INSTINCTS OF NEUTER INSECTS.
IN this chapter I will consider, as briefly as possible, the strongest
argument that I have been able to discover against the supposition that
instinct is chiefly due to habit. I have said “the strongest argument;”
I should have said, the only argument that struck me as offering on the
face of it serious difficulties.
Turning, then, to Mr. Darwin’s chapter on instinct (“Natural Selection,”
ed. 1876, p. 205), we find substantially much the same views as those
taken at a later date by M. Ribot, and referred to in the preceding
chapter. Mr. Darwin writes:—
“An action, which we ourselves require experience to enable us to
perform, when performed by an animal, more especially a very young one,
without experience, and when performed by many animals in the same way
without their knowing for what purpose it is performed, is usually said
to be instinctive.”
The above should strictly be, “without their being conscious of their own
knowledge concerning the purpose for which they act as they do;” and
though some may say that the two phrases come to the same thing, I think
there is an important difference, as what I propose distinguishes
ignorance from over-familiarity, both which states are alike
unself-conscious, though with widely different results.
“But I could show,” continues Mr. Darwin, “that none of these characters
are universal. A little dose of judgement or reason, as Pierre Huber
expresses it, often comes into play even with animals low in the scale of
nature.
“Frederick Cuvier and several of the older metaphysicians have compared
instinct with habit.”
I would go further and would say, that instinct, in the great majority of
cases, is habit pure and simple, contracted originally by some one or
more individuals; practised, probably, in a consciously intelligent
manner during many successive lives, until the habit has acquired the
highest perfection which the circumstances admitted; and, finally, so
deeply impressed upon the memory as to survive that effacement of minor
impressions which generally takes place in every fresh life-wave or
generation.
I would say, that unless the identity of offspring with their parents be
so far admitted that the children be allowed to remember the deeper
impressions engraved on the minds of those who begot them, it is little
less than trilling to talk, as so many writers do, about inherited habit,
or the experience of the race, or, indeed, accumulated variations of
instincts.
When an instinct is not habit, as resulting from memory pure and simple,
it is habit modified by some treatment, generally in the youth or
embryonic stages of the individual, which disturbs his memory, and drives
him on to some unusual course, inasmuch as he cannot recognise and
remember his usual one by reason of the change now made in it. Habits
and instincts, again, may be modified by any important change in the
condition of the parents, which will then both affect the parent’s sense
of his own identity, and also create more or less fault, or dislocation
of memory, in the offspring immediately behind the memory of his last
life. Change of food may at times be sufficient to create a specific
modification—that is to say, to affect all the individuals whose food is
so changed, in one and the same way—whether as regards structure or
habit. Thus we see that certain changes in food (and domicile), from
those with which its ancestors have been familiar, will disturb the
memory of a queen bee’s egg, and set it at such disadvantage as to make
it make itself into a neuter bee; but yet we find that the larva thus
partly aborted may have its memories restored to it, if not already too
much disturbed, and may thus return to its condition as a queen bee, if
it only again be restored to the food and domicile, which its past
memories can alone remember.
So we see that opium, tobacco, alcohol, hasheesh, and tea produce certain
effects upon our own structure and instincts. But though capable of
modification, and of specific modification, which may in time become
inherited, and hence resolve itself into a true instinct or settled
question, yet I maintain that the main bulk of the instinct (whether as
affecting structure or habits of life) will be derived from memory pure
and simple; the individual growing up in the shape he does, and liking to
do this or that when he is grown up, simply from recollection of what he
did last time, and of what on the whole suited him.
For it must be remembered that a drug which should destroy some one part
at an early embryonic stage, and thus prevent it from development, would
prevent the creature from recognising the surroundings which affected
that part when he was last alive and unmutilated, as being the same as
his present surroundings. He would be puzzled, for he would be viewing
the position from a different standpoint. If any important item in a
number of associated ideas disappears, the plot fails; and a great
internal change is an exceedingly important item. Life and things to a
creature so treated at an early embryonic stage would not be life and
things as he last remembered them; hence he would not be able to do the
same now as he did then; that is to say, he would vary both in structure
and instinct; but if the creature were tolerably uniform to start with,
and were treated in a tolerably uniform way, we might expect the effect
produced to be much the same in all ordinary cases.
We see, also, that any important change in treatment and surroundings, if
not sufficient to kill, would and does tend to produce not only
variability but sterility, as part of the same story and for the same
reason—namely, default of memory; this default will be of every degree of
intensity, from total failure, to a slight disturbance of memory as
affecting some one particular organ only; that is to say, from total
sterility, to a slight variation in an unimportant part. So that even
_the slightest conceivable variations should be referred to changed
conditions_, _external or internal_, _and to their disturbing effects
upon the memory_; and sterility, without any apparent disease of the
reproductive system, may be referred not so much to special delicacy or
susceptibility of the organs of reproduction as to inability on the part
of the creature to know where it is, and to recognise itself as the same
creature which it has been accustomed to reproduce.
