from the human genome – that animals evolve by adjusting the thermostats on the fronts of genes, enabling them to grow different parts of their bodies for longer – has profound implications for the nature–nurture debate. Imagine the possibilities in a system of this kind. You can turn up the expression of one gene, the product of which turns up the expression of another, which suppresses the expression of a third, and so on. And right in the middle of this little network, you can throw in the effects of experience. Something external – education, food, a fight, or requited love, say – can influence one of the thermostats. Suddenly nurture can start to express itself through nature.
CHAPTER TWO A plethora of instincts
When, as by a miracle, the lovely butterfly bursts from the chrysalis full-winged and perfect…it has, for the most part, nothing to learn, because its little life flows from its organization like melody from a music box.
Douglas Alexander Spalding, 18731
Like Charles Darwin, William James was a man of independent means. He inherited a private income from his father Henry, whose father William had amassed $10,000 a year from the Erie Canal. The one-legged Henry used his self-sufficiency to become an intellectual, and spent much of his life shuttling between New York, Geneva, London and Paris with his children in tow. He was articulate, religious and self-assured. His two youngest sons went off to fight in the Civil War, then failed in business and turned to drink or depression. His two eldest sons, William and Henry, were trained almost from birth to be intellectuals. The result was (in Rebecca West’s phrase) that ‘one of them grew up to write fiction as though it were philosophy and the other to write philosophy as though it were fiction’.2
Both brothers were influenced by Darwin. Henry’s novel The Portrait of a Lady was written in thrall to Darwin’s idea of female choice as a force in evolution.3 William’s Principles of Psychology, much of which was first published as a series of articles in the 1880s, contained a manifesto for nativism – the idea that the mind cannot learn unless it has the rudiments of innate knowledge – going against the prevailing fashion for empiricism, the theory that behaviour is shaped by experience. William James believed that human beings were equipped with innate tendencies that were not derived from experience but from the Darwinian process of natural selection. ‘He denies experience!’ wrote James, quoting an imaginary reader. ‘Denies science; believes the mind created by miracle; is a regular old partisan of innate ideas! That is enough! We’ll listen to such antediluvian twaddle no more.’
William James asserted that human beings have more instincts than other animals, not fewer. ‘Man possesses all the impulses that [lower creatures] have, and a great many more besides…It will be observed that no other mammal, not even the monkey, shows so large an array’. He argued that it was false to oppose instinct to reason:
Reason, per se, can inhibit no impulses; the only thing that can neutralize an impulse is an impulse the other way. Reason may, however, make an inference which will excite the imagination so as to set loose the impulse the other way; and thus, though the animal richest in reason might also be the animal richest in instinctive impulses, too, he would never seem the fatal automaton which a merely instinctive animal would be.4
This is an extraordinary passage, not least because its impact on early twenty-first-century thought can be said to be almost nil. Very few people, on the side of either nature or nurture, took up such an extreme nativist position in the century to come, and almost everybody assumed for the following hundred years that reason was indeed the opposite of instinct. Yet James was no fringe lunatic. His work has influenced generations of scholars on consciousness, sensation, space, time, memory, will, emotion, thought, knowledge, reality, self, morality and religion – to name just the chapter headings of a modern book about his work. So why does this same book of 628 pages not even have the words ‘instinct’, ‘impulse’ or ‘innate’ in its index?5 Why, for more than a century, has it been considered little short of indecent even to use the word ‘instinct’ in the context of human behaviour?
James’s ideas were indeed immensely influential at first. His follower, William McDougall, founded a whole school of instinctivists, who became adept at spotting new human instincts for every circumstance. Too adept: speculation outstripped experiment and before long a counter-reformation was inevitable. In the 1920s the very empiricist ideas attacked by James, embodied in the notion of the blank slate, swept back to power not just in psychology (with John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner), but in anthropology (Franz Boas), psychiatry (Freud) and sociology (Durkheim). Nativism was almost totally eclipsed until 1958, when Noam Chomsky once again pinned its charter to the door of science. In a famous review of a book on language by Skinner, Chomsky argued that it was impossible for a child to learn the rules of language from examples: the child must have innate rules to which the vocabulary of the language was fitted. Even then, the blank slate dominated human sciences for many years. It was not until a century after his book was published that William James’s idea of uniquely human instincts was at last taken seriously again in a new manifesto of nativism, written by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides (see chapter 9).
More of that later. First, a digression on teleology. It was Darwin’s genius to turn the old theological argument from design on its head. Until then, the obvious fact that parts of organisms appear to be engineered for a purpose – the heart for pumping, the stomach for digesting, the hand for grasping – seemed logically to imply a designer, just as a steam engine implied the existence of an engineer. Darwin saw how the entirely backward-looking process of natural selection could none the less produce purposeful design – what Richard Dawkins called the blind watchmaker.6 Though in theory it makes teleological nonsense to talk of a stomach having its own purpose, since the stomach has no mind, in practice it makes perfect sense so long as you engage the grammatical equivalent of four-wheel drive, the passive voice: stomachs have been selected to appear as if equipped with purposeful design. Since I have an aversion to the passive voice, I intend to avoid this problem throughout this book by pretending that there is indeed a teleological engineer thinking ahead and planning purposefully. The philosopher Daniel Dennett calls such an artefact a ‘skyhook’,7 since it is the rough equivalent of a civil engineer hanging his scaffolding from the sky, but for the sake of simplicity I shall call my skyhook the Genome Organising Device, or GOD for short. This may keep religious readers happy, and allows me to use the active voice. So the question is: how does the GOD build a brain that can express an instinct?
Back to William James. To support his assertion that human beings have more instincts than other animals, James systematically enumerated the human instincts. He began with the actions of babies: sucking, clasping, crying, sitting up, standing, walking and climbing were all, he suggested, expressions of impulse, not imitations or associations. So, as the child grew, were emulation, anger and sympathy. So was a fear of strangers, loud noises, heights, the dark, reptiles. (The ordinary cock-sure evolutionist ought to have no difficulty in explaining these terrors,’ wrote James, neatly anticipating the argument of what is now called evolutionary psychology, ‘as relapses into the consciousness of the cave-men, a consciousness usually overlaid in us by experiences of more recent date.’) He moved on to acquisitiveness, noting the tendency of boys to collect things. He noticed the very different play preferences of boys and girls. Parental love, he suggested, was at least initially stronger in women than in men. He tripped quickly through sociability, shyness, secretiveness, cleanliness, modesty
