BEAST AND MAN

From the Introduction to the first edition:

.. people have a lot of obvious and important things that other species
do not - speech, rationality, culture, and the rest. Comparison must deal
with these. I have tried to discuss some of the most important of them,
not attempting at all to deny their uniqueness, but merely to grasp how
they can occur in what is, after all, a primate species, not a brand of
machine or a type of disembodied spirit. I have tried to show these
capabilities as continuous with our animal nature, connected with our
basic structures of motives.’
Some reviews of the first edition:
‘Beast and Man is a brilliant and persuasive attempt to set us in our animal
context, to show us to ourselves as at home in the world, and to indicate a
morality for a society without religious absolutes - a morality of which we
see the rudiments in our brother species.’ The Observer
‘Mrs Midgley’s book is . .. particularly welcome ... she has familiarized
herself with a great deal of the recent literature in sociobiology and
ethology, and has used her philosophical knowledge to make a critical
appraisal of it, believing it to be vitally relevant to the question of whether
there is, or is not, such a thing as “human nature” .... As I believe that
her essential arguments are well-founded, I hope it will be widely read.’
Anthony Storr, The Spectator
‘Beast and Man will undoubtedly be widely read and enjoyed. But most of
all it should be read by those interested in moral philosophy, for whom
new light will be thrown on such well handled tools of their trade as
“freedom”, “reason”, “self-interest”, “pleasure” and many more. In the
discussion of such concepts, it is a book which will be truly influential.’
Mary Wamock, New Society
*... an extremely elegant, penetrating and thought-provoking text... It
is beautifully written, stimulating and innovative. To me, there is no
question but that Beast and Man should be read by all those directly
concerned in the nature/nurture debate: zoologists, anthropologists and
social scientists. But I would go much further than that to say that no
thinking person can afford to live without a Weltanschauung (philoso­
phical outlook) which integrates biology and culture. Accordingly, this is
a book which deserves to be read across all disciplinary boundaries; I
hope it will be.’ R. D. Martin, Reader in Physical Anthropology, University
College London
The author: Mary Midgley was Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the
University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
Cover illustration: Woodcut of a manticore from Edward Topsell’s The
History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents (1658), reproduced in Curious
Woodcuts of Fanciful and Real Beasts (Dover Publications, 1971).
BEAST AND MAN
The Roots of Human Nature
MARY MIDGLEY
First published in Great Britain in 1979 by
The Harvester Press Limited
First published as a University Paperback in 1980 by
Methuen & Co. Ltd
Revised edition 1995
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
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Copyright© 1978 Cornell University

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trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of
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ISBN 13: 978-0-415-12740-0 (pbk)

DOI: 10.4324/9780203380192
TO MY SONS,
with many thanks for making
it so clear to me that the
human infant is not blank paper
Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction to Revised Edition xiii
Introduction to First Edition xxxiv
PART o n e : c o n c e pt u a l pr o bl e ms of an u n u s u a l s pe c ie s
1. Have We a Nature?
Understanding Our Motives 3
What We Can Ask of Our Concepts 14
Could People Be Blank Paper? 19
2. Animals and the Problem of Evil 25
Tradition and Reality 25
Beasts Within 36
Aristotelian and Kantian Beasts 44
3. Instinct, N ature, and Purpose 51
Instincts, Closed and Open 51
What Is the Nature of a Species? 57
The Meaning of “Biological Determinism” 62
Reasoning from Purpose 72
PART t w o : a r t a n d sc ie n c e in ps y c h o l o g y
4. Directions without a Director 85
On Being Scientific 85
The Exaltation of the Gene 89
The Need for the Long Perspective 93
The Absurdity of Forgetting the Individual 97
Contents
5. On Taking Motives Seriously 105
Behavior Includes Motive 105
What Describing Is 110
Communication and Consciousness 1 13
6. Altruism and Egoism 117
Different Notions of Selfishness 117
The Use and Misuse of Egoism 121
How to Misunderstand Altruism 125
The Mystery of the Unconscious Altruist 130
How to Make the Whole Study of Motives Impossible 134
pa r t t h r e e : s ig n po s t s
7. Up and Down 145
Is There an Evolutionary Ladder? 145
Survival Is Not Enough 152
Understanding the Metaphor of Height 158
8. Evolution and Practical Thinking 165
Where Evolution Is Relevant 165
Why Neurology Cannot Replace Moral Philosophy 169
9. Facts and Values 177
Goodness and Wants 177
On Using Our Knowledge 184
Our Nature Is a Whole 189
We Are Not Tourists Here 194
pa r t f o u r : t h e ma rks o f ma n
10. Speech and O ther Excellences 203
The Lure of the Simple Distinction 203
Descartes: Reason and Language 209
Language and Morality 217
What Goes with Language? Other Structural Properties 225
Why the Machine Model Cannot Work 233
Understanding What Language Does 239
Understanding What Expressive Movements Do 243
11. On Being Animal as well as Rational 253
The Unity of Our Nature 253
Conflict and Integration 261
Self-control: The Human Solution 266
The Shared Solution 273
12. Why We Need a Culture 285
Culture Is Natural 285
Culture as Language 293
 Contents
The Prehuman Roots of Culture in Habit and
Symbolism 306
The Place of Conventional Symbols 314
PART f iv e : t h e c o mmo n h e r it a g e
13. T he Unity of Life 321
Our Emotional Constitution 321
Families and Freedom 326
Why Intelligence Does Not Replace Instinct 331
What Is Anthropomorphism? 344
The Egoist’s Blind Alley 351
Living in the Whole World 357
Bibliography 365
Index 371
 A cknowledgments
Much o f the work for this book was done in 1976 at Cornell
University, which I visited at the invitation o f Max Black, a m em ­
ber o f the Program on Science, Technology, and Society, to in­
troduce some discussions on M an and Beast at interdisciplinary
seminars. I am most grateful to everybody there for the endless
help and encouragem ent they offered in my confused attem pts
to organize a subject so interdisciplinary as to be nearly impossi­
ble to sort out. As so m any people were kind, I can nam e here
only the two who probably m ade me think hardest, Professor
Black him self and William W imsatt. T he paper I later wrote for
their program is the basis for C hapter 11 of this book.
Colleagues at Newcastle University have been m ore than
generous with their assistance. In particular, Alec Panchen and
Alan Ibbotson read the m iddle part of the book and saved me
from m any howlers, recom m ended m uch reading, and in gen­
eral oversaw the book’s zoological aspects. Jane H eal kindly
looked through C hapter 10 and helped me with problem s about
language. R enford B am brough and Julius Kovesi generously
vetted C hapter 9, including a great deal that has finally been
crowded out for lack of room . I thank each o f them warmly for
their time and attention. E rrors that rem ain are entirely my
contribution.
I thank my family and friends for putting up with a lot, and
for m uch help with the argum ent. I am especially grateful to
Acknowledgments
colleagues in my university’s A dult Education D epartm ent, who
originally gave me the chance to get this confusing subject off
the ground by inviting me to teach an adult class on it—a
m ethod I vigorously recom m end to anyone who wants to get an
impossible bundle of questions under control. I am indebted to
the students in that class, who refused to allow me to get away
with easy answers.
I am grateful to the editor and proprietors of Philosophy for
allowing me to draw on a paper called “T he Concept of Beastli­
ness,” published in Philosophy, 48 (1973). This form s the basis for
the first three chapters.
1 thank the following for permission to include quotations:
H arvard University Press for those from Sociobiology by Edward
O. Wilson, copyright © 1975 by the President and Fellows of
H arvard College; Faber and Faber Ltd. and H arcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Inc., for lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Hippopotamus and
The Waste Land; Anthony Powell and his publishers, William
H einem ann Ltd. and Little, Brown, Inc., for those from his
novels The Acceptance World and Books Do Furnish a Room;
Michael Frayn and Wildwood House Ltd. for those from Con­
structions; Mrs. H odgson and Macmillan (London and
Basingstoke) for “Reason Has M oons,” from Collected Poems, by
Ralph H odgson; Chatto and W indus Ltd. and Random House,
Inc., for the extract from Within a Budding Grove, copyright 1924
and renewed 1952 by Random House, Inc., and reprinted from
Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1, by Marcel Proust, trans­
lated by C. K. Scott M oncrieff; and the Society of Authors,
literary representative of the Estate of A. E. Housm an, and
Jonathan Cape Ltd., publishers of H ousm an’s Collected Poems,
for lines from A Shropshire Lad.
M ary M id g l e y
Newcastle upon Tyne
 Introduction to Revised Edition

Retrospective: The Debate

Is it worthwhile trying to build bridges across disputes and
constantly getting shot at from both sides? That has been my
occupation since 1978, when Beast and Man first came out. I have
to admit that it hasn’t transformed the world. Polarized, tribal
debating is a very deep hum an habit, highly resistant to efforts at
reconciliation. Stephen Jay Gould has said (resignedly) that, since
feuding goes so deep, one might as well drop the notion of bridge­
building altogether, and simply try to balance things by plum ping
for the less disastrous of the two extremes that are contending in
any given debate.
He has a point. Yet, even during the most ferocious feuds, some
people do actually want to resolve the issues as well. W hen
controversy has raged for a while and has sent both sides into
absurdly extreme positions, fatigue and disillusion sometimes
make attempts at reconciliation seem downright welcome. This is
what happened during the 1960s and 70s in the dispute about
whether there was, or was not, something called Hum an Nature.
Both the positions that were being most loudly offered had
grown increasingly fantastic and hard to swallow. On the one
hand—roughly speaking, the left hand—social scientists were still
insisting that hum an nature did not exist at all. Hum an beings were
xiv Introduction to Revised Edition
pure products of their culture, originally indeterm inate items,
infinitely malleable, dough or blank paper at birth, shaped only by
education. This position—drawn originally from empiricist
philosophers—was seen as the only possible defence against
racism, sexism and authoritarianism. It had the firm backing of
Marxists (who were then still very influential), of behaviorist
psychologists, of sociologists and of many educational theorists.
On the other hand—the right one—the traditional racists,
sexists and authoritarians who had given Hum an Nature such a bad
name in the first place, were still quite active and influential. Their
most up-to-date prophets were then the popular exponents of
ethology, such as Robert Ardrey and Desmond Morris. These
writers com bined lively and persuasive comparisons between
people and animals with strong emphasis on just those alarming
motives that the traditional right had always stressed in hum an
nature—namely, aggression, territory and dominance. Konrad
Lorenz, who was actually a m uch more serious and less one-sided
theorist, was widely seen as simply one of this party, while Niko
Tinbergen was ignored.
In 1975, however, Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, A New Synthesis
came out, changing the scene profoundly. Wilson carried heavier
scientific guns and added a new kind of feud because he called up
strong feeling for and against “science” itself. Lorenz, Morris and
Ardrey had not been academic partisans declaring war on other
studies. (Ardrey was a playwright, while Morris and Lorenz, though
good zoologists, had been mainly known as popularizers). Wilson,
by contrast, wrote tribally as a campaigning biologist and an
outspoken academic imperialist. He was reductive. He did not just
offer to explain hum an life by animal comparisons. He claimed
that his m ethods—which he justified largely from population
genetics—would reshape, displace and finally “cannibalize” the
entire social sciences and humanities. And though he was not
explicitly political, he did not trouble to defend his “genetic
determ inism ” against the political interpretations that people were
naturally inclined to put on it.
 Introduction to Revised Edition xv
The Wild Project of Mediation
No wonder a m onum ental row followed. I came into this bullring
myself, rather to my surprise, in 1976 when Wilson’s tome suddenly
landed on my desk. I had then, as I supposed, already finished
writing Beast and Man. I had started writing it because, after reading
the ethologists—especially Tinbergen and Lorenz—I thought that
they were making new and very useful contributions to the enquiry
about the difficult subject of hum an motives.
I thought that these contributions ought to be digested, not spat
out in disgust. They could (I believed) bring much-needed light to
moral philosophy, which was my official academic business. They
were surely relevant to philosophical questions about the relation
between body and mind, between motivation and rationality,
between humanity and nature. They could help to answer queries
on these topics already launched by psychoanalytic thinkers,
queries which I also considered im portant. I thought (and still
think) that the Freudian tradition is better at asking questions than
at answering them —but then, asking them is often the more
im portant task. And, since Freudian concepts are often accepted
for guidance in common life, it is damagingly artificial to exclude
them from academic discussion.
I was astonished, then, at the social scientists’ shocked and
defensive response, their determ ination to retreat from the whole
subject behind the species barrier. So I wrote, first an article1 and
then at the request of the Cornell Press a book, to suggest a more
realistic position which m ight bring the warring factions together.
The core of that book lay, and still lies, in Part Four (on the
distinctive Marks of Man) and especially in Chapter 11 on
Rationality, though later additions have distracted many readers’
attention from those topics, probably also making the book longer
than it ought to be.
Cornell liked my draft, but told me to read Wilson. I can’t say
that I was pleased to get a book the size of a paving stone, full of
technical detail, along with an equally weighty pack of cuttings
about the surrounding dispute and firm instructions to “put in 1
1. “The Concept of Beastliness”, Philosophy,, vol. 48 (1973).
xvi Introduction to Revised Edition
something about all this”. But I saw at once that the job must be
done, and done not casually but properly. The mess that was
developing was a philosophical mess, however little most of the
warriors involved might think so. It concerned the general re­
lations between concepts, something which few of them were used
to considering and which their ingrained habits of specialization
made it hard for them to see.
There were certainly times in the next few m onths when I felt
like throwing the whole package out of the window and following
it myself. But I gradually saw that two very im portant things had
happened. First, the presence of inherited behavioral tendencies
throughout the animal kingdom had indeed been docum ented
with a thoroughness that would be hard to ignore, along with good
reason to suppose that these tendencies extended to hum an beings
as well. Second, that thesis was couched in language which made
it almost impossible for many people to accept it. This was a
language m uch cruder and more provocative—more ideologically
loaded—than that of the ethologists. It was bound to be both
catchier and more politically divisive. It would make the previous
polarization worse. The resulting feud was likely to distract atten­
tion almost completely from the serious enquiries into hum an and
animal motivation that the ethologists had started.

