Who taught beavers to build dams?

How does any animal know what to do? A neuroscientist argues it's not “instinct.” Something bigger is going on. (First published in 2022) Guest: Mark Blumberg, behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Iowa For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Help us plan for the future of Unexplainable by filling out a brief survey: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠voxmedia.com/survey⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:21Speaker 02

  How does a spider know how to spin a web? How does a bird know how to fly? How does a beaver know how to build a dam? By instinct.

• 1:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  For a long time, scientists have looked at fascinating, complex animal behaviors like spiders spinning a web, birds migrating, beavers building a dam, and used the term "instinct," something that an animal seems to do without being taught, something it just knows. The term comes up a lot, from animal trainers-- The animal is born with this instinct. --to nature documentaries-- The instinct to have the right type of food is very powerful. --to scientists--

• 2:07Speaker 04

  And then you might call it an instinct.

• 2:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  The idea is that a lot of these behaviors are somehow genetically hardcoded.

• 2:14Speaker 05

  Each individual is born with built-in behavioral patterns.

• 2:18Noam Hassenfeld?

  And it's a pretty compelling idea. Like, how else would honeybees know how to honeybee?

• 2:23Speaker 02

  They are born with the ability and urge to do it.

• 2:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  But Unexplainable listeners have some questions. Denise, Carlos and Madeline all wrote in suggesting we look into instinct. And they asked things like, how does instinct work? Is it genetic or learned? And how can anything just know something? Well, turns out, the idea of instinct is a lot less simple than those nature documentaries can make it seem. I talked to a scientist who can't stand this word.

• 2:53Speaker 06

  It's basically a covert expression of ignorance and lack of imagination. That's it.

• 3:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  Mark Blumberg, behavioral neuroscientist, coming in hot.

• 3:03Speaker 06

  I can't tell you the number of articles for scientific journals that I review where people just throw the word around. It drives me crazy.

• 3:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's been bugging Mark ever since he was in grad school, and he felt like people were essentially using the idea of instinct as a shortcut.

• 3:16Speaker 06

  So as soon as you say it's genetic, it means you can skip over all the things that actually get you from that amorphous blob of an embryo or a newborn and get right to the action.

• 3:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  But Mark says it's nowhere near that simple.

• 3:29Speaker 06

  Every animal develops. It doesn't matter who you are, all of us, we all develop.

• 3:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  Mark wrote a whole book on this. It's called Basic Instinct, of course, because he thinks relying on the idea of instinct gets away from everything he loves about science.

• 3:44Speaker 06

  Science is supposed to be asking the next question. And you just will never ask the next question if you label it as instinct, or innate, or hardwired, or programmed. All of those words are basically designed to halt all further inquiry. And that's just not good for science.

• 4:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and this week on Unexplainable, we dive into an argument that made me question everything I thought I knew about instinct. So how real and how important is this idea of instinct? And if that's not where these incredible behaviors come from, how do animals know what to do?

• 4:35Noam Hassenfeld?

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

• 4:42Speaker 06

  It goes back a long, long way, but one of the interesting aspects of it is that it actually has its roots in a sort of a religious perspective. So it starts as a problem with free will and reason and good and evil.

• 4:55Noam Hassenfeld?

  Really?

• 4:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's weird, right?

• 4:56Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 4:58Speaker 06

  So imagine that you're, you know, in order to earn your way to heaven and hell, you have to basically make choices. You have to have free will. You can't take an animal that cannot make choices about good and evil and put them in heaven or hell. That doesn't make sense.

• 5:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right.

• 5:11Speaker 06

  Humans are the only ones. We have, we have a soul. We have free will. We have rationality. These are all ideas within the religious context. But we're not letting dogs into heaven or hell. So what you have to do is you have to deny them free will. But you have to explain what they're doing and you say, well, it's instinctive.

• 5:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  So then how does this sort of religious idea make its way over to science?

• 5:32Speaker 06

  Well, that just creates the idea of instinct, really. I mean, historically speaking, I mean, it has its derivation in this religious concept. And then Conrad Lorenz comes along, who was a very powerful Austrian scientist, who was one of the founders of ethology.

