1. Of Men and Mockingbirds

A territory is an area of space, whether of water or earth or air, which an animal or group of animals defends as an exclusive preserve. The word is also used to describe the inward compulsion in animate beings to possess and defend such a space. A territorial species of animals, therefore, is one in which all males, and sometimes females too, bear an inherent drive to gain and defend an exclusive property.

In most but not all territorial species, defense is directed only against fellow members of the kind. A squirrel does not regard a mouse as a trespasser. In most but not all territorial species -- not in chameleons, for example -- the female is sexually unresponsive to an unpropertied male. As a general pattern of behavior, in territorial species the competition between males which we formerly believed was one for the possession of females is in truth for possession of property.

We may also say that in all territorial species, without exception, possession of a territory lends enhanced energy to the proprietor. Students of animal behavior cannot agree as to why this should be, but the challenger is almost invariably defeated, the intruder expelled. In part, there, seems some mysterious flow of energy and resolve which invests a proprietor on his home grounds. But likewise, so marked is the inhibition lying on the intruder, so evident his sense of trespass, we may be permitted to wonder if in all territorial species there does not exist, more profound than simple learning, some universal recognition of territorial rights.

The concept of territory as a genetically determined form of behavior in many species is today accepted beyond question in the biological sciences. But so recently have our observations been made and our conclusions formed that we have yet to explore the implications of territory in [4] our estimates of man. Is Homo sapiens a territorial species? Do we stake out property, chase off trespassers, defend our countries because we are sapient, or because we are animals? Because we choose, or because we must? Do certain laws of territorial behavior apply as rigorously in the affairs of men as in the affairs of chipmunks? That is the principal concern of this inquiry, and it is a matter of considerable concern, I believe, to any valid understanding of our nature. But it is a problem to be weighed in terms of present knowledge, not past.

How recently our information about animal territory has come to us is very well illustrated by reflections recorded only thirty years ago by the anthropologist Julian H. Steward, now of the University of Illinois. "Why are human beings the only animals having land-owning groups?" he wondered. And he brought together observations "of twenty-four different hunting peoples so primitive that their ways differ little, in all probability, from the ways of paleolithic man. Their homes were isolated and far-spread -- in Philippine and Congo forests, in Tasmania and Tierra del Fuego, in Canada's Mackenzie basin, in the Indian Ocean's Andaman Islands, in southwestern Africa's Kalahari Desert. So remote were they from each other that there seemed small likelihood that any one could have learned its ways from others. Yet all formed social bands occupying exclusive, permanent domains.

How could it be that such a number of peoples in such varying environments so remote from each other should all form similar social groups based on what would seem to be a human invention, the ownership of land? Steward came to a variety of conclusions, but one line of speculation was denied him. Even in 1936 he could not know that his assumption was false, since many animals form land-owning groups. Lions, eagles, wolves, great-horned owls are all hunters, and all guard exclusive hunting territories. The lions and wolves, besides, hunt in cooperative prides and packs differing little from the bands of primitive man. Ownership of land is scarcely a human invention, as our territorial propensity is something less than a human distinction.

Man, I shall attempt to demonstrate in this inquiry, is as much a territorial animal as is a mockingbird singing in the clear California night. We act as we do for reasons of our [5] evolutionary past, not our cultural present, and our behavior is as much a mark of our species as is the shape of a human thigh bone or the configuration of nerves in a corner of the human brain. If we defend the title to our land or the sovereignty of our country, we do it for reasons no different, no less innate, no less ineradicable, than do lower animals. The dog barking at you from behind his master's fence acts for a motive indistinguishable from that of his master when the fence was built.

Neither are men and dogs and mockingbirds uncommon creatures in the natural world. Ring-tailed lemurs and great-crested grebes, prairie dogs, robins, tigers, muskrats, meadow warblers and Atlantic salmon, fence lizards, flat lizards, three-spined sticklebacks, nightingales and Norway rats, herring gulls and callicebus monkeys -- all of us will give everything we are for a place of our own. Territory, in the evolving world of animals, is a force perhaps older than sex.

The survival value that territory brings to a species varies as widely as do the opportunities of species themselves. In some it offers security from the predator, in others security of food supply. In some its chief value seems the selection of worthy males for reproduction, in some the welding together of a group, and in many, like sea birds, the prime value seems simply the excitement and stimulation of border quarrels. And there are many species, of course, for which the territorial tie would be a handicap to survival. Grazing animals for the most part must move with the season's grass. Elephant herds acknowledge no territorial bond, but move like fleets of old gray galleons across the measureless African space. The gorilla, too, is a wanderer within a limited range who every night must build a new nest wherever his search for food may take him.

In those countless species, however, which through long evolutionary trial and error have come to incorporate a territorial pattern into their whole behavior complex, we shall find a remarkable uniformity. Widely unrelated though the species may be, a few distinct patterns are endlessly repeated. In the next chapter, for example, we shall examine arena behavior, in which solitary males defend mating stations to which females come solely for copulation. It makes little difference whether the species be antelope or sage grouse, the pattern will be almost the same. And in the [6] chapter after that we shall consider the pair territory, that portion of space occupied and defended by a breeding couple, as in robins and beavers and men. So we shall move along, surveying the territorial experience in the world of the animal as it has been observed by science in our generation.

It is information, all of it, which failed to enter your education and mine because it had not yet come to light. It is information, all of it, which yet fails to enter our children's textbooks or the processes of our own thought, through nothing but neglect. To me, this neglect seems a luxury which we cannot afford. Were we in a position to regard our knowledge of man as adequate in our negotiations with the human circumstance, and to look with satisfaction on our successful treatment of such human maladies as crime and war, racial antagonisms and social loneliness, then we might embrace the world of the animal simply to enjoy its intrinsic fascinations. But I find no evidence to support such self-satisfaction. And so this wealth of information concerning animal ways, placed before us by the new biology, must be regarded as a windfall in a time of human need.

If, as I believe, man's innumerable territorial expressions are human responses to an imperative lying with equal force on mockingbirds and men, then human self-estimate is due for radical revision. We acknowledge a few such almighty forces, but very few: the will to survive, the sexual impulse, the tie, perhaps, between mother and infant. It has been our inadequate knowledge of the natural world, I suggest, that has led us to look no further. And it may come to us as the strangest of thoughts that the bond between a man and the soil he walks on should be more powerful than his bond with the woman he sleeps with. Even so, in a rough, preliminary way we may test the supposition with a single question: How many men have you known of, in your lifetime, who died for their country? And how many for a woman?

Any force which may command us to act in opposition to the will to survive is a force to be inspected, at such a moment of history as ours, with the benefit of other than obsolete information. That I believe this force to be a portion of our evolutionary nature, a behavior pattern of [7] such survival value to the emerging human being that it became fixed in our genetic endowment, just as the shape of our feet and the musculature of our buttocks became fixed, is the premise of this inquiry. Even as that behavior pattern called sex evolved in many organisms is nature's most effective answer to the problem of reproduction, so that behavior pattern called territory evolved in many organisms as a kind of defense mechanism, as nature's most effective answer to a variety of problems of survival. I regard the territorial imperative as no less essential to the existence of contemporary man than it was to those bands of small-brained proto-men on the high African savannah millions of years ago. I see it as a force shaping our lives in countless unexpected ways, threatening our existence only to the degree that we fail to understand it. We can neither accept nor reject my premise, however, or even begin to explore its consequence, on any basis other than science's new knowledge of the animal in a state of nature. And since that knowledge has been acquired at the same time that radical changes have come to our understanding of evolution itself, we shall do well to defer until the next chapter our entrance to the field and our first specific inspection of territory. Before we inspect the behavior of the animal, let us inspect the behavior of that equally intriguing being, the scientist.