Science Tangled with Ideology

What then was this ideology which was now, somewhat mislead­
ingly, proclaimed as the up-to-date form of Darwinism?2 If I call it
right-wing I do not, of course, mean that it was statically hierarchi­
cal, “conservative” in the style of old-fashioned authoritarians. It
wasn’t. Instead—to put things crudely—it was biological Thatcher­
ism, romantic and egoistic, celebrating evolution as a ceaseless
crescendo of competition between essentially “selfish” individual
organisms, each making “investments” for its own separate advan­
tage, organisms whose attempts to “m anipulate” one another
2. I have discussed its exuberant and often off-putting additions to Darwin’s
actual thesis in “Darwinism and Ethics” in Medicine and Moral Reasoning, eds K.W.M.
Fulford, Grant Gillett and Janet Martin Soskice (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
 Introduction to Revised Edition xvii
provided the whole dynamic of development. In fact, it offered
scientific respectability to the myth that power resides essentially in
competitive commercial mobility, the myth that is now the creed of
“the right”, replacing the earlier, feudal belief in static power vested
in the inheritance of land. (The strange fate of the words right and
left is another large question which cannot be dealt with here.)
In essence, of course, this picture was not so new. It went back to
Social Darwinism—to H erbert Spencer’s one-sided, sweeping exal­
tation of individual freedom over community and especially to his
veneration for free-enterprise economics. That simple message got
into the water-supply in the United States at the end of the
nineteenth century, when Spencer’s works outsold all other philos­
ophers throughout the country. It remains endemic there at the
back of many people’s minds, so that scientists like Wilson who
repeat it are usually unaware that it has any particular source.
Spencer, however, had spoken as a philosopher, not as a natural
scientist. He knew little about biology, and his views were plainly
m eant in the first place as comments on hum an life. On that plane,
as social doctrines, they have obvious faults and they have always
been well criticized. But Wilson seemed now to give Spencer’s story
a quite new standing, allowing it to bypass these criticisms. He
showed it as a biological thesis about the whole nature of life.
Spencerism seemed now to get the scientific respectability that
Spencer himself could never have given it. The dram a was moved
away from the familiar scenery of hum an competition—where its
limitations had been clearly visible—to population genetics, to the
remote prospects, not of individuals, but of hordes of competing
genes for selfishness, altruism, spite and the like.
Wilson’s argum ent here was often mysterious, partly because
m uch of it was technical, but more deeply because the non­
technical part was so intensely metaphorical. Strong, colourful
words like “selfish”, “spiteful” and “manipulative”, which were
central to the story, were acknowledged to be metaphors. Yet their
rhetorical effect was evidently intended as part of the thesis, and
they were often used in an unmistakably literal sense as well. This
was the strange brew about which I endeavored to say something
in Beast and Man. In 1976, too, Richard Dawkin’s book The Selfish
Gene came out (though I did not see it till later), com pounding the
xviii Introduction to Revised Edition
sense of dram a by insistently personifying the genes themselves. It
declared that selfishness, whatever that might be, was not just
transmitted by genes but also actually belonged to them. Genes
were not only—as Wilson had said—the real scene of the process
but also its only active agents. Humans and other animals were not
agents but the genes’ helpless vehicles, though they were still, also,
themselves selfish: “we are born selfish”.3

Sociobiology and M arxism

All this, of course, was not going to go away. Looking back now
over the time since the first publication of this book, I have the
impression that this new ideology has played a role in our
intellectual lives very similar to the one which Marxism played in
the thirty years after the war. Like Marxism, Sociobiology has been
powerfully attractive because it claims to be a comprehensive
system, simplifying the world by a universal form ula and heart­
ening its disciples by calling them to tribal warfare on its behalf.
Like Marxism too, it can be used to justify injustice, because it
promises rosy results in the future (this time through “trickle-
down” effects and also, on some accounts, through longterm
evolution). Again like Marxism, it claims scientific authority, and
has been defended by technical arguments so elaborate as to give
its more learned supporters a great feeling of security.
Sociobiology does not, of course, have the idealistic appeal of
Marxism. The absence today of any popular political doctrine with
that kind of appeal is a serious loss to all of us. It leaves the idealistic

3. The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976) p. 3. This gratuitous claim
about individual selfishness is loaded on top of the message that, as Dawkins put it
in the opening passage of his preface, “we are survival machines—robot vehicles
blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes”, p. x. My
own somewhat explosive comments on this book appeared in an article in Philosophy
called “Gene-Juggling”, vol. 54, no. 210 (October 1979). Dawkins replied “In
Defence of Selfish Genes” in Philosophy, vol. 56, no. 218 (October 1981) and I
answered him in “Selfish Genes and Social Darwinism”, Philosophy, vol. 58 (1983).
Anyone who finds the language that I used on this subject too mild should read
David Stove’s two articles, “The Demons and Dr Dawkins” in The American Scholar
(Winter 1992) and “So You Think You Are a Darwinian?” in Philosophy, vol. 69,
no. 269 (July 1994) pp. 267-77.
 Introduction to Revised Edition xix
young with no obvious first stage on their intellectual journey
unless they can take a religious course. No doubt this is why more
of them are now taking that kind of course—often a Buddhist
rather than a Christian one. Right-wing political doctrines do not
actually have to be ostentatiously cynical just because they are right-
wing. They needn’t be guided only by
Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell
From Heaven—
but recent ones have largely been so.
In compensation for its weakness in this kind of attraction,
Sociobiology possesses a scientific flavour which is apparently
stronger and more in tune with present-day tastes than that of
Marxism. Like Marxism, however, Sociobiology has proved quite
hard to defend at an academic level. In its own chosen disciplines,
its scientific critics have cut it down to size without much difficulty
for the relatively learned public. Wilson’s claim to speak for the
whole of biology, still more for the whole of genetics, was always a
wild one. Sociobiological genetics has proved to be particularly
casual and has come in for a good deal of dam ning criticism, but
it is by no means the only weak spot. Altogether, in contem porary
scientific discussions of evolution, the contentions of Wilson’s
school now occupy a relatively m odest place.
But of course Sociobiology does not depend for its influence on
scholarly validation, any more than Marxism did. Though the
general authority of science is im portant to it, it depends at root on
representing the tem per of the age. It survives just in proportion
as that tem per has rem ained intensely individualistic, romantic,
optimistic, egoistic and competitive. At governm ent level, there is
still a surprisingly strong unreasoned faith in competition, in the
salvation that is supposed to flow from market forces. The
economism of this faith is very close to that of Marxism, which is
no doubt why people convert so easily from one to the other. And
the end of the Cold War naturally tended to bolster that faith. In
this sort of atmosphere, sociobiological attitudes and jargon have
prospered.
xx Introduction to Revised Edition
The Remarkable Persistence of Dynastic Ambition in Lions
One area where the continued prosperity of these attitudes and
jargon does really surprise me is over animal behaviour. Today’s
ethologists seem to have bowed to this strange view of what is
“scientific” and abandoned their own distinctive tradition to an
extent that is somewhat remarkable. The otherwise admirable
David Attenborough is not alone in this odd form of piety. Serious
scientific articles, as well as TV programmes about animals, now all
have an obligatory section proving that the behaviour discussed—
however obviously futile it may be—must have been selectively
advantageous to the creature’s ancestors, since sociobiological
theory insists that it must be so—a doctrine known as “pan-
selectionism”.
Parts of this discussion are usually couched in language that
expressly credits the animal with sociobiologically approved
motives inform ed by full knowledge of its genetic prospects— “the
lion is trying to spread his genes more widely”—and so forth. The
fact that this is supposed to be a m etaphor is plainly usually
forgotten. This empty story is thus allowed to supersede the serious
enquiry into the animals’ real motives which Tinbergen and
Lorenz had begun to pioneer.4 Discussion of evolutionary
prospects—which is in itself im portant and necessary—is conflated
with talk of motives in a way that seriously hampers both.
O f course, the authors do always contrive to find some optimiz­
ing explanation for even the most damaging traits, because their
theory dem ands it. Yet that success is plainly just a testimonial to
their own ingenuity and persistence. This kind of speculation often
resembles the wilder suggestions of the psychoanalysts and is as
immune to empirical verification. It would be interesting, in fact,
to see whether it is possible to invent any trait so disadvantageous
that it could not be whitewashed in this way. Like the theologians
who used to find divinely chosen functions for wasps and nettles,
4. I have discussed this muddle about motives in “Darwinism and Ethics” (see
note 1) and in “Gene Juggling” (see note 2) as well as in the Introductory Chapter
to Heart and Mind, pp. 18-24, and more fully in Beast and Man. That recurrence is
not just obsessive nit-picking. I seriously believe that this distortion of the whole
topic of motives is a major cultural disaster, with repercussions all over the place.
 Introduction to Revised Edition xxi
sociobiologists are driven by their faith to accept whatever improb­
able story of concealed advantage they finally manage to invent.5
As has often been pointed out, the words God or Providence can be
substituted for natural selection in these Just So stories without
changing their sense at all.
What, then, should really be said about such cases of imperfect
adaptation? Darwin, like all other unprejudiced students of evolu­
tion, freely adm itted that there were many such cases and he saw
that they made no difficulty for his theory. That theory did not
claim that adaptation would be perfect, merely that it must have
been adequate for survival. It is adequate provided that surviving
traits are not so damaging as to destroy the species, which they may
well not do where there is only moderate competition. Thus, giant
pandas have been able to make out as a species despite their

