Animal Nature and Human Nature

W.H. Thorpe

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351362399
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psicología
• Categoría: Historia y teoría en psicología

Our views on human nature are fundamental to the whole development, indeed the whole future, of human society. Originally published in 1974, Professor Thorpe believed that this was one of the most important and significant topics to which a biologist can address himself, and in this book he attempts a synthetic view of the nature of man and animal based on the five disciplines of physiology, ethology, genetics, psychology and philosophy.

In a masterly survey of the natural order he shows the animal world as part of, yet distinct from, the inanimate world. He then treats aspects of the animal world which approach the human world in behaviour and capabilities, examining simple organisms, communications in vertebrates and invertebrates, innate behaviour versus acquired behaviour, and animal perception. In the second part of the book he deals with those aspects of human nature for which there is no analogy and which constitute man's uniqueness – his consciousness of his past, his awareness of his future and his desire to understand the meaning of his existence.

The primary facts which demonstrate the importance of this book arise from the ever-growing power of man over his environment and his apparent inability to foresee and cope with the dangers of uncontrolled population growth on the one hand and the wildly irrational waste and degradation of the natural resources of the world on the other. Professor Thorpe believes that an immense responsibility lies with literate men of good will, particularly scientists, to convince man that he is the spearhead and custodian of a stupendous evolutionary process. Animal Nature and Human Nature integrates scientific fact with sound theological thought in an attempt to fulfil, in a manner previously impossible Pascal's injunction that: 'It is dangerous to show man too clearly how much he resembles the beast without at the same time showing him his greatness. It is also dangerous to allow him too clear a vision of his greatness without his baseness. It is even more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both. But it is very profitable to show him both.'

PART ONE

ANIMAL NATURE

Chapter 1

LIVING AND NON-LIVING

INTRODUCTION

My objective in this book is to show the living world, and especially the animal world, as part of, yet distinct from, the inanimate world and to consider particularly the animal world especially as it appears to approach the human world in behaviour and capabilities. Then I propose to consider man firstly as part of the animal world and secondly as in some respects uniquely different from the animals and to discuss the nature and extent of this uniqueness. I am only too aware of the immensity of this undertaking, involving as it does incursions into many branches of science both physical and biological. And as if that were not enough, I must attempt substantial raids into the territories of various branches of psychology, philosophy, linguistic, and other arts, and, not least, theology! Though parts of this book must inevitably be complex I have chosen a simple title, Animal Nature and Human Nature. In this title I use the word “nature” in its ordinary everyday meaning, as denoting the qualities of anything which make it what it is, and this implies that we are trying to discover the essential quality, character, or disposition of the beings we talk about.

There are two key questions to be asked at the outset, questions which are continually debated by scientists and to which the answers are very far from clear: Is there a real unbridgeable gap between (1) the living and the non-living and (2) between man and the rest of the living world?

Just because the relationship, or lack of relationship, between animals and men is central to my whole theme I have, in choosing the examples of animal behaviour that I discuss, often selected the more complex, the “higher” or what appear to be the more “intelligent” instances. But I am anxious not to give the impression that all the animal world is like this; and so it is essential to start with an aspect of the whole subject which is more technical and difficult than most—that is, the relations between the animate and the inanimate, between the approaches of the physicist chemist and engineer on the one hand and the biologist, naturalist, and psychologist on the other.

Whenever we discuss the sciences and particularly how to teach them, even when we just think about them, most of us tend to place them in our minds in a linear series. Mathematics and physics are at the top and the others arranged down the rungs of a ladder up which they are proceeding as they become more exact. The so-called descriptive sciences are at the bottom of the ladder, perhaps not even standing on it at all, but still waiting for the first lucky throw as in a dice game (Pantin, 1968). In fact, a little thought shows that this linear arrangement is certainly wrong. We have only to consider astronomy, geology, and biophysics to see that much. The divisions we make are in fact arbitrary, and the divisions between physical science and biological science at first appear as merely those of practical convenience. Obviously the sciences form a multidimensional network—some of them complex, some of them apparently much simpler, some of them highly precise and exact, some with a lot of fluff round the edges.

