terminating, releases b, which, in turn, produces external work B and releases c, etc., clearly b could never appear before a, and the sight of A ready-made would not inhibit a, nor would the removal of A defer the advent of b. In other words, regulation would be impossible. But, if we suppose that not the elemental act a, but rather the sensory perception of A, the first state of the external construction, is the stimulus to b and, consequently, to the production of the second state of construction B, then we understand why b is released independently of a, when, for example, an insect discovers a ready-made substitute for A, the initial step in its construction, and we also understand why, in cases of accidental damage resulting in the total or partial removal of A, the reaction b is deferred and the reaction a prolonged, until the repair or reconstruction of A is complete; for, in this supposition, the addition of A will inhibit a and release b, whereas the subtraction of A will inhibit the appearance of b and consequently defer B, until the state of construction A, the sight of which is the stimulus to b, is complete. The fact of regulation, therefore, entails sensory control of the serial responses involved in the constructive instinct. Hence, as H. P. Weld of Cornell expresses it: “We may safely assume that even in the lowest forms of animal life some sort of sensory experience releases the (instinctive) disposition and to an extent determines the subsequent course of action.” (Encycl. Am., v. 15, p. 168.)

But it would be going to the opposite extreme to interpret these adjustments of instinct to external contingencies as evidence of intelligent regulation. The animal’s ability, for example, to repair accidental damage to a construction, which instinct impels it to build, is rigidly limited to repairs that can be accomplished by a simple continuation of the actual and normal occupation of the moment. If, however, the damage affects an already completed portion of the instinctive structure, and its present occupation is capable of continuance, the animal is impotent to relinquish this actual occupation of the moment, in order to cope with the emergency. Suppose, for illustration, that the instinctive operations a and b are finished and the animal is in the c-stage of its instinctive performance, then, if the damage is inflicted in the A-portion of the structure, and c can be continued independently of A, the animal cannot relinquish c and return to a, in order to restore the marred integrity of A. This shows that the animal is guided, in its repair-work, by sense, which is bound to the here and now, and not by intelligence, which is an abstractive faculty that emancipates from the actual and concrete present, and enables the possessor to hark back to the past of its performance, should necessity require. Thus Fabre found that the Mason-bee, after it had turned from building to the foraging of honey and pollen, would no longer repair holes pricked in its cell, but suffered the latter to become a veritable vessel of the Danaïdes, which it vainly strove to fill with its liquid provender. Though the holes affected portions extremely close to the topmost layer of masonry, and although it frequently sounded and explored these unaccustomed holes with its antennæ, it took no steps to check the escape of the honey and pollen by recurring to its mason craft of earlier stages. And, finally, when it did resume the plasterer’s trade in constructing a lid for the cell, it would spare no mortar to plug the gaping breaches in the walls of its cell, but deposited its egg in a chamber drained of honey, and then proceeded to perform the useless work of closing with futile diligence only the topmost aperture in this much perforated dwelling. Obviously, therefore, the bee failed to perceive the connection which existed between these breaches and the escape of the honey, and it was unable to apply its instinctive building skill to new uses by abstraction from the definite connection, in which the latter is normally operative.

