Who taught beavers to build dams?

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1:25How does a spider know how to spin a web? How does a bird know how to fly? How does a beaver know how to build a dam? By instinct. For a long time, scientists have looked at fascinating, complex animal behaviors like spiders spinning a web, birds migrating, beavers building a dam, and used the term instinct, something that an animal seems to do without being taught, something it just knows. The term comes up a lot, from animal trainers, The animal is born with this instinct. to nature documentaries, The instinct to have the right type of food is very powerful. to scientists. And then you might call it an instinct.

2:14The idea is that a lot of these behaviors are somehow genetically hard-coded. Each individual is born with built-in behavioral patterns. And it's a pretty compelling idea. Like, how else would honeybees know how to honeybee? They are born with the ability and urge to do it. But unexplainable listeners have some questions. Denise, Carlos, and Madeline all wrote in suggesting we look into instinct. And they ask things like, how does instinct work? Is it genetic or learned? And how can anything just know something? Well, turns out the idea of instinct is a lot less simple than those nature documentaries can make it seem.

2:54I talked to a scientist who can't stand this word.

2:57Mark Blumberg:It's basically a covert expression of ignorance and lack of imagination. That's it. Mark Blumberg, behavioral neuroscientist, coming in hot. I can't tell you the number of articles, you know, for scientific journals that I review where people just throw the word around. It drives me crazy. It's been bugging Mark ever since he was in grad school, and he felt like people were essentially using the idea of instinct as a shortcut. So as soon as you say it's genetic, it means like you can skip over all the things that actually get you from that amorphous blob of an embryo or a newborn and get right to the action.

3:31Mark Blumberg:But Mark says it's nowhere near that simple. Every animal develops. It doesn't matter who you are. All of us, we all develop. Mark wrote a whole book on this. It's called Basic Instinct, of course, because he thinks relying on the idea of instinct gets away from everything he loves about science. Science is supposed to be asking the next question. And you just will never ask the next question if you label it as instinct or innate or hardwired or programmed. All of those words are basically designed to halt all further inquiry. and that's just not good for science. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and this week on Unexplainable, we dive into an argument that made me question everything I thought I knew about instinct.

4:15So how real and how important is this idea of instinct? And if that's not where these incredible behaviors come from, how do animals know what to do?

4:40So, Mark, where does this idea of animal instinct and innate animal behavior come from? How far back does it go?

4:46Mark Blumberg:It goes back a long, long way. But one of the interesting aspects of it is that it actually has its roots in a sort of a religious perspective. So it starts as a problem with free will and reason and good and evil. Really? Yeah. It's weird, right? So imagine that in order to earn your way to heaven and hell, you have to basically make choices. You have to have free will. You can't take an animal that cannot make choices about good and evil and put them in heaven or hell. That doesn't make sense. Humans are the only ones. We have a soul. We have free will. We have rationality. These are all ideas within the religious context.

5:23Mark Blumberg:But we're not letting dogs into heaven or hell. So what you have to do is you have to deny them free will. But you have to explain what they're doing. and you say, well, it's instinctive. So then how does this sort of religious idea make its way over to science? Well, that just creates the idea of instinct, really. I mean, historically speaking, I mean, it has its derivation in this religious concept. And then Karad Lorenz comes along, who was a very powerful Austrian scientist who was one of the founders of ethology. What's ethology, exactly? Ethology is the study of animal behavior in its natural context.

5:54Okay.

5:55Mark Blumberg:And so he was looking at different sorts of communication behaviors in birds. He's mostly known for his work on imprinting and, you know, famous pictures of Conrad Lawrence and all these little ducklings following after him. So when a chick is hatched, we'll basically create a visual connection to the first animal it sees. In nature, that's typically going to be the mother, and then they will follow the mother. And so the idea there is that they're sort of born with this computer program to imprint onto something, and then it gets turned on. Yes. And that's how they behave? Well, one way you could think about imprinting the way he did was it's like a switch.