5. A common case is that of animals (often birds) that produce two offspring, the
larger of which promptly and regularly kills the smaller. This “strategy” is usually
explained as insurance against the possible death of the larger twin. But (as many
human insurance-buyers can attest) calling something insurance does not prove
that it is good value. No actuary has ever been fetched in to balance out the cost of
constantly producing a wasted twin against that of occasionally losing a year’s
offspring by death. Dogma apart, there is thus no reason for rejecting the more
natural explanation—namely, that there simply has not happened to be a mutation
which would either produce single births or make the newborns less destructive.
A striking recent example of this oddity can be seen in an otherwise thoughtful
and impressive article called “When Hyenas Kill Their Own” by Laurence Frank in
New Scientist, March 5, 1994. Spotted hyenas usually have twins, the elder of which
(especially if both are female) regularly attacks the younger savagely as soon as they
are born, sometimes killing it and often doing it grave permanent injury. Over half
of the mothers are thus left bringing up a single cub which (not surprisingly) grows
faster and does better than the remaining twins.
Frank explains this aggressiveness, which wears off after a few weeks, as due to an
imbalance of hormones at the time of birth—a flood of androgens reaching the
cubs before they have developed other factors that would counter it. Clearly he is
inclined to rest content with this causal explanation. Custom, however, calls on him
also to contrive a teleological story that will explain “the evolutionary role of this
behaviour”, that is, not just its effects but how there is at some point a pay-off for
somebody. As often happens, this discussion is complicated and inconclusive. It
does not answer the obvious question, “Why go on having twins at all?” It considers
the idea that “twin sisters seek to eliminate each other as infants in order to avoid
going on to compete intensely as adults” but, finding a difficulty there, ends with
the rather limp suggestion that “female spotted hyenas are capitalising on an
extreme form of infant behaviour that is largely beyond their control”. (They are
what})
xxii Introduction to Revised Edition
inefficient digestion and their freakish habit of eating only a single
species of bamboo. Presumably they could do this because there
was no great competitive pressure forcing them to change. In fact,
the pandas (like many im prudent people) had a niche large
enough to accommodate their quirks. No one need make any
tortuous efforts to prove that these animals’ drawbacks are really a
devious strategy providing hidden assets all the time.
Sociobiologists have claimed so insistently to be Darwin’s repre­
sentatives on this m atter that it seems worthwhile to cite here two
passages where he put his own position beyond doubt in the Origin
of Species:
Nor ought we to marvel if all the contrivances in nature be not, as far as
we can judge, absolutely perfect, and if some of them be abhorrent to our
ideas of fitness. We need not marvel at the sting of the bee causing the
bee’s own death; at drones being produced in vast numbers for one single
act, with the great majority slaughtered by their sterile sisters__ The
wonder indeed is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of the
want of absolute perfection have not been observed.6
And, thirteen years later:
As my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented, and it has been
stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural
selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of this
work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position—namely
at the close of the Introduction—the following words, “I am convinced
that natural selection has been the main, but not the exclusive means of
modification”. This has been of no avail. Great is the power of mis­
representation.7
—words as near to downright bitterness as that patient man ever
wrote.
Sociobiology, however, cannot tolerate any such admission of
complexity. Because it is essentially reductive, it insists on a single,
crude explanation for every aspect of evolution. For it, the notion
of competition as an all-powerful, incessant pressure, a quasi­
physical force explaining every development, is central. Its theorists
6. The Origin of Species, 1st edition (1859), p. 472.
7. Ibid, 6th edition (1872), p. 395. See also 1st edition pp. 46 and p. 472 (above
the passage just quoted).
 Introduction to Revised Edition xxiii
can no more leave room for any other evolutionary factor than
Marxist theorists could adm it the possibility of gradual social
reform.

The Shift to Environmental Concern

W hat else, however, has been happening to the tem per of our
age? Obviously, within the time since first publication of this book
there has been a great increase in concern for the environment,
following on a steep increase in the dangers that make that
concern necessary. (Interestingly, Wilson himself has now followed
up his earlier book Biophilia by moving largely into work on this
issue.) That change is in general surely adverse to much in the
sociobiological attitude. Environmentalism absolutely requires a
social rather than an individualist standpoint. It is m uch more
interested in co-operation than in competition. It also uses a wider
perspective which makes concentration on the hum an economic
model look oddly narrow and arbitrary. The same bias towards
co-operation seems in general to flow from the recent develop­
ments of feminism. It is true that there are some feminists who
prefer to join in the competitive frenzy on the principle of “if you
can’t beat ’em, join ’em ”. But probably they too would prefer to
move towards a less competitive world, if they saw some hope of
doing so.
Another interesting recent change is an increased attention to
extinction rates. That increase probably bears some relation to
environmental alarms. Scientists used to think that these rates had
to be gradual and constant—that the Victorian belief in cata­
strophes was contrary to reason. But this idea has given way before
evidence of disasters caused by volcanic activity or climatic changes,
possibly indeed started by impacts from outer space. That change
reinforces the general awareness of outside nature as a factor to be
respected and reckoned with. It shows still more clearly how
inadequate a purely social, competitive model is to represent the
whole vast evolutionary process.

Adm itting Our Continuity with Nature

Yet of course there are also good things in Sociobiology. It does
xxiv Introduction to Revised Edition
in principle emphasize our continuity with the rest of nature. It
resists the strange segregation of hum ans from their kindred that
has deform ed much of Enlightenm ent thought, a segregation
which has indeed terribly delayed our realization of environmental
damage itself. It can be linked, too, with increasing public concern
about the suffering we inflict on animals. This concern has grown
especially fast in the last decade, and it is interesting that Richard
Dawkins has come out in support of it.8
It is, then, surely time for the political left, and for intellectuals
in the social sciences and humanities, to see that our continuity
with nature is an im portant fact in the world, a fact quite distinct
from those objectionable ideologies—not just the sociobiological
one—that have, at one time and another, distorted and exploited
it. This distinctness between the fact of continuity itself and the
twisting of it to justify abuses is something that I have continually
tried to make clear, both in Beast and Man and in most other things
that I have written.
During the years since publication of Beast and Man, there has
certainly been some progress here. In principle, many social
scientists are now willing to admit that some aspects of hum an
behaviour do indeed flow from innate tendencies. And they see
that, if so, it may be very im portant to understand these tendencies.
Accordingly, they are beginning to find it worthwhile to take
biological evidence on such matters seriously instead of defending
their tribal frontier staunchly, as they used to, against all such
inform ation offered from outside.9*

Equality Is Not Sameness

In particular, they have begun to see that political equality does
not have to mean sameness. It does not call on us to treat each
8. For instance, in The Great Ape Project, eds Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer (St.
Martin’s Press, 1994) Chapter 7. Dawkins’s contention there is peculiar but
undoubtedly zoophilous.
9. One very helpful contribution to this enquiry is The Tangled Wing; Biological
Constraints on the Human Spirit by Melvin Konner (Heinemann, 1982). The author,
a biological anthropologist, manages to arbitrate the feud remarkably well.
 Introduction to Revised Edition xxv
person as a standard, unvarying, dough-like product at birth. What
it requires instead is that people, despite their natural differences,
should all be fairly treated. Thus, for instance over gender, there is
nothing offensive in admitting the obvious fact that our horm onal
constitution produces natural differences of temperam ent. The
offensive move comes in exalting one gender over the other—in
supposing that what is different must be worse. Different is not
worse; it is just different.10 Feminist thought does in fact admit this
difference, indeed has often celebrated it, honouring the distinc­
tive contribution of women. It seems therefore rather odd that
there is still constant controversy about this—still a dogged,
automatic habit of objecting when any new docum entation of the
natural difference comes up.
I do find this persistent, mindless kind of feuding depressing,
more especially when I happen—as I often do—to share the
practical political aims of the feuders. It is indeed in many ways very
im portant to rethink traditional notions of the relations between
men and women, and especially to help poor and disadvantaged
women. But trying to do this by arguing that women are really
indistinguishable from men is irrelevant, misguided and wasteful.
That homogenising approach to equality—so popular in the
Enlightenm ent—flows from an unrealistic attem pt to treat people
as abstract, standard social entities, divorced from nature. It
enforces the sharp division between m ind and body, between
culture and nature, between thought and feeling, which is the bad
side of our inheritance from the Age of Reason. (My book Heart
and Mind; The Varieties of Moral Experience discusses the many
troubles caused by this set of divisions.11) In m odern times Science,
because of its trem endous prestige, has been invoked to dramatize
all these splits in a way that often has little to do with any real
scientific work, but that seems to bring an unanswerable authority
10. I have discussed this issue in an article “On Not Being Afraid of Natural Sex
Differences” in Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy, eds Morwenna Griffiths and
Margaret Whitford (Macmillan 1988) and more fully in Women’s Choices;Philosophical
Problems Facing Feminism, Mary Midgley and Judith Hughes (Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1983).1
11. Methuen University Paperback 1981, St. Martin’s Press in the US.
xxvi Introduction to Revised Edition
to the side that can exploit it. This reductive move adds a damaging
warfare between the “two cultures” to the general chaos, deep­
ening the gaps already opened by specialization between different
studies and generally fragmenting the intellectual scene in a way
that wastes endless time and resources.

Issues That Persist

As I say, it was worry about these wasteful divisions that m ade me
start to write Beast and Man in the first place. Looking at the book
today, I wish it had become more out of date than it seems to have
done. O f course it contains mistakes and some things in it look
odd—for instance, the unsuspecting use of masculine nouns and
pronouns. (What changes in our language can we expect the next
decade to bring? It would save us all a lot of bother to know in
advance.) But on the large issues of entrenched distortions of
controversy, things seem only to have moved very slowly. The huge
scale of m odern academic life gives an extraordinary inertia to
attractive errors and in particular to feuds, once they are estab­
lished.
Thus, though B.F. Skinner is dead and social scientists now
disavow many of his views, the tem per of behaviorist psychology still
lingers as a ground-bass through an extraordinary range of social-
science thinking. It, like Sociobiology, has profited immensely by
claiming to be scientific, and the successive erosion of its various
claims to that title has done little to weaken its influence. So I think
that the arguments presented against it in Beast and Man can still
be useful. Again, the rise of cognitive science has extended
confidence in machine-models of the m ind in a way that has given
new life to some very old mechanistic mistakes which I discussed
there.
As for ethics, the idea of an unbridgeable conceptual gap
between facts and values no longer dominates moral philosophy.
But elsewhere its destructive influence is still very wide, so that
repair work is still needed. The emotivist and existentialist argu­
ments that I largely considered in this book are of course no longer
in fashion. But the subjectivist and relativist positions that they
expressed are still with us and have not found more intelligible
 Introduction to Revised Edition xxvii
prophets. So these older doctrines, which are at least dramatic and
clearly presented, may perhaps still provide a reasonably suitable
ground on which to tackle those views.

Postmodernism ?
More recent forms of subjectivism and relativism now mostly go
under the umbrella name of postmodernism. Some of them are
expressed in language so esoteric, so steeped in the influence of
decadent forms of Marxism and poststructuralism, that they seem
designed for academic controversy rather than for any application
to life. So perhaps it does not m atter m uch that Beast and Man—
which is written in ordinary English because it is m eant to be about
ordinary life—does not m ention them.
This is, of course, not m eant as a dismissal of everything that has
happened to come under that umbrella. The name postmodernism
is also used, more widely, for a great range of perfectly reasonable,
more or less pluralistic views, views that quite sensibly emphasize
the complexity of the world and attack simple, reductive forms of
explanation. U nder this wider umbrella my own ideas may indeed
find a place.12 But I still think that the name postmodernism is a
thoroughly noxious one. It is bad because it means nothing except
new fashion. The mistake that the post-impressionists (or their
popularizers) made in not bothering to think out what positive
cause they wanted to stand for but merely asking to be considered
different from their predecessors, has been repeated m uch too
often. Maybe the art world has to put up with it, but we don’t need
to do so on wider topics.
Modernism itself was always a jum bled notion, a confused term of
praise centring m uch more on fashion than on any particular
thesis or commitment. The idea of a single new movement that
would contradict all the various views that have been called
“m odern” has been a wild one. And now that postm odernism ’s own
faults are becoming obvious—now that we constantly hear of the
12. I have discussed the general issue of reductivism in Part Two of The Ethical
Primate and in an article called “Reductive Megalomania”, Chapter 9 of Nature’s
Imagination, ed. John Cornwell, (Oxford University Press, 1995).
xxviii Introduction to Revised Edition
need to move to “postpostm odernism ”—it does seem to be time to
drop the umbrella. We can’t go on playing this game for ever. We
need a more helpful, more specific language. We need, in fact, to
call each movement or artistic style by a name with a meaning, one
that really suits it.

Leftover Business
(1 ) EVIL
Two problems left over from Beast and Man always seemed to me
to need further treatment. The first was this very point about moral
objectivity and the reality of evil. By insisting, in my discussion of
animal nature, on lightening the fear of our natural motives, on
showing our constitution as tolerable, I ran the risk of seeming
over-optimistic, of neglecting its dark side. I needed to avoid this
danger of making morals look optional—the danger (into which
Aristode slips in his more casual moments) of suggesting that we
humans, provided we are nicely brought up, don’t really need any
morality at all___And since Nietzsche, from a very different
standpoint, had made this very suggestion—since, too, a whole raft
of popular prophets were now following him in declaring that
morality was an embarrassing and out-of-date survival—since, in
fact, mindless, dogmatic moral scepticism was the postm odern
flavour of the m onth, it seemed im portant to do something about
this.
In Heart and Mind, then, I approached this big topic by
discussing the unrealistic division between thought and feeling
which makes morality look so unworkable, and in one chapter of
that book (“On Trying O ut O ne’s New Sword”) I dealt directly with
the problem of objectivity. I then came back more fully to that
problem in Wickedness,13 and again later in Can’t We Make Moral
Judgments f14 If I were still teaching regular courses in moral

13. Routledge, 1984.

14. Bristol Press (now Duckworth) 1991, St. Martin’s Press in the US.
 Introduction to Revised Edition xxix
philosophy I would now start them with this issue, which today is
surely central.