The Relations Between the Sciences

A hundred years ago it was customary to divide sciences into the observational and the experimental (Pantin, op. cit.). When we merely note and record phenomena which occur around us, in the ordinary course of nature, we are said “to observe.” When we change the course of nature, by the intervention of our will and manipulative powers producing new or unusual combinations of phenomena, we are said “to experiment.” Sir John Herschel suggested that these two modes would be better called passive and active observation. Obviously observations are made in both cases; experiment is therefore just observation plus the controlled alteration of conditions. There are, of course, “natural experiments” such as the occurrence of eclipses or the appearance of super nova stars; and the astronomer, even today, has to wait for the appropriate time, or journey to the appropriate place, in order to find the conditions most fitted to allow firmer conclusions to be drawn. In the mid-nineteenth century it was frequently said that geologists ought only to observe and not to theorise—in response to which argument Charles Darwin remarked that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel pit and count the pebbles and describe their colours. He even went so far as to say, and we should all agree with him today, that even to be a good observer one must be an active theoriser.

But the physical scientists are unwilling to deal with any project where they cannot in at least some, and often a very high, degree manipulate the conditions. In doing this they are in fact abstracting from the richness and complexity of the natural world and focussing their attention on small parts of it—with the spectacular results that we all know today. Carl Pantin (1968) said that physics and chemistry had been enabled to become exact and mature just because so much of the wealth of natural phenomena is excluded from their study. So there is no need for the classical physicist or chemist as such to go to biology for data; he in fact restricts himself to certain types of material and situations which his techniques and theories can deal with, and for this reason Pantin, in fact following Clerk Maxwell (in 1877), calls such sciences “restricted.” In contrast, biology and geology are ‘unrestricted.” Scientists devoted to these latter fields may have to follow the analysis of their problems into every other kind of science; whereas the physicist can stick to his last. This selection or restriction enables the physical scientist to make rapid progress, with the help of mathematical models of high intellectual quality. To quote Carl Pantin again, “Very clever men are answering the relatively easy questions of the Natural Examination Paper. Intellectually magnificent though the attack upon these problems has been, the problems they present are easier than those of the unrestricted sciences, of which biology is the obvious example.”

At first sight it might seem that the fact that sciences like geology deal with gross phenomena is an indication of immaturity. Similarly with psychology. Indeed, during the last twenty-five years, experimental psychologists have again and again pleaded that the reason why their results are not more satisfactory and firmly established is because their science as yet lacks an Isaac Newton. It should therefore, so they argue, be their aim to make psychology as precise and exact as physics. But it is an error to suppose that it is only micro-events, such as the behaviour of electrons and of molecules, which are worthy of the consideration of the true scientist. Indeed the astronomer and geologist would heartily agree with the biologist that there is much to be learned from the study of slow-acting systems of relatively large size; these systems simply cannot be examined with the precision and exactitude characteristic of the work of the chemist and physicist. Nonetheless it is, and of course must be, the aim of all branches of science to render themselves as exact as possible; and so, as the various disciplines mature, mathematics is brought more and more into the picture—even nowadays in such apparently unmathematical subjects as taxonomic botany. New mathematical techniques are continually being produced to answer questions which have become too intractable for the old-fashioned methods of observation and description. This is of course just as it should be and reveals another important point: namely that, since mathematics is really the study of relations, so also is science to a very large extent the study of relationships; and we may find important relations displayed in the interaction of species of animals at one level of size, in the movements of strata and the drift of the continents at another level of size, as well as in the unimaginable distances of the stellar universes. This does not mean that these sciences are simply becoming new branches of physics and chemistry! On the contrary they are revealing new features and new laws as they become more exact—features and laws which the chemist and physicist by themselves are powerless to investigate.