6:28Mark Blumberg:You're born, and over the very limited time, you see your mother or you see an Austrian ethologist, and you imprint on it. It's just a switch clicks, boom. But it turns out it's a multi-step process, that it involves both a slight predisposition of bias to perceive the world in a certain way in the chick, and then a more typical learning process. But what happens a lot is that when you call it an instinct, it sort of throws a blanket over your inquiry. I mean, if you just say it's instinctive and why is it instinctive? Well, it's genetically encoded, or as you put it, it's a computer program. Well, then what's to understand about it?

7:01Mark Blumberg:Like we would not have studied it further and learned the deeper meaning of imprinting if we had simply accepted Lorenz's perspective on these things. Yeah, what kind of things have we figured out about imprinting since then? So one of the leaders in my field, Gilbert Gottlieb was his name. He was interested in the auditory aspects of imprinting. So when chicks come out there, the mom makes what's called a maternal call, and it attracts the duckling. Well, he wanted to know where that came from. So he's somebody who did not do the Lorenzian thing and simply say, oh, it's instinctive. What he said was, how do they know to be attracted to the maternal call?

7:37Mark Blumberg:So what he did was he looked at the eggs. And what he realized is that inside the egg, the chicks are vocalizing themselves. And he said, that's weird. Why would they be vocalizing inside the egg? and he wondered whether these vocalizations were creating an attraction somehow to the maternal call. So he figured out a way how to prevent the vocalizations from happening. So when these ducks normally, when they normally are hatched and you just play that chicken versus a duckling call, they go to the duckling call. But if they were devocalized and never heard their own vocalizations, they showed no species typical preference at all.

8:14So they were actually developing an attraction to the mom while they were still in the egg?

8:19Mark Blumberg:Yeah. If Gilbert Gottlieb, if he was faced with this maternal call and he simply said, the newly hatched chicks have an instinct, you know, to be attracted to their mother's call, would you ever go and do the experiments that he did? No. So these are some of the most famous experiments in my field that would never be done if you simply said it's instinctive. But because he had doubts about the whole terminology, he was motivated to look deeper.

8:49So are there other examples? I mean, let's say we move away from Lorenz a little bit. Are there other examples that show things that we might normally think of as innate animal instincts are actually developed through experience?

9:02Mark Blumberg:Sure. Let's take the writing reflex. So if anybody has a cat and likes to have fun with cats and you hold them upside down and you drop them, they'll land on their feet. Yeah, I grew up with a cat and my brother once just tossed my cousin's tiny dog thinking it'd be fine and the dog just sort of landed on its back. I think it's more fun with cats. But I mean, so, okay, so here's the instinct part, perhaps. So you take a baby rat, you take a tank of warm water, and you put the rat on its back, and then they flip over and they land on their legs. So the rats are like flipping themselves over in the water, just like the cats are doing in the air?

9:35Mark Blumberg:As soon as they're born. Okay. It's instinctive, right? Well, how do you prove it's not? The way you prove that it's not is that you have to do something that only we can do recently, which is you can gestate rats in space. Okay, because we were in a gravitational environment, and so you need to get them away from the gravitational environment. The way you do that is you send them up to space, and they did this. During the middle parts of gestation, they fly these rats, and they had ground controls in this experiment. So the ground controls were just regular rats that were still on Earth. Just to make sure that they were still flipping.

10:07Mark Blumberg:That was their control group, yeah. Okay. And then you have these rats that are gestated in space, and then the rats come back to Earth, and then the rats were born. And it turns out that a good chunk of these rats, when they dropped them on their back in the tank of water, they just floated down and landed on their back. No writing reflex at all. And the ground controls flipped over and landed on their feet. And that's pretty cool because then that gets you thinking more broadly about what genes actually do. Genes evolved and function expecting a certain environment. And on our planet, you can expect that to be gravity.

10:43Mark Blumberg:And it's because we take it for granted that we're able to say things like it's instinctive and it's in the genes because we're not thinking about the broader picture about the things that genes don't have to do. And normally they do not have to do anything about providing a gravitational environment. That comes for free. Right. So if we just said, you know, rats flipping is instinctive, we would miss the idea that gravity shapes the entire way we develop. Yeah. And you could take this even farther now. Talk about so gravity hits all animals the same way. But now you move into different species.