• 5:45Noam Hassenfeld?

  What's ethology exactly?

• 5:46Speaker 06

  Ethology is the study of animal behavior in its natural context.

• 5:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 5:50Speaker 06

  And so he was looking at different sorts of communication behaviors in birds. He's mostly known for his work on imprinting and, you know, famous pictures of Conrad Lorenz and all these little ducklings following after him. So when a chick is hatched, we'll basically create a visual connection to the first animal it sees. In nature, that's typically going to be the mother and then they will follow the mother.

• 6:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  And so the idea there is that they're sort of born with this computer program to imprint onto something and then it gets turned on?

• 6:18Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 6:19Noam Hassenfeld?

  And that's how they behave?

• 6:20Speaker 06

  Well, one way you could think about imprinting, the way he did was it's like a switch. You know, you're born and with a very limited time, you see your mother, or you see an Austrian ethologist and you imprint on it, right? It's just a switch clicks, boom. But it turns out is a multi-step process, that it involves both a slight predisposition of bias to perceive the world in a certain way in the chick, and then a more typical learning process. But what happens a lot is that when you call it an instinct, It sort of throws a blanket over your inquiry. I mean, if you just say it's instinctive and why is it instinctive? Well, it's genetically encoded, or as you put it, it's a computer program. Well, then what's to understand about it? Like, we would not have studied it further and learned the deeper meaning of imprinting if we had simply accepted Lorenz's perspective on these things.

• 7:05Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, what kind of things have we figured out about imprinting since then?

• 7:08Speaker 06

  So, one of the leaders in my field, Gilbert Gottlieb was his name. He was interested in the auditory aspects of imprinting. So, when chicks come out there, the mom makes what's called a maternal call, and it attracts the duckling. Well, he wanted to know where that came from. So, he's somebody who did not do the Lorenzian thing and simply say, oh, it's instinctive. What he said was, how do they know to be attracted to the maternal call? So, what he did was, he looked at the eggs. And what he realized is that inside the egg, the chicks are vocalizing themselves. And he said, that's weird. Why would they be vocalizing inside the egg? And he wondered whether these vocalizations were creating an attraction somehow to the maternal call.

• 7:52Speaker 06

  So, he figured out a way how to prevent the vocalizations from happening. So, when these ducks normally, when they normally are hatched, and you just play a chicken versus a duckling call, they go to the duckling call.

• 8:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right.

• 8:03Speaker 06

  But if they were devocalized and never heard their own vocalizations, they showed no species typical preference at all.

• 8:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  So, they were actually developing an attraction to the mom while they were still in the egg?

• 8:15Speaker 06

  Yeah. If Gilbert Gottlieb, if he was faced with this maternal call and he simply said, the newly hatched chicks have an instinct, you know, to be attracted to their mother's call, would you ever go and do the experiments that he did? No. So, these are some of the most famous experiments in my field that would never be done if you simply said it's instinctive.

• 8:35Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right.

• 8:36Speaker 06

  But because he had doubts about the whole terminology, he was motivated to look deeper.

• 8:45Noam Hassenfeld?

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

• 8:57Speaker 06

  Sure, let's take the writing reflex. So if anybody has a cat and has like likes to have fun with cats and you hold them upside down and you drop them, they'll land on their feet.

• 9:05Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, I grew up with a cat and my brother once just tossed my cousin's tiny dog thinking it's fine and the dog just sort of landed on its back.

• 9:13Speaker 06

  I think it's more fun with cats, but I mean, so, okay, so here's the instinct part, perhaps. So you take a baby rat, you take a tank of warm water and you put the rat on its back and then they flip over and they land on their legs.

• 9:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  So the rats are like flipping themselves over in the water, just like the cats are doing in the air?

• 9:31Speaker 06

  As soon as they're born.

• 9:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 9:33Speaker 06

  It's instinctive, right? Well, how do you prove it's not? The way you prove that it's not is that you have to do something that only we can do recently, which is you can gestate rats in space.