Sense, therefore, and not intelligence, is the regulatory principle of instinct. To recognize causal and telic relationships is the prerogative of a superorganic intelligence. The transcendental link by which a useful means is referred to an ulterior end is something that cannot be sensed, but only understood. An animal, therefore, acts toward an end, not on account of an end. Nature, however, has compensated for this ignorance by implanting in each species of animal a special teleological disposition, by reason of which objects and actions, which are, under normal conditions, objectively useful to the individual, or the species, become invested for the animal with a subjective aspect of agreeableness, while objects and actions, which are normally harmful, are invested with a subjective aspect of repulsiveness. The qualities of serviceableness and pleasantness happen, so far as the animal is concerned, to be united in one and the same concrete object or action, but the animal is only aware of the pleasantness, which appeals to its senses, and not of the serviceableness, which does not. Thus, in the example already cited, the dog suffering from tapeworms eats the herb known as Common Wormwood, not because it is aware of the remedial efficacy of the herb, but simply because the odor and flavor of the plant appeal to the animal in its actual morbid condition, ceasing to do so, however, when the latter regains the state of health. How different is the action of the man whose blood is infected with malarial parasites and who takes quinine, not because the bitter taste of the alkaloid appeals to his palate, but solely because he has his future cure explicitly in view! “Finally,” says Weld, “the more we learn about instincts the more apparent it becomes that the situations from which they proceed are meaningful, but we need not suppose that the organism is aware of the meaning. The chick in the egg feels (we may only guess as to its nature) a vague discomfort, and the complicated reaction by which it makes its egress from the shell is released.” (Encycl. Am., v. 15, p. 169.)

Recapitulating, then, we may define instinct as a psycho-organic propensity, not acquired by education or experience, but congenital by inheritance and identical in all members of the same zoölogical species, having as its physical basis the specific nervous organization of the animal and as its psychic basis a teleological coördination of the cognitive, emotional, and motor functions, in virtue of which, given the proper physiological state of the organism and the presence of an appropriate environmental stimulus, an animal, without consciousness of purpose, is impelled to the inception, and regulated in the performance, of complicated behavior which is sensually gratifying and, under normal circumstances, simultaneously beneficial to the individual, or the race.

Instinctive acts are performed without previous experience or training on the part of the animal, and are, nevertheless, at least in the majority of cases, perfect in their first performance. A few, like the pecking-instinct of young chickens, are slightly improvable through sentient experience, e.g. the young chick, at first undiscriminating in the choice of the particles which it picks up, learns later by associative memory to distinguish what is tasty and edible from what is disagreeable and inedible, but, for the most part, the perfection of instinctive acts is independent of prior experience. Hence instinct is entirely different from human reason, which, in the solution of problems, is compelled to begin with reflection upon the data furnished by previous experience, or education. The animal, however, in its instinctive operations, without pausing to investigate, deliberate, or calculate, proceeds unhesitatingly on the very first occasion to a prompt and perfect solution of its problems. Hence, without study, consultation, planning, or previous apprenticeship of any sort, and in the complete absence of experimental knowledge, that might serve as matter for reflection or as a basis for inference, the animal is able to solve intricate problems in engineering, geometry, anatomy, pharmaceutics, etc., which the combined intelligence of mankind required centuries upon centuries of schooling, research, and reflection in order to solve. Of two things, therefore, one: either these actions do not proceed from an intelligent principle inherent in the animal; or they do, and in that case we are compelled to recognize in brute animals an intelligence superior to our own, because they accomplish deftly and without effort ingenious feats that human reason cannot duplicate, save clumsily and at the price of prolonged discipline and incessant drudgery. “Perhaps the strongest reason,” says an anonymous writer, “for not regarding the activities of instinct as intelligent is that in such enormously complex sequences of action as, for instance, the emperor moth carries out in the preparing of an escape-opening for itself on its completing the larval and passing into the imago state, the intelligence needed would be so great that it could not be limited to this single activity, and yet it is so limited.”[15]

