Basic Instinct: The Genesis of Behavior [Paperback]

Mark S. Blumberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 6, 2006

A panicked mother runs through highway traffic to save her wandering child. A green turtle swims hundreds of miles to return to the beach on which it was hatched. Your child utters her first word. Have you ever wondered what causes you to react in a certain way to a certain situation, and if you would react differently under different circumstances? From Charles Darwin to Malcolm Gladwell, writers and scientists have been fascinated by what prompts us to snap decisions. In Basic Instinct, neuroscientist Mark Blumberg provides readers with a logical perspective that does not rely on the clichéd explanations that have become so prevalent among scientists and laypeople alike. Blumberg delves into the debate between the nativists and evolutionary psychologists, who believe we are born with an instinctive knowledge about the world, and the epigeneticists, who believe that instincts are built anew in each of us, generation after generation. The result is an entertaining and balanced examination of the role of genes, experience, and evolution in the construction of behavior.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This is a passionate (and at times polemical) survey of what contemporary neuroscience has to say about the nature of instinct. Actually, as it turns out, it might be more accurate to say the "nurture" of instinct, since Blumberg firmly argues against the perspective that what we think of as instincts are innate—he reframes "instincts," ranging from a baby's tendency to mimic faces to monkeys' fear of snakes, as a consequence of reflexes rather than innate knowledge. Though initially a bit dense with scientific jargon, the book picks up midway through, and the then generally accessible prose skillfully unpacks behaviors that seem instinctive, ranging from the mundane (getting thirsty) to the astonishing (androgenital licking in newborn rats). The writing is as persuasive as it is rich in intriguing detail, and a reader may well find that, by the end of the book, the word "nativism" (the perspective that animals and humans are born with cognitive instincts in place, which Blumberg at one point calls "an intellectual and experimental red herring") has become a dirty word. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Scientific American

What is an instinct? A salmon swims upstream to spawn. A dog herds sheep. These inborn patterns of behavior characteristic to a species seem straightforward enough. Even Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species remarked that "everyone understands what is meant" by an instinct.

Mark S. Blumberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa, is not so convinced about creatures being born knowing how to do something, and he picks apart this notion in Basic Instinct. Even Darwin, he notes, became tangled in his own contradictions when he attempted to define and discuss instinct. Blumberg also notes that the issue of inborn knowledge is central to our origins and place on this earth. Do humans alone have the capacity for rational thought—that is, beyond instinctive reactions? Does experience shape instinct, perhaps even before birth? These are not idle questions, he maintains. "At stake is man’s privileged place in the animal kingdom and the need to posit a god as the ultimate source of intelligent design."

After hundreds of years of debate, today’s prevailing (and opposing) ideologies simultaneously hold that instincts derive either from divine influence or genes, chains of reflexes or nonreflexes, and learned or nonlearned behavior. Blumberg finds it puzzling that so much disagreement—even among scientists—prevails, and the debate over instinct’s significance and role in human development has never been more heated. Nativists, he explains, argue that we are born with certain core capacities and knowledge that structure our learning throughout life. Nonnativists contend that the concept of instinct has "outlived its usefulness" and that to apply it to human infant development retards our understanding and learning about the process.

Blumberg ultimately sides with the nonnativists, explaining that too often the knee-jerk invocation of instinct is misleading. He asserts that the term "instinct" is usually just a convenient way to refer to complex, species-typical behaviors that seem to emerge mysteriously out of nowhere. Yet he believes this perspective is "an illusion fostered by the instinct concept." As the sciences of mind, brain, behavior and cognitive development now show, the very concept of instinct, he says, has become "less satisfying as an explanatory tool."

Blumberg’s interest in the subject, by the way, may have been cast when he attended a debate between a nativist and a nonnativist. The room, he writes, was packed "with members nodding vociferously when their person was talking, and shaking their heads and muttering when it was the opponent’s turn."

Richard Lipkin --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (November 6, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560259000
• ISBN-13: 978-1560259008
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #662,833 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nativists beware., September 15, 2005

By 

Sven Wahlgren - See all my reviews

This review is from: Basic Instinct: The Genesis of Behavior (Hardcover)

This book is a must-read for all broadly interested in the origins of behavior and specifically for those interested the long-standing controversy of nature vs. nurture. In the book thoughtful arguments are made against the idea of inborn behaviors and each arguement is presented with examples that help to unravel what at face value seem to be prime examples of instincts. Nativists beware.

18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Of Tempests and Teapots, September 24, 2005

By 

Herbert Gintis (Northampton, MA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Basic Instinct: The Genesis of Behavior (Hardcover)

Nativism is the view that many complex behaviors are direct developmental expressions of the organism's genetic constitution, provided the organism experiences a normal environment. Anti-nativism is the view that complex behaviors are virtually always the product of complex epigenetic dynamics. Stephen Pinker is a prime example of a nativist, and Blumberg of a passionate anti-nativist.