(2) FREEDOM
The second problem was our freedom. Because we have all been
brought up on a picture of the cosmos as a vast, ineluctably-
grinding machine, any attem pt to stress our continuity with the rest
of nature tends to produce fatalism because it tends to make us feel
like cogs. Sociobiologists have openly drawn these fatalistic conclu­
sions, insisting explicitly on our helplessness. But even without
their support this tendency has been very strong for more than a
century. Out attempts to grasp the meaning of our freedom have
constantly been blocked by a guilty sense that we must not tamper
with the machine-picture because it is stamped as final by Science.
Now of course, Science today is in fact no longer fully satisfied
with the machine-picture. Physics—the original source of this
model—has found for some time that it works badly for many
purposes, and has moved on to supplem ent it by other patterns of
thought. What follows from this is not some kind of postm odern
slop, loosening all connexions of thought so that anything goes. It
is something far more interesting, namely, that there is more than one
kind of legitimate explanation. Things must be talked about in
different terms for different purposes. A botanist, a carpenter and
a forester use different concepts in talking about the same tree.
This difference does not stop them understanding one another.
But the connexions between their various sets of concepts must be
established by relating them, not by forcing a single mould of
thought onto these radically different ways of thinking. The
connexions cannot be imposed by reduction.
This has always been true, and to some extent philosophers used
to know it. But the urge to unify by reduction is immensely strong,
and, since Newton’s time, the tem ptation to do it through m odern
science has proved almost irresistible. Kant did a great deal to show
us how to resist that temptation, and more recently Wittgenstein
has done more. But the doctrines of both have been over-simplified
and straitjacketed in ways that continue to protect reducers from
their attacks. Scientific reductionism is thus still a powerful and
xxx Introduction to Revised Edition
irrational force hindering our thought about freedom and respon­
sibility, making it hard for us to accept our situation as active
citizens of the physical universe. These are the difficulties which I
have tried to discuss in my most recent book, The Ethical Primate.15

Agenda: Trouble on the Building-Site

Those five books, then, contain my central thoughts about
motivation and moral psychology—about the relation between fact
and value, between what we are actually like and how we ought to
act. This has always been my main concern. It is a big topic—so big,
in fact, that m odern specialization often makes it hard for
academics to see it at all, let alone to get funded today for thinking
about it. It is, however, a topic deeply relevant to everyday life.
Since it is also one that is quite hard to think about, it needs
professional attention as well as everyday commitment. Work on it
goes best where those two approaches are brought together.
I have myself been exceptionally lucky here in having the chance
to work in this area during a long and disorganized life, before the
present battery-egg system of academic production was brought in.
Future historians will surely find it hard to believe that this system
was actually accepted in practice—that, in this highly sophisticated
age, academic work was assessed essentially in quantitative terms,
by num ber of publications and sometimes even by num ber of pages
published.
The point is not just that this arrangem ent encourages indus­
trious mediocrity. It is that anyone, however gifted and original,
who has to keep publishing at this rate is forced to choose small
topics—usually negative ones—and to treat them at dispropor­
tionate length. Quality is indeed supposed to be kept up by
requiring publication in “reputable journals”. But the sheer mass
of print flooding out is such that most of it cannot hope to find
readers anyway. Nobody has time for such endless reading, even if
it were likely to be useful. Many journals are therefore bound to be
merely reputable cold-stores for eggs that everybody knows will
never be eaten.
15. Routledge, 1994.
 Introduction to Revised Edition xxxi
To change the metaphor, the most respectable reason that could
be given for the present system would presumably be based on an
analogy with bricks. Its defenders would claim that knowledge
comes ready packed in discrete units, each of which can best be
provided in one article by a separate researcher, while a distinct
caste of more leisured sages at the top decides how to put them
together. Now there probably are indeed some areas of “norm al
science” where things can go on for a time in this way. And it is true
that research in the sciences more often involves teamwork than it
does in the arts. But the system’s success obviously depends
crucially on a supply of high-quality sages to run the teams. How
can this supply possibly be kept up when the only training available
for aspiring sages is to work as brickmakers?
Over fifty years ago, the biologist C.H. W addington already
suggested that this supply did indeed seem to be failing and that
something ought to be done about it:
Scientists have tended to refuse to see the wood for the trees__ There
have been an army of bricklayers piling brick on brick, even plumbers
setting up super WCs, and heating and lighting engineers installing the
most modern equipment; but they have all united to shoo the architect off
the building site, and the edifice of knowledge is growing like a factory
with a furnace too big for its boilers, its precision tools installed in a room
with no lighting, and anyhow with no-one who knows what it is supposed
to manufacture.16
Have things improved since W addington’s time? They have not.
The current system, into which we have insensibly drifted, manages
to combine to a surprising extent the worst of both worlds—the
mindless pedantry that can afflict academe with the mindless
worship of quantity in productivity that infests commerce. This
system is not forced upon us by fate. It could be altered. There are
undoubtedly people somewhere who are in a position to do
something about it. It is very hard for those who are still involved
in the lower levels of the system to protest against it. But those of
us who are no longer ourselves liable to be ground to pieces in its
cogs ought surely to shout that change is needed.
16. C.H. Waddington, The Scientific Attitude (West Drayton, Penguin, 1941) p. 80.
I quoted this passage to illustrate a related point in Science as Salvation (Routledge,
1992) p. 80.
xxxii Introduction to Revised Edition
The Role of Philosophy
Contrary (then) to much academic thought today, there is
nothing unprofessional in attending to large issues. Background
thinking—large-scale conceptual engineering—and the fore­
ground thinking that deals with the details are interdependent.
Each needs the other. Large questions are unavoidably part of
professional academic business, especially (of course) of philo­
sophic business, since the general connexion of concepts is the
province of philosophy. Somebody has to attend to it. Those
scientists who today complain that philosophy is intruding in big
questions raised in the sciences are themselves engaged in doing
philosophy of science. They may do it very well, but they can’t really
expect to have so large a field entirely to themselves.17
Most useful progress in the past, both in philosophy and in the
wider reaches of other subjects, has been made by people who did
not mind starting enquiries that went beyond one area, enquiries
so large that they themselves obviously could not finish them, and
perhaps nobody else could either. Philosophers do not need (as
Geoffrey Warnock once put it) to keep biting off much less than
they can chew. Over-specialization here has been harmful, as I tried
to make clear in Wisdom, Information and Wonder.18 Correspond­
ingly, in Evolution As A Religion19 and Science As Salvation20 I have
pointed out how the unwillingness of specialized scientists to
attend critically to the wider, imaginative penum bra of their ideas
has led to some very odd myths coming to be accepted as part of
science.
The dangers of today’s grotesque academic over-specializations
are, I think, now beginning to be realized. Efforts are certainly