Mr. Darwin thinks that the comparison of habit with instinct gives “an
accurate notion of the frame of mind under which an instinctive action is
performed, but not,” he thinks, “of its origin.”
“How unconsciously,” Mr. Darwin continues, “many habitual actions are
performed, indeed not rarely in direct opposition to our conscious will!
Yet they may be modified by the will or by reason. Habits easily become
associated with other habits, with certain periods of time and states of
body. When once acquired, they often remain constant throughout life.
Several other points of resemblance between instincts and habits could be
pointed out. As in repeating a well-known song, so in instincts, one
action follows another by a sort of rhythm. If a person be interrupted
in a song or in repeating anything by rote, he is generally forced to go
back to recover the habitual train of thought; so P. Huber found it was
with a caterpillar, which makes a very complicated hammock. For if he
took a caterpillar which had completed its hammock up to, say, the sixth
stage of construction, and put it into a hammock completed up only to the
third stage, the caterpillar simply re-performed the fourth, fifth, and
sixth stages of construction. If, however, a caterpillar were taken out
of a hammock made up, for instance, to the third stage, and were put into
one finished up to the sixth stage, so that much of its work was already
done for it, far from deriving any benefit from this, it was much
embarrassed, and in order to complete its hammock, seemed forced to start
from the third stage, where it had left off, and thus tried to complete
the already finished work.”
I see I must have unconsciously taken my first chapter from this passage,
but it is immaterial. I owe Mr. Darwin much more than this. I owe it to
him that I believe in evolution at all. I owe him for almost all the
facts which have led me to differ from him, and which I feel absolutely
safe in taking for granted, if he has advanced them. Nevertheless, I
believe that the conclusion arrived at in the passage which I will next
quote is a mistaken one, and that not a little only, but fundamentally.
I shall therefore venture to dispute it.
The passage runs:—
“If we suppose any habitual action to become inherited—and it can be
shown that this does sometimes happen—then the resemblance between what
originally was a habit and an instinct becomes so close as not to be
distinguished. . . . _But it would be a serious error to suppose that the
greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one
generation_, _and then transmitted by inheritance to succeeding
generations_. _It can be clearly shown that the most wonderful instincts
with which we are acquainted—namely_, _those of the hive-bee and of many
ants_, _could not possibly have been acquired by habit_.” (“Origin of
Species,” p. 206, ed. 1876.) The italics in this passage are mine.
No difficulty is opposed to my view (as I call it, for the sake of
brevity) by such an instinct as that of ants to milk aphids. Such
instincts may be supposed to have been acquired in much the same way as
the instinct of a farmer to keep a cow. Accidental discovery of the fact
that the excretion was good, with “a little dose of judgement or reason”
from time to time appearing in an exceptionally clever ant, and by him
communicated to his fellows, till the habit was so confirmed as to be
capable of transmission in full unself-consciousness (if indeed the
instinct be unself-conscious in this case), would, I think, explain this
as readily as the slow and gradual accumulations of instincts which had
never passed through the intelligent and self-conscious stage, but had
always prompted action without any idea of a why or a wherefore on the
part of the creature itself.
For it must be remembered, as I am afraid I have already perhaps too
often said, that even when we have got a slight variation of instinct,
due to some cause which we know nothing about, but which I will not even
for a moment call “spontaneous”—a word that should be cut out of every
dictionary, or in some way branded as perhaps the most misleading in the
language—we cannot see how it comes to be repeated in successive
generations, so as to be capable of being acted upon by “natural
selection” and accumulated, unless it be also capable of being remembered
by the offspring of the varying creature. It may be answered that we
cannot know anything about this, but that “like father like son” is an
ultimate fact in nature. I can only answer that I never observe any
“like father like son” without the son’s both having had every
opportunity of remembering, and showing every symptom of having
remembered, in which case I decline to go further than memory (whatever
memory may be) as the cause of the phenomenon.
But besides inheritance, teaching must be admitted as a means of at any
rate modifying an instinct. We observe this in our own case; and we know
that animals have great powers of communicating their ideas to one
another, though their manner of doing this is as incomprehensible by us
as a plant’s knowledge of chemistry, or the manner in which an amœba
makes its test, or a spider its web, without having gone through a long
course of mathematics. I think most readers will allow that our early
training and the theological systems of the last eighteen hundred years
are likely to have made us involuntarily under-estimate the powers of
animals low in the scale of life, both as regards intelligence and the
power of communicating their ideas to one another; but even now we admit
that ants have great powers in this respect.
A habit, however, which is taught to the young or each successive
generation, by older members of the community who have themselves
received it by instruction, should surely rank as an inherited habit, and
be considered as due to memory, though personal teaching be necessary to
complete the inheritance.