A bird does not fly because it has wings; it has wings because it flies.

Such a statement may seem, from a variety of viewpoints, to be a triumph of obviousness, of absurdity, or of unimportance. But reflect on it for a moment and something in the statement will begin to nag at you. It will take on the aspect of one of those psychologist's cubes that at a quick glance present one face to the observer and then, in the most puzzling fashion, turn themselves over and present another. Just what is the relationship of body to behavior? Do we think because we have brains, or do we have brains [8] because we think? It may not matter too much if you are late for an appointment and trying to catch a taxi on a rainy afternoon in Piccadilly or the Piazza di Spagna. But it has mattered mightily to evolutionary thought in the past thirty years, and it must matter to us.

In this period during which most of us have had our minds on other things, three questions have disturbed not a few scientific disciplines. What is the relationship of behavior to body, of how we act to what we act with? What is the relationship of learning to instinct, of what we acquire in the experience of a lifetime to what we were born with, assuming that we were born with anything? And, finally, what is the dominant influence in our daily lives, the compulsions of our immediate environment or the inner dictates of our evolutionary past? The last two might be considered rephrasings of the same question, but they do not come out quite that way. In any event, each of these three questions concerning the roles of behavior, of instinct, and of heredity on the evolutionary stage has received a giant body of inquiry in our time, each has induced giant cases of apoplexy in its more dedicated partisans, and each not only is central to our newer concepts of evolution but is essential to any approach to our story of territory. And while it is true that the question of instinct and learning is most sharply related to conclusions which we may draw concerning man, let us turn first to the question of body and behavior as more nearly settled and withdrawn from the field of controversy.

Should you have access to any of the older zoology textbooks, you will find either little reference to behavior, or none. Discussion is confined to those animal attributes [9] which zoologists call morphological and physiological -- that is, dealing with physical structures and processes. Such a preoccupation with body -- what an animal is and how he looks -- as opposed to concern about behavior -- how he acts and why -- dominated our thoughts about evolution until about 1930. Should your curiosity lead you on to wonder about what is being taught in the field today, you will find available slim paperback volumes called the College Outline Series, used widely in English-speaking schools, which will give you at a glance a fair summary of what your children are being taught in any subject. I have before me those volumes treating biology and zoology, both in editions published in 1962. You will find the bulk of both devoted to the anatomical classification of animals into species and genera and families and so on, a subject of immense fascination to zoologists in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Ecology has crept in to the extent of a chapter in each volume: ecology is the relationship of an animal to his environment. But you will find no mention of behavior at all. And yet biology is in general agreement today that it is behavior -- such behavior as territory, or the manner in which an animal evades predators -- that determines whether bodily characters have selective advantage or not. It is behavior, in other words, that evolves and is central to the evolutionary process. Your children are being taught an interpretation of evolution discarded by modern biologists for quite some time.

Let us look at the matter more closely. I have mentioned the wolf. A group of Arctic wolves has a hunting territory of about one hundred square miles. The boundaries are fairly precise, and periodically the adults will make the rounds, refreshing their markers as a warning against intrusion. Like the dog, the wolf marks his property with a squirt of urine the fragrance of which is reinforced by the output of a special scent gland. Since the dog is promiscuous, we might interpret his marking as an attraction for females. But the wolf is monogamous. He mates for life, is intractably faithful, and if widowered will probably not re-mate but will remain a bachelor to the end of his days. To spread that much sexually attractive scent over that much mileage would seem in a beast of such temperament an impressive waste of time. The gland has evolved, of course, as a bodily character of selective value to territorial behavior. By the marking of boundaries wolves [10] reduce the likelihood of lethal conflict over property rights.

The howling monkey, another passionately propertied creature, has likewise evolved an anatomical specialty of no earthly use but to his behavioral preoccupations. Since monkeys have lived for tens of millions of years almost entirely in trees, the sense of smell, useful if you live on the ground, has suffered reduction. Stereoscopic vision and depth perception have become of prime arboreal importance, faces have flattened, snouts have retreated, scent glands have for the most part vanished. Thus the howler possesses no wolflike equipment for marking the boundaries of his preserve. But he has something else. As his name implies, he has come into possession of a voice box to humiliate an air-raid siren. At dawn the howler will deafen the awakening forest in a cry raised in unison with the fellows of his clan. Every other clan for a mile or so about is put on warning as to the home clan's whereabouts. Should two such groups in the course of the day's wanderings meet at some point where unmarkable boundaries are vague, then all argument will be settled by out-howling. Again, a body structure has evolved through its selective advantage to a form of behavior.

As a last territorial example, I may recall a group of captive ring-tailed lemurs that I encountered a few years ago in Tananarive, in the laboratories of the Institut de Recherche Scientifique de Madagascar. Lemurs are among the most primitive of primates, from an evolutionary horizon so much earlier than monkeys that they have not renounced loyalty to the sniffing way of life. The combination of foxy snout, delicate hands, and long striped tail makes the ring-tail one of nature's most beguiling creatures. I knew little about them at the time of our first encounter, and when at the sight of me one began running its tail through its arms and another backed its rear against the edge of the cage and started rubbing, I put it all down to captive nervousness. It did not occur to me that, as warning, they were preparing to mark out their territory, the cage.

Some time later I ran into a full explanation by Heini Hediger, world-famous director of the Zurich zoo and professor of animal psychology at the University of Zurich. The ring-tail has glands on the inside of his arms which he rubs with his tail when disturbed; I had been correct that far. But also the ring-tail has a perineal gland near the [11] anus, used for border marking. At Zurich, Hediger had a group in a large cage, and for years he would take his students to watch the demonstration. As they approached, the dominant animal would invariably go to a position at the lower left corner of the cage, do a hand stand, and with tail upraised squeeze the perineal gland against the wire mesh. The leader would then go on to eight more predictable spots, including one on either side of the door, to place warning marks. That the warnings were serious found testimony on an occasion when a volunteer entered the cage with the regular keeper. The little lemurs were accustomed to the keeper. The volunteer, however, was hospitalized for some weeks with a severed artery in the leg.

It is of passing interest that the captive lemur will defend a territory against species other than his own. It is of more immediate interest that the leader of this group was a female. Both male and female ring-tails possess the same gland, which despite its position has no sexual relevance. Like the urinary gland of the wolf, it has evolved as an anatomical character with a single value: to warn away trespassers.

Let me wind this up with an example of body as a function of another sort of behavior. Konrad Z. Lorenz, the [12] Austrian naturalist, is the father of ethology, the modern study of animal behavior. Among the many creatures which have fallen under his imaginative yet critical eye has been the night heron. Three different genera of night herons all have a behavior trait in common. As a dog wags its tail to indicate friendly intentions, so the night herons bob their heads. To emphasize the head bob, all three genera have crests which they raise like flags for the amiable occasion. But the flags differ in pattern. Does the night heron bob his head to display the crest he possesses? Or does he possess a crest because he would bob his head anyway? Lorenz reasoned that since the three crests differ whereas the gesture is the same, some ancestor of the family must have found such a gesture of value in keeping down disputes, and that the bodily structures had evolved in descendant species to enhance the value. His reasoning is confirmed by herons so young that they have not yet grown crests; they too bow.