Intelligence is essentially a generalizing and abstracting power; hence, from its very nature, it could not be limited to a single activity. Bestial instincts, however, though frequently so amazingly complex and ingeniously purposive as to seem the fruit of profound meditation, are, nevertheless, confined exclusively to this or that determinate ability. They operate within narrow and preëstablished grooves, from which they never swerve to any appreciable degree, being but little modifiable or perfectible by experience. Bees always construct hexagonal cells, spiders stick to the logarithmic spiral, and beavers never attempt to put their engineering skill to new uses. Instincts have but little pliancy, their regularity and uniformity being such as to make the instinctive abilities definitely predictable in the case of any given species of animal. Now, the distinctive mark of intelligence is versatility, that is, aptitude for many things without determinate restriction to this or that. A man who is expert in one art may, by reason of his intelligence, be equally proficient in a dozen others. The biologist may be a competent chemist, and the astronomer an excellent physicist. Michel Angelo was a sculptor, a frescoer, a painter, an anatomist, an engineer, and an architect, while Leonardo da Vinci had even more arts to his credit. To predict before birth the precise form that a man’s ability will take is an impossibility. Certain aptitudes, such as a musical gift, are no doubt inherited, but it is an inheritance which imposes no rigid necessity upon inheriter; since he is free to neglect this native talent, and to develop others for which he has no special innate aptitude. With man, the fashion in clothing and the styles of architecture vary from day to day. The brute, however, never emerges from the rut of instinct, and each generation of a given animal species monotonously reproduces the history of the previous generation. Man, on the contrary, is capable of indefinite progress, as the march of human cultures and civilizations shows. Gregarious animals are restricted by their instincts to determinate types of aggregation, as we see in the case of ants and bees. Hence these insect communities are unacquainted with our sanguinary revolutions which overturn monarchies in favor of republics, or set up dictatorships in place of democracies; for, fortunately or unfortunately, as one may choose to regard it, man is not limited to one form of government rather than another.

Animals, then, notwithstanding their wonderful instincts, are deficient in precisely that quality which is the unique criterion of intelligence, namely, versatility. Each species has but one stereotyped ability, outside of which it is woefully stupid and inefficient. “So long,” says Fabre, “as its circumstances are normal the insect’s actions are calculated most rationally in view of the object to be attained” (“The Mason-Bees,” p. 167), but let the circumstances cease to be normal, let them vary never so little from those which ordinarily obtain, and the animal is helpless, while its instinctive predisposition becomes, not merely futile, but often positively detrimental. Thus the instinct, which should, in the normal course of events, guide night-flying moths to the white flowers that contain the life-sustaining nectar of their nocturnal banquets, proves their undoing, when they come into contact with the white lights of artificial illumination. In fact, the fatal fondness of the moth for the candle flame has become in all languages a proverb for the folly of courting one’s own destruction.

The animal may employ an exquisitely efficient method in accomplishing its instinctive work, but is absolutely impotent to apply this ingenious method to more than one determinate purpose. Man, however, is not so restricted. He varies at will both his aims and his methods. He can adapt the same means (a pocketknife, for instance) to different ends, and, conversely, he can obtain the same end by the use of different means (e.g. communicate by mail, or telegraph, or radio). Man, in a word, is emancipated from limitation to the singular and the concrete by virtue of his unique prerogative, reason, or intelligence, the power that enables him to generalize from the particular and to abstract from the concrete. This is the secret of his unlimited versatility. This is the basis of his capacity for progress. This is the root of his freedom; for his will seeks happiness in general, happiness in the abstract, and is not, therefore, compelled to choose any particular form or concrete embodiment of happiness, such as this or that style of architecture, this or that form of government, this or that kind of clothing, etc., etc. Teleology is but a material expression of intelligence, and may, therefore, occur in things destitute of intelligence, but versatility is the inseparable concomitant and infallible sign of an inherent and autonomous intelligence. Lacking this quality, instinct, however telic, is obviously not intelligence.