11:11Mark Blumberg:These are things that we inherit as well. So think about a beaver. Think about building a dam. How does a beaver know how to build a dam? Well, where do beavers grow up? They grow up around trees, around water. When you're born as a beaver, your environment comes for free. When you develop in that sort of environment, then developing the capacity to build a dam is going to emerge out of your interactions with the environment. If a beaver family were put in the desert, they're not going to build a dam. There's no water. There are no trees. right? So the environment enables and shapes the sorts of behaviors that we call species typical because the environment is part of the inheritance of every species.

11:54Mark Blumberg:It can be a large environment like water and trees. It can be a microenvironment like dew on the bottom of a leaf or, you know, all the sorts of small little aspects that we aren't even aware of because of our size that are vitally shaping the way animals develop and behave. I read a study, just in preparing to speak with you, I read a study that said something like, if you isolate squirrels, raise them away from other squirrels, you raise them maybe in a cage with a hard floor, they still kind of do these digging and burying motions. Why would they be trying to dig dirt if they've never seen dirt?

12:33Isn't that sort of a hard-coated instinct?

12:35Mark Blumberg:Yeah, I think that's a fascinating phenomenon. I've heard a similar thing about burrowing rodents that are put in hard cages. On its surface, that does feel like a very strong argument for things that emerge without any sort of rationale in the external environment. They just do it, right? But when you see an animal do that, when you see a rodent in a cage digging, the tendency is to say, look, they've never encountered dirt before. They're digging in a cage. It makes no sense. Therefore, it must be instinctive. That is dangerous because we don't know very much about the developmental experiences that got them to doing that behavior.

13:13Mark Blumberg:Now, I do believe that it is fascinating and should be studied, but I don't know anybody who has studied it in a careful way. Yeah, so you're basically saying there could have been, you know, other less obvious things besides seeing actual dirt that might have led squirrels to try to dig. Yeah, let me give you a great example. So, you know, there are these animals, cuckoos and cowbirds, where a mom will lay its eggs in the nest of another species. Okay, that's a really interesting problem because now you've got an egg from one species being raised with a bunch of eggs from another species of bird.

13:48Mark Blumberg:And then at some point, they grow up and they find their mates because they keep reproducing. They must find their mates somehow. And so a very famous evolutionary biologist and ornithologist named Ernst Meyer, he said that the ability of a cowbird to identify its own species is encoded in the zygote. He just assumed he was basically calling it an instinct with no data, no investigation, just like this is what's happening. I cannot imagine any other way than this can happen. And it turns out there are ways that it can happen. One way that's been shown in the slightly different situations in other birds is that when a young bird is out and about, the adults of its own species will identify it and literally bully it.

14:34Mark Blumberg:And so through that bullying process, the young bird figures out who are the members of its own species. Not that the young bird is going out searching for its own species and goes, oh, my instinct button just went off and oh my god, you know, the lights went off and now I say like, oh, you're my people. Now it's the identification goes the other way. It's the adults who see the young bird and then bring them into the fold through this process of engaging with them aggressively. That turns the whole process on its head. It almost feels like for some of these scientists, if there's no obvious connection of like A leads to B, the default is it must just be hard-coded.

15:11Exactly. And so even with like the squirrel example, I don't know, it seems plausible that there are other reasons it could be digging besides having a gene for digging.

15:20Mark Blumberg:Absolutely. Understanding the development of complex behavior is a really, really tough problem. And it should be treated as a tough problem in a way that does justice to the problem and doesn't just, you know, put a lot of things under the rug. Fighting words. Well, you know, I'm calling this the way I see it because I've been, you know, a lot of us who care about these issues have been saying this for a very long time. I mean, want to hear fighting words? Yeah, please. It's no different than being a creationist. I mean, what is a creationist? You're confronted with the complexity of the external world and you cannot imagine how it could have evolved.

15:55Mark Blumberg:And so you have to resort to a creator to try to capture the complexity and to give it some explanation when you can't provide one that makes sense.

16:08Coming up next, this whole instinct argument can have some pretty serious implications.

16:13Mark Blumberg:Lorenz was promoting eugenics, trying to stop the breeding of inferior peoples in his scientific works. More with Mark after the break.

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19:23So this idea that, you know, animal behavior is hard-coded, is this still an argument that lots of scientists are making?