Knowledge of the “Objective” World

To say that science investigates relationships is of course only one aspect of the truth. The word science formerly meant the whole of knowledge; but by popular usage it has become more or less restricted to knowledge about objects in the natural world—that is the task of the natural sciences. This brings us to the next important question, namely—what are the “objects” which the scientist investigates? Nature presents itself to us in one aspect as a continuum. In studying this continuum we recognise complexes of phenomena which retain identity and show a high degree of stability and persistence of pattern, in contrast to examples with less cohesive features (Weiss, 1969). In practice the scientist, like everyone else, accepts the reality of descriptions of the external world as in some sense made up of “real” objects. We may all be confused at the first sight of an entirely new object or of an old object in an unfamiliar situation. A curved stick in the forest may look like a snake, a toadstool may look like a delightfully sticky bun, and we have to look quite carefully before we can decide what it is we are really seeing. At first glance we may be quite certain of our identification, only to find, perhaps to our embarrassment, how wrong we have been. A favourite dog of mine, who was fond of chasing cats, was not prepared for the fact that a neighbour had acquired a highly miniaturised Yorkshire Terrier which at a distance looked to her like a cat. She chased it, and her confusion when it turned and barked at her was comical to behold.

As scientists we must beware of following the psychologists of a previous generation and looking upon sense data as a substance “out of which we build perceptions.” Rather sense data are highly intellectual abstractions from it, robbed of those relationships which are the basis of our conviction of reality. But above all, the scientist, whatever he may say, always believes that he is investigating a real world consisting of “objects” whose relationships he can study. Now the most striking feature of the everyday world of objects is the enduring character of the things in it. Apart from cyclical changes, daily and seasonal, the world is full of things which we see as objects; some of them like the hills and the oceans are constant over immense periods of time; others like snowflakes and lightning flashes and many radio-active atoms and elementary particles may have very brief, even infinitesimal, existences. So the “real world” is built up of objects that endure, though (with the exception of certain primary physical particles) decaying slowly or rapidly, and other objects displaying dynamic equilibria (as does our atmosphere), which may endure for an immense period of time. And indeed most of the objects which, as biologists, we study are in a state of dynamic equilibrium. For though both a man and a mollusc may be presented to our senses as a continuing individual for a long time, the tissues of which they are composed are for the most part in a continual state of flux; like a river, whose form may remain substantially constant even though the water is continually changing, they can be composed of an entirely different set of molecules after the lapse of a few years. So our choice as to what we call “objects” obviously depends on our senses and on the fact that these senses only cover a certain range; our perceptions are in fact limited by what may be called our “sensory spectrum.” We only see with light over a certain range of wavelengths. Bees have a good colour sense, but it corresponds to quite different divisions of the visible spectrum from our own and includes a region of sensitivity in ultraviolet. It is difficult for us to imagine what the bee is “seeing” when it can be trained to respond differentially to two white papers that are to our vision identical, but one of which reflects ultraviolet and the other does not. Again with our unaided senses we do not perceive things which are too small, or too vast, or which endure for too short a time. The endurance of an enduring object is to be measured against the time scale of our own lives and senses. Events which are too small, too large, too quick, or too slow are not perceived, and unless our attention is drawn to them by indirect means we know nothing about them.

The Approach of the Physicist

But while we must have objects to study and “facts” about them—nevertheless, in all branches of science, we find that as we analyse, so the facts and objects tend to disappear and become systems of relations. It has always been so and very disturbing it is too. Scientists have at times been moved by a robust sense of a reality waiting to be studied, of nature as bringing to them an intelligible message which they only have to decipher (Toulmin, 1966). Yet at other times the programme of science has been modified so fast as to leave many almost in a state of shock. The popular and semi-popular writings of Eddington in the 1930s played a great part in helping the ordinary man to understand what was going on as the safe material world of Victorian physicists seemed to be dissolving under his very eyes. This is no new problem. Some deplore change, some welcome it; and the changes that have taken place in theoretical science may indeed be welcomed, even though they may seem to conflict with common sense, since by and large they undoubtedly constitute immense advances in our understanding of the very nature of the natural world. But we always feel some pangs for the disappearance of the worlds we knew, just as did Newton and Galileo in their last years, a feeling which was well expressed by John Donne in 1611 who wrote,

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt,

The Element of fire is quite put out;

The Sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit

Can well direct him where to looke for it.

And freely men confesse that this world’s spent,

When in the Planets, and in the Firmament

They seeke so many new; then see that this

Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies.

’Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone;

All just supply, and all Relation.¹

Ever since Victorian times it has been the changes in physics and in astronomy which have in fact seemed so appalling and disconcerting to many thoughtful men. Many of our most cherished beliefs have gone by the board. Atoms were thought to be permanent unchanging elements of nature. Now, far from remaini...