Another indication of the fact that no intelligence lies behind the instinctive behavior of brutes is manifest from their evident unconsciousness of purpose. That the animal is ignorant of the purpose implied in its own instinctive actions appears from the fact that it will carry out these operations with futile diligence and exactitude, even when, through accident, the purpose is conspicuously absent. Thus the hen deprived of her eggs will, nevertheless, continue the now futile process of incubation for twenty-one days, or longer, despite the fact that her obstinacy in maintaining the straw of the empty nest at a temperature of 104° F. serves no useful purpose whatever. She cannot but sense the absence of the eggs; she has not, however, the intelligence to realize that incubation without eggs is vain. The connection between the latter and the former is something that mere sense cannot apprehend. Hence the hen is not troubled by the purposelessness of her performance. Fabre gives many examples of this futile persistence in instinctive operations, despite their complete frustration. Alluding to the outcome of his experiments on the Mason-wasp Pelapaeus, he says: “The Mason bees, the Caterpillar of the Great Peacock Moth, and many others, when subjected to similar tests, are guilty of the same illogical behaviour: they continue, in the normal order, their series of industrious actions, though accident has now rendered them all useless. Just like millstones unable to cease revolving though there be no corn left to grind, let them once be given the compelling power and they will continue to perform their task despite its futility.” (“Bramble Bees,” pp. 192, 193.)

The instance cited by Dr. H. D. Schmidt is an excellent illustration of this inability of an animal to appreciate either the utility or futility of its instinctive behavior. Having described the instinct of squirrels to bury nuts by ramming them into the ground with their teeth, and then using their paws to cover them with earth, he continues as follows: “Now, as regards the young squirrel, which, of course, never had been present at the burial of a nut, I observed that, after having eaten a number of hickory nuts to appease its appetite, it would take one between its teeth, then sit upright and listen in all directions. Finding all right, it would scratch upon the smooth blanket on which I was playing with it as if to make a hole, then hammer with the nut between its teeth upon the blanket, and finally perform all the motions required to fill up a hole—in the air; after which it would jump away, leaving the nut, of course, uncovered.” (Transactions of the Am. Neurological Ass’n, 1875, vol. I, p. 129—italics his.) This whole pantomime of purposeless gesticulations, from the useless “Stop, look and listen!” down to the final desertion of the uncovered nut, is overwhelming evidence of the fact that the brute is destitute of any rational faculty capable of recognizing the telic aspect of its own instinctive conduct.

The claim is sometimes made that certain forms of animal behavior are not unconsciously, but consciously, telic. Bouvier, for example, claims that in the rare cases of the use of tools among the Arthropoda, we have evidence of the existence of intelligent inventiveness of a rudimentary kind. Thus the crab Melia carries a sea-anemone in its chela as a weapon wherewith to sting its prey into a condition of paralysis. The leaf-cutting ants of India and Brazil use their own thread-spinning larvæ as tools for cementing together the materials out of which their nests are constructed. The predatory wasp Ammophila urnaria uses a pebble to tamp the filling of its burrow. According to the Wheelers (cf. Science, May 30, 1924, p. 486), the hunting wasp Sphex (Ammophila) gryphus (Sm.) makes similar use of a pebble. As Bouvier notes, however, this use of tools appears “to be rather exceptional ..., showing itself only in the primitive state consisting of the use of foreign bodies as implements.” (Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1918, p. 456.) Moreover, the animals in question are limited to a concretely determinate kind of tool, which their environment supplies ready-made. Such a use of implements does not presuppose any power of abstraction and generalization. In fact, the presence of such a power is expressly excluded by the consideration that the animal’s so-called “inventiveness” is confined exclusively to one particularized manifestation.

