Basic Instinct: The Genesis of Behavior - Hardcover

Blumberg, Mark S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1560256591 ISBN 13: 9781560256595

Publisher: Basic Books, 2005

Synopsis

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

About this title

About the Author

Mark S. Blumberg is a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa and the author of Body Heat: Temperature and Life on Earth. He has published over sixty journal articles and chapters on such topics as sleep, animal behavior, temperature regulation, and communication. He is associate editor of the journal "Behavioral Neuroscience." After graduating from Brandeis University, he received his doctorate in biopsychology from the University of Chicago. He is the recipient of an Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association and, most recently, of an Independent Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Lipkin

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1560256591
• ISBN 13: 9781560256595
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224