An objection suggests itself that if such a habit as the flight of birds,
which seems to require a little personal supervision and instruction
before it is acquired perfectly, were really due to memory, the need of
instruction would after a time cease, inasmuch as the creature would
remember its past method of procedure, and would thus come to need no
more teaching. The answer lies in the fact, that if a creature gets to
depend upon teaching and personal help for any matter, its memory will
make it look for such help on each repetition of the action; so we see
that no man’s memory will exert itself much until he is thrown upon
memory as his only resource. We may read a page of a book a hundred
times, but we do not remember it by heart unless we have either
cultivated our powers of learning to repeat, or have taken pains to learn
this particular page.
And whether we read from a book, or whether we repeat by heart, the
repetition is still due to memory; only in the one case the memory is
exerted to recall something which one saw only half a second ago, and in
the other, to recall something not seen for a much longer period. So I
imagine an instinct or habit may be called an inherited habit, and
assigned to memory, even though the memory dates, not from the
performance of the action by the learner when he was actually part of the
personality of the teacher, but rather from a performance witnessed by,
or explained by the teacher to, the pupil at a period subsequent to
birth. In either case the habit is inherited in the sense of being
acquired in one generation, and transmitted with such modifications as
genius and experience may have suggested.
Mr. Darwin would probably admit this without hesitation; when, therefore,
he says that certain instincts could not possibly have been acquired by
habit, he must mean that they could not, under the circumstances, have
been remembered by the pupil in the person of the teacher, and that it
would be a serious error to suppose that the greater number of instincts
can be thus remembered. To which I assent readily so far as that it is
difficult (though not impossible) to see how some of the most wonderful
instincts of neuter ants and bees can be due to the fact that the neuter
ant or bee was ever in part, or in some respects, another neuter ant or
bee in a previous generation. At the same time I maintain that this does
not militate against the supposition that both instinct and structure are
in the main due to memory. For the power of receiving any communication,
and acting on it, is due to memory; and the neuter ant or bee may have
received its lesson from another neuter ant or bee, who had it from
another and modified it; and so back and back, till the foundation of the
habit is reached, and is found to present little more than the faintest
family likeness to its more complex descendant. Surely Mr. Darwin cannot
mean that it can be shewn that the wonderful instincts of neuter ants and
bees cannot have been acquired either, as above, by instruction, or by
some not immediately obvious form of inherited transmission, but that
they must be due to the fact that the ant or bee is, as it were, such and
such a machine, of which if you touch such and such a spring, you will
get a corresponding action. If he does, he will find, so far as I can
see, no escape from a position very similar to the one which I put into
the mouth of the first of the two professors, who dealt with the question
of machinery in my earlier work, “Erewhon,” and which I have since found
that my great namesake made fun of in the following lines:—
. . . “They now begun
To spur their living engines on.
For as whipped tops and bandy’d balls,
The learned hold are animals:
So horses they affirm to be
Mere engines made by geometry,
And were invented first from engines
As Indian Britons were from Penguins.”
—_Hudibras_, Canto ii. line 53, &c.
I can see, then, no difficulty in the development of the ordinary
so-called instincts, whether of ants or bees, or the cuckoo, or any other
animal, on the supposition that they were, for the most part,
intelligently acquired with more or less labour, as the case may be, in
much the same way as we see any art or science now in process of
acquisition among ourselves, but were ultimately remembered by offspring,
or communicated to it. When the limits of the race’s capacity had been
attained (and most races seem to have their limits, unsatisfactory though
the expression may very fairly be considered), or when the creature had
got into a condition, so to speak, of equilibrium with its surroundings,
there would be no new development of instincts, and the old ones would
cease to be improved, inasmuch as there would be no more reasoning or
difference of opinion concerning them. The race, therefore, or species
would remain in _statu quo_ till either domesticated, and so brought into
contact with new ideas and placed in changed conditions, or put under
such pressure, in a wild state, as should force it to further invention,
or extinguish it if incapable of rising to the occasion. That instinct
and structure may be acquired by practice in one or more generations, and
remembered in succeeding ones, is admitted by Mr. Darwin, for he allows
(“Origin of Species,” p. 206) that habitual action does sometimes become
inherited, and, though he does not seem to conceive of such action as due
to memory, yet it is inconceivable how it is inherited, if not as the
result of memory.
It must be admitted, however, that when we come to consider the
structures as well as the instincts of some of the neuter insects, our
difficulties seem greatly increased. The neuter hive-bees have a cavity
in their thighs in which to keep the wax, which it is their business to
collect; but the drones and queen, which alone bear offspring, collect no
wax, and therefore neither want, nor have, any such cavity. The neuter
bees are also, if I understand rightly, furnished with a proboscis or
trunk for extracting honey from flowers, whereas the fertile bees, who
gather no honey, have no such proboscis. Imagine, if the reader will,
that the neuter bees differ still more widely from the fertile ones; how,
then, can they in any sense be said to derive organs from their parents,
which not one of their parents for millions of generations has ever had?
How, again, can it be supposed that they transmit these organs to the
future neuter members of the community when they are perfectly sterile?