As any Lorenz devotee comes to know, he has run into some of his most charming experiences through accident. Such an accident revealed the importance of the head bob in the life of the night heron. One of the objects of his study was a family nesting in a tree near his house. When the father heron would return to the nest, he always bowed to the young inside with what might seem the most remarkable paternal courtesy. But there was more to it than manners. One afternoon when the father was absent Lorenz climbed the tree to check up on the young and see how they were coming along. They were accustomed to him and raised no fuss. But in the midst of Lorenz' examination the father returned unexpectedly and, outraged by the intrusion, made threatening displays at the naturalist. Unhappily, however, the distracted father forgot to make his bow of friendly intentions, and was promptly attacked by his own young.

Harvard University's Ernst Mayr is biology's unrivaled authority in the field of systematics -- that is, the evolutionary classification of species. At a symposium in 1958 he said, "On the whole it seems correct to state, as Lorenz has emphasized, that behavior movements often precede phylogenetically the special structures that make these movements particularly conspicuous." In other words, as in the case of the night herons, it would be a normal situation for some ancestor to start bobbing a crestless head as [13] a form of behavior of survival value, and for natural selection in descendant species to favor incidental but effective ornaments. Five years later, in his definitive Animal Species and Evolution, Mayr went even further: "A shift into a new niche or adaptive zone is, almost without exception, initiated by a change in behavior. The other adaptations to the new niche, particularly the structural ones, are acquired secondarily."

What truly leads the evolutionary procession, in other words, is behavior. Let us say that some tiny rodent species has lived for a million years deep in the shelter and the succulence of a prevailing grassland. Then comes a change of climate. For decade after decade and for century after century remorseless drought burns away the grasses and reduces the land to unending desert. The little rodent must change his entire way of life or perish. He must eat new foods and discover perhaps a means of hoarding and storing what in his meadows had never suffered scarcity. Through hundreds of generations of selection those who hoard tend to raise offspring successfully, those who live for today tend to fail. A hoarding behavior pattern becomes established, and with it arises a necessity for storage places. The little rodent must dig. And with his new burrowing way comes selective pressure to favor those who by chance have paws best adapted to digging, coats best adapted to underground life. The dainty-footed, soft-coated meadow dweller becomes a brand-new species, rough-coated, heavy of paw and claw.

But the burrowing way of life in the desert has brought survival challenges of other sorts. From the beginning of his new career the rodent has been exposed to the hawk, with no sheltering grasses to hide in. And so for many a generation now the darker members of the meadowland species have become morsels in the diet of hawks, and the new desert species has become cryptic in color and difficult to spot from the air. But hawks are clever, and menace still remains. The burrow becomes a haven. It is a haven also against the terrifying, desiccating summer heat that scorches animals and their food alike. And so more and more the little rodent tends to stay in the cool of his burrow through the merciless summer, to sleep, to accommodate physiological changes that permit him, as a bear hibernates in winter, to estivate.

Rodent and burrow have become one. A way of life [14] impossible in the meadow's tightly rooted land has encouraged such changes of body and bodily process that he can never return to his former way. The burrow is his castle, his exclusive domain, and he will permit none of his kind to come near it. Even at the risk of exposing himself to the hawk, he will chase away any intruder who either through designs on his burrow or by simple accident comes near. This new territorial pattern of behavior may have bodily consequences, too, one day. Through the infinite span of generations, chance will present one little rodent or another with a special pungency of urine or fecal matter, or a gland with a particularly lasting secretion. Within the species a differential rate of survival will be set up. Those old-fashioned members who lack means of warning and who must chase away every intruder will have one set of odds with the watchful hawk. But for the new sort, the smelly sort, the sort who on their territorial boundaries may substitute warning signals for their vulnerable selves, a more favorable mathematics will invest the desert. And a more invulnerable species will assemble its genes.

Birds do not fly because they have wings; they have wings because they fly. The newer concept of evolution, and of the relation of behavior and body, might seem an interesting mental exercise, a parlor game of no pressing significance to our understanding of territory in relation to man, had it not been for a flip of the psychologist's cube that occurred in 1953. In that year Oxford's J. S. Weiner and Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark together with the British Museum's Kenneth P. Oakley combined their gifts to prove that the world's most famous fossil of early man, the Piltdown skull, was a fraud. And out of the logic of birds and wings an enormous question was placed before us: Do we think because we have brains, or do we have brains because we think? The new biology's logic dictates the answer, but there have so far been few members of either the biological or social sciences who have chosen to pursue the never-ending implications.

Let us recall that Piltdown man was found early in the century in some river gravels in Sussex. The skull combined a large, relatively modern human brain-case with a distinctly ape-like jaw. With the fossil were associated certain remains of extinct animals indicating a date earlier than that of any other human remains known at the time. A few [15] skeptics muttered to themselves in their scientific cellars, but the body of science, including almost all of the world's most influential anthropologists, accepted Piltdown as a true representative of primal man.

Now, had Piltdown truly represented primal man, then its huge brain would have confirmed all that we should like to believe about ourselves: that in our progression from the simian background we received, whether by divine or mutational intervention, the great human brain freeing us from animal necessity. So it was interpreted by one of the most respected authorities of the time, Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, who referred to "this wonderful skull" and stated things quite clearly: "The outstanding interest of the Piltdown skull is the confirmation it affords of the view that in the evolution of Man the brain led the way. It is the veriest truism that Man has emerged from the simian state in virtue of the enrichment of the structure of his mind."

We think because we have brains. There matters stood for some decades until Oakley revealed with his fluorine tests that skull and jaw bore no relation to each other. Some unknown joker with a most superb grasp not only of human paleontology but of human gullibility had assembled the whole bone collection and planted it in the Sussex gravels. Not a thimbleful of evidence remained to indicate that we behave as we do because we have brains. Piltdown man expired in the acid of Oakley's tests; but Piltdown thinking thrives today -- as it will thrive tomorrow, without doubt -- unaffected by the most acidulous solvents which history so abundantly provides.

The effect of Oakley's tests, so far as our understanding of human evolution was concerned, was immediate and uproarious. I pursued in detail those effects in African Genesis, since they made possible the acceptance of Raymond Dart's theories concerning the evolution of his small-brained australopithecines, pressed by the selective necessities of the hunting life, into the large-brained Homo anatomically equipped to deal with the complex necessities of that life. In the years since my book was published in 1961, the spectacular discoveries of L. S. B. Leakey and his family in East Africa have gone so far to prove Dart's thesis that I can conceive of no informed body of scientific thought which today actively opposes it. But the effects of Oakley's tests on a broader assessment of man have been [16] a story less than uproarious; one might think, indeed, that nothing had occurred.

It has been demonstrated that the human brain came into existence like any other evolving structure -- like the night heron's lovely bluish crest or the wolf's less lovely scent glands -- the more adequately to deal with pre-existing behavioral demands or opportunities. Are we then to conclude that those earlier modes of proto-human behavior have had no hand in shaping our brain's form and structure? That the behavioral patterns which were so essential to survival half a million or so years ago, and which forced the enlargement of our brains to their present dimension and complexity, left no mark upon them? Without doubt the enlarged human brain, with its capacities for memory, for foresight, for self-awareness, for conceptual thought, brought something new to the natural world which had existed previously merely as hints. But if our brain exists as something new in an old, old world, it remains likewise something quite old in a new one.