• 9:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 9:44Speaker 06

  Okay, because we were in a gravitational environment and so you need to get them away from the gravitational environment. The way you do that is you send them up to space. So they did this. During the middle parts of gestation, they fly these rats and they had ground controls in this experiment. So the ground controls were just regular rats that were still on Earth.

• 10:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  Just to make sure that they were still flipping.

• 10:02Speaker 06

  That was their control group, yeah. And then you have these rats that are gestated in space and then the rats come back to Earth and then the rats were born. And it turns out that a good chunk of these rats, when they dropped them on their back in the tank of water, they just floated down and landed on their back. No writing reflex at all. And the ground controls flipped over and landed on their feet. And that's pretty cool because then that gets you thinking more broadly about what genes actually do. Genes evolved and function expecting a certain environment. And on our planet, you can expect that to be gravity. And it's because we take it for granted that we're able to say things like it's instinctive and it's in the genes, because we're not thinking about the broader

• 10:45Speaker 06

  picture about the things that genes don't have to do. And normally, they do not have to do anything about providing a gravitational environment. That comes for free.

• 10:54Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right. So if we just said, you know, rats flipping is instinctive, we would miss the idea that gravity shapes the entire way we develop.

• 11:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, and you could take this even farther now, talk about so gravity hits all animals the same way, but now you move into different species. These are things that we inherit as well. So think about a beaver, think about building a dam.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  How does a beaver know how to build a-

• 11:15Speaker 06

  Well, where do beavers grow up? They grow up around trees, around water.

• 11:19Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right.

• 11:19Speaker 06

  When you're born as a beaver, your environment comes for free. When you develop in that sort of environment, then developing the capacity to build a dam is going to emerge out of your interactions with the environment. If a beaver family were put in the desert, they're not going to build a dam. There's no water.

• 11:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right.

• 11:36Speaker 06

  There are no trees. Right? So the environment enables and shapes the sorts of behaviors that we call species typical because the environment is part of the inheritance of every species. It can be a large environment, like water and trees. It can be a microenvironment, like dew on the bottom of a leaf or, you know, all the sorts of small little aspects that we aren't even aware of because of our size that are vitally shaping the way animals develop and behave.

• 12:06Noam Hassenfeld?

  I read a study, just in preparing to speak with you, I read a study that said something like, if you isolate squirrels, raise them away from other squirrels, you raise them maybe in like a cage with a hard floor, they still kind of do these like digging and burying motions. Why would they be trying to dig dirt if they've never seen dirt? Like, isn't that sort of a hardcoded instinct?

• 12:31Speaker 06

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

• 13:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, so you're basically saying there could have been, you know, other less obvious things besides seeing actual dirt that might have led squirrels to try to dig.

• 13:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, let me give you a great example. So, you know, there are these animals, cuckoos and cowbirds, where a mom will lay its eggs in the nest of another species.

• 13:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:37Speaker 06

  Okay, that's a really interesting problem because now you've got an egg from one species being raised with a bunch of eggs from another species of bird. And then at some point, they grow up and they find their mates because they keep reproducing. They must find their mates somehow. And so, a very famous, you know, evolutionary biologist and ornithologist named Ernst Meyer, he said that the ability of a cowbird to find, you know, identify its own species is encoded in the zygote, right? He just assumed, he was basically calling it an instinct with no data, no investigation, just like, this is what's happening. I cannot imagine any other way than this can happen. And it turns out, there are ways that it can happen. One way that's been shown in the slightly different situations in other birds is that

• 14:22Speaker 06

  when a young bird is out and about, the adults of its own species will identify it and literally bully it. And so, through that bullying process, the young bird figures out who are the members of its own species. Not that the young bird is going out searching for its own species and goes, oh, my instinct button just went off and oh, my God, you know, the lights went off and now I say like, oh, you're my people. No, it's the identification goes the other way. It's the adults who see the young bird and then bring them into the fold through this process of engaging with them aggressively. That turns the whole process on its head.

• 14:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  It almost feels like for some of these scientists, if there's no obvious connection of like A leads to B, the default is it must just be hardcoded.

• 15:06Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 15:08Noam Hassenfeld?

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

• 15:16Speaker 06

  Absolutely. Understanding the development of complex behavior is a really, really tough problem.