17. For instance, Steven Weinberg in a chapter called “Against Philosophy”

(Chapter 7 of his book Dreams of a Final Theory, Hutchinson Radius, 1993). See also
Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Sience (Faber and Faber, 1992) pp. xiii and
106.
18. Routledge, 1989.
19. Methuen, 1985.
20. Routledge, 1992.
 Introduction to Revised Edition xxxiii
being made to set up better interdisciplinary co-operation. I hope
that from both sides—from the humanities and the sciences and
from many different branches of both—younger and more gifted
people will be able to carry on these kinds of enquiry which (in
ways whose inadequacies I entirely realise) I have been trying to
pursue for the last twenty years.
 Introduction to First Edition
We are not ju st rather like animals; we are animals. O ur dif­
ference from other species may be striking, but com parisons
with them have always been, and m ust be, crucial to ou r view of
ourselves. This is a general book about how such com parisons
work and why they are im portant. T he gap between m an and
other animals comes, I believe, in a slightly different place from
the one where tradition puts it, as well as being rather narrow er.
T he traditional view has certainly distorted argum ent in ethics
and may have caused mistakes about the possibilities open to
hum anity.
Many people dislike using concepts evolved for talking about
anim al behavior to describe the hum an scene. T he first use of
such concepts, however, is the uncontroversial one of telling us
m ore about animals themselves. This knowledge alone directly
alters our idea of m an, because that idea has been fram ed, tra­
ditionally, by contrast with a profoundly ignorant and confused
idea of other species. We can now do som ething to correct this
ignorance and confusion. T he kind of animal that careful obser­
vation shows us does not seem by any m eans so obviously incom ­
parable with m en as the travesty we are used to.
Still, people have a lot of obvious and im portant things that
other species do not—speech, rationality, culture, and the rest.
Com parison m ust deal with these. I have tried to discuss some of
the most im portant of them , not attem pting at all to deny their
 Introduction to First Edition xxxv
uniqueness, but merely to grasp how they can occur in what is,
after all, a prim ate species, not a brand of machine or a type of
disem bodied spirit. I have tried to show these capabilities as
continuous with our animal nature, connected with our basic
structure of motives.
Obviously, this attem pt m ust invade the territory of a dozen
subjects. But the project still belongs to philosophy, because
finding how the basic concepts of any inquiry work is a
philosophical problem . O f course this does not m ean that a
philosopher m ust always be brought in to do it. Scientists of the
caliber of Newton or Darwin do their own philosophizing. And
we all, in our thinking, work out to some extent our own system
of concepts. Philosophy, like speaking prose, is som ething we
have to do all our lives, well or badly, w hether we notice it or not.
W hat usually forces us to notice it is conflict. And on the m atter
of our anim al nature a pretty mess of conflicts has arisen—
between different elem ents in the common-sense tradition, be­
tween com m on sense and various learned studies, am ong those
learned studies themselves, and between all these and the re­
m arkable facts turned up by those who, in the last few decades,
have taken the trouble to observe dispassionately the behavior of
other species.
I first entered this jungle m yself some time ago, by slipping
out over the wall of the tiny arid garden cultivated at that time
u n der the nam e of British M oral Philosophy. I did so in an
attem pt to think about hum an nature and the problem of evil.
T he evils in the world, I thought, are real. T hat they are so is
neither a fancy im posed on us by our own culture, nor one
created by our will and im posed on the world. Such suggestions
are bad faith. W hat we shall abom inate is not optional. Culture
certainly varies the details, but then we can criticize our culture.
W hat standard do we use for this? W hat is the underlying struc­
ture of hum an nature which culture is designed to com plete and
express? In this tangle of questions I found some clearings being
worked by Freudian and Jungian psychologists, on principles
that seem ed to offer hope but were not quite clear to me. O ther
areas were being m apped by anthropologists, who seemed to
have some interest in my problem , but who were inclined (at that
xxxvi Introduction to First Edition
time) to say that what hum an beings had in com m on was not in
the end very im portant; that the key to all the mysteries did lie in
culture. T his seemed to me shallow. It is because our culture is
changing so fast, because it does not settle everything, that we
need to go into these questions. W hat shapes, and what ought to
shape, culture? I then came upon another clearing, this time an
expansion of the borders of traditional zoology, m ade by people
studying the natures o f other species. They had done m uch
work on the question of what such a nature was— recent work in
the tradition of Darwin, and indeed of Aristotle, bearing directly
on problem s in which Aristotle was already interested, but which
have become peculiarly pressing today. W hat I found here
seem ed to me, and still seems, enorm ously im portant, though
there are great difficulties in connecting it neatly with other
things we know, without being slick and oversimple. T his book is
an attem pt to work out some of these connections.
I have tried to write without technical term s. Because so many
disciplines border the topic, I think it m ust necessarily be dis­
cussed in plain language. This is not at all a piece o f condescen­
sion, a translation of learned m atter into rougher and less suit­
able terms. Each subject evolves technical language to suit its own
assum ptions. These may well be good enough to use within that
subject, and still serve badly for relating it to its neighbors. O n
very general questions of m ethod, therefore, it is im portant to
force oneself to write and speak plain English. As everyone used
to the academic scene knows, the boundaries between subjects
recognized at any time have grown up partly by chance—they
com m em orate strong pioneering personalities, bits of teaching
convenience, even the flow of research money, as well as real
principles o f investigation. T he true structure of the problem s
may cut right across them .
But besides this general consideration there is a special one
about discussions of motives. Like many areas of m oral philoso­
phy, this is ground already fam iliar to com m on sense. M aking
up a term inology here is not at all like m aking one up for
biochemistry or nuclear physics. T he facts are not new. People
have been trying to understand their own and other people’s
motives for thousands of years. T hey have thrashed out quite a
 Introduction to First Edition xxxvii
sophisticated term inology, namely, the one we use every day. O f
course it needs refining and expanding, but to by-pass it and
start again as if it were all ignorant babble is arrogant and waste­
ful. B. F. Skinner has dem anded a brand-new technical language
for psychology, on the ground that “the vernacular is clumsy
and obese.”1 W hat elegant slimness technical language may pos­
sess, however, is bought at the price of reinforcing prejudice.
Jargon always tends to make unwelcome facts unstatable. We
can all see this when we look at other people’s jargon. It is ju st as
true of our own. In this book, I have used a few technical term s
in ethology12 because I am talking about them ; they stand for
concepts that are useful to all of us, but new, and they need
explaining. Some of them are, in any case, entering common
language. A part from them , I try to stick to ordinary speech.
Consideration of motives brings up the m atter o f free will. I
had better say at once, that my project of taking anim al com pari­
sons seriously does not involve a slick mechanistic or determ inis­
tic view of freedom . Animals are not machines; one of my main
concerns is to com bat this notion. Actually only machines are
machines. N othing else is m ade by hum an beings from parts and
for purposes entirely supplied by themselves. N othing else
therefore can be understood simply by reading off those parts
and purposes from the specifications. T he model of com parison
with machines is useful enough in some simple anim al contexts,
notably for explaining insect behavior. At any higher level it is
an incubus. T he motivation of the m ore advanced creatures is
enorm ously m ore complex than the tradition supposes. T hat is
why it can, as I am suggesting, throw light on hum an motives.
But understanding and explaining motives does not com ­
prom ise freedom ; nor does even predicting acts necessarily do
so. A person seriously com m itted to a political cause may vote
predictably, and intelligibly, in an election. He does not vote less
1. See The Behavior of Organisms (New York, 1938), p. 7.
2. The term ethology, first coined by Konrad Lorenz and his followers to de­
scribe their own studies of animal behavior, and disowned by some who dis­
agreed with him, is now quite generally used for all systematic animal behavior
studies. The convenience of having this single word, together with some pro­
gress in settling disputes, make this use helpful, and I shall follow it.
xxxviii Introduction to First Edition
freely than someone who flips a coin at the last m inute. So if we
find com parison with animals any help in understanding
motives, it will not m ean that conduct is not free. And since
animals are not (as Descartes supposed) autom ata, the issue of
freedom does not m ake com paring man with other species a
degrading irrelevance.
Man has his own nature, not that of any other species. He
cannot, therefore, be degraded by com parison, if it is careful
and honest, because it will bring out his peculiarities, it will show
what is unique about him as well as what is not.3 Certainly he is
more free than other species. But that extra freedom flows from
som ething natural to him —his special kind of intelligence and
the character traits that go with it. It is not, and does not have to
be, unlim ited. (In fact, unlim ited freedom is an incoherent no­
tion.) It is not som ething added by his own will after birth, or by
some external force called culture.
A very recent controversy closely related to this them e has
changed the scope and balance of my book. I had com pleted the
first draft before I came across Edw ard O. W ilson’s rem arkable
tome, Sociobiology,4 and the suggestion arose that I should add
some com m ents on it.
W hat Wilson says on many points rounds out and completes
adm irably what I want to say. O n others I differ from him
sharply. Both the agreem ent and the difference light up my theme.
His book is an immensely com prehensive survey of social life
throughout the animal kingdom . T he determ ined combination
of breadth with scholarly thoroughness is most impressive. Be­
cause it is so encyclopedic, because it bears hallm arks of
academic respectability unm istakable to the most obtuse, it has
got through even to many of those who still persisted in believ­
ing that the study of social behavior in animals was som ething
3. For further criticism and a line on the controversies now current, see R. A.
Hinde’s works listed in the bibliography. Opposition to Lorenz’s line may be
found there, also in T. C. Schneirla’s paper “Some Conceptual Trends in Com­
parative Psychology” {Psychological Bulletin, No’c 1952), and at a popular level in
Ashley Montagu’s works. But I think we should probably trade off Montagu
against Robert Ardrey, stop squabbling, and take it that we are all trying to
discuss the same world.
4. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).
 Introduction to First Edition xxxix
thought up on a Saturday afternoon by Robert A rdrey. On the
other hand, the book has run into opposition of a political kind
from people who believe that any notion of inborn active and
social tendencies, if extended to man, threatens hum an free­
dom.
I take this opposition extrem ely seriously; I believe it to be
thoroughly misconceived, and very dangerous to hum an free­
dom itself. T he notion that we “have a nature,” far from
threatening the concept of freedom , is absolutely essential to it.
If we were genuinely plastic and indeterm inate at birth, there
could be no reason why society should not stam p us into any
shape that m ight suit it. T he reason people view suggestions
about inborn tendencies with such indiscrim inate h o rror seems
to be that they think exclusively of one particular way in which
the idea of such tendencies has been misused, namely, that
where conservative theorists invoke them uncritically to resist
reform . But liberal theorists who combat such resistance need
them ju st as much, and indeed usually m ore. T he early ar­
chitects of our current notion of freedom m ade hum an nature
their cornerstone. Rousseau’s trum pet call, “Man is born free,
but everywhere he is in chains,”5 makes sense only as a descrip­
tion of our innate constitution as som ething positive, already
determ ined, and conflicting with what society does to us. Kant
and Mill took similar positions. And Marx, though he officially
dropped the notion of hum an nature and often attacked the
term , relied on the idea as much as anybody else for his crucial
notion of Dehum anization.
People have been strangely determ ined to take genetic and
social explanations as alternatives instead of using them to com ­
plete each other. Com bining them without talking nonsense is
therefore by now fearfully hard work. But there is no future in
refusing to try, and no value in starting a game of cops-and-
robbers w henever anybody else does. Wilson works from the
zoologist’s angle, and is often naive in his use of general con­
cepts. T he cure for this shortcom ing is not to abuse him for
trying, but to do the job better. He speaks not ju st for himself,
5. Social Contract. Bk. 1, chap. 1.
xl Introduction to First Edition
but for a m ultitude of scientifically trained people who want to
extend the m ethods they know over a wider territory. W here
these m ethods help, others should accept them ; where they do
not, people should show why. No dogfights are called for. As far
as academic territory is concerned, it has to be adm itted that
Wilson asks for trouble by offering to take over ethics and psy­
chology as part of his subject on his way to putting the “bio” into
sociology. (“Having cannibalized psychology, the new
neurobiology will yield an enduring set of first principles for
sociology”— p. 575.) But then, those concerned with all these
subjects have for some time asked for trouble themselves by
grossly neglecting the genetic angle. They cannot really com ­
plain if somebody tries to fill the vacuum they leave.
W here politics is concerned, however, Wilson offers no griev­
ance at all. For every political purpose, but particularly for re­
form ing and revolutionary ones, we need to understand our
genetic constitution.6 T he notion that reform ers can do without
this understanding is a bizarre tactical aberration, closely com­
parable to that of the Christian church in the nineteenth century
when it rejected the theory of evolution—and indeed rather like
its similar rejection of Galileo in the seventeenth. In both these
cases, the church exhausted, distorted, and discredited itself in
order to com bat a quite im aginary danger. Most Christians today
readily accept that the earth does not have to be in the m iddle of
the universe, and that God, if he could create life at all, could do
it just as well through evolution as by instant fiat. Many would
add that this m ore complex and organic perform ance is the
greater miracle. They have not for some time needed to retain,
as a literal statem ent of fact, the story in Genesis 1 and 2, which,
besides contradicting itself, contradicts many other things that
clearly have to be believed. N either do reform ers and revo­
lutionaries now need to retain the dogm a that m an is indeterm i­
nate. In fact, they need it like a hole in the head. T hat dogm a, in
its sociological form , where it says that m an is entirely the prod­
uct of his society, must, as I have suggested, destroy all the
6. A point admirably and sympathetically made by Theodosius Dobzhansky in
discussing the ambiguities of inherit {Mankind Evolving [New Haven, 1962], chap.
2 ).
 Introduction to First Edition xli
central argum ents for freedom . In its Existentialist form , where
it says that we create ourselves out of nothing, it does not make
sense.
These som ewhat sweeping rem arks merely sketch in tele­
graphic form points I shall be discussing at length in this book. I
am taking both W ilson’s position and the argum ents brought
against him seriously. As to the opposition, I adm it to some
personal concern. Like most people who have spent time and
caught colds on plenty of leftwing dem onstrations, I am un­
happy when I see the com rades tearing off down a useless blind
alley. T here are real things in the world that require their atten­
tion. W hat should trouble everybody, however, is the waste and
distraction caused by such futile contentiousness. T he strange
habit of m isrepresenting one’s opponent’s statem ents in order to
prove that he does indeed belong to the dreaded opposition has
been carried to extraordinary lengths against W ilson.7 T here is
plenty w rong with his book, and what is w rong can be
answ ered—although answ ering it does involve some hard think­
ing. T here is also plenty right. Wilson, originally an expert on
insect populations, does have a bias toward noticing inherited
tendencies and ignoring causes that operate after birth. But that
bias is overdue as a counter to its opposite. And he repeatedly
explains that he does recognize the im portance of social condi­
tioning in man. Indeed he even tries to explain it, and that gets
him into even m ore trouble.
Every attack on him I have seen protests strongly at his saying
that “hum an beings are absurdly easy to indoctrinate; they seek
it,” and “m en would rather believe than know” (Sociobiology, p.
562). Now this seems simply to be an explicit statem ent of the
force o f social conditioning, which is the very fact he is accused
of neglecting. People are indeed very easily indoctrinated by
their societies. T hat is what makes their nature so m uch harder
to study than that of other species. But anyone who holds that
we really have no nature is surely forced to believe that we are, not
just absurdly, but infinitely easy to indoctrinate, since we can have
7. Those interested in this melancholy subject can find some of the material in
question in BioScience, 26 (1976), no. 3 (“Sociobiology—Another Biological De­
terminism”), and in the letters column of The New York Review of Books,
November 13, 1976.
xlii Introduction to First Edition
no inborn tendencies that either deflect or resist the process. No
doubt the word indoctrinate sounds harsh. For the norm al busi­
ness of cultural acclimatization we m ight choose a m ilder one,
keeping indoctrinate for the instilling of false opinions. But
then—as everyone not wholly satisfied with the present state of
the world m ust surely agree—people do very often hold false
opinions. T here are many iniquitous and confused societies
around, kept going by the fact that people do absorb without
criticism the beliefs of those around them. They would not do so
if they did not feel the need for some sort of belief, or if they did
not m ind disagreeing with everyone in sight, or if they insisted
on clear proof before they ever accepted a suggestion. Wilson
simply points out that there is a general hum an tendency to pick
up any belief that is current. He does not say that it is irresistible.
But it certainly is one thing that has to be assum ed to explain
social conditioning. And it becomes especially relevant when
people are perpetuating a bad society, one which fails to “re­
w ard” them with anything m ore palpable than the sense that
they are agreeing with their neighbors and are supporting the
honored status quo. Yet (as Wilson says) this same openness and
suggestibility in us is a necessary condition of our building up
any sort o f culture. It is natural and useful. Acknowledging this
does not com m it us to saying that it is irresistible, or that it ought
never to be resisted, or that it is the only tendency we have in
relation to culture, or that it is always a good thing. Just what it
does commit us to is the kind of question I shall be asking in this
book.
In Part O ne I shall look at the suggestion that m an is so dif­
ferent from other species as not to have a nature at all. I shall ask
what this can mean. I shall try to size up the difficulties of think­
ing straight about the species barrier, and to clean up awkward
concepts like Instinct, Purpose, and N ature itself. I conclude
that, if we understand it properly, the acknow ledgm ent that we
have a nature does not harm hum an dignity.
In Part Two I ask how this nature ought to be studied. H ere
we have to consider the generous offer of Wilson and other
biologists to take over the job. Many people share his suspicion
that any decent inquiry is a part of some physical science, and
 Introduction to First Edition xliii
ought to be conducted as such. I shall point out how m uch hard
background thinking we need here which is not part of science
itself, though it is necessary if science is to be properly done, and
is itself “scientific” in the sense of being disciplined, methodical,
and appropriate. I then dem onstrate this point practically by
clearing up a tangle of concepts, am ong them “the selfish gene”
and “inclusive genetic fitness,” which spoil W ilson’s useful book
and retard the general understanding of evolution.
In Part T hree, I turn to the practical consequences. Can our
understanding of our nature affect our lives? I look at the puz­
zling but deep-rooted notion of a fixed Upward direction in
evolution. Social Darwinists and “evolutionary m oralists” have
hoped to use this as a direct practical guide. But the facts of
evolution cannot guide us directly. They m atter only insofar as
they can help us to understand our nature, our em otional and
rational constitution. Yet our understanding of that does give us
practical guidance. Facts about it are directly relevant to values.
Values register needs. It is a mistake to suppose that there is
some logical barrier, convicting such thinking of a “naturalistic
fallacy” (Chapter 9). We are not, and do not need to be, disem ­
bodied intellects. We are creatures of a definite species on this
planet, and this shapes our values.
Part Four is really the core of the book. T here I take it for
granted that the general notion of our having a nature has been
vindicated, and consider the relation of its various parts. I look
at the traditional m arks of man, such as speech, rationality, and
culture, and try to show how we m ight view them , not as alien or
hostile to the underlying em otional structure in which we so
m uch resemble other species, but as growing out of and com plet­
ing it. Reason and Emotion are not antagonists.
Part Five is a brief conclusion, pointing the way to further
work. T here I bulldoze, somewhat hastily, some m ore of the
fences that have been held to prevent our seeing ourselves as in
any serious sense a part of the biosphere in which we find o u r­
selves, with the idea of showing how fatal—to our real dignity as
well as to our survival—m ust be any insistence on radical isola­
tion. I conclude that m an can neither be understood nor saved
alone.
Mary Midgley 1980
Part One
CONCEPTUAL PROBLEMS
OF AN UNUSUAL SPECIES
The broad-backed hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Though he seems so firm to us,
He is merely flesh and blood.
Flesh and blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail,
For it is based upon a rock.
—T. S. Eliot, The Hippopotamus