The anatomical arrangements of the human brain recall its behavioral necessities at the time of the brain's final enlargement some hundreds of thousands of years ago. If we are to believe otherwise, then we must deny that the form of a hummingbird's wing has been adjusted, through selective pressure, to other than its function in flight. Our brain, through its enlargement, may have achieved a qualitative breakthrough into spheres of activity which neither the australopithecine nor his Miocene ancestor, the Proconsul family, could have within their limitations foreseen. But to deny the formative influences of an animal past on our human mentality is to deny all present understanding of the evolutionary process. We may, with or without happiness, accept such a denial as a portion of our children's education. We cannot, however, in such an adult inquiry as this, accept the probability that those animal patterns of behavior which have shaped our minds have entirely vanished from our being.

I have so far avoided any use of the word "instinct" for what seems to me a sound enough reason: because no one, [17] apparently, has a glimmer as to what an instinct is. In African Genesis I used the word blithely, chopping off behavioral heads with it in a manner to have delighted Alice's Red Queen. Such use was justified in an inquiry so broad. But if we are to inquire with any depth or definition into innate patterns of behavior, then we can neither avoid the word, in the manner of many psychologists, nor can we use it like a two-handed axe in the hands of an absent-minded dentist.

What in the actions of any individual, man or other animal, can be attributed to instinct? What to learning? The question, stated or unstated, lies at the heart of some of our most heated controversies. It is difficult to discuss any contemporary issue -- crime or race, techniques of education, aid to underdeveloped countries or ways to bring up baby -- without finding oneself in the presence, sooner or later, of this ambiguous monster which seems always proceeding in two opposite directions at once. In many a parlor of contemporary discussion the word "instinct" is banned more severely than some of its fellows boasting only four letters. To such subjective depths has an essentially objective problem been reduced that Abraham Maslow, the astute chairman of Brandeis University's psychology department, has suggested a political explanation. To refer to human instincts is to damn oneself as a reactionary, probably of the most fascist-minded sort. Total devotion to learning, on the other hand, is to label oneself as liberal, progressive, securely democratic.

Our troubles with instinct began, I suspect, with those studies of insects that initiated a modern fascination with the animal world. There is something about a butterfly called Hoplitis milhauseri which can be neither dismissed nor forgotten. Its soft little pupae lie in cocoons as hard as nutshells. How do they get out? Well, each pupa has a built-in can-opener on top of its head and, when the moment comes, cuts a circular hole in the shell so that its metamorphosed self may emerge as a butterfly. Instinct most obviously has something to do with this, as well as a natural tool kit. To examine the instinct with precision, an experimenter in Zurich once carefully removed two pupae from their nutshells a day or two before their time had come and laid them on the floor of a little breeding cage. They remained there quietly. Then, however, nature commanded. [18] The pupae moved. They scrambled, in fact, to the wall of the breeding cage, where for an hour they made thrusts and circular turning movements with their heads. Only then, the instinct satisfied, did they go about the developing of wings.

When the work of the French entomologist Jean Henri Fabre was collected and published as The Wonders of Instinct early in this century, the wonders were so astounding that we never quite got over them. A fair example is the Capricorn beetle, whose helpful offspring any parent must envy, and whose instincts make the pupae with the can-openers seem crude.

The larva of the Capricorn beetle is a tiny wormlike being who starts out life no thicker of body than a straw. He burrows into an oak tree, ingesting wood at the front end and leaving a tunnel behind. You may have seen the same traces in old furniture. For three years he wanders around in the heart of the oak, very much on his own without parental guidance, increasing in size until he is as thick as your finger. About then he is ready to turn into a beetle, and this he will do inside the oak. The problem confronting Fabre was how the beetle gets out. Only the larva has the capacity to dine off oak. The beetle would be helpless.

Fabre gave long attention to the matter and found that while in the whole three years of wandering the larva would never approach the bark, at the end of his journey he headed directly to it, leaving his tunnel behind him and stopping only when the thinnest film of bark separated the tunnel from the outdoors. Then the larva backs up. [19] Having moved an appropriate distance from the exit, he proceeds to hollow out a chamber not his size but large enough to accommodate the beetle who does not yet exist. The larva's brush with destiny, however, is not yet done. He seals the chamber at either end with a natural cement produced in his stomach. Now, with doors neatly closed, he rasps down the walls of his sealed chamber to cover the floor with a soft down. Using the same wood-wool, he completes the decor by felting all walls a millimeter thick. Now at last his preparations for the accouchement are finished and he lies down and sheds his skin, becoming a pupa which in turn will become a beetle. But the wonders of instinct have not yet been finally recorded. He lies down always with his head toward the exit. Were he to lie down the wrong way, the beetle would be unable to turn around.

The instincts of the larva of the Capricorn beetle may be compared, perhaps, to the programming of a computer. And perhaps someday, when we have become a bit more relaxed in the presence of these modern beasts with all their mechanical wonders, we shall better understand, through analogy, such natural wonders as Fabre presented to the world. But we have no such understanding today. Biology, whether old or new, has no more to say about the Capricorn beetle than it had half a century ago.

Did we reject instinct because we could not understand it? The human mind is capable of its own wonders, and this may in some cases have been true. On the whole, however, I believe that the rejection came about through more reasonable processes. The kind of instinct observed in the insect world -- a total programming in which learning plays no part -- occurs rarely in the world of the vertebrate, and never in the world of man. If one's understanding of the word is limited to insect example, then one is apt to reject instinct as a factor in human motivation.

The great rejection took place in the 1920's, headed in America by a scientific cult, brief of glory, called behaviorism. J. B. Watson, treading hard on the heels of Pavlov's salivating dog, demonstrated that the human being consists of nothing but a few striped muscles and some conditioned reflexes. Today, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his earlier but equally extreme views concerning the natural goodness of man, Watson musters few defenders. Both, nevertheless, left deep scars on the face of human thought. The primacy of the conditioned reflex contributed lasting [20] damage to American psychology and, like some great wave which gathers fury and greater destructive power the farther it moves from the storm center, brought to other departments of American learning devastation typical of a disaster area. We do not know -- we Americans -- how unquestioning is our devotion to the conditioned reflex as we search for human explanations. In but one other nation, the Soviet Union, can one witness a dedication so profound and so unanimous.

It was in the 1920's, then, that we rejected instinct and the demands of the past as of any great relevance to human behavior and turned to the immediate present and that conditioned reflex called experience for all final answers as to why men today are the way they are, or as to what they will be tomorrow. Our premature conclusions concerning animal instinct had been drawn from the termitary, the beehive, the anthill. Not until the following decade would biology's focus shift to the vertebrate.

Ethology is a new science, pioneered by Austria's Konrad Lorenz and Holland's Niko Tinbergen in the 1930's. Some of its leading contributors today are Americans, but its work is best known in Europe. In a way, the science has been badly named, for the word is easily lost in the scientific jumble of ethnology, entomology, and etymology. Furthermore, ethology suggests ethics to the ear, whereas its major concern is with the precise study of innate behavior patterns in animals. In the long run, however, the significance of the word will probably surmount its temporary handicaps, for ethology is most certainly revealing universal patterns of behavior and may someday uncover by most objective means an ethos in the nature of all living beings.

The existence of innate, genetically determined behavior patterns was first discussed, I believe, by an American, C. O. Whitman, in a series of lectures delivered at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in 1898. Ten years or so later Oskar Heinroth in Berlin independently explored the possibility of patterns to which learning makes a contribution but which are in themselves genetically controlled. Serious study of genetically determined behavior had to wait, however, until in the 1930's biologists and comparative psychologists at last turned their attention from the zoo and the laboratory to the way of the animal in a state of nature. [21] And in field and forest, on seashore and desert, these adventurers found a world that no man had guessed before.