• 15:24Speaker 06

  And it should be treated as a tough problem in a way that does justice to the problem and doesn't just, you know, put a lot of things under the rug.

• 15:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  Fighting words.

• 15:32Speaker 06

  Well, you know, I'm calling this the way I see it because I've been, you know, a lot of us who care about these issues have been saying this for a very long time. I mean, want to hear fighting words?

• 15:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, please.

• 15:43Speaker 06

  It's no different than being a creationist. What is a creationist? You're confronted with the complexity of the external world and you cannot imagine how it could have evolved. And so you have to resort to a creator to try to capture the complexity and to give it some explanation when you can't provide one that makes sense.

• 16:03Noam Hassenfeld?

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

• 16:09Speaker 06

  Lorenz was promoting eugenics, trying to stop the breeding of inferior peoples in his scientific works.

• 16:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  More with Mark after the break.

• 16:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  Support for the show comes from Sonos. Hey, Sonos, give me some music.

• 16:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  All right, one of life's great mysteries. You're listening to music in the living room, but you gotta grab something from the kitchen. You don't want to take the speaker with you, but you also don't want to miss that beat drop. And this is where I introduce you to the magic of Sonos. Sonos sent me a couple of speakers to try out, so I've got to move two here in the living room. And then I walk down the hall.

• 16:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  I get in here to the kitchen and I got a brand new Sonos Play right here on the counter. I can open the fridge, grab a seltzer.

• 17:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  And yeah, I didn't miss a second. And I can make each speaker louder or softer in the Sonos app, or if I'm using AirPlay, so I can make it louder in the kitchen without blasting whoever is still in the living room.

• 17:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's all just easy and it sounds amazing.

• 17:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  These speakers are crisp, they've got great bass, and I'm especially impressed with the new Sonos Play. It packs this like truly awesome sound in a much smaller size. So I don't know if I want to.

• 17:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  Head outside for a minute.

• 17:46Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's super easy and yeah, pretty nice out. Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos, love the sound, feel the system.

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• 20:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  So this idea that, you know, animal behavior is hardcoded, is this still an argument that lots of scientists are making?

• 20:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's everywhere. They use the word like, I'm studying an innate behavior. And they're doing it in part because they think that by calling it innate, they're making their work sound more important, you know, more universal. You know, I'm not just studying behavior X. I'm studying innate behavior X. Therefore, anything I learn about it must be super important, must have been evolved and ancient and universal. Throw, you know, use the words of choice. So it's partly a strategy and partly it's ignorance about what the words actually mean.

• 20:40Noam Hassenfeld?

  That feels like you're calling it laziness.

• 20:42Speaker 06

  I am absolutely calling it laziness.

• 20:44Noam Hassenfeld?

  Do you make enemies out of this? Do you call people out and people who are talking about innate behaviors? Are they like, ah, Mark?

• 20:53Speaker 06

  No, I mean, yeah, I don't know. Um, I like to think I'm not making enemies. I actually, I try to do it more subtly.

• 21:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  Sounds like you're making enemies.

• 21:02Speaker 06

  Well, you know, look, it's science. It's supposed to be, you know, if we can't be honest about what we think, then we shouldn't be doing the business. And there is really a lot of confusion out there. I mean, it's really hard to think developmentally about how certain things come about, especially when it's not obvious, especially when the developmental processes are subtle and complex and circuitous. It's not easy.

• 21:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  Even like the most basic, necessary behaviors? Those are still hard to figure out?

• 21:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, the classic experiment was from 1910 or 12, was involved a scientist who was looking at ring doves in basically a tank of water. It was a shallow tank of water, I believe. And on the bottom were some seeds. Now, these birds were young and they had never actually drunk water before. But as the person was observing the behavior, they saw that the first time they actually got water into their bill was when they were pecking at the seeds at the bottom of the water. They peck at it and they accidentally get water into their mouth. So, you know, it's over 100 year old anecdote now. Hasn't really been followed up to my understanding, but it was followed up in rats to some extent. And they found that if they raised the rats from, you know,

• 22:10Speaker 06

  early in development, as soon as they start weaning off their mother, you know, when they start to eat food, if they gave them a wet mash. So that it was, it contained liquid and food. Then when they gave them dry food and a water bottle, they could not figure out how to drink. But if they raised them from early on with dry food, they immediately learned how to drink. So, you know, when we learn to drink, it's because we get dehydrated because we eat dry food and we feel a dry mouth and we feel dehydrated. That's the stimulus to drink, but you need to learn, you need to come into contact with water and that often happens by accident.

