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ANIMAL INSTINCT AND THE GROUP SOUL
Adjusting our sights
Having earlier considered what science can explain, and (in the last chapter) something of what it cannot, we should now have freed ourselves from the compulsion to expect all phenomena to be subject to laws of science and should be able to examine impartially evidence that is currently assumed to be explicable "any day now," but actually cannot be explained by existing scientific theories.
When science was first winning its laurels, it was in the position of having to persuade skeptics that it could legitimately be extended into areas where it had not previously ventured. The synthesis of urea, vaccination, sterilization, the chemical analysis of insulin and other proteins, and the analysis of the double helix in DNA were mileposts in this extension into what formerly was territory regarded as beyond the scope of scientific inquiry.
Presently, however, things are turned the other way about. The spectacular achievements of science have so impressed layman and scientist alike that it is assumed there is no realm which science cannot conquer. In economics, sociology, psychology, advances commensurate with this belief in the omnipotence of science have been conspicuously lacking, but no amount of failure seems to discourage the implicit faith that any day now we will have the answers.
But the theory of process gives us, to the contrary, theoretical reasons to expect that there are categorically different areas or realms between which the prevailing laws differ in the degree of predictability they afford (see beginning of Chapter X). These areas or realms are the levels set forth in our arc, and we have derived their existence by close attention to the actual findings of science, especially in quantum physics. Understanding of these levels with their differing kinds of law can liberate the life sciences from their present entanglement in the billiard ball paradigm.
It could be objected that we attribute too great a significance to the uncertainty of fundamental particles, which, after all, affects only single electrons too minute to be of any consequence to living things.
We hope the reader can by now answer this objection for himself, or at least accept the relevance of the answer we would give: that the same freedom which in electrons and atoms dissipates in randomness is, on the right side of the arc, organized into what we recognize as living creatures, each stage encompassing greater scope:
Level I Light ?
Level II Particles Animals
Level III Atoms Plants
Level IV Molecules
The actuality of this progression, culminating in the ascendancy of organization over the material organized, can be seen with special clarity in our survey of the molecular kingdom, where the seven substages have been worked out by science in great completeness. It will be recalled that beginning with metals (molecules with but one atom), followed by salts (in which the ionic bond operates to hold two or more atoms together in the molecule), the development then follows a sequence in which more and more atoms are held together, until with polymers there are hundreds of thousands of atoms, and with DNA millions of atoms, organized into a single molecule. Wonderful as this is, it points to what is still more so, the sweep of large-scale process from photons to man and beyond.
Thus the most thoroughly understood of the kingdoms supports the thesis of an evolution in which law is transcended and used, in which there is an orderly progression from entities that are under the rule of law to those that use law and hence are above it.
How will controls matter
But we still must find how this mastery of law evolves. For such a task, science must adjust its sights, firstly to recognize action as more basic than inert objects, and secondly to recognize the chain of causation which connects pure action, will, or purpose with physical objects. (See Additional information section at the end of Chapter V.)
Purpose, of course, requires means to carry it out. In the detection of ore by physical instruments, for example, we need, say, a pointer reading on an instrument, indicating some change in the magnetic field. Thus, besides purpose, the project involves physical objects which take a form to give a reading by the operation of a force. These are the three levels below level I (which is purpose itself).
Level I Purpose
II Force (motive power)
III Form
IV Objects
The amoeba can be thought of similarly: the food, its object; the shape it makes, the plan or form; and the plasma moving under the direction of intention, the force that makes possible the change of shape. We have no trouble understanding the physical objects, nor the form or plan, nor, I trust, the self-evident nature of purpose as first cause. What eludes explanation is the nature of the moving force.
In the last chapter we pointed out the similarity of the pseudopods of the amoeba to the ectoplasmic appendages of mediums, and the psychic libido described by Freud. Now the interesting thing is that this force is no better "explained" in cases we consider quite normal, like the amoeba, than in the case of the medium. Take, for example, a person typing a letter: there is purpose, to convey a message; there are objects, the letters of the alphabet (or the typewriter keys) ; there is the mentally formed message. What pushes the keys? You can say muscles, or for an electric typewriter electricity, but this does not explain the cause of movement. Somewhere there is another typist (in the brain?) pushing the right nerves to move the right muscles.