That the actions of an animal in captivity bear remote resemblance to his actions in the wild proceeds from the simplest of logic: only in the wild does he face those pressures and opportunities which give expression to his total nature. We tend to feel sorry for the captive animal, as indeed we frequently should. But we tend also to forget that captivity shelters him from that most conspicuous fact of natural existence, the empty stomach, whether his own or that of the predator who seeks to devour him. Much of his natural energy has been organized to deal with this daily, hourly problem of the natural way: to eat without being eaten. Captivity has subtracted fear from his life, and substituted boredom. And it is for this reason that we should feel sorry for him.

Only when a new generation of scientists went out into the field could we begin to apprehend, for example, the subtlety of organization in those natural animal societies which cannot exist in the zoo. Only when we watched the whole range of behavior exhibited by the animal as he meets the whole range of life contingencies could we begin to guess at those processes by which evolution has so ably perfected his remarkable capacities. The laboratory would retain its worthy place for experimental purposes, but only as measured against the new observations in the field could indoor conclusions be accepted as meaningful.

New hypotheses, new theories, sprang up to take account of the new, revolutionary evidences. Konrad Lorenz in 1937 published in English his landmark paper, The Companion in the Bird's World, breaking the news that in the life of our backboned comrade, the vertebrate, problems of instinct could not be reduced to the programmed specifics of insect life. In 1951 Tinbergen published his The Study of Instinct, a work so glacial in its objectivity that no scientist, whatever his emotional allegiances, could ignore it entirely. (That some succeeded, of course, may be deduced from the fact that the book is today out of print and unavailable in both Britain and America.) Then in 1955 Tinbergen's rival and fellow Dutchman, Adriaan Kortlandt of the University of Amsterdam, published his Aspects and Prospects of the Concept of Instinct, demonstrating in a single, erudite, bristling document that ethology [22] was going to be other than the polite preserve of a Pall Mall club of like-minded students, but more fun than a barrel of argumentative monkeys.

In its short career ethology has touched many a facet of the central problem of instinct. The one to engage us at this moment, however, is the reality of inherited, genetically determined behavior based on open as well as closed programs. The larva of the Capricorn beetle may execute his entire life cycle instructed by none but his inward computer. The weaver bird may build his most complex of nests after four generations of removal from nest-building materials or opportunities. These are closed patterns to which nothing need be added by experience to serve perfectly the needs of the species. But let us take an excursion into bird song.

Every species of singing bird has a song specific to its kind. Throughout the nineteenth century it was generally accepted that a bird learns its song from the parent. Then in 1926 Heinroth questioned this. At last, a quarter of a century later, a Dane named Holger Poulsen concluded a series of observations and experiments demonstrating just how widely instinctual patterns may range.

By raising birds either in isolation or in contact only with other species, Poulsen found, for example, that the linnet must learn. Raised with other birds, it will sing almost anything but a linnet's proper song. The skylark must learn too, but it is a little different from the linnet. Reared only with other birds, the skylark will learn the complete songs of the chaffinch, the goldfinch, or the yellow bunting. But there will always be a few skylark notes and phrases, learned from none. Then at the opposite end of the range there is the reed bunting, who will remain quite indifferent to the songs of other species and when the time comes will make his perfect reed-bunting song. Poulsen wondered if such innate capacity might be a character of birds with simple calls, but he found that the tree pipit, with one of the most complex of songs, sang as innately as the reed bunting.

It is the chaffinch, however, that provides an illuminating example of the open instinct. In Denmark the chaffinch begins to sing about February 15. Poulsen raised males in isolation. By the middle of January they were beginning to twitter and in two weeks were producing an abbreviated chaffinch song, imperfect of pitch, imperfect of rhythm. [23] When Chaffinch Day came in the middle of February, he freed them but allowed them at first to mix only with linnets. They imitated the linnet and succeeded in producing some of its notes. But then they heard a chaffinch. Immediately they perfected their chaffinch song, nor did they imitate the linnet ever again.

Instinct may vary from the closed program of the tree pipit, in which nothing is learned, through the moderately open program of the chaffinch, in which there exists a design and a general disposition to learn only from one's own species but in which much must be filled in by experience; then on to the skylark, who derives from his genetic heritage only a few disorganized hints as to how a skylark should sing, and finally to the linnet, in which instinct directs only that he sing at a certain season, but in which all else must be learned.

When we discuss behavior patterns, such as the territorial, we deal with these open programs of instinct. The disposition to possess a territory is innate. The command to defend it is likewise innate. But its position and borders will be learned. And if one shares it with a mate or a group, one learns likewise whom to tolerate, whom to expel. To the human eye all herring gulls look alike. The [24] male herring gull, however, will allow none on his little territory but his mate, and he will recognize her coming fifty yards away in a crowded colony of thousands.

This capacity to fill out with learning a behavioral pattern of innate design seems in itself somehow to be related to instinct. It is not simple experience, for example, that teaches an animal territorial boundaries which he will cross at his peril. Eskimo dogs in East Greenland live in packs, each pack defending rigorously a social territory. At an early stage of his career Tinbergen observed that immature males wander about, violating boundaries and continually taking severe punishment in consequence. Yet they seem unable to learn, despite the most bitter experience, where to go and where not to. Then, however, they mature sexually and immediately learn all boundaries. Tinbergen recorded two cases in which first copulation, first territorial defense, and first avoidance of the next pack's territory all occurred in the course of one week.

Even in insects not all instincts are closed, by any means. The honey bee learns the location and variety of many kinds of nectar. But there is a digger wasp called Philanthus triangulum, with no such capacity. She preys on hive bees, and no conditioning, no most formidable scarcity of edible bees, will induce her to prey on anything else. One would not expect in a creature with a mind so closed any extraordinary capacity for learning. Yet in another of Tinbergen's experiments he placed a ring of pine cones around a nest hole while the wasp was still inside. She emerged, circled the area for precisely six seconds, and made off on a bee hunt. He then moved the circle of pine cones a few feet. An hour and a half later she returned and settled without hesitation at the middle of the circle. Helplessly she looked for her nest and was entirely incapable of finding it until the pine cones were returned to their proper position. Philanthus triangulum may be unable to learn to hunt anything excepting bees, but she can learn the landmarks around her home in just six seconds.

The open instinct, a combination in varying portion of genetic design and relevant experience, is the common sort in all higher animal forms. As beginning with the digger wasp we proceed higher and higher in the animal orders, the closed instinct all but vanishes, the open instinct incorporates more and more a learned portion. In man it reaches a maximum of learning, a minimum of design. [25] The same pattern, filled out by a thousand different tracks of experience by a thousand different men, yields a richness which has made man, in a famous phrase, the most variable of all wild species. And we may understand why natural selection has permitted man, at least temporarily, to come out on top: in human behavior those patterns common to the animate world have been permitted the widest latitude of adaptation to circumstance. We retain genetic resolve while obtaining the diversity of experience. But what the sophisticated man in our time tends to ignore is that, no matter how open the instinct, no matter how much learning is incorporated into the completed pattern, the total influence on individual behavior will proceed with very nearly the form of a closed program directing an insect in the heart of an oak. It remains an instinct.