• 22:46Noam Hassenfeld?

  That is so, so, so even, it's hard to imagine anything more instinctive, sorry to use the word, than drinking.

• 22:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 22:54Noam Hassenfeld?

  It seems like that's like something that we all need to do. And you're saying that, you know, there's examples where if animals are not learning how to drink early on, they don't know how to drink.

• 23:01Speaker 06

  Yeah. What I love about this paper was the author had a lovely turn of phrase. He referred to an acquired nature.

• 23:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  An acquired nature, interesting.

• 23:10Speaker 06

  Acquired nature because that's what defeats dichotomies is you bring these ideas together. We all have this ability to drink. It's essential. If we don't drink, we die, but we acquire it. So it's not a nature thing. It's not a nurture thing. It's the combination. And that's why those of us who don't use phrase, words like nature, you know, innate and instinct and so on. We don't because it's a false dichotomy that these things are inextricably linked. It doesn't make sense to pull them apart. You need both of them together to make us work. But I also think, you know, there's another trap here, which is we're always sort of looking at animals that go through a typical developmental process.

• 23:51Speaker 06

  But for me, I'm fascinated also by when animals are born with atypical bodies for their species and yet they figure a lot of stuff out.

• 24:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  What do you mean?

• 24:00Speaker 06

  Every human that I'm aware of that's born with a condition which involves the shortening of the legs. They all discover the ability to walk on their arms. Within the body that they have, they're graceful and they engage in lots of very complex behaviors.

• 24:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  So they did like wa- just walking around on their, on their hands.

• 24:18Speaker 06

  Go on, on YouTube and look for Johnny Eck, who was an actor whose legs were not functional. Still the human species, same genome, but they all become hand walkers. That is not species typical for us. And yet, we still find the solution. And the point that I think is so important is that all of us learn to move our bodies like Johnny Akk, right? Same process. It's just if you have legs, you stand upright and you walk. And if you don't, you use your arms to walk around. It's not instinctive to walk on your legs or on your arms. It's just that you learn to use the body that you have.

• 24:54Noam Hassenfeld?

  And it's not like you're saying genetics plays no role here, right? I mean, I don't think you're saying this, but it's not like a fox in a different environment is going to learn how to be a bird.

• 25:04Speaker 06

  I gave a talk once about this, this very topic at the Howard Hughes Institute in Northern Virginia. And it was a room filled with a lot of really excellent scientists. And I gave my whole talk, basically saying these things. And a very sort of pushy guy at the front row said, so what you're trying to tell me is, is that genes don't do anything. And I went, that is absolutely the opposite. You know, that's, from what did you get, you know? So for that, for this one individual, if genes are not doing everything, if I'm saying that genes don't do everything, then I must be saying they do nothing. And that's dichotomous thinking at its core. Of course, I'm a biologist. Without genes, there's no us. I mean, they're the central part of the mechanism.

• 25:47Speaker 06

  But that is just an ounce of the complexity that's going on inside of a developing organism.

• 25:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  So this whole time, you've been making the case that avoiding the term instinct allows us to ask, you know, more and better questions. And I'm just wondering if we flip this around. Would using the term instinct open up any new questions? Are there questions about innateness that we wouldn't be able to ask otherwise?

• 26:10Speaker 06

  I've never, in my 30 years of doing this and thinking about it and being a developmentalist, I've never seen a single instance where calling something instinctive or innate had any benefit that was actually tangible.

• 26:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  So we're not just like throwing Conrad Lorenz under the bus here?

• 26:26Speaker 06

  Well, look, he focused attention on natural behavior. That was a very positive thing. I'm just talking here about the conceptual level, about what you can infer from those types of observations.