DOI: 10.4324/9780203380192-1
C H A PT E R 1

Have We a Nature?
Understanding Our Motives
Every age has its pet contradictions. T hirty years ago, we used
to accept M arx and Freud together, and then w onder, like the
cham eleon on the turkey carpet, why life was so confusing.
Today there is similar trouble over the question w hether there
is, or is not, som ething called H um an Nature. On the one hand,
there has been an explosion of animal behavior studies, and
com parisons between animals and men have become immensely
popular. People use evidence from animals to decide w hether
m an is naturally aggressive, or naturally territorial; even
w hether he has an aggressive or territorial instinct. M oreover,
we are still m uch influenced by Freudian psychology, which de­
pends on the notion of instinct.1 On the other hand, many
sociologists and psychologists still hold what may be called the
Blank Paper view, that m an is a creature entirely without in­
stincts. So do Existentialist philosophers. If m an has no instincts,
all com parison with animals must be irrelevant. (Both these sim­
ple party lines have been somewhat eroded over time, but both
are still extrem ely influential.) 1
1. For Freud’s own discussion of this term, see his paper “Instincts and Their
Vicissitudes,” 1915, Complete Psychological Works, Tr. and ed. James Strachey et al.
(London, 1948-1974), Vol. 14. For a good modern revision of Freudian views in
relation to ethology, see Anthony Storr, Human Aggression (New York, 1968). I
discuss instincts further myself in Chap. 3.

DOI: 10.4324/9780203380192-2
Conceptual Problems of an Unusual Species
According to the Blank Paper view, m an is entirely the p rod­
uct of his culture. He starts off infinitely plastic, and is form ed
completely by the society in which he grows up. T here is then no
end to the possible variations am ong cultures; what we take to be
hum an instincts are ju st the deep-dug prejudices of our own
society. Form ing families, fearing the dark, and jum ping at the
sight of a spider are ju st results of our conditioning. Existen­
tialism at first appears a very different standpoint, because the
Existentialist asserts m an’s freedom and will not let him call him ­
self a product of anything. But Existentialism too denies that
m an has a nature; if he had, his freedom would not be complete.
T hus Sartre insisted that “there is no hum an nature. . . . Man
first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world, and
defines him self afterwards. If man as the Existentialist sees him
is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will
not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes
him self.”2 For Existentialism there is only the hum an condition,
which is what happens to man and not what he is born like. If we
are afraid of the dark, it is because we choose to be cowards; if
we care m ore for our own children than for other people’s, it is
because we choose to be partial. We must never talk about
hum an nature or hum an instincts. This implicit m oral notion is
still very influential, not at all confined to those who use the
metaphysic of essence and existence. So I shall sometimes speak
of it, not as Existentialist, but as Libertarian—m eaning that those
holding it do not just (like all of us) think liberty im portant, but
think it suprem ely im portant and believe that our having a na­
ture would infringe it.
Philosophers have not yet m ade much use of inform ed com ­
parison with other species as a help in the understanding of
man. O ne reason they have not is undoubtedly the fear of
fatalism. A nother is the appalling way term s such as instinct and
human nature have been misused in the past. A third is the absur­
dity of some ethological propaganda.
About the fear of fatalism I shall not say much, because it
seems to me quite misplaced here. T he genetic causes of hum an
2. Existentialism and Humanism, tr. Philip Mairet (London, 1958), p. 28.
 Have We a Nature?
behavior need not be seen as overw helm ing any m ore than the
social causes. Either set would be alarm ing if treated as predes­
tined to prevail. But no one is com m itted to doing that by adm it­
ting that both sets exist. Knowing that I have a naturally bad
tem per does not make me lose it. On the contrary, it should help
me to keep it, by forcing me to distinguish my norm al peevish­
ness from m oral indignation. My freedom , therefore, does not
seem to be particularly threatened by the admission, nor by any
light cast on the m eaning of my bad tem per by com parison with
animals.
As for words such as instinct, drive and the nature of a species,
ethologists have done a great deal of work here toward cleaning
up what was certainly a messy corner of language. Much m ore is
needed, and I shall try to do a little of it. Such words must
somehow be reorganized, not ju st throw n away. T hey are neces­
sary if we are to talk either about other species or about our own.
As for the bizarre uses that have sometimes been m ade of
ethology, if we were to veto every science that has some lunatic
exponents, we could quickly em pty the libraries. W hat we m ust
do in such cases is sort out the wheat from the chaff, and particu­
larly observe ju st what sort of argum ent each point belongs to,
what job it is doing. R. A. H inde, a particularly fair and patient
ethologist, rem arks that in the present state of his science, “Su­
perficial generalizations of wide validity and precise ones of lim­
ited scope are com plem entary to each other, and both are neces­
sary”.3 He can say that again, and (as he obviously intends) with­
out any offensive flavor to the word “superficial.” Ethology is
still being mapped. It is at the “descriptive phase.” W hatever we
are studying, it is universally agreed, we have to describe it suffi­
ciently before we can usefully experim ent on it. A nd the “de­
scriptive phase” of any science is not som ething to be hurried
through by blindly “collecting facts,” ready-m ade, as a matchbox
collector gathers matchboxes. It is m ore a time for hard
thinking—for inventing concepts. What counts as a fact depends on
the concepts you use, on the questions you ask. If som eone buys
stamps, what is going on can be described as “buying stam ps,” or
3. Animal Behavior (New York, 1966), p. 8.
Conceptual Problems of an Unusual Species
as the pushing of a coin across a board and the receiving of
paper in retu rn —or as a set of m uscular contractions—or one of
stim ulus-response reactions—or a social interaction involving
role-playing—or a piece of dynamics, the m ere m ovem ent of
physical masses—or an economic exchange—or a piece of p ru ­
dence, typical of the buyer. None of these is the description.
T here is no neutral term inology. So there are no wholly neutral
facts. All describing is classifying according to some conceptual
scheme or other. We need concepts in order to pick out what
m atters for our present purpose from the jum ble of experience,
and to relate it to the other things that m atter in the world.
T here is no single set of all-purpose “scientific” concepts which
can be used for every job. D ifferent inquiries make different
selections from the world. So they need different concepts.
People may still wonder, however, why we should need, for
understanding hum an life, concepts developed to describe ani­
mal behavior. Perhaps I can best bring out the reason by glanc­
ing at a problem we often have when we try to understand
hum an m otivation—the shortage of suitable conceptual
schemes.
Consider the case of someone (call him Paul) who buys a house
with an acre of land, though he can scarcely afford it, instead of
one without. How should we describe this “scientifically”? W hat
should we say he is doing? Plenty of economic descriptions are
available. He m ight be m eaning to grow turnips to sell or to
supply his household; he m ight be speculating for resale, or
buying as an investm ent or as a hedge against inflation. It is
interesting that even at this stage, where all the alternatives are
economic, we already need to know his motive in order to decide
am ong them . T he “facts” of the particular transaction are not
enough to classify it, or explain it, even economically, unless they
include motives.4 (Motives, of course, are not just his private
states of m ind, but patterns in his life, many of which are directly
observable to other people.) We cannot say what he is doing until
we know why he does it.
4. The question what “facts” are is not so simple as it might look. See pp. 110,
178 (note).
 Have We a Nature?
Now, what happens if the motives are not economic? Paul, it
turns out, is not trying to make money out of the land at all.
W hen asked, he says that he bought it to secure his privacy. He
hates being overlooked by strangers. As his whole conduct is
consistent with this, we believe him. Besides believing, however,
we still need to understand this motive. T hat is, we want to see
how it fits into the background of his life, and of hum an life
generally.
Shall we accept a simple Marxist interpretation, that he is
showing off his riches to establish his class status? This will not
get us far. O f course people do show off for that reason. But
merely saying so does not account for the particular form s show­
ing off takes. T he ostentatious rich buy big cars, because those
are what most people would like to have if they could. They do
not usually display their status by burning themselves to death
on piles of paper money in the streets. And it is the basic taste
that we are trying to understand. Explaining motives by ostenta­
tion is always producing a box with another box inside it. We
m ust ask next; why display that? This was the weakness of Thors-
tein Veblen’s view of art as conspicuous expenditure to im press
the populace. As later and m ore subtle Marxists have pointed
out, if art is to be worth displaying, it has to have a real point in
the first place.5 O f course a particular ostentatious person can
display things he sees no point in. Whole groups within a society
may do it; many Romans thus collected Greek art. But this is still
parasitical. It depends on acknowledging the authority of people
who do see the point, and treating them as the norm . It needs
too, I think, an explicit doctrine that the thing itself actually
is valuable, with reasons given. Thus, the more people explicitly
praise pictures, or horses, or yachts, or abbeys to pray for one’s
soul, the m ore likely other people with no genuine taste for these
things are to want them . But this wanting is a by-product of the
praise. It is not what the praise itself is about. Ostentation, in
fact, is just one of the cure-all political explanations which
people produce for motives and which tu rn out circular. The
5. For example, Ernst Fischer in The Necessity of Art, tr. Anna Bostock (Pen­
guin, 1963).
Conceptual Problems of an Unusual Species
most central case is power. T he desire for power is necessarily
secondary to other desires, because power is power to do certain
things, and valuing those things has to come first. Those who
really pursue power just for its own sake are neurotics, entan­
gled in confusion by habit and destroying their own lives. Hobbes
realized this:
So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all man­
kind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth
only in Death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a
more intensive delight than he has already attained to; or that he cannot
be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the
power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acqui­
sition of more.6
This puts power in its place as an insurance. But Hobbes still
made it central and probably never realized how m uch this circu­
lar psychology limited the value of his political theory. I suspect
that M arx’s position was similar. Nietzsche, when he m ade the
Will to Power a prim ary motive, did try to give it a m ore direct
m eaning. He thought of power as straightforw ard dom inance
over other people—indeed, m ore specifically still, delight in
torm enting th em 7—which is certainly clearer, but happens to be
false, except of psychopaths.
Now Paul certainly m ight be just being ostentatious, buying
land he did not want, solely because he saw other rich men doing
so. But if so, his case would be a parasitical one, and we should
need to shift our attention, if we wanted to understand the m o­
tive, to some rich man who actually did want the stuff. This same
consideration works even more strongly against another equally
fashionable, and m ore respected, shortcut, the notion of con­
6. Leviathan, Pt. 1, chap. 11. The character of Widmerpool in Anthony
Powell’s series The Music of Time is a splendid study of someone who “cannot be
content with a moderate power,” having really decided, as Powell says, to “live by
the will.” The philosopher who is most reliably clear on the point that power is
only a waiting room for actuality is Aristotle.
7. See, for example, The Genealogy of Morals, tr. Walter Kaufmann, Essay 2,
sec. 6, end, where he makes the totally false claim that “apes... in devising
bizarre cruelties anticipate man and are, as it were, his prelude.” Also Beyond
Good and Evil, sec. 229. Nietzsche always regarded the fascination with power as a
sign of strength, though it seems quite as plausible to say, with Hobbes, that it is a
sign of weakness.
 Have We a Naturel
formity. He bought it, some say, because his society had con­
ditioned him to value it. Now (again) some people certainly are
so distractedly conventional that they will do almost anything to
be like the neighbors. But their existence depends on having
neighbors who are not like them , who make positive suggestions.
If the neighbors too did not care what they did apart from
conform ing, there would be nobody to generate the standards
that everybody conform s to. Society is not a subsistent Being, a
creative divinity. Not everybody can always be at the receiving
end of culture.
Paul, we will say, knows what he is doing, to the extent that
what moves him actually is the motive he mentions, not his class
or society. Indeed, both may disapprove of what he does, and he
him self may even be rather puzzled by his motive, in the sense
that its strength surprises him, and that it is not explicitly linked
to his value system.8 In this sense, he does not quite know what
he is doing. He needs further understanding of what his motive
means or am ounts to. We all have motives sometimes that put us
in this quandary, which is why we badly need to understand our
motives better.
His motive then really is the wish for privacy. He “hates being
overlooked by strangers.”
I have picked this motive because it is one on which all the
main traditional theories of motive are particularly unhelpful—a
fact that may well leave Paul, if he is an educated fellow, puzzled,
defensive, and even somewhat asham ed of its force. Freud does
supply us with the notions of voyeurism and exhibitionism. But
these are positive tastes. How will they explain anybody’s dislike
of being looked at? Certainly there could be an inversion here, a
ho rror of sex. If someone has a m orbid and excessive fear of
being looked at, we m ight suspect that it linked up with a distur­
bance of his sexual life, and there would be ways to check this
suspicion. But perfectly norm al people want privacy; indeed,
everybody sometimes does so unless he is a gravely deranged
exhibitionist. And since we do not need (as Freud did) to balance
a contem porary concealm ent of sex by dragging it forcibly into
8. Such a situation can be seen in the U.S.S.R., where the demand for country
houses, though ideologically incorrect, is still strong.
Conceptual Problems of an Unusual Species
every explanation, we can ask dispassionately w hether there is
evidence for a sexual motive of any explanatory value. This must
be som ething more than the m ere sexual aspect which (as F reu­
dians rightly point out) most motivation can be found to have if
you really look for it. All the main strands of hum an
m otivation—affection, fear, aggression, dom inance, sex,
laziness—pervade our lives and have some influence in shaping
all our actions. Sexual behavior itself can obviously have its ag­
gressive, frightened, or dom ineering aspect. But sexual motiva­
tion does not seem to help us in understanding the notion of
privacy.
F reud’s weakness here can be seen in his startlingly perverse
and insensitive way of interpreting the nightm are of his patient
the W olf M an.9 As a child of five or less, this man had dream ed
that, as he lay in bed, his window fell open of its own accord,
and he saw six or seven white wolves standing in the walnut tree
outside and staring at him intently. Freud ruled that this dream
was not a dream about being stared at at all, but about staring,
and that it stood for a (hypothetical) occasion when the child
m ust have watched his parents m aking love. It does not m atter
m uch here that F reud’s preferred view was probably wrong,
since the W olf Man, as a Russian aristocrat, not a middle-class
Viennese, would not have been sharing his parents’ bedroom .
W hat m atters is F reud’s overlooking the distinct and primitive
horror of being stared at. T he patient em phasized two things
about his dream , which, he said, “m ade the greatest im pression
on him, First, the perfect stillness and immobility of the wolves,
and secondly, the strained attention with which they looked at
him .”10 Both these things Freud simply transm uted into their
opposites. T he stillness, he said, must be regarded as standing,
contrariwise, for “the most violent m otion,” namely that of the
copulating parents, and the attention had to be that of the child
him self staring at them . By these principles of interpretation,
anything can, quite literally, m ean anything.
In citing Freud at his least helpful I do not m ean to travesty
9. See The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud, ed. Muriel Gardiner (Penguin, 1973).
10. Ibid., pp. 196-198.
 Have We a Nature?
him. O f course he was often m ore sensible than this. But on
many puzzling topics, many whole areas of life, he had really
nothing helpful to say, because he was not interested in them for
themselves at all, only in using them to round out a particular
view of sex. And in considering many of these, parallels with
other species can be helpful. Staring is one such case. It m ight
seem a small m atter, but it is part of a most im portant com plex.11
Being stared at produces ho rror widely, not only in man, but
in a great range of animal species. In most social creatures, a
direct stare constitutes an open threat. Norm al social approaches
to those one does not know well always proceed somewhat indi­
rectly, with various form s of greeting to show one’s friendly
intentions, interspersed with intervals of turning away and ap­
pearing occupied with som ething else. And eye contact in p ar­
ticular is at first limited to brief glances, often broken off and
renewed. To stare steadily while you approach someone, or to
stand still staring after he has seen you, is as direct a threat as can
be made. Why this should be so is an interesting field for inquiry.
It may well have som ething to do with the fact that predators
naturally stare fixedly at prospective prey before jum ping on it.
And they are of course regarding it as an object, not as a possible
friend—which is just the effect a direct stare conveys to a hum an
being. W hatever the cause, so strong and so general is this ten­
dency that a num ber of species have been able to exploit it by
developing eyelike spots on their bodies, with which they
frighten off their enemies. Many species of butterfly have sepa­
rately developed detailed and lifelike eye-spots on their wings.
Displaying these effectively frightens off predators, some of
which never attack such a butterfly again. And this effect has
been shown to vary according to how closely the spots actually
resemble eyes.1112 H um an beings, of course, deliberately produce
a similar device by painting eyes on things. “Staring eyes have a
threatening effect, and spellbinding eye-spots are therefore
widely used as protective devices on uniform s, ships, houses and
11. Claustrophobia and agoraphobia are other examples. They, too, seem to
be primarily disorders of our spatial orientation.
12. See Niko Tinbergen, Curious Naturalists (New York, 1968), pp. 157-171.
Conceptual Problems of an Unusual Species
the like.” 13 Also in advertisem ents. But because pictures stay still,
we are not so much upset by their staring. W hen a live hum an
being does it, it is most unnerving. Those stared at often feel as
much attacked as if they had been actually abused or hit. This is
not a cultural m atter. I have seen a cheerful baby eight m onths
old burst into tears and rem ain inconsolable for some time on
being stared fixedly at by strange aunts, although the aunts were
only vaguely curious and absentm inded. Dogs too, as is well
known, can be “stared down.” People sometimes take this as
evidence that they recognize men as their superiors, but all it
actually shows is that, if you exhibit hostility to someone smaller
than yourself, he will dislike it and probably go away. Dogs do
not stare at each other except in the challenge to a fight, when
the stare appears, along with the obligatory slow, steady ap­
proach, the growl, and the bristling hair, as a natural expression
of hostility. And the prim ates seem to avoid the direct stare
strongly.
Thus it would be little com fort, if one were overlooked by
staring neighbors, to know that they were merely curious. The
stare is not just a threat. It constitutes an actual intrusion.
Are we any further on with understanding what is worrying
Paul? I certainly think so. If people, like other creatures, quite
directly and naturally mind being stared at, this in part explains
his touchiness on the subject. But what, you may wonder, about
the num erous people who live at close quarters, overlooked, and
do not mind it?
We should notice that it is prim arily strangers who cause alarm.
People in small primitive societies know everybody around them
well. So do people in stable m odern neighborhoods like villages,
or indeed old-fashioned slums. They do not always like the
closeness, and may move out. But at least they have had time to
settle into a m ore or less tolerable relation with those around
them , and there is likely to be some mutually accepted code
about not doing irritating things like staring. M oreover they
13. Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Love and Hate, tr. Geoffrey Strachan (London,
1971), p. 24. The very widespread fear of magical “overlooking” by the evil eye is
another example.
 Have We a Nature? 13
know a great deal about each other already, so curiosity will not
be so m uch of a problem . All the same, some privacy usually is
provided. And where com m unities grow bigger, m ore of it is at
once needed. Chinese and Indian cities have long been large and
confusing, full of strangers. For that reason, the houses became
highly defensive—usually closed in by solid outer walls. More
clothes are worn; women are locked up; m anners, too, become
defensive.
And everywhere, not just in our society, rich people who have
made good in crowded cities move out and make space round
them selves.14
This m atter of what is called personal space is just one part
of the com plex set of patterns now discussed under the general
heading of territorial instincts. I shall say m ore about it later,
though not as m uch as I should like.15 All I am concerned to do
at the m om ent is to point out that there really is a range of
phenom ena here which needs describing, and that animal com ­
parisons help because concepts for describing similar behavior
already exist in that area, and turn out, on the whole, quite
applicable. Earlier theories of instinct ignored the m atter, with­
out actually denying it. They could leave it alone because, for
one thing, nobody was trying to change people’s lives radically in
this respect. But so drastic have social changes been in this cen­
tury that it becomes necessary to state all kinds of facts about our
animal nature which used to be taken for granted—for instance,
that we cannot live properly in infinite crowds or in conditions of
ceaseless change.