One can understand that the young neuter bee might be taught to make a
hexagonal cell (though I have not found that any one has seen the lesson
being given) inasmuch as it does not make the cell till after birth, and
till after it has seen other neuter bees who might tell it much in, _quâ_
us, a very little time; but we can hardly understand its growing a
proboscis before it could possibly want it, or preparing a cavity in its
thigh, to have it ready to put wax into, when none of its predecessors
had ever done so, by supposing oral communication, during the larvahood.
Nevertheless, it must not be forgotten that bees seem to know secrets
about reproduction, which utterly baffle ourselves; for example, the
queen bee appears to know how to deposit male or female, eggs at will;
and this is a matter of almost inconceivable sociological importance,
denoting a corresponding amount of sociological and physiological
knowledge generally. It should not, then, surprise us if the race should
possess other secrets, whose working we are unable to follow, or even
detect at all.
Sydney Smith, indeed, writes:—
“The warmest admirers of honey, and the greatest friends to bees, will
never, I presume, contend that the young swarm, who begin making honey
three or four months after they are born, and immediately construct these
mathematical cells, should have gained their geometrical knowledge as we
gain ours, and in three months’ time outstrip Mr. Maclaurin in
mathematics as much as they did in making honey. It would take a senior
wrangler at Cambridge ten hours a day for three years together to know
enough mathematics for the calculation of these problems, with which not
only every queen bee, but every undergraduate grub, is acquainted the
moment it is born.” This last statement may be a little too strong, but
it will at once occur to the reader, that as we know the bees _do_
surpass Mr. Maclaurin in the power of making honey, they may also surpass
him in capacity for those branches of mathematics with which it has been
their business to be conversant during many millions of years, and also
in knowledge of physiology and psychology in so far as the knowledge
bears upon the interests of their own community.
We know that the larva which develops into a neuter bee, and that again
which in time becomes a queen bee, are the same kind of larva to start
with; and that if you give one of these larvæ the food and treatment
which all its foremothers have been accustomed to, it will turn out with
all the structure and instincts of its foremothers—and that it only fails
to do this because it has been fed, and otherwise treated, in such a
manner as not one of its foremothers was ever yet fed or treated. So
far, this is exactly what we should expect, on the view that structure
and instinct are alike mainly due to memory, or to medicined memory.
Give the larva a fair chance of knowing where it is, and it shows that it
remembers by doing exactly what it did before. Give it a different kind
of food and house, and it cannot be expected to be anything else than
puzzled. It remembers a great deal. It comes out a bee, and nothing but
a bee; but it is an aborted bee; it is, in fact, mutilated before birth
instead of after—with instinct, as well as growth, correlated to its
abortion, as we see happens frequently in the case of animals a good deal
higher than bees that have been mutilated at a stage much later than that
at which the abortion of neuter bees commences.
The larvæ being similar to start with, and being similarly
mutilated—i.e., by change of food and dwelling, will naturally exhibit
much similarity of instinct and structure on arriving at maturity. When
driven from their usual course, they must take _some_ new course or die.
There is nothing strange in the fact that similar beings puzzled
similarly should take a similar line of action. I grant, however, that
it is hard to see how change of food and treatment can puzzle an insect
into such “complex growth” as that it should make a cavity in its thigh,
grow an invaluable proboscis, and betray a practical knowledge of
difficult mathematical problems.
But it must be remembered that the memory of having been queen bees and
drones—which is all that according to my supposition the larvæ can
remember, (on a first view of the case), in their own proper
persons—would nevertheless carry with it a potential recollection of all
the social arrangements of the hive. They would thus potentially
remember that the mass of the bees were always neuter bees; they would
remember potentially the habits of these bees, so far as drones and
queens know anything about them; and this may be supposed to be a very
thorough acquaintance; in like manner, and with the same limitation, they
would know from the very moment that they left the queen’s body that
neuter bees had a proboscis to gather honey with, and cavities in their
thighs to put wax into, and that cells were to be made with certain
angles—for surely it is not crediting the queen with more knowledge than
she is likely to possess, if we suppose her to have a fair acquaintance
with the phenomena of wax and cells generally, even though she does not
make any; they would know (while still larvæ—and earlier) the kind of
cells into which neuter bees were commonly put, and the kind of treatment
they commonly received—they might therefore, as eggs—immediately on
finding their recollection driven from its usual course, so that they
must either find some other course, or die—know that they were being
treated as neuter bees are treated, and that they were expected to
develop into neuter bees accordingly; they might know all this, and a
great deal more into the bargain, inasmuch as even before being actually
deposited as eggs they would know and remember potentially, but
unconsciously, all that their parents knew and remembered intensely. Is
it, then, astonishing that they should adapt themselves so readily to the
position which they know it is for the social welfare of the community,
and hence of themselves, that they should occupy, and that they should
know that they will want a cavity in their thighs and a proboscis, and
hence make such implements out of their protoplasm as readily as they
make their wings?
