Yet today, some researchers consider instinct a dirty word—a murky, even lazy label that obstructs investigations into how behaviors develop. Scott Robinson, the director of Pacific Ethological Laboratories, told me that instinct is like the Cheshire Cat: It is clear upon first glance, but the closer you look, the more it blurs and fades. Ethologists and developmental psychologists complain that the term could refer to an ability present at birth, a skill learned before it is used, a trait encoded in DNA, or something else entirely—scientists don’t specify and thus don’t investigate. “Instinct is just a label, and it obscures the underlying complexity of things,” says the University of Iowa behavioral neuroscientist Mark Blumberg. “And it obscures their origins. When you say it’s instinctive, you immediately think it’s hardwired”—a description, he says, that rarely holds up to scrutiny.
Is ‘Instinct’ Really Keeping Flaco the Owl Alive?
This article used an escaped Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped the Central Park Zoo in New York City as an opening for an interesting discussion on instinct. I thought it was a fairly well established idea but I guess I was wrong. It is the old nature\nurture theme revisited. I wondered what causes the repeated patterns you see in animals are if not instinct. I didn’t dig into it but it is an interesting subject and hopeful. If the behavior of people is more than their DNA it is a hope that we may be able to change enough to survive. So far things are iffy as we repeat the same apparent instinct driven mistakes over and over.
Updated Mar 15, 2023
Updated Mar 15, 2023