Here we must avoid the trap of saying that muscular motions are conditioned reflexes and that the message is a composite of such reflexes. It is true that a great many habit patterns have been learned. The spelling of words, for example, was learned in school until it became automatic, but this automatic response becomes an agency of the voluntary self, which has relegated it to habit because it no longer requires active attention. Thousands of spellings have been so learned, along with muscular training (for writing, reading, and speaking), but above and beyond the habitual automatic reflexes there sits the voluntary self purposively writing a letter and making decisions about what to say.
We need not, and should not, try to explain this initiating principle beyond what we have already done in correlating it with the quantum of action. But how does the quantum of action, or voluntary self, which is nonphysical, reach out and press the physical keys of the typewriter? The problem is the same whether we think of the fingers pressing the keys of the actual typewriter or of the monad sitting at an imaginary console inside the brain and pressing buttons like the Beatles in the "Yellow Submarine."
This phenomenon of action acquiring the means of expression is foreshadowed by the amoeba.
Another look at the amoeba
According to current biological theory (mentioned in Chapter X), the amoeba extends pseudopods by converting the plasmic substance with which it is filled from a gel (which is relatively solid) to a sol (which is fluid). But how?
At the temperature at which life can maintain itself, the average kinetic energy of the molecules in which the amoeba swims about is 1/25 of an electron volt (or about 1/40 of the energy in a flashlight battery). The wavelength of electromagnetic energy of this magnitude is about 1/1000 centimeter, which is about the size of the interior of the amoeba. In other words, the amoeba swims about in a bath of free energy, and has only to point this energy, which is heat, in whatever direction it wishes to create a pseudopod. This it can do by virtue of the free phase or timing dimension implicit in the quantum of action.
Bear in mind the "turn" discussed in Chapter V, where the molecule, by means of this same free choice of timing (the phase dimension), becomes able to store energy.* (See discussion of phase dimension, in Chapter V.) The molecule does so by controlling the forces impinging upon it. This stored energy is then made available to volition as expressed in growth. Here with the amoeba the control would appear to be achieved by converting the gel to a sol (or vice versa) ; in other words, by controlling the binding and thereby making a fluidic process produce a form which can effect a result.
*If an analogy will help, we can again cite the self-winding wristwatch, which takes energy from the arm movements of the wearer and stores this energy to run the watch.
As a plausible explanation of the observed behavior of the amoeba, this interpretation can at any rate lead us to the important interim hypothesis we need, provided we generalize or expand the idea to embrace much larger spheres than the interior of the amoeba. The amoeba is an illustration of how purpose can influence matter in a way that exhibits choice. The choice we refer to is animal choice, the choice among targets known through sense experience. (As we have noted earlier, a plant does not exercise choice except of the yes or no variety; it just chooses to grow or not to grow.)
Attraction, compulsive and controlled
This throws light on the sixth or animal power. Just as attraction brought about the fall into matter, so does the controlled use of the same force (attraction) provide for animal mobility. It is the besetzung (the endowing with attraction) that induces the animal to pursue its quarry or seek out a mate. Note how this differs from the compulsory attraction due to gravity or to electricity at stage two, in which there is no choice. The greyhound chases the rabbit by endowing the rabbit with the attractiveness needed to make pursuit worthwhile. If the greyhound is not hungry, it doesn't chase. One might say that hunger endows the rabbit with attractiveness, but in any case the attraction is not that of a mechanical force. (See discussion of animal mobility at the opening of Chapter IX, and the section Nucleation through attraction.)
Earlier kingdoms present interestingly similar differences between the sixth substage and the second. The ionic bond that holds second substage molecules together reappears in the proteins of substage six, but this time to hold the two chemicals actin and myosin apart, that is, triggered for action, so that the ionic bond is used in reverse.
Instinct and animal soul
For animals, the sixth substage includes the 600,000 species of insects. Here instinct is a prominent development. Since animals are also the sixth kingdom, we can expect that instinct is especially emphasized in the sixth principle, mobility. Instinct,. "a tendency to actions which lead to the attainment of some goal natural to the species," meets this prescription: it is part of the mobility syndrome. Although it is virtually automatic, instinct is not necessarily compulsive. The nesting instincts of birds still leave choice operative; the bird has options. Only as it makes the nest does it proceed according to a predetermined plan.
It is currently taken for granted that complex instincts such as are typical of insects - certain moths, for example, that navigate by the stars, or the wasp that lays its eggs in the larvae of another particular species of wasp and simultaneously paralyzes the larvae by stinging them at a certain nerve ganglion - can be explained as encoded in the DNA. This is to me a serious abuse of scientific explanation. Instinctual behavior can be learned only by interaction with the environment. Animal instinct cannot be explained by DNA.