I admit that, under normal treatment, none of the above-mentioned
potential memories would be kindled into such a state of activity that
action would follow upon them, until the creature had attained a more or
less similar condition to that in which its parent was when these
memories were active within its mind: but the essence of the matter is,
that these larvæ have been treated _abnormally_, so that if they do not
die, there is nothing for it but that they must vary. One cannot argue
from the normal to the abnormal. It would not, then, be strange if the
potential memories should (owing to the margin for premature or tardy
development which association admits) serve to give the puzzled larvæ a
hint as to the course which they had better take, or that, at any rate,
it should greatly supplement the instruction of the “nurse” bees
themselves by rendering the larvæ so, as it were, inflammable on this
point, that a spark should set them in a blaze. Abortion is generally
premature. Thus the scars referred to in the last chapter as having
appeared on the children of men who had been correspondingly wounded,
should not, under normal circumstances, have appeared in the offspring
till the children had got fairly near the same condition generally as
that in which their fathers were when they were wounded, and even then,
normally, there should have been an instrument to wound them, much as
their fathers had been wounded. Association, however, does not always
stick to the letter of its bond.
The line, again, might certainly be taken that the difference in
structure and instincts between neuter and fertile bees is due to the
specific effects of certain food and treatment; yet, though one would be
sorry to set limits to the convertibility of food and genius, it seems
hard to believe that there can be any untutored food which should teach a
bee to make a hexagonal cell as soon as it was born, or which, before it
was born, should teach it to prepare such structures as it would require
in after life. If, then, food be considered as a direct agent in causing
the structures and instinct, and not an indirect agent, merely indicating
to the larva itself that it is to make itself after the fashion of neuter
bees, then we should bear in mind that, at any rate, it has been leavened
and prepared in the stomachs of those neuter bees into which the larva is
now expected to develop itself, and may thus have in it more true
germinative matter—gemmules, in fact—than is commonly supposed. Food,
when sufficiently assimilated (the whole question turning upon what _is_
“sufficiently”), becomes stored with all the experience and memories of
the assimilating creature; corn becomes hen, and knows nothing but hen,
when hen has eaten it. We know also that the neuter working-bees inject
matter into the cell after the larva has been produced; nor would it seem
harsh to suppose that though devoid of a reproductive system like that of
their parents, they may yet be practically not so neuter as is commonly
believed. One cannot say what gemmules of thigh and proboscis may not
have got into the neutral bees’ stomachs, if they assimilate their food
sufficiently, and thus into the larva.
Mr. Darwin will be the first to admit that though a creature have no
reproductive system, in any ordinary sense of the word, yet every unit or
cell of its body may throw off gemmules which may be free to move over
every part of the whole organism, and which “natural selection” might in
time cause to stray into food which had been sufficiently prepared in the
stomachs of the neuter bees.
I cannot say, then, precisely in what way, but I can see no reason for
doubting that in some of the ways suggested above, or in some combination
of them, the phenomena of the instincts of neuter ants and bees can be
brought into the same category as the instincts and structure of fertile
animals. At any rate, I see the great fact that when treated as they
have been accustomed to be treated, these neuters act as though they
remembered, and accordingly become queen bees; and that they only depart
from their ancestral course on being treated in such fashion as their
ancestors can never have remembered; also, that when they have been
thrown off their accustomed line of thought and action, they only take
that of their nurses, who have been about them from the moment of their
being deposited as eggs by the queen bee, who have fed them from their
own bodies, and between whom and them there may have been all manner of
physical and mental communication, of which we know no more than we do of
the power which enables a bee to find its way home after infinite
shifting and turning among flowers, which no human powers could
systematise so as to avoid confusion.
Or take it thus: We know that mutilation at an early age produces an
effect upon the structure and instincts of cattle, sheep, and horses; and
it might be presumed that if feasible at an earlier age, it would produce
a still more marked effect. We observe that the effect produced is
uniform, or nearly so. Suppose mutilation to produce a little more
effect than it does, as we might easily do, if cattle, sheep, and horses
had been for ages accustomed to a mutilated class living among them,
which class had been always a caste apart, and had fed the young neuters
from their own bodies, from an early embryonic stage onwards; would any
one in this case dream of advancing the structure and instincts of this
mutilated class against the doctrine that instinct is inherited habit?
Or, if inclined to do this, would he not at once refrain, on remembering
that the process of mutilation might be arrested, and the embryo be
developed into an entire animal by simply treating it in the way to which
all its ancestors had been accustomed? Surely he would not allow the
difficulty (which I must admit in some measure to remain) to outweigh the
evidence derivable from these very neuter insects themselves, as well as
from such a vast number of other sources—all pointing in the direction of
instinct as inherited habit. {239}
Lastly, it must be remembered that the instinct to make cells and honey
is one which has no very great hold upon its possessors. Bees _can_ make
cells and honey, nor do they seem to have any very violent objection to
doing so; but it is quite clear that there is nothing in their structure
and instincts which urges them on to do these things for the mere love of
doing them, as a hen is urged to sit upon a chalk stone, concerning which
she probably is at heart utterly sceptical, rather than not sit at all.
