The Act of Creation (69 page)

 

 

 

Thus at one end of the scale we find rituals, fixed action-patterns,
vacuum and displacement activities -- rigid, automatized, and compulsive,
petrified habits of unknown phylogenetic origin. At the other extreme
we find supra-individual codes which govern behaviour of remarkable
flexibility, and original adaptations which lie outside the animal's
normal skills and habit repertory. In all forms of social organization
-- from courtship, mating, and fighting rituals, through territorial
demarcations, up to the complex insect state, we find an interlocking of
individual behaviour-patterns into a collective super-code which casts the
individual bird or bee into the role of a part in the social whole. Thus
we see the hierarchic part-whole relationship repeated on the level
of social organization, where the integrative functions of catalyzers,
inductors, and nerve impulses are superseded by interlacing systems of
social releasers, including communication by signs and symbol -- from
display, through bird-song, to the dance-language of the honey-bee.

 

 

 

NOTES

 

 

To
p. 481
. The equivalent of the term 'appetitive
behaviour' in American behaviourist theory are Hull's drive-stimulus
(Sd); and his 'fractional antedating goal-stimuli and responses' (SgRg).

 

 

To
p. 481
. Out of this grew the theory that
the fixed pattern of the consummatory act -- and not the 'appeted
stimulus' -- is the goal of the animal's striving and the source of the
'action-specific energy' of the drive; but the subject is outside the
scope of this book.

 

 

 

 

 

VII

 

 

IMPRINTING AND IMITATION

 

 

So far we have discussed the codes of morphogenesis and innate behaviour,
which emerge ready-made from the black boxes of evolution' -- like All
Baba's thieves, popping out of the urns in which they were hiding.

 

 

In the chapters which follow we shall discuss the ontogenesis of
behavioural codes -- the acquisition of habits, knowledge, skills,
by the processes' of learning from experience.

 

 

 

The 'Following-response'

 

 

The transition from innate to learnt behaviour is sharply highlighted
in the phenomena of imprinting. The follow-the-leader response of the
gosling is governed by an innate code; it must stick to the mother-goose
or perish. But like many phylogenetically acquired codes it seems to have
been formed according to the principle of parsimony. It can be triggered
off by any releaser which satisfies very broad Gestalt criteria of
'goose-likeness' -- including German ethologists and even inanimate
moving objects of a certain size. In a normal environment this would
indeed be sufficient to ensure the gosling's survival, since the first
sizeable moving creature seen would be the mother-goose. Accordingly, a
young goose, reared from the egg in isolation (or in the incubator) will
accept -- during the brief critical period of maturation when imprinting
occurs -- its human keeper as its 'mother', and follow him around. Once
this has happened the process becomes more or less irreversible: the
'imprinted' bird will reject the company of other geese and attach
itself only to memebers of the human species -- treating them as parents,
companions, and later on as objects of sexual advances. Many other birds,
and possibly also some fish and insects, show the phenomena of imprinting
in varying degrees.

 

 

Here, then, we have a pregnant example of the genesis of a matrix through
the integration of innate and acquired behaviour-patterns. The built-in
'following response' has the characteristic autonomy of motor-patterns
which we have met before: it is triggered off and modified, but not
created by the environmental input. The first step in the development
of the matrix is the act of imprinting itself; it must occur, as already
mentioned, during the critical phase when the young bird is susceptible
for it (in ducks, for instance, between eleven and eighteen hours after
birth, with a pointed peak in the susceptibility curve at sixteen
hours). [1] The input which triggers off the following-response is
at this stage an undifferentiated and primitive sign-releaser: 'Large
moving object' -- much simpler in character than the more specific
Gestalt stimuli which release the fighting or mating instinct in the
stickleback ('red belly', 'swollen belly') or the begging response of
the herring-gull chick ('red spot on beak').

 

 

The next stage is one of
perceptual learning
. After a few hours,
even a few minutes, of following a human being, the gosling will follow
only human beings -- it has somehow learned to 'abstract', or
'encode' in its memory some specific Gestalt-characteristics of homo
saplens which distinguish it from other 'shapes that move'. On the
other hand, at this stage all human beings are still 'equipotential'
members of the emergent perceptual matrix. At a still later stage,
the goose may become attached to one or more single individuals, that
is to say, it learns to discriminate individuals within the species --
as, vice versa, animal breeders learn to sharpen their perception and
to distinguish one sheep or goose from another.
We thus meet, already on this level, the twin phenomena involved
in all learning processes:
generalization
('transfer',
'abstraction') and
discrimination
(segregation of pattern,
selective inhibition of responses to non-specific stimuli). These basic
processes will be discussed later (
Chapter X
);
in the meantime, let us note that the innate, primitive 'rule of the game'
which made the new-born animal respond to 'things-that-move', has been
sharpened and elaborated into a more complex set of rules by a series of
'steps. Each of these steps involved a restructuring of the perceptual
matrix by successive generalizations and discriminations -- which we
may regard as quasi-extensions of functional integration and structural
differentiation into the learning process. Morphogenesis and learning
form continuous series which overlap during maturation; and the matrices
of innate and acquired behaviour form an equally continuous hierarchy.

 

 

 

Bird-song and Parrot-talk

 

 

There are no sharply defined boundaries between imprinting and learning
by imitation, or by trial and error. The word 'imprinting' itself is
a translation of Heinroth's
Prägung
, [2] by which he meant
to indicate the dramatic form of learning in birds which we have just
discussed. Its chief characteristics are: it is species-specific and
directly dependent on innate organization; quasi-instantaneous; and
limited to a relatively brief period in the animal's life. By applying
these criteria, Thorpe has extended the concept of imprinting to include
'a bird's instantaneous attachment to territory, its occasional attachment
not only to humans but also to other animals and even inanimate objects;
and lastly, the song-bird's way of learning its species-characteristic
song'. [3]

 

 

Apparently in some birds such as thrushes, warblers, pippits, the
whole song is genetically 'built in' and can be but slightly modified
by learning; while in others, for instance the skylark, it is mainly
learned. In chaffinches Thorpe has shown that 'while the basic pattern
of the song is innate, all the finer detail and much of the pitch and
rhythm have to be acquired by learning.'* We have here another example
of a 'roughed-in' pattern (
p. 470
) whose details
are filled in later by that particular type of 'feedback' process which
constitutes learning.