The role of DNA
What DNA can do is to provide a blueprint for manufacture. It encodes instructions for making chemicals which in turn build tissues and organs.
Animal behavior, on the other hand, which includes animal instinct, must have been perfected by trial and error. Such skill begins with play. All young animals play and so discover how to operate the physical vehicle. When Johnny the Monad gets his brand-new amoeba, the first thing he does with it is to play. This is not coded in the DNA. By the play he learns how to operate the console, how to make pseudopods, which becomes useful when he has to get food. The DNA would be capable of specifying "move toward food," but this instruction doesn't supplant the need for the practice provided by play.
The real problem is how to find and capture food, and this, DNA could not indicate, because the pertinent information has to come from interaction with the environment. The animal is to chase another animal; so the problem is with cybernetics (steering) rather than blueprints. Pursuit of a moving target cannot be computerized; it is learned by practice, much as one learns to walk.
Clearly, there is a categorical distinction between the instructions for manufacture which are set forth in the blueprints and learning to use the resultant product which involves practice, especially play, to provide the feedback on which control is based. The same may be said of behavior patterns based on instinct. These may be enormously complicated: hive-building, nest-building, migration, mating rituals, feeding, egg-laying. I cannot accept the assumption that instincts are built into the DNA, because they must have their origin in behavior and depend on interaction with the environment.
Consider again the wasp that buries its eggs in the larvae of another species of wasp, at the same time stinging the larvae at a nerve ganglion in order to paralyze them. Could any sort of blueprint teach this symbiotic relationship? If we had the kind of blueprint known as a map, we could use it to find treasure buried at a point shown on the map. But this is not how the right kind of larva is located by the predatory wasp. It must be located by the same target-seeking process that is involved in the pursuit of food.
The role of the group
The next point we must recognize is that instinctual behavior is not learned by the individual animal. This is clear from the fact that young animals which have not seen their parents and hence could not have been instructed by them - young salmon or wasps - nevertheless follow the instinct of their species. Neither can a given animal individually transmit acquired behavior to its progeny genetically, because the genes are isolated at an early age and cannot be influenced by the animal's behavior.
How can we explain it? Let us look again at the arc:
Level I 1 Light 7 (?)
II 2 Particles 6 Animals
III 3 Atoms 5 Plants
IV 4 Molecules
It will be recalled that level I is outside time. Level II exists in time, but has no beginning or ending: its energy is transformable, but indestructible; so likewise the fundamental particles. Level III covers forms: its entities can be constructed and taken apart. Their existence, in time as well as space, is finite. Since the sixth or animal principle is at level II, it is not finite; like energy, it may change form, but cannot cease to exist.
What does this mean? Surely an animal's existence is finite. It is born, it dies. That is according to existing conceptions, but not according to the theory we are presenting. Based on what we can deduce about the levels, the animal principle (as distinguished from the cellular body of the animal) must continue to exist after the cellular organism dies. This implies that the animal principle is quite distinct from the cellular organization with which we normally identify it.
Animal death is abrupt and distinct. The cellular organism may still be there for a time afterwards and may even remain alive in the sense that cells continue to grow (hair and fingernails continue to grow after death) ; but from the moment after death the animal (animating principle) is gone. The death of a plant is quite different. It is impossible to say when it occurs, if indeed it does. When a tree is cut down, the stump will sprout and with some species produce a tree again. Flowers blossom in a vase of water; fruits ripen after being picked; seeds may germinate even after thousands of years.
But we cannot say that the seed is immortal, for it can be destroyed, a consequence of the fact that it is composite. The animal principle, on the contrary, being at level II, is not composite; it cannot be destroyed.
This gives support to the existence of something which could be referred to as an "animal soul" (interestingly, the word animus means "animating spirit") which not only survives the death of the animal, but has existed throughout the history of the species. Such an entity would account for instinct by providing an indefinitely long period for learning and an explanation of its inheritance in the young animals.
But because all animals of the same species have the same instincts, we can say that these animals have the same soul, that is, a group soul. In other words, there is presumably a group soul for polar bears, a group soul for wrens, a group soul for the wasp that buries its eggs in larvae, and a group soul for bees. Instinct can accordingly be regarded as a fixed pattern of activity inherited by the species collectively from behavior learned earlier in its history.