The debate between these two positions has a long intellectual lineage, and there is no sign of a let-up, despite the huge increase in our understanding of the brain and of developmental processes in the past quarter century. Each side has executed seeming deadly thrusts against the other, only to see the other bounce back, better armed then ever.

When a scientific dispute such as this leads such an extended existence, one suspects that there is a reinterpretation in which each is correct. Such was the case, for instance, in the ancient debate about the wave vs. particle nature of light.

Blumberg's strongest anti-nativist thrust in this book is the story of several dramatic claims by nativists that human infants, without experience, are primed to mimic facial movements, to understand basic physical laws, and to have the concept of number. Blumberg's account of the evidence against these nativist views is quite persuasive.

Blumberg does not closely analyze what is perhaps the most compelling case for a nativist behavior in humans: the structure of language. This nativist argument that human language as genetically encoded, a view that goes back to Chomsky in the mid-Twentieth century, is treated by Blumberg in a perfunctory and uncompelling manner. Blumberg explains the evidence that there is a "universal grammar" (UG) exhibited by all known languages and learned rapidly by children in all but the most deprived environments, by saying that all current languages are offshoots of a single "primordial" language spoken by our common ancestors. There is certainly no evidence of such a primordial language, and to assert this is the sort of "just-so" reasoning that Blumberg rightly criticizes. Blumberg claims that language creates linguistic capability developmentally, which would be at least plausible were the primordial language argument correct. But, it is not. Moreover, Blumberg does not even mention the many cases in which societies without language (e.g., deaf children who never learned sign language, or a mixture of ethnicities that use a pidgin discourse that does not conform to the UG, and is indeed much more primitive) develop a UG-conformant language within a generation. There are certainly linguists who agree with Blumberg's anti-nativist position on language, but I believe Blumberg sides with this minority view simply to present a united anti-nativist position.

A possible way to adjudicate the differences between nativists and their opponents is to assert that the nativist's "normal environment" may itself be a complex product of interaction between developing individuals and the epigenetic structures they face as well as create. A close, fine-grained look at the emergence of complex behaviors thus follows the epigenetic models, while a coarser look fits the nativist preconception. This view is very likely in the case of language, and may apply in many other cases. Nativists should be comfortable with this adjudication, and it appears to me to satisfy the criticism of the anti-nativists.

The nail in the coffin of nativism would be the verification that in many or most cases, there are novel environments that allow organisms to develop extremely novel, yet fitness-enhancing behaviors, through learning and/or adjustment of population gene frequencies. I believe this probably false for most species, but is the case for some complex human traits, and perhaps for some traits in non-human primates (behavior in captivity, for instance, may be very different that in the wild for some species).

One of the most dramatic applications of nativism to humans is the Evolutionary Psychology notion, promoted by Pinker, David Buss, and many others, that contemporary humans have an advanced technological environment, but are still possessed of a "stone-age mind" that prevents us from achieving our most cherished ethical ideals. While there may be some complex human behaviors that fit this description, mostly likely most do not. This does not mean, however, that the "blank slate" view of the human mind, bitterly criticized by Lida Cosmides, John Tooby, Stephen Pinker, and other evolutionary psychologists, is in the least bit plausible. It is not. The fact that there may be different environments that elicit (through a dynamic exchange of genetic and epigenetic forces) novel behaviors does not mean that for every behavior, there is an environment that will elicit that behavior.

To this outsider (I am an economist, not a psychologist), the extremely primitive level at which this debate is carried out is indicative of the primitive state of modern cognitive psychology. The brain is an exceedingly complex piece of nature and modern psychology has an exceedingly primitive understanding of its functioning. Studying modern psychology, one learns many facts and gains many insights. But, there is no theory there, and there is no theory on the horizon at the present moment, despite fMRI and other new techniques for probing the physiology of thought. In the absence of a common theory to which we all adhere by force of its explanatory value, we have the sort of tempests in a teapot exhibited by the nativist/anti-nativist controversy.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My instincts tell me that nativists are all wet, September 16, 2005

By 

Coco - See all my reviews

This review is from: Basic Instinct: The Genesis of Behavior (Hardcover)

More and more, we read and hear about the claims made by some scientists who espouse that our behaviors are fully mature at birth. But as clearly discussed in this highly engaging and well-written book, these claims simply aren't true. The author gives many fine examples of the science that disputes these assertions, but I'll discuss just one.

Nativists (people like Steven Pinker who think that animals do not develop "instincts" but are born with them) believe that newborn infants can imitate. For example: a baby sticks out his tongue after an adult does the same thing. The fact is, babies do this a lot, but not because they are born with the ability to imitate. Rather, the author explains, it has been proven that babies stick out their tongues for a much simpler reason: before a baby is developmentally able to reach for things with his hands, he explores the world with his tongue.

Expositions such as this one fill this very insightful book. Replete with the inquiries and discoveries that have helped to illuminate the origins of development, this book is wonderful for readers who love to learn and get to the bottom of mysteries. Highly recommended!