We tend, in our contemporary vocabulary of human motivation, to refer to "drives." This word is a bastard child of a common-law marriage between our rejection of the concept of instinct and a necessary acceptance of certain facts of life. It is a euphemism, as were those Victorian words and phrases referring in most genteel terms to a variety of undeniable human activities revolving about sexual intercourse. But euphemism has no lasting place in the sciences. As a psychological cynic, Professor Cyril Burt, once commented, a drive is an instinct under a new name. "Flung out at the front door, the old instincts are allowed in at the back after assuming an alias and a slight disguise." It is no help to the student of man, groping for an understanding of his fellow being, that psychology has arrayed the open instinct, a form of innate behavior exhibited by man and all higher animals, in a crepe beard and well-placed rouge, has termed it a drive, and has expected of its objective study any superbly significant conclusions.

But there remains the undeniable problem that we have no information as to how an instinct operates. Ethologists have assumed that there must be a neurological foundation in the central nervous system providing an anatomical switchboard for handling messages. Yet no neurologist has been able to isolate the switchboard. One of our most distinguished authorities in the field, T. H. Bullock, gave a recent symposium this desperate conclusion: "At the bottom we do not have a decent inkling of the neuronal mechanism of learning or the physiological substratum of [26] instinctive patterns. . . . Indeed if one considers the other great problems in natural science it seems clear that the gulf between our knowledge of neurophysiology and our knowledge of behavior is at least as wide as any other that confronts us."

That, then, is in general where things stand today. There are many American psychologists, like Harry Harlow, J. B. Calhoun and Jay Boyd Best, deeply engaged with laboratory study of the relation of instinct to learning. In England, Cambridge's W. H. Thorpe has published Learning and Instinct in Animals, the most comprehensive single volume on the subject. Many others, in America and elsewhere, have turned their experiments and meditations from the problem of genetically determined behavior to that of genetically determined needs, a rich subject to which we shall turn our own attentions at a much later moment in this inquiry. In general, however, American psychologists pursue their studies of learning almost as if instinct did not exist, while on the Continent ethology observes the behavior patterns of animals in the wild, with rare excursions into the problems of learning. Beyond some shining exceptions, neither side is well informed as to what the other side is up to. And without exception whatsoever, none has found the secret link between organism and organization, between body and behavior. It is a widely held hope, however, that the infant science of molecular biology will bring us suggestions that both learning and instinct, like the genetic code itself, may be based on the molecule within the cell. Then at least we shall have some fresh hypotheses to work with, whereas now we have only spooks.

Under the conditions of present scientific ignorance, one cannot blame too severely the student of man who tends to place instinct somewhere between the angels of medieval schoolmen and the heads of the pins they danced on. Nevertheless, instinct exists and we cannot dismiss it from our doorstep just because we do not know where it lives. Instinct exists and it makes use of learning the way a furnace sucks in air. One may consider the scientist himself as an example. Many a physicist or chemist, deficient not at all in the humanitarian virtues, has in our time placed at the disposal of the machinery of war the most sophisticated attainments of his discipline. All apparent conscience, all cultural instruction and religious teaching [27] concerning the immorality of killing vanish before the higher command to defend his country, and the scientist makes available to the art of murder the most intricate secrets of his trade. In the language of this inquiry we should say that he fills out from the particularity of his learning the generality of that open instinct, the territorial imperative; and, having done so, he will act according to the finished pattern with the predictability of a Capricorn beetle.

Briefly we skip like a water bug across the surface of the new biology's still, deep pools.

We may say that behavior -- the frame of possibilities available to any animal's actions -- is as characteristic of species and subspecies as is length of claw or shape of shoulder bone. Body and behavior form an organic unit, subject within a species to normal variation in individuals and populations, which will be tested in the field of worth by natural selection.

We have seen that instinct -- the genetically determined pattern which informs an animal as to how to act in a given situation -- has tended in the evolution of vertebrates to become increasingly of an open sort. As ways of life have become more complex, it has become of selective value to support instincts which make use of experience and learning. One can no more say that the kind of instinct motivating man is qualitatively different from the kind of instinct motivating higher animals than one can inspect the fossil record of the gradual human emergence and say: Here, here at this anatomical moment, animals ended and men began.

Now finally we come to the general problem of heredity and environment. And my best advice is to refresh one's drink, sit deep in one's chair, and hold fast. It is at this dangerous corner that the natural and social sciences collide.

In America, and to a lesser degree elsewhere, the dominant school of thought in the study of man for the last thirty years has been cultural anthropology. It was founded by Franz Boas and a brilliant group of students at Columbia University. One of those students was Margaret Mead, [28] today our most distinguished anthropologist, and in a recent work she has described her field more concisely and more persuasively than can I:

In the central concept of culture as it was developed by Boas and his students, human beings were viewed. as dependent neither on instinct nor on genetically transmitted specific capabilities but on learned ways of life that accumulated slowly through endless borrowing, readaptation, and innovation. . . . The vast panorama which Boas sketched out in 1932 in his discussion of the aims of anthropological research is still the heritage of American anthropology.

At this particular point in my narrative, I prefer to allow authorities to speak for themselves. M. F. Ashley Montagu is another eloquent onetime student of Boas, a geneticist as well as anthropologist. In 1962 he wrote in his introduction to Culture and the Evolution of Man:

It is principally through cultural pressures that primate nature, in the case of man, has been changed into human nature. It must be emphasized that this change has been brought about not -- among other things -- by the suppression of primate instinctual drives, but by their gradual supplantation by an adaptively more effective means of meeting the challenges of the environment, namely, by enhancing the development of intelligence. ... In the course of human evolution the power of instinctual drives has gradually withered away, until man has virtually lost all his instincts. If there remain any residues of instincts in man, they are, possibly, the automatic reaction to a sudden loud noise, and in the remaining instance to a sudden withdrawal of support; for the rest, man has no instincts.

I mentioned in the last section that Watson and his striped muscles did not last long in psychology and would find, like Rousseau, few defenders today, but that the work of the behaviorists brought lasting effects on other areas of thought. It was Watson who reduced the human endowment to two instinctive fears: of falling and of loud noises. Perhaps we should regard it as less than surprising [29] that cultural anthropology leans with various degrees of frankness on the work of the other rejected master and tends at least implicitly to accept Rousseau's concept of original goodness. In another book published in 1962, The Humanization of Man, Montagu is both frank and explicit: "Evil is not inherent in human nature, it is learned. . . . Aggressiveness is taught, as are all forms of violence which human beings exhibit."

In fairness to anthropology, it should be recorded that not all of its authorities have remained so aloof to contemporary developments in evolutionary thought. A. Irving Hallowell is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He comments:

Whereas opponents of human evolution in the nineteenth century were those who naturally stressed evidence that implied discontinuity between man and his primate precursors, anthropologists of the twentieth century, while giving lip service to morphological evolution, have by the special emphasis laid upon culture as the prime human differential, implied what is in effect an unbridged behavioral gap between ourselves and our closest relatives.

As divine intervention, in other words, was the last century's means of disavowing evolution's relationship to man, so the primacy of culture is this century's. In further fairness to anthropology as well as to my fellow Americans, I feel the need to include one more quotation, this from the broader field of sociology and from a Briton. The quotation carries extraordinary authority. A few years ago there was published in London a volume called A Century of Darwin in which fifteen world-famous specialists were invited to sum up the present influence of Origin of Species on their various scientific fields. Donald G. McRae, reader in sociology at the University of London, discussed with admirable candor the present influence of evolutionary theory on the social sciences:

The tendency of the social scientist to whore after theories drawn from natural science -- physical or biological -- has a long history. Something has been gained, but the mass of consequent error suggests that the price may well have been too high. It is [30] certainly the case that the place of both specifically Darwinian and more broadly evolutionary ideas is smaller in modern social science than has been true at any time in the past century. ... It used to be said that the last word of biology was the first word of sociology. Logically it ought to be the case, but for it to become so biology will have to offer the social sciences something other than Darwinism -- or at least something additional.