• 26:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 26:37Speaker 06

  And he was a Nazi.

• 26:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, God.

• 26:42Speaker 06

  So, yeah, I don't, I think you can throw somebody like that under the bus. I'm OK with that.

• 26:46Noam Hassenfeld?

  Is it too much of a stretch to, to connect the idea of like instinctive, things are the way they are, things behave the way they do with like a Nazi type of ideology?

• 26:56Speaker 06

  Funny you should say that. So one of my scientific heroes is a guy by the name of Danny Lerman. And in a really wonderful paper in 1953, he went after the much more senior Conrad Lawrence over the issue of instinct. And Lorenz was promoting eugenics, trying to stop the breeding of inferior peoples in his scientific works throughout the war period. Most people don't know about that, and it was in German, and it's never been, those papers, as far as I know, have not been translated. But Lerman did translate it, and he wrote about it in his 1953 paper. Very, very briefly, because he was told by his senior colleagues to cut out all the stuff he had originally put in there about it.

• 27:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, is that why you would say that this debate is important? I mean, it seems like on the surface, someone could see it as a semantic debate.

• 27:41Speaker 06

  Because it really influences the way science is done. It influences which scientists get the resources to do their work. It elevates scientists who are not so great, and it makes it harder for scientists who are doing the hard work to get the notoriety and the attention they deserve. I see this in conferences all the time, you know, where very prominent people simply throw out the innate word or the instinct word, and they get away with it because they aren't being challenged. And that offends me as a scientist. So let me give you an example of where these assumptions get in the way. So I study a phenomenon called twitches, which was what animals do in their sleep. The old idea about twitches was that these were simply behaviors that were emitted when we're dreaming. So it's like, you know, oh, you know, a dog is chasing rabbits in its sleep.

• 28:26Speaker 06

  That assumption basically led to there being no studies about what twitching is. Now, all animals twitch in their sleep. Human infants are twitching. Tens of thousands of times per day. Now, if it's just a byproduct of dreams, well, then why study it? But it turns out that when you dive in and you look at it, you find that these twitches are among the most powerful activators of brain activity in early development that we see. If I had simply accepted the assumption that these were byproducts of dreams, all the work I've been doing for the last 15 years on this would not have happened, and the work of others as well. And so these assumptions are damaging. They close our minds to possibilities. And I think that that's what words like an instinct and innate do. They close our minds to possibilities.

• 29:13Speaker 06

  You just have to continue to be inquisitive and not search for simple answers to complex problems. You know, this is biology. Nothing is more complex than how animals come to do the things that they do, whatever the cause. And we should be trying to understand the diversity of life and all the different mechanisms that are available.

• 29:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  And we probably still don't understand it all that well.

• 29:32Speaker 06

  No, now we're scratching the surface. Big time.

• 29:45Speaker 08

  Okay. Hey, I like to just do a, hey, everyone. Like I'm talking to someone. Hey, everyone. This week's episode was produced by Noam Hassenfeld. Editing from Catherine Wells, Meredith Hadenot, and me, Brian Resnick. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala. Music from Noam. And fact checky, fact checky.

• 30:08Speaker 08

  Speaking can be hard sometimes. Fact checking from Zoe Mullock. Mandy Nguyen is wondering how small plants are. How small? I'm sorry, this is getting bad. I said, how small plants are. She's got a really big, magnifying glass.

• 30:27Speaker 08

  Mandy Nguyen is wondering how smart plants are. Neil Dinesha is counting armadillos. And Byrd Pinkerton, she woke up and found herself in a long, featureless hallway lit with flickering fluorescent lights. She could just barely hear a low rumble in the distance.

• 30:49Speaker 08

  If you want to read more about animal behavior from Mark, he's got a couple of great books you can check out. One's called Basic Instinct, the other is called Freaks of Nature. For a shorter read, he's got a fascinating paper called Development Evolving: The Origins and Meanings of Instinct. If you have thoughts about this episode or ideas for the show, please send us an email. We're at [email protected].

• 31:34Speaker 09

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• 32:03Speaker 10

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