14. See further development of this point at the end of Chap. 3.

15. 1 am fairly baffled about fitting adequate examples into this book, because
the explanatory power of such notions depends on following through the whole
system of concepts. Merely naming an impulse as territorial may tell you quite a
lot about it, just as naming it as sexual may. But you will understand much more
if you have an adequate idea of how territory works generally, and still more if
you know how it works in a given species, how it relates there to other motives
like dominance, affection and aggression. All these general motives are groupings
of particular impulses. Personal space is only one aspect of territory. But it is one
that matters greatly to all advanced social creatures, including those with no
fixed home. And staring is only one form of intrusion.
Conceptual Problems of an Unusual Species
What We Can Ask of Our Concepts
I am suggesting that we badly need new and m ore suitable
concepts for describing hum an motivation.
T he alarm ing truth is, of course, that it is not only animal
behavior studies that are still in the descriptive phase. Certainly,
a particularly deep snowfall of virgin ignorance has till lately
been observable there. People in general never knew very much
about animals; they had various motives for distorting what they
did know, and when in the last two centuries we in the West
mainly moved into towns, we cut ourselves off from what little
we m ight ever have discovered. (That is why the recent renais­
sance of this subject interests us so much.) It m ight seem, on the
other hand, that we know plenty about that m uch-described
m atter, hum an conduct. So we might, if we had always asked the
right questions and had not been m ore anxious to deceive o u r­
selves than to learn the truth. But we can always do with new
questions. People like Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, by asking
new questions, have taught us much, and it is yet further ques­
tions, and a m ore intelligent connecting of questions, that we still
need.
Freud should never be dismissed as “unscientific” on the sim­
ple grounds that he did not make detailed predictions that could
be falsified in experim ent. W hat he was providing was concepts.
His general question: what is the structure of hum an instinct?
was a perfectly sensible one. His answer was oversimple and
overconfident, but his suggestions still make excellent indicators
of where inquiry can start—of what, for instance, m ust be
wrong, but points the way to what is right. He m ade “good
mistakes”—a most useful habit, the value of which is perhaps
m ore familiar to philosophers than to scientists. H e m ade possi­
ble the m aking of concepts.
A good concept-m aker has to be a man of great general intel­
ligence and wide interests, or he cannot make connections with
other fields and is liable to produce a scheme that some other
study will shatter. But he needs also, and quite as much, to be
m ore or less soaked in, com m itted to, involved with, and gener­
ally crazy about his subject. A long phase of fairly om nivorous
observation, of deep receptiveness and genuine wonder, is
 Have We a Nature?
needed to appreciate the form al peculiarities of the thing one is
dealing with, to see what about it should be laid hold on for
description. T hat background of experience is the strength of
Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen and their school. They have
been animal people all their lives. T heir involvement in the con­
crete has, as H inde justly says, “ensured that explanatory con­
cepts have been chosen to suit the phenom ena studied, rather
than vice versa”16—an advantage that is rarer than it ought to be.
But we still have the problem of relating the study of animal
behavior to other ways of studying man. Homo sapiens is an ani­
mal. (At least he is not a machine, or an angel, or a fairy, or even
som ething from V ulcan.17) So it would really be odd, would
need a lot of accounting for, if com parative m ethods that make
good sense over the wide range of other terrestrial species sud­
denly simply had no application to him at all. But Homo sapiens is
already m arked out as the property of the social sciences. And
they are because of their early history to some extent com m itted
to the view that he has no nature, or none that can be im portant,
that his behavior (apart from a few simple physical needs) must
be understood entirely in term s of his culture.
T he thing we must keep in m ind here is that there is room for
all m ethods. As my small exam ple of stam p-buying shows, no
one way of studying m ankind has a monopoly or needs one.
Innate factors can be ignored for some purposes because they
are taken for granted, without therefore vanishing from the
scene.
W hat each m ethod has to do is to establish its usefulness. It
must fill a need. It seems obvious to me that we do need to
understand hum an motives better, both what they are and how
they connect. T here is a load of common-sense lore about them ,
some of it excellent, some confusing, some worthless. But the
16. “Ethological Models and the Concept of Drive,” British Journal for the Phi­
losophy of Science, 6 (1956), 321.
17. The common use of the word animal which contrasts it with man is
obscure. I have so used it for convenience sometimes, even in this book, but it
must never be forgotten that we do not have a clear basis for it, as we do if we
oppose animals to vegetables, minerals, or machines. Drawing analogies “between
people and animals” is, on the face of it, rather like drawing them “between
foreigners and people” or “between people and intelligent beings.”
 Conceptual Problems of an Unusual Species
intellectual systems that have tried to organize it work mostly by
reducing many motives to one or a few basic ones—sex, self-
preservation, power. They tidy one province, but then they dis­
tort themselves in an effort to take over the whole. H um an life
simply contains m ore motives, even m ore separate groups of
motives, than they allow for. We have to work out their natural
relations, not hack or wrench them to fit Procrustes’ bed. Com ­
parison with other species shows possible groupings m ore subtle
and m ore helpful than these flat reductions. Certainly this com ­
parison itself must not be used reductively. We must not say
“university departm ents are really only territories.” “Only” is an
exaggeration. But with that word removed, the rem ark can still
be useful. Similarly, a reviewer put the question: “on Desmond
M orris’s own principles, should not his book The Naked Ape be
seen as the dom inance display of a rising male, eager to gain
followers and com pete for leadership of the troop?” Well, among
other things, yes. And so should Eminent Victorians, Language,
Truth and Logic, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,18 and half the papers
in periodicals. H um an contentiousness is a fact. We could
never keep our heads in the babble of controversy if we did not
know how to allow for it. Indeed it is just those readers least
aware of the deliberately polemical, challenging elem ent in
works such as these who are most likely to be draw n in by it, to
involve themselves in the am using but irrelevant game of cops-
and-robbers that the authors want to play, rather than sticking to
the central questions about the value of what is being said or
done.
Still, we say, these motives belong to hum an beings. Why
should we need to look outside the hum an scene to understand
them?
Because, (as I have just suggested), our cultures limit so subtly
the questions that we can ask and reinforce so strongly our
natural gift for self-deception. W hen we ask why som ething that
is norm al in our culture is being done, official answers are always