It is our business to fill in the blanks which the theory affords, to apply to theory. Here is a case in point. The theory anticipates something analogous to energy at the sixth stage which, like the energy of science, is conserved.
If we at least open our minds to the possibility of a group soul, a number of interesting bits of evidence become available which support the concept.
Especially important is the work of Eugene Marais described in a little book called The Soul of the White Ant.*(I was pleased to see that Robert Ardrey dedicated his book, African Genesis** to Marais, who was one of the first to observe animals in their natural habitat.) Marais found that workers in a termite colony behave in an impressively coordinated way, for example, moving to repair damage to the colony even when there is no detectable means of communication. And a plate of glass interposed between the queen and the workers does not affect communication, but removal of the queen does. Their termite colony behaves as a single organism, with workers and soldiers responsive to an unexplained communications system dependent on the queen. This is good evidence for what I am calling the group soul.
*Marais, Eugene. The Soul of the White Ant. Translated by Winifred DeKok. London: Methuen & Co., 1939.
**Ardrey, Robert. African Genesis. New York: Atheneum, 1961.
Again, the coordinated movement of a school of fish or of a flock of birds seems more comprehensible if we assume it to be guided by a coordinating principle than if it depended on ad hoc communication between members.
If we now reflect that what Marais called the "soul" of the white ant, which guides the activity of the worker and soldier termites, does so with no apparent physical communication, and that flocks of birds and schools of fish are in all likelihood similarly coordinated, we may wonder whether there is any real difference between these cases of coordination and those of other animals exhibiting instinctual patterns of behavior. Some nonphysical agency seems to be required to explain the termite colony; would not this also serve to explain instincts in general?
Another clue, which I have heard of from several sources but have not been able to establish with certainty, is that in the training of rats the control group appears to profit from the learning experience of the experimental animals, to the despair of the researcher. Even a small "leakage" of this sort would confirm the group soul hypothesis. But since there is no currently accepted theoretical framework into which this sort of thing would fit, most experimenters would doubtless be reluctant to advertise what would generally be interpreted as some error in method, the control group not properly isolated or the like.
One of the most carefully studied and yet mysterious instincts exhibited by animals is the ability of birds to navigate by the stars. The blackcap, a European song bird, annually migrates from Germany southeast to Turkey, then flies directly south to Egypt, returning in the spring. By placing young birds who have not yet flown the trip in a planetarium in which it is possible to duplicate the night sky as it would appear at different parts of the earth's surface at different times of the year, it has been established that the bird navigates according to the position of the stars.
If the sky as it would be seen in Germany is displayed, the blackcap flies southeast; if the sky of Turkey, it flies due south. If the sky as it would appear in France is shown, the bird flies east; if the sky of Persia, it flies west. Since these abilities are not diminished when most of the stars are obscured as if by clouds, the bird must have imprinted on its consciousness not only a very complete star map, but it must have an internal biological clock of great accuracy, since an error in time of one minute would put it fifteen miles off course.
But fantastic as this ability is, it is somehow inherited from the ancestors. The achievement of millions of years of learning and evolution is behind it, whatever the means by which the achievement is transmitted to the young bird.
More recent work on the navigation of birds by the stars provides important additional clues. Emlen* reared young birds where they could not see the stars and found that when the time came to migrate and the birds were exposed to the night sky, they were not able to navigate, demonstrating that the young birds required direct experience, as his next experiment proved, to learn the right stars to navigate by. This next experiment was most interesting - he adjusted the planetarium to turn around the star Betelgeuse instead of Polaris, as though Betelgeuse were the pole star. These birds, when the season came to migrate, behaved as they should were it the case that the earth were tipped so that the axis of the north pole coincided with Betelgeuse.
This brings out the important fact that the birds are able to adjust to the changes in the star map produced over the centuries by the precession of the equinoxes, which gradually shifts the pole through a circle, only returning to a given spot every 25,000 years. Such instinctive behavior, like that of the wasp which seeks out a particular kind of caterpillar in which to lay its eggs, must have been learned over millions of years and requires the type of memory we can anticipate at Level II, that of the group soul.
Can the theory be put to test? I believe it could. I have heard that English tits have learned to open milk bottles. It would be simple enough to isolate young birds so they could not learn from other birds, and see if they could open milk bottles - though I suppose the die-hard geneticist would still claim that there had occurred a milk bottle mutation in the species. Maybe tits just have a fundamental affinity for milk.
*Emlen, T. "Stellar Orientation System of a Migrating Bird." Scientific American (July 1975).