 

 

When we turn to
imitative
bird-song and parrot-talk, the part
played by innate organization is obviously less specific and the part
played by learning much greater; yet the difference is again one of
degree. In fact,
Prägung
means stamping (a coin), which makes
the continuity between imprinting and 'stamped-in learning' even more
obvious.** Less obvious, however, is the biological purpose or adaptive
value of the striking capacity of parrots, mocking-birds, starlings, etc.,
to imitate the songs of entirely alien species -- including 'God Save the
King'. [4] Now parrots living in freedom in their natural environment
utter only a few fixed, simple types of cries; yet folklore apart, we
have no lesser authority than Lashley describing a captive parrot with a
'vocabulary' of between fifty and a hundred words; and there is reliable
evidences that both parrots and robins can learn to utter certain words
meaningfully. Granted that vocal imitation, as McDougall has pointed out
[6], is a special case owing to the close integration of auditory-vocal
patterns, one must nevertheless admit that such imitative ability is
'a further example of pre-adaptation for apparently remote and unlikely
contingencies, specialization going in advance of immediate adaptive
requirement, and as such on a par with the astonishing number-sense which
can be developed in many species by careful training. Such a counting
ability seems to offer even less practical advantage for a wild bird
than the features we have been considering; all are as yet somewhat
mysterious.' [7] (The counting ability of birds was revealed in Otto
Koehler's famous experiments, to be discussed later.) Ethologists such as
Koehler (not to be confused with Wolfgang Köhler), Lorenz, Craig,
and Thorpe all agree that the tonal purity, the 'inventiveness' and
improvisation in the advanced forms of bird-song should be regarded as
'the first steps in both music and speech'. [8]

 

 

To mention one example among many: Waite, at the Museum in Sydney,
owned an Australian magpie whom he taught by playing on the flute 'a
fifteen-note melody in two distinct phrases'. Some years later he got a
second magpie which learned the tune from the first. The two birds then
developed the habit of singing it antiphonally, the first singing the
first phrase, and the second only the second. 'Later the second, younger,
bird died whereupon the first resumed its performance of the whole'. [9]

 

 

Examples like this show not only the great flexibility of these
auditory-vocal matrices. They also show that the total pattern -- the
rudimentary code of the hand-reared chaffinch -- develops first, and that
learning the song does not consist in the chaining of individual notes
according to the S.-R. scheme, but in the elaboration and variation
of the pattern. We further note that originality or 'inventiveness'
make their appearance at only a few removes from innate and imprinted
behaviour. Lastly, the striking learning abilities of some birds,
which are only revealed under the abnormal conditions of captivity --
these examples of 'pre-adaptations for remote and unlikely contingencies'
remind us of regenerative potentials manifested in response to traumatic
challenges.

 

 

 

Untapped Resources

 

 

We have seen evidence of this latent super-flexibility -- of 'doing
wonders' in adversity -- on every level: from the restoration of
locomotive patterns in mutiliated insects and rats, through the emergency
redistribution oflabour in the beehive, up to the solution of blocked
problems by 'thinking aside'. In recent years, unsuspected learning
abilities were revealed in such widely different classes as fiatworms,
dolphins, and seals -- the latter, apparently, can even be taught to
obey visual sign-commands printed on cards. Yet the evidence for a
surplus, or reserve, of learning potentials far surpassing immediate
adaptive needs has always been there in our own species: ten thousand
years ago our ancestors fought with clubs and arrows, but the structure
of their brains was the same as ours, and therefore potentially just as
capable of learning Boolean Logics or the principles of making a nuclear
bomb. Even the dumb fish have been shown to have optical capacities
for form and colour discrimination far in advance of their needs under
natural conditions. Thorpe comments: 'It does indeed seem to be a general
feature of animal life that the precision and sensitivity of sense organs
is higher than the environment would appear to justify. This fact poses
a serious problem for students of evolution, since it is not easy to
account for such perfection on the basis of natural selection alone'.*
It seems that this
overshooting
of the mark, this giving more
than was asked for, is an inherent characteristic of the mechanism of
evolution. In homo sapiens the 'overshooting' is demonstrated by the fact
that mental evolution -- learning to exploit the surplus potentials in
his brain -- has been going on for an astronomical period, and with no
end in sight. The problem is not so much why mental evolution occurs
in man, but why no similar phenomenon -- learning to use their native
equipment to maximum capacity -- seems to have occurred in any other
species, although many animals demonstrate the existence of their untapped
resources in captivity. (Animals, it is true, keep no written records of
their discoveries, but these could have been transmitted by imitative
learning.) All this is a nice subject for speculations on a rainy day;
the important point in our context is the hard core of evidence to show
that various animals reveal in captivity various degrees of originality
and resourcefulness which are not displayed under natural conditions. Most
animals seem to have more sensitive organs than they need, and more latent
capabilities than they ever learn to actualize, except when challenged
under propitious circumstances. That bar-pressing experiments with rats
are not the type of challenge designed to elicit original responses,
need not be emphasized, and it is not surprising, therefore, that leading
Behaviourists have either denied the occurrence of original responses or
put them down to chance. We shall return to the subject in later chapters.
NOTES
To