Instinct, Intelligence and Culture

Instinct vs Intelligence

Saying is:

"Man learns his behavior (and uses his intelligence)
whereas Animals simply act on instinct"

Reality is not so simple.

* Instinct : that is not learned. that is genetically coded to lack adaptation.
* Intelligence : ability to learn, to adapt to environment.

Ants - can memorize path through a maze, can apply this learning to other mazes.

However, the range and complexity of learned behavior in human beings >> those in other species.

Chimpanzees raised in human households
* learn as well as human infants of same age for a few years
* but they soon reach limit of their learning capacity
* then they are overtaken by human youngsters.

Human beings
* almost no instinct
* every behavior is learned in response to environment
* though the learning (/adaptation) curve may vary with age.

Artificial Neural Networks:
Learning/adaption is the target of neural network machines.
They consider an animal/human brain nothing but a machine that can learn and they try to emulate this brain.

Culture

A newborn human baby lacks all the behavior pattern of its society.
It has to learn a lot, has to learn a way of life. It adapts its behavior to rewards and punishments awarded to its actions by its surrounding, its family and society.

Culture of a society is collection of learned items shared by members of that society.

Culture, which is learned, can be very different from society to society.

A 40 feet long hall, one North American and one South American talking to each other, talk started at one end of hall and finished at other end, North one steadily stepping back and South one steadily advancing. Why??

Issue is their learned comfort zone: for North Am his counterpart comes too close, for South Am his counterpart is too far.

Wolf-Children of Midnapur

This is a well documented case.

Two girls, under the age of 8, reportedly were found in a wolf-den in Bengal in 1920. They walked on all fours, howled like wolves, preferred raw meat, and lacked any form of speech.

Though an extreme example, their behavior was well within the norm of wolf-culture.

Source: "Sociology - Themes and Perspectives", by M. Haralambos, Oxford Unversity Press, 1980