There is no honey and cell-making instinct so strong as the instinct to
eat, if they are hungry, or to grow wings, and make themselves into bees
at all. Like ourselves, so long as they can get plenty to eat and drink,
they will do no work. Under these circumstances, not one drop of honey
nor one particle of wax will they collect, except, I presume, to make
cells for the rearing of their young.
Sydney Smith writes:—
“The most curious instance of a change of instinct is recorded by Darwin.
The bees carried over to Barbadoes and the Western Isles ceased to lay up
any honey after the first year, as they found it not useful to them.
They found the weather so fine, and materials for making honey so
plentiful, that they quitted their grave, prudent, and mercantile
character, became exceedingly profligate and debauched, ate up their
capital, resolved to work no more, and amused themselves by flying about
the sugar-houses and stinging the blacks” (Lecture XVII. on Moral
Philosophy). The ease, then, with which the honey-gathering and
cell-making habits are relinquished, would seem to point strongly in the
direction of their acquisition at a comparatively late period of
development.
I have dealt with bees only, and not with ants, which would perhaps seem
to present greater difficulty, inasmuch as in some families of these
there are two, or even three, castes of neuters with well-marked and wide
differences of structure and instinct; but I think the reader will agree
with me that the ants are sufficiently covered by the bees, and that
enough, therefore, has been said already. Mr. Darwin supposes that these
modifications of structure and instinct have been effected by the
accumulation of numerous slight, profitable, spontaneous variations on
the part of the fertile parents, which has caused them (so, at least, I
understand him) to lay this or that particular kind of egg, which should
develop into a kind of bee or ant, with this or that particular instinct,
which instinct is merely a co-ordination with structure, and in no way
attributable to use or habit in preceding generations.
Even so, one cannot see that the habit of laying this particular kind of
egg might not be due to use and memory in previous generations on the
part of the fertile parents, “for the numerous slight spontaneous
variations,” on which “natural selection” is to work, must have had some
cause than which none more reasonable than sense of need and experience
presents itself; and there seems hardly any limit to what long-continued
faith and desire, aided by intelligence, may be able to effect. But if
sense of need and experience are denied, I see no escape from the view
that machines are new species of life.
Mr. Darwin concludes: “I am surprised that no one has hitherto advanced
this demonstrative case of neuter insects against the well-known doctrine
of inherited habit as advanced by Lamarck” (“Natural Selection,” p. 233,
ed. 1876).
After reading this, one feels as though there was no more to be said.
The well-known doctrine of inherited habit, as advanced by Lamarck, has
indeed been long since so thoroughly exploded, that it is not worth while
to go into an explanation of what it was, or to refute it in detail.
Here, however, is an argument against it, which is so much better than
anything advanced yet, that one is surprised it has never been made use
of; so we will just advance it, as it were, to slay the slain, and pass
on. Such, at least, is the effect which the paragraph above quoted
produced upon myself, and would, I think, produce on the great majority
of readers. When driven by the exigencies of my own position to examine
the value of the demonstration more closely, I conclude, either that I
have utterly failed to grasp Mr. Darwin’s meaning, or that I have no less
completely mistaken the value and bearing of the facts I have myself
advanced in these few last pages. Failing this, my surprise is, not that
“no one has hitherto advanced” the instincts of neuter insects as a
demonstrative case against the doctrine of inherited habit, but rather
that Mr. Darwin should have thought the case demonstrative; or again,
when I remember that the neuter working bee is only an aborted queen, and
may be turned back again into a queen, by giving it such treatment as it
can alone be expected to remember—then I am surprised that the structure
and instincts of neuter bees has never (if never) been brought forward in
support of the doctrine of inherited habit as advanced by Lamarck, and
against any theory which would rob such instincts of their foundation in
intelligence, and of their connection with experience and memory.
As for the instinct to mutilate, that is as easily accounted for as any
other inherited habit, whether of man to mutilate cattle, or of ants to
make slaves, or of birds to make their nests. I can see no way of
accounting for the existence of any one of these instincts, except on the
supposition that they have arisen gradually, through perceptions of power
and need on the part of the animal which exhibits them—these two
perceptions advancing hand in hand from generation to generation, and
being accumulated in time and in the common course of nature.