At times the behavior of animals so closely simulates the consciously telic or intelligent conduct of men, that only severely critical methods enable us to discriminate between them. An experiment, which Erich Wasmann, S.J., performed upon ants will serve to illustrate this point. In one of his glass nests, Father Wasmann constructed an island of sand surrounded by a moat filled with water. He then removed from their “nursery” a certain number of the ant larvæ and placed them on the island. Thereupon the ants were observed to build a bridge of sand across the moat “for the purpose,” apparently, of rescuing the marooned larvæ. Such behavior seemed to imply an intelligent ordination of a means to an end. Wasmann’s second experiment, however, proved this inference to be wholly unwarranted; for, when he excavated a hole in the sand of the nest and filled it with water, the ants, stimulated by what to them was the disagreeable dampness of the marginal sand, were impelled to perform the reflex act of kicking about in the sand. This impulse persisted until all traces of the hole, the dampness and the water had been buried under a carpet of drier sand. Then, and then only, was the aforesaid impulse inhibited. Applying these results to the interpretation of the first experiment, we see that the “building of a bridge” in the first experiment was not intentional, but merely an accidental result of a kicking-reflex, with damp sand acting as a stimulator. Once the moat was bridged, however, the ants happened to find the larvæ, and were then impelled by instinct to carry the larvæ to their proper place in the nest. To see in such an incident a planned and premeditated rescue of the marooned larvæ would be grossly anthropomorphic. Nevertheless, had only the first experiment been performed, such an anthropomorphic interpretation would have seemed fully justified, and it was only by an appropriate variation of the conditions of the original experiment that this false interpretation could be definitively excluded.

Consciously telic behavior is distinguishable from unconsciously telic conduct only to the extent that it implies an agent endowed with the power of abstraction. Unless an agent can vary radically the specificity of the procedure, whereby it attains a given end, the purposiveness of its behavior is no evidence of its intelligence. “Among animals,” says Bergson, “invention is never more than a variation on the theme of routine. Locked up as it is within the habits of its species, the animal succeeds no doubt in broadening these by individual initiative; but its escape from automatism is momentary only, just long enough to create a new automatism; the gates of its prison close as soon as they are opened; dragging the chain merely lengthens it. Only with man does consciousness break the chain.” (Cf. Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1918, p. 457.)

In vain, then, do our Darwinian humanizers of the brute exalt instinct at the expense of intelligence. Their attempt to reduce to a difference of degree the difference of kind that separates the irrational from the rational, fails all along the line. Indeed, far from being able to account for the appearance of intelligence in the world, transformistic theories are impotent to account for so much as the development of instinct, all forms of the evolutionary theory, the Lamarckian, the Darwinian, the De-Vriesian, etc., being equally inadequate to the task of explaining the origin of animal instincts.

The complex instinctive behavior of predatory wasps, for example, is absolutely essential for the preservation of their respective races, and yet these indispensable instincts are completely useless in any other than the perfect state. From their very nature, therefore, they do not admit of gradual development. The law of all, or none, holds here. “Instinct developed by degrees,” says Fabre, “is flagrantly impossible. The art of preparing the larva’s provisions allows none but masters, and suffers no apprentices; the Wasp must excel in it from the outset or leave the thing alone.” (“The Hunting Wasps,” p. 403.) To be useful at all, the instinctive operation must possess an indivisible perfection, which cannot be partitioned into degrees. The Pompilius (Calicurgus), for instance, must, under penalty of instant death, take the preliminary precaution to sting into inaction the ganglion that controls the poison forceps of her formidable prey, the Black Tarantula (Lycosa), before she proceeds to paralyze it by stabbing its thoracic ganglion. The slightest imperfection or shortcoming in her surgery would be irretrievably disastrous. Such an instinct never existed in an imperfect form. The first wasp to possess it must have been an expert, or she would never have lived to serve the limp body of the huge spider as living provender for her tiny grub. “The first to come to grips with the Tarantula,” says Fabre, “had an unerring knowledge of her dangerous surgery. The least hesitation, the slightest speculation, and she was lost. The first teacher would also have been the last, with no disciples to take up her art and perfect it.” (“Bramble Bees,” p. 354.)