I myself have nothing but gratitude for McRae's intellectual courage in stating the truth with such clarity in the midst of such a volume. That for thirty-five years a revolution in evolutionary thought has been holding sway in biology, and that almost every page of A Century of Darwin offers the sociologist the additional something he demands and at once ignores, is beside the point. What McRae does is to expose cleanly the break to which Hallowell referred: Evolution is all right for animals, but it has nothing to do with men. And the layman must ask, How in the world did the sciences -- in which if nowhere else reason must be presumed to rule -- ever develop such a split personality?

It is the influence of heredity, of course, which is denied just as the influence of environment is exalted. But the denial is impossible, since the two are in balance. Through the shufflings and sortings of heredity, through normal variation of individuals and populations, through sexual combination and recombination, through novel mutation and sleeping with strangers, an infinite variety of living possibilities is and always has been continually created, just as worth is being eternally tested on the field of environment.

Such fields are many. Environment exists within your body, where physiological combinations will face germs and parasites from the outside world; some combinations will succeed and others will fail, and the survivors in a population after sufficient generations will perfect a heritable genetic arrangement to provide a degree of immunity for descendants. This is what happened in Europe in the Middle Ages when developing communications with Asia brought us strange diseases for which we had no immunities. Epidemics like the Black Death decimated our populations. But the plagues lost their virulence long [31] before the advent of modern medicine. We developed immunities. Had they not been heritable, we might possess today no generation of sociologists to decry the significance of heredity.

Or environment may be social. If you are an adolescent chacma baboon of overly bellicose nature and your aggressions lead you to pick quarrels again and again with fellow members of your troop, then the chances are that someday you will get hurt. And you will not be able to keep up with your troop as it moves about its range seeking food. And you will fall behind and the leopard will eat you. Your troop will be the better for it, since baboons simply cannot survive without their highly organized cooperative societies. This capacity to form disciplined societies is the baboon's most valuable genetic endowment. You were a variant, but happily you will leave no offspring since the leopard has eaten you.

Cultural traditions are also a part of our environment. If there is a tradition, as in almost all African tribes, to kill twins as soon as they are born, then you will not find many twins around, and if you pursue the tradition through a sufficient number of generations the genetic potentiality to twin should be considerably reduced. In this sense the cultural anthropologist is correct: Variations between the cultural traditions of human populations must, if pursued for a sufficient number of generations, have a selective effect on the quality of a population's gene pool. The capacity for a human population to form cultural traditions which become a significant selective force in a particular environment has probably contributed to the rapid rate of human evolution. To underrate the long-term genetic consequences of a cultural tradition is as dangerous as to overrate the short-term conclusiveness of cultural determination.

Environment tests us in many ways, and time itself may be a factor. There have been epochs like the Pliocene, when times were so changeless that time itself seemed scarcely to move. Such periods test the conservatism of beings, since the probability is high that if one acts today as one acted yesterday, one will survive. But there have also been epochs of an opposite nature. Such has been the Pleistocene in which we yet live, when climates changed, and changed again, and the great cold would come to consume a continent or rains would change desert to forest and then [32] drought would return it to sand. Through such unending; panoramas of shifting, changing times there passed like figures in a fragmented dream those little bands of struggling beings who someday would be men. They survived by courage in the face of adversity, endurance in the face of extremity; they survived, like baboons, through recognition of a need, one for another; they survived through enormous selective pressure encouraging the expansion of normal primate wit. Above all, however, they survived through plasticity, through a broadening power to incorporate experience into the iron of old behavioral patterns, through a growing capacity to recognize, in changing times, that today is different from yesterday, and tomorrow from today.

Many -- most without doubt -- were conservative creatures. These died by dry, unanticipated stream beds, or numbed and froze in unanticipated storms. These quite obviously were not your ancestors. It was the others -- the witty, the sensitive, the flexible, the ones who could recognize a changing environment when they saw one and incorporate new information into the program of their instincts -- these were the ones to assemble, ever so slowly, a new and most remarkable genetic package: ourselves.

As a layman I can understand an academic position which accepts my description but says, "You have forgotten two things. First, that a time came when these open instincts, under selective pressure, vanished entirely, to be supplanted by unencumbered intelligence. And, second, you have forgotten that man came at last so thoroughly to control his environment that it ceased to have selective force."

To the first reminder I can only reply, "Am I truly expected to believe that the history of man, to this date, has been written by unencumbered intelligence? And even if, for the sake of argument, I were to accept a proposition so outrageous, there is this matter of how we came to be. Every living creature, man or mosquito, has an unbroken ancestry going back at least two billion years to the first chemical stirrings of life. No responsible authority would dare to maintain that longer ago than at the most ten thousand years, when man first secured control of his food supply through domestication of grains and animals, our human ancestors were exempt from the natural processes that I have described. Are we seriously to believe [33] that in ten thousand years, without divine intervention, we have repealed those natural laws that prevailed for the previous one billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety thousand years, and that brought us into being?"

I am entirely willing to grant that anything is possible, but to me the statistics seem against it. And to the second reminder concerning the control we exert over our environment, I must reply, "You are thinking of environment in terms of physical arrangements. You are thinking of drainage ditches and antibiotics and slum clearance and hybrid corn. You are forgetting something -- that the most important element in the human environment is man himself. And so long as we live in a time when a few human beings, by pressing an arrangement of buttons, can in a few hours so alter our physical environment as to make life all but insupportable on this planet, then I am unimpressed by the argument that we have gained control of any part of it."

One must brood. For a man in the street to be compelled to present such childlike logic to the professional thinker is little less than embarrassing. What ails us? What is this inhibition afflicting so many of our finest minds which renders them incapable of adding two and two? I believe that I know, although it will require a subjective digression to explore it. And it will be useful, also, if we recall Maslow's hint that to refer to instinct or heredity in our time is to expose oneself as a political reactionary. I believe that it goes beyond that, however, into an area as much moral as political.

Many established leaders of contemporary thought today spent all or most of their formative years, as I did, in the 1930's. It was a decade, as any of us old enough will recall, at once splendid in its creativity and all but annihilating in environmental hardship. Poverty was the normal condition. As the decade opened I emerged from the University of Chicago with a Phi Beta Kappa key and a degree with honors, of which neither raised my wages as a lecturer in anthropology above fifty cents an hour. After seven or eight years I managed somehow to achieve an income of eighteen hundred dollars a year, but since I received it as a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, even this might be regarded as less than honest money. I must hasten to confess, of course, that I cannot blame all [34] on the depression. I might perhaps have done better financially had I not been imbued with such unforgettable standards of literary excellence as flowed from the immaterial soul of Thornton Wilder, my mentor for five un-forgettable years.

In any event, the 1930's were impressive times. If you were an American, there was unending unemployment at home and Adolf Hitler across the seas. If you were a European, there was unending unemployment at home and Adolf Hitler next door. This was our environment. So encompassing was it, so wholeheartedly inimical to human hopes, so wonderfully varied in its gambits of disaster, that if you were young and impressionable there was no conclusion which you were likely to reach other than that environment is responsible for human fault.