I have already sufficiently guarded against being supposed to maintain
that very long before an instinct or structure was developed, the
creature descried it in the far future, and made towards it. We do not
observe this to be the manner of human progress. Our mechanical
inventions, which, as I ventured to say in “Erewhon,” through the mouth
of the second professor, are really nothing but extra-corporaneous
limbs—a wooden leg being nothing but a bad kind of flesh leg, and a flesh
leg being only a much better kind of wooden leg than any creature could
be expected to manufacture introspectively and consciously—our mechanical
inventions have almost invariably grown up from small beginnings, and
without any very distant foresight on the part of the inventors. When
Watt perfected the steam engine, he did not, it seems, foresee the
locomotive, much less would any one expect a savage to invent a steam
engine. A child breathes automatically, because it has learnt to breathe
little by little, and has now breathed for an incalculable length of
time; but it cannot open oysters at all, nor even conceive the idea of
opening oysters for two or three years after it is born, for the simple
reason that this lesson is one which it is only beginning to learn. All
I maintain is, that, give a child as many generations of practice in
opening oysters as it has had in breathing or sucking, and it would on
being born, turn to the oyster-knife no less naturally than to the
breast. We observe that among certain families of men there has been a
tendency to vary in the direction of the use and development of
machinery; and that in a certain still smaller number of families, there
seems to be an almost infinitely great capacity for varying and inventing
still further, whether socially or mechanically; while other families,
and perhaps the greater number, reach a certain point and stop; but we
also observe that not even the most inventive races ever see very far
ahead. I suppose the progress of plants and animals to be exactly
analogous to this.
Mr. Darwin has always maintained that the effects of use and disuse are
highly important in the development of structure, and if, as he has said,
habits are sometimes inherited—then they should sometimes be important
also in the development of instinct, or habit. But what does the
development of an instinct or structure, or, indeed, any effect upon the
organism produced by “use and disuse,” imply? It implies an effect
produced by a desire to do something for which the organism was not
originally well adapted or sufficient, but for which it has come to be
sufficient in consequence of the desire. The wish has been father to the
power; but this again opens up the whole theory of Lamarck, that the
development of organs has been due to the wants or desires of the animal
in which the organ appears. So far as I can see, I am insisting on
little more than this.
Once grant that a blacksmith’s arm grows thicker through hammering iron,
and you have an organ modified in accordance with a need or wish. Let
the desire and the practice be remembered, and go on for long enough, and
the slight alterations of the organ will be accumulated, until they are
checked either by the creature’s having got all that he cares about
making serious further effort to obtain, or until his wants prove
inconvenient to other creatures that are stronger than he, and he is
hence brought to a standstill. Use and disuse, then, with me, and, as I
gather also, with Lamarck, are the keys to the position, coupled, of
course, with continued personality and memory. No sudden and striking
changes would be effected, except that occasionally a blunder might prove
a happy accident, as happens not unfrequently with painters, musicians,
chemists, and inventors at the present day; or sometimes a creature, with
exceptional powers of memory or reflection, would make his appearance in
this race or in that. We all profit by our accidents as well as by our
more cunning contrivances, so that analogy would point in the direction
of thinking that many of the most happy thoughts in the animal and
vegetable kingdom were originated much as certain discoveries that have
been made by accident among ourselves. These would be originally blind
variations, though even so, probably less blind than we think, if we
could know the whole truth. When originated, they would be eagerly taken
advantage of and improved upon by the animal in whom they appeared; but
it cannot be supposed that they would be very far in advance of the last
step gained, more than are those “flukes” which sometimes enable us to go
so far beyond our own ordinary powers. For if they were, the animal
would despair of repeating them. No creature hopes, or even wishes, for
very much more than he has been accustomed to all his life, he and his
family, and the others whom he can understand, around him. It has been
well said that “enough” is always “a little more than one has.” We do
not try for things which we believe to be beyond our reach, hence one
would expect that the fortunes, as it were, of animals should have been
built up gradually. Our own riches grow with our desires and the pains
we take in pursuit of them, and our desires vary and increase with our
means of gratifying them; but unless with men of exceptional business
aptitude, wealth grows gradually by the adding field to field and farm to
farm; so with the limbs and instincts of animals; these are but the
things they have made or bought with their money, or with money that has
been left them by their forefathers, which, though it is neither silver
nor gold, but faith and protoplasm only, is good money and capital
notwithstanding.
I have already admitted that instinct may be modified by food or drugs,
which may affect a structure or habit as powerfully as we see certain
poisons affect the structure of plants by producing, as Mr. Darwin tells
us, very complex galls upon their leaves. I do not, therefore, for a
moment insist on habit as the sole cause of instinct. Every habit must
have had its originating cause, and the causes which have started one
habit will from time to time start or modify others; nor can I explain
why some individuals of a race should be cleverer than others, any more
than I can explain why they should exist at all; nevertheless, I observe
it to be a fact that differences in intelligence and power of growth are
universal in the individuals of all those races which we can best watch.
I also most readily admit that the common course of nature would both
cause many variations to arise independently of any desire on the part of
the animal (much as we have lately seen that the moons of Mars were on
the point of being discovered three hundred years ago, merely through
Galileo sending to Kepler a Latin anagram which Kepler could not
understand, and arranged into the line—“_Salve umbistineum geminatum
Martia prolem_,” and interpreted to mean that Mars had two moons, whereas
Galileo had meant to say “_Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi_,”
meaning that he had seen Saturn’s ring), and would also preserve and
accumulate such variations when they had arisen; but I can no more
believe that the wonderful adaptation of structures to needs, which we
see around us in such an infinite number of plants and animals, can have
arisen without a perception of those needs on the part of the creature in
whom the structure appears, than I can believe that the form of the
dray-horse or greyhound—so well adapted both to the needs of the animal
in his daily service to man, and to the desires of man, that the creature
should do him this daily service—can have arisen without any desire on
man’s part to produce this particular structure, or without the inherited
habit of performing the corresponding actions for man, on the part of the
greyhound and dray-horse.