Another hunting wasp, the Hairy Ammophila, subdues a large caterpillar into a state of coma by pricking with its sting nine of the ventral ganglia, while it spares the cervical ganglion, merely compressing the latter with its mandibles, so as not to destroy life altogether. This nice discrimination rules out Loeb’s hypothesis of a so-called “chemotaxis.” As a result of this elaborate surgical operation, the power of movement is suppressed in every segment, and the tiny larva of the wasp emerging from the egg laid on the ventral surface of the caterpillar can devour this huge living, but motionless, victim in peace and safety. Dead meat would not agree with the larva, and any movement of the caterpillar would be fatal to the delicate grub. To eliminate these contingencies, the Wasp’s surgery must be perfect from the very outset. “There is,” says Fabre, “no via media, no half success. Either the caterpillar is treated according to rule and the Wasp and its family is perpetuated; or else the victim is only partially paralyzed and the Wasp’s offspring dies in the egg. Yielding to the inexorable logic of things, we will have to admit that the first Hairy Ammophila, after capturing a Grey Worm to feed her larva, operated on the patient by the exact method in use today.” (“The Hunting Wasps,” pp. 403, 404.)

Certain meticulous critics of our day cite the fact of the diffusion of the poison as indicating that the surgery of the hunting wasps need not be so perfectly accommodated to the nervous system of their prey, and they attempt in this way to discredit Fabre as having failed to take the occurrence of diffusion into account. A careful reading of his works, however, will serve to vindicate him in this respect. In a chapter on the poison of the bee, for instance, we read: “The local effect is diffused. This diffusion, which might well take place in the victims of the predatory insects, plays no part in the latter’s method of operation. The egg, which will be laid immediately afterwards, demands the complete inertia of the prey from the outset. Hence all the nerve-centers that govern locomotion must be numbed instantaneously by the virus.” (“Bramble Bees,” p. 347.) Bouvier, therefore, very justly remarks: “After all, when Fabre’s work is examined there is no trouble in seeing that none of these details escaped him. He never disputed the paralytic action of the poison inoculated by the insect, and the wonderful researches by the Peckhams on the Pompilids, which hunt Lycosids, have clearly established the fact that the thrusts of the sting given by the predatory insect produce two different kinds of paralysis, one functional, and often temporary, resulting from the action of the venom, the other structural and persistent, produced by the dart which more or less injures the nervous centers.” (Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1916, p. 594.)

In the case of predatory insects, therefore, the instinct must be perfect at the outset, or survival is impossible. For the origin of such instincts, Darwinism, which stresses the gradualness of evolutionary progress, has no explanation that will hold water. Lamarckism, which sees in acquired habits transmitted by inheritance, the origin of instinct, the “memory of the race,” is equally at a loss to account for these instincts. The formation of habits requires practice and repetition. The predatory insect must be perfect at the start, and yet it only exercises its remarkable instinct once a year. Where is the practice and reiteration requisite for canalizing its nervous system into the conduction-paths of habit? How did one particular set of rarely performed acts happen to gain precedence over all others, and to be alone successful in stamping themselves indelibly upon the nerve plasm as habits, and upon the germ plasm as instincts? De-Vriesianism, which would make the acquisition and perfecting of instinct dependent upon the rare and accidental contingency of a fortuitous mutation, is even more objectionable. These instincts are vital to the insect. If their acquisition and improvement depend upon the lucky chance of a series of favorable mutations, its prospects of survival are nil; for it cannot afford to wait at all. “In order to live,” says Fabre, “we all require the conditions that enable us to live: this is a truth worthy of the famous axioms of La Palice. The predatory insects live by their talent. If they do not possess it to perfection, their race is lost.” (“Bramble Bees,” p. 364.)