I was one of a handful of young playwrights who established as fashionable what might be called the Theater of Social Protest. There was Sidney Kingsley, and Dead End, and an audience that fell in love with the Dead End Kids. The play said that poverty is responsible for crime. There was Lillian Hellman, and The Little Foxes, and we thrilled to her matchless panoply of villains. The play said that money is the source of all evil. There was Clifford Odets, and Golden Boy, and the tragedy of commercialism vs. art. We all envied Clifford, for he found himself with the biggest commercial hit on Broadway. And there was Irwin Shaw, and the terrifying Bury the Dead, which convinced us that but for propaganda there would be no wars. (Irwin, a few years later, became the best soldier that the Dramatists Guild would produce. By that time he had taken Bury the Dead off the market, refusing to allow its further public presentation.)

My own best contribution to the genre was a play called Jeb. It was about American Negroes, and it said that when a white man asks, "Would you want a Negro to marry your sister?" what he really means is, "Would you want a Negro to get your job?" It was a good play, by general agreement, though perhaps in subject matter a bit ahead of its time. It did not last long. But it was typical of the way we looked at things through the window of the 1930's.

Now, what can one say of plays like these? That they were untrue? That economic motive does not enter into racial discrimination? That propaganda is not a factor in war? That the struggle for material gain does not spawn [35] greed and cruelty? That, poverty does not breed crime? They were true; but they were half-truths. And a half-truth presented as a whole truth becomes, in the end, a total lie. How could we know that in the end there would come a changed environment and a prosperity such as no man had ever seen? And that such an age of affluence and material security would witness a level and degree of juvenile delinquency that did not exist in the depression years; racial conflict and bitterness that we had never known; and a crime rate beyond our most monstrous imaginings? Crime could not even have been described as a major problem when poverty was king.

A changed environment demonstrated that our environmentalist conclusions were inadequate. Perhaps some of us sensed it at an early date. The Theater of Social Protest vanished in the 1940's, to be replaced by the Theater of Self-Pity, which yet commands. But we had done our mighty bit to make fashionable the Age of the Alibi, to make acceptable an attitude which seeks fault anywhere but in oneself, and damns it as immoral to do otherwise. In July, 1934, to have said to an unemployed British workingman "You have none but yourself to blame" would have been to commit an outrage both moral and intellectual. In July, 1964, when for the first time in Britain there existed more jobs than job-seekers, to make the same proposal would carry a reasonable degree of intellectual merit, at least as a hypothesis; yet it would meet the same moral rejection now as before.

Is it possible that the environmental severity of the 1930's induced -- particularly in the most aware, alert, and compassionate of men -- a morality which makes no sense today? Is it possible that some of us -- like Konrad Lorenz' endearing ducks, to whom we shall return one day -- were somehow imprinted with an attitude which was reasonable then, but which clings now as nothing but a moral posture? Is this the inhibition that prevents many of those who, while exalting intelligence and environment, are incapable of recognizing the nature of the new environment in which they themselves now live?

Should this be the case, then again we may witness scenes of natural selection resembling the immense panoramas of the Pleistocene. As in another fragmented dream we shall behold small bands of struggling beings against backgrounds of shifting climates. Again we watch while [36] unsentimental forces select or reject, accept or discard, encouraging the plastic, the flexible, those with instincts open enough to accommodate today's information, those beings genetically capable of reading clues in the sky when clues appear and of recognizing a novel environment when they see one. And then again there must be, I suppose, those little bands of conservative creatures struggling with today as if it were yesterday, staggering across bewildering, unrecognized landscapes, chanting weary hymns to unencumbered intelligence while acting the closed programs of insects, lying down at last by some dry, unanticipated stream bed or vanishing, selected out, into some uncompromising, unanticipated storm. So works evolution.

The sciences, one must hope, will come in time to bury their dead.

Men, unlike mockingbirds, have the capacity for systematic self-delusion. We echo each other with equal precision, equal eloquence, equal assurance. But be it said for mockingbirds, bidden by the indigo of a California night, that they do not risk their species' future with the lush inflation of their song.

I have set down enough in these pages, I believe, to allow us to get started. I have permitted us an opportunist's glance at just those few of the new biology's interpretations which we need to begin with. I have tried to present a certain sense of that broadening conflict within the sciences, between evolutionist and anti-evolutionist, that one cannot gain as yet from the newspapers. Having myself been science's witness for many years, I am convinced that we shall all witness in the near future a resumption of those passionate controversies of almost a century ago, in the [37] time of T. H. Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce, which followed the publication of Origin of Species. Biology had not the resources in Darwin's day to carry the logic of natural selection beyond the evolution of man's bodily being. It has the resources now. And I cannot see our appointment with the deferred debate as anything but inevitable. But there will be a difference in the character of the contestants. In the nineteenth century science as a whole spoke for the continuity of living beings, whereas religion spoke for the uniqueness of man. In our time the controversy must arise between two wings of science itself. So far as my own position is concerned, I should like to believe that it can be found somewhere in the neighborhood of a statement by Harvard's beloved biologist George Gaylord Simpson which he wrote in the introduction to one of his books: "I am trying to pursue a science that is beginning to have a good many practitioners but that has no name: the science of four-dimensional biology or of time and life." That is about it. I do not believe that we are towns without histories, ships without compasses, moments without memories. We carry in that region known as the unconscious certain patterns inherited from ancient days. They are patterns of survival value, or we should not be here. And they are a legacy of all that life which has come before us, assuring us that we are not alone.

I believe, furthermore, that what we call the age of anxiety is in truth a transitional time, an uncertain moment in the adolescence of a species, when the superstitions and imaginary identifications of childhood are no longer enough but the larger comprehensions of maturity are yet unavailable. In such an awkward emotional age we lose faith in fathers, divine or domestic, and yearn for more suitable stars to steer by. We lose confidence. We feel ourselves children of inconspicuous circumstance, dry leaves tumbling before unimportant winds, victims of worlds not of our making, will-less trespassers on dubious pastures. Yet self-knowledge cannot be denied. Maturity must come.

It was only a generation or so ago that the physical sciences added the dimension of time to their three-dimensional calculations of matter and energy, and with a single mathematical leap plunged us into the world of the atom. It is a world as exhilarating as it is hazardous, a world to stir the most stagnant of imaginations even as it frightens [38] the most dashing of souls. Above all, however, it was the feat of the physical sciences to present man with a confidence that he was the master of material things.

It is the turn now of biology, I believe, to extend our calculation of man by the addition of that same fourth dimension, time. It will be a leap, I believe, of not incomparable consequence. There will be terror of a sort in losing, once and for all, this comfortable, pupa-like, three-dimensional chamber of human uniqueness, the only world we have ever known. And there will be hazard, most particular hazard, in the chance that we may discover ourselves the pale prisoners of a determinate past, whereas before we were at worst the nervous victims of an indeterminate future. But it is a chance I believe worth taking: in part, because I have reason to suspect that this will not be biology's answer; in part, because I believe that the winning of self-knowledge is worth every risk; and in part, because I have no choice, for truth is peering in my window and I cannot ask him to go away.

One of the nineteenth-century thinkers most influenced by Darwin, most despised by fashionable thought today, was Herbert Spencer. And in a minor, forgotten work he once recorded a major, everlasting thought: "The profoundest of all infidelities is the fear that the truth will be bad," I may quake in my boots, I may shake in my bed. But I do not have the courage to live a life so dangerous as that of a gambler against the truth.

The protozoa (or is it the egg that once I was?) has his eye on me. And he knows all about me, all my secrets, for he was there when I began, and he knows when I am lying, and he is watching me, right now, just as he watches you.