And I believe that this will be felt as reasonable by the great majority
of my readers. I believe that nine fairly intelligent and observant men
out of ten, if they were asked which they thought most likely to have
been the main cause of the development of the various phases either of
structure or instinct which we see around us, namely—sense of need, or
even whim, and hence occasional discovery, helped by an occasional piece
of good luck, communicated, it may be, and generally adopted, long
practised, remembered by offspring, modified by changed surroundings, and
accumulated in the course of time—or, the accumulation of small
divergent, indefinite, and perfectly unintelligent variations, preserved
through the survival of their possessor in the struggle for existence,
and hence in time leading to wide differences from the original
type—would answer in favour of the former alternative; and if for no
other cause yet for this—that in the human race, which we are best able
to watch, and between which and the lower animals no difference in kind
will, I think, be supposed, but only in degree, we observe that progress
must have an internal current setting in a definite direction, but
whither we know not for very long beforehand; and that without such
internal current there is stagnation. Our own progress—or variation—is
due not to small, fortuitous inventions or modifications which have
enabled their fortunate possessors to survive in times of difficulty,
not, in fact, to strokes of luck (though these, of course, have had some
effect—but not more, probably, than strokes of ill luck have
counteracted) but to strokes of cunning—to a sense of need, and to study
of the past and present which have given shrewd people a key with which
to unlock the chambers of the future.
Further, Mr. Darwin himself says (“Plants and Animals under
Domestication,” ii. p. 237, ed. 1875):—
“But I think we must take a broader view and conclude that organic beings
when subjected during several generations to any change whatever in their
conditions tend to vary: _the kind of variation which ensues depending in
most cases in a far higher degree on the nature or constitution of the
being_, _than on the nature of the changed conditions_.” And this we
observe in man. The history of a man prior to his birth is more
important as far as his success or failure goes than his surroundings
after birth, important though these may indeed be. The able man rises in
spite of a thousand hindrances, the fool fails in spite of every
advantage. “Natural selection,” however, does not make either the able
man or the fool. It only deals with him after other causes have made
him, and would seem in the end to amount to little more than to a
statement of the fact that when variations have arisen they will
accumulate. One cannot look, as has already been said, for the origin of
species in that part of the course of nature which settles the
preservation or extinction of variations which have already arisen from
some unknown cause, but one must look for it in the causes that have led
to variation at all. These causes must get, as it were, behind the back
of “natural selection,” which is rather a shield and hindrance to our
perception of our own ignorance than an explanation of what these causes
are.
The remarks made above will apply equally to plants such as the misletoe
and red clover. For the sake of brevity I will deal only with the
misletoe, which seems to be the more striking case. Mr. Darwin writes:—
“Naturalists continually refer to external conditions, such as climate,
food, &c., as the only possible cause of variation. In one limited
sense, as we shall hereafter see, this may be true; but it is
preposterous to attribute to mere external conditions, the structure, for
instance, of the woodpecker, with its feet, tail, beak, and tongue, so
admirably adapted to catch insects under the bark of trees. In the case
of the misletoe, which draws its nourishment from certain trees, which
has seeds that must be transported by certain birds, and which has
flowers with separate sexes absolutely requiring the agency of certain
insects to bring pollen from one flower to another, it is equally
preposterous to account for the structure of this parasite with its
relations to several distinct organic beings, by the effect of external
conditions, or of habit, or of the volition of the plant itself”
(“Natural Selection,” p. 3, ed. 1876).
I cannot see this. To me it seems still more preposterous to account for
it by the action of “natural selection” operating upon indefinite
variations. It would be preposterous to suppose that a bird very
different from a woodpecker should have had a conception of a woodpecker,
and so by volition gradually grown towards it. So in like manner with
the misletoe. Neither plant nor bird knew how far they were going, or
saw more than a very little ahead as to the means of remedying this or
that with which they were dissatisfied, or of getting this or that which
they desired; but given perceptions at all, and thus a sense of needs and
of the gratification of those needs, and thus hope and fear, and a sense
of content and discontent—given also the lowest power of gratifying those
needs—given also that some individuals have these powers in a higher
degree than others—given also continued personality and memory over a
vast extent of time—and the whole phenomena of species and genera resolve
themselves into an illustration of the old proverb, that what is one
man’s meat is another man’s poison. Life in its lowest form under the
above conditions—and we cannot conceive of life at all without them—would
be bound to vary, and to result after not so very many millions of years
in the infinite forms and instincts which we see around us.