Recently, there has been a revival of Lamarckism hitherto regarded as defunct. Guyer, Kammerer, and Pawlow profess to find factual justification for it, and Bouvier adopts it in his “La vie psychique des insectes” (1918), to account for the origin of instinct. Of the alleged facts of Kammerer and Guyer, we have spoken in a previous chapter. Here we shall content ourselves with few remarks on the experiments of Ivan Pawlow, as being especially relevant to the subject under consideration. The Russian physiologist has experimented on white mice, and claims that the mice of the fifth generation learned to answer a dinner bell in the space of five lessons, whereas their ancestors of the first generation had required a hundred lessons to answer the same signal. Hence he concludes: “The latest experiments ... show that conditioned reflexes, i.e., the highest nervous activity, are inherited.” (Science, Nov. 9, 1923, p. 360.) His results, however, do not tally with those recently obtained by E. C. MacDowell of the Carnegie Institution, by H. G. Bragg, and by E. M. Vicari of Columbia. MacDowell found that white rats trained in a circular maze did not improve in their susceptibility to training from generation to generation. “Children from trained parents,” he says, “or from trained parents and grandparents, take as long to learn the maze habit as the first generation used.” (Science, March 28, 1924, p. 303.) Having cited the similar results of Bragg, who experimented with white mice, he concludes: “The results are in full accord with those given above; they indicate that the training of the ancestors did not facilitate the learning of the descendants.” (Ibidem.) E. M. Vicari, using a simple maze and white rats, obtained the same results. “It seems clear,” she says, “that the latter generations have not been aided by the training of their ancestors.” (Ibidem.)

Bouvier’s conception, then, that the automatisms of instinct originate as automatisms of acquired habit, the latter being appropriated by inheritance, still stands in need of reliable experimental confirmation. Moreover, a theory of this sort could never account, as Weismann points out, for such phenomena as the specific instincts of worker bees, which are excluded from propagation. Nor can the theory explain, as originating in acquired habit, those instinctive operations of enormous complexity, like the complicated method of emergence employed by the larva of the emperor moth, which only occur once in a lifetime, and could not, therefore, fasten themselves on the organism as a habit.

An evolutionary origin of instinct, however, though extremely improbable, is, at any rate, not absolutely inconceivable. Its teleology, as we have seen, does not imply inherent intelligence, but is explicable as an innate law involving appropriate coördination of the sensory, emotional, and motor functions, all of which are intrinsically dependent on the organism. But intelligence, as we have seen, is a superorganic power, having its source in a spiritual principle, that, from the very nature of things, cannot be evolved from matter. Human reason, therefore, owes its origin, not to any evolution of the human body, but to the creation of the human soul, which is the source and subject of that unique prerogative of man, namely: the power of abstract thought.

CHAPTER III
THE ORIGIN OF THE HUMAN BODY

In an article published August 31, 1895, in the New York Freeman’s Journal, the late Rev. J. A. Zahm gave expression to the following opinion: “The evolution of the body of man from some inferior animal and its subsequent endowment in this body by God of a rational soul is antagonistic to no dogma of faith and may be shown to be in harmony with the teachings of St. Thomas.” The scriptural and theological aspect of this view need not concern us here, our sole purpose being to evaluate it from a purely scientific standpoint. Once evolutionary thought takes cognizance of the fact that the human soul is a spiritual principle underivable from mere matter, once it acknowledges the immediate creation of the human soul, and professes to do no more than account for the origin of man’s animal body, that moment is it shorn of its materialistic implications; but what, we may ask, are the foundations of such an hypothesis in the realm of scientific fact?

The writer must confess that he cannot fathom the mentality of those who accept the evolutionary explanation, so far as plant and animal organisms are concerned, but proceed to draw the line when it comes to applying it to the human body. For if one (to borrow Du Bois-Reymond’s expression) “gives so much as his little finger to” the evolutional argument from organic homology, he must end, in so far as he is consistent, in acknowledging as incontestable its obvious application to man. The only choice which sound logic can sanction is between fixism and a thoroughgoing system of transformism, which does not exempt the human body from the scope of the evolutionary explanation. Indeed, the theory of evolution itself stands or falls upon this issue; for, if structures so strikingly similar as the skeletons of a man and an ape, respectively, have originated from two distinct ancestral stocks, then in no case at all is the inference of common descent from structural resemblance a legitimate procedure. In other words, if the homologies existent between the human and simian organisms are explicable on some other basis than that of common ancestry, then all organic homologies are so explicable, and the whole evolutionary argument collapses.