18. For Picasso’s polemical intention in this picture, and its success, see E.
Gombrich, “Psycho-Analysis and the History of Art,” in his Meditations on a Hobby
Horse (London, 1963). This whole essay is of enormous interest for my theme.
 Have We a Nature?
prom pt. Spaniards tend not to be short of reasons for bullfight­
ing, Romans for gladiatorial games, totalitarians for torture,
Erewhonians for punishing illness. To break this circle, to make
our local presuppositions stand out, fabulists have long used
animals. They rely on the shock of a different context to make a
familiar pattern visible at last. It often works. But of course its
value depends on the power of the fabulist’s own imagination,
on his being able him self to take a new point of view. T he device
has a different kind of force when facts are used rather than
fiction. W hen other hum an cultures are found acting at cross­
purposes to ours or caricaturing it by pushing its vices to star­
tling excess, we are im pressed, and quite rightly. H ere, in fact,
we already accept the value of looking away from the familiar
scene in order to understand it. Many notions first evolved for
the study of primitive peoples have been found useful for the
study of m ore complex ones like ourselves, who did not know
they had these things because they never thought to ask, but had
already half-form ed puzzles to which these notions provide the
answer. (Examples are initiation rites and crisis rites generally,
competitive giving, conspicuous expenditure.) And many half-
form ed suspicions about our own society have been shaken up
and clarified into valuable insights by com parison with strange
cultures.
W hat happens with patterns first spotted in animals is very
similar. Someone first detects a pattern in animal behavior—he
finds, that is, a notion that unifies and makes sense of a common
sequence of behavior, say, displacement activity, or dom inance
displays, or redirected aggression. He then looks at the hum an
scene and sees som ething similar. So much is traditional. T he
further things which are needed, and which are now being
vigorously developed, are a careful, thorough, disciplined pro­
cedure for m aking the original observations of animals precise
and a subtler technique for com parison for checking the dif­
ferent sorts of variation in different species and linking them to
their different sorts of causes.
T he value of animal com parisons here depends on a simple
point about what understanding is, which I think has come
hom e to the public m uch m ore quickly than it has to the
Conceptual Problems of an Unusual Species
theorists. Understanding is relating; it is fitting things into a con­
text. N othing can be understood on its own. H ad we known no
other anim ate life-form than our own, we should have been
utterly mysterious to ourselves as a species. And that would have
m ade it immensely harder for us to understand ourselves as
individuals too. Anything that puts us in context, that shows us
as part of a continuum , an exam ple of a type that varies on
intelligible principles, is a great help. People welcome seeing
how animals behave, either directly or on film, in ju st the same
way in which a man who had begun to practice, say, mathematics
or dancing on his own would welcome seeing others who were
already doing it, though differently. T here has been an arbitrary
principle, laid down for a variety of reasons in European
thought, that only hum an activities can concern us in this sort of
way.19 It is false. It comes out entertainingly when people deeply
involved with owls, otters, and whatnot are interviewed for tele­
vision. Tow ard the end of the proceedings the animal person is
asked, rather solemnly, “And what do you think is the point of
(or the justification for) spending time on these creatures?” Far
from replying, “Just what brought you here, chum —I like them.
They have a life akin to mine, but different—they make me feel
m ore at hom e in the world—they fill the gap between me and
the dead things I have to m anipulate—they help me to under­
stand myself,” he usually answers that they are educational for
children (but why? except on the grounds ju st m entioned)
or—and this passes as a perfectly respectable reason—that no­
body has succeeded in breeding them in these latitudes before.
T he really m onstrous thing about Existentialism too is its pro­
ceeding as if the world contained only dead m atter (things) on
the one hand and fully rational, educated, adult hum an beings
on the other—as if there were no other life-forms. T he im pres­
19. Just because this is our tradition, many people think of it as obvious
common sense. It became the tradition, however, as a result of a deliberate and
sustained campaign by Christian thinkers, using some very strange material
gathered from Rationalist philosophers, to crush a natural respect for animals,
and for nature generally, which they saw as superstitious. John Passmore in his
book Mans Responsibilityfor Nature (London, 1971) gives a careful and fascinating
account of this strange process, which explained to me many things I had always
found incomprehensible.
 Have We a Nature?
sion of desertion or abandonment which Existentialists have is due,
I am sure, not to the removal of God, but to this contem ptuous
dismissal of almost the whole biosphere—plants, animals, and
children. Life shrinks to a few urban rooms; no w onder it be­
comes absurd.

Could People Be Blank Paper?

I am sure then that the contribution of ethology is useful and
that it can be fitted in without dam aging anything worth keeping
in the social sciences—though it certainly conflicts with the still
influential Blank Paper theory. This theory, though first
popularized by Locke, was brought to its extrem e form by John
B. Watson, the founding father of behaviorism, and was a cor­
nerstone of the original version of that doctrine. Locke him self
had m eant by it merely that we are born without knowledge: “Let
us then suppose the m ind to be, as we say, white paper, void of
all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be fu r­
nished? . . . T o this I answer in one word, from EXPERIENCE;
in that all our knowledge is founded.”20 He had never doubted
that we had instincts—that we were born adapted to act and feel
in specific ways. However, Locke did supply the language for
this further step, and W atson went on to take it. Man, he de­
clared, had no instincts. This mysterious news was rem arkably
well publicized; there seems to be nobody who studied any sort
of social science in English-speaking countries between the wars
who was not taught it as gospel. Its obscurity, however, has m ade
it increasingly a nuisance and no sort of a help to inquiry. Not
only do people evidently and constantly act and feel in ways to
which they have never been conditioned, but the >ery idea that
anything so com plex as a hum an being could be totally plastic
and structureless is unintelligible. Even if—which is absurd—
people had no tendencies but the general ones to be docile,
imitative, and m ercenary, those would still have to be innate, and
there would have to be a structure governing the relations
am ong them.
20. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk. 2.1.2.
20 Conceptual Problems of an Unusual Species
Sensible psychologists have accordingly tended m ore and
m ore to adm it that people do have some genetically fixed ten­
dencies. W hat makes this admission hard, however, is the very
strong im pression still prevalent that we have to choose between
considering these tendencies and considering outside condi­
tions, that we m ust be either loyal innatists or faithful environ­
mentalists. This polarization seems m uch like holding that the
quality of food is determ ined either by what it is like when you
buy it or by how you cook it, but not both. T hus Skinner, who in
his early work simply ignored innate determ ining factors,21 has
now for some time adm itted that they exist, but still doesn’t want
them studied, on the ground that they cannot be altered.
Knowledge of them , he says, “is of little value in an experim ental
analysis because such a condition cannot be m anipulated after
the individual has been conceived. T he most that can be said is
that knowledge of the genetic factor may enable us to make
better use of other causes.” And again, “since we cannot change
the species of an organism , this variable [species-status] is of no
im portance in extending our control, but inform ation about
species-status enables us to predict characteristic behavior, and,
in turn, to make m ore successful use of other techniques of
control.”22
How would our inability to effect changes be received as a
reason for not studying the weather, or indeed the laws of
chemistry? O f course there is nothing wrong with wanting one’s
knowledge to be useful. But from that very angle, knowing what
one cannot change m atters as m uch as knowing what one can.
Skinner appears to adm it this so fully at the end of these two
quotations that one expects him to move on to saying that psy­
chology will have to study both. But he never does. In Beyond

21. The index to The Behavior of Organisms (1938) has no entries under instinct,
innate, inherited, genetic, or any similar term, and though the book has a section on
Drive, the concept is reduced to the ideas of frequency and intensity. Yet the
behavior discussed in that book was almost entirely that of rats, so arguments
against applying such notions to humans were not in any case relevant. Watson’s
simple and popular doctrine had deflected attention from the topic entirely.
Halcyon days.
22. Science and Human Behavior (New York, 1953), pp. 26 and 157.
 Have We a Nature?
Freedom and Dignity (1971) he may still be seen apparently hold­
ing him self bound, even after recognizing the two com plem en­
tary aspects, to make an agonizing, and indeed unintelligible,
choice between them :
The ethologists have emphasized contingencies of survival which would
contribute these features [aggressive instincts] to the genetic endow­
ment of the species, but the contingencies of reinforcement in the
lifetime of the individual are also significant, since anyone who acts
aggressively to harm others is likely to be reinforced in other ways—for
example, by taking possession of goods. The contingencies explain the
behavior quite apartfrom any state or feeling of aggression or any initiat­
ing act by autonomous man. [pp. 185-186, my italics]
An explanation that quite patently can work only for repetitions
of aggressive acts, and then only for those that were rew arded in
the first place, is placidly extended to account for all such acts,
including the unrepeated originals. More generally, the form ula
of smooth transition from “x as well as y ” to “therefore not y ”
reappears constantly, as where he says: “For ‘instinct’ read
‘habit.’ T he cigarette habit is presum ably som ething more than
the behavior said to show that a person possesses it; but the only
other inform ation we have concerns the reinforcers and the
schedules of reinforcem ent which make a person smoke a great
deal’’ (p. 196). More inform ation obviously does exist—for in­
stance, on the one hand, about the effect of nicotine on the
hum an organism , and on the other, about people’s innate ten­
dency to suck things. T hat inform ation, however, is not sup­
posed to concern psychologists. Again, he rem arks: “T he per­
ceiving and knowing which arise from verbal contingencies are
even m ore obviously products of the environm ent.. . . Abstract
thinking is the product of a particular kind of environm ent, not
of a cognitive faculty’’ (pp. 188-189). So why can’t a psycholo­
gist’s parrot talk psychology?
T here is simply no need to take sides between innate and
outer factors in this way. We can study both. W hat behaviorism,
it seems, still needs is to com plete its m etam orphosis from a
dogmatic, fighting, metaphysical creed to an im partial m ethod
of study. T he strength of behaviorism is that it is a form of
empiricism, that is, an assertion of the primacy of experience
22 Conceptual Problems of an Unusual Species
over dogmatic theoretical principles in form ing our knowledge.
So, when it finds a dogmatic theoretical principle blocking our
recognition of obvious and pervasive aspects of experience, its
interests lie in ditching that principle, even when it happens to
be a hom egrown one. This has already been done in the m atter
of adm itting data from private experience, som ething that W at­
son ruled out on metaphysical grounds as “the myth of con­
sciousness.” In Beyond Freedom and Dignity Skinner admits reality
here admirably, speaking of “the indisputable fact of privacy; a
small part of the universe is enclosed in a hum an skin. It would
be foolish to deny the existence of that private world” (p. 191).
T he question is simply, as he goes on to say, how best to describe
it, what conceptual scheme to fit it into. And the same thing is
true of innate tendencies.
One thing that ham pers a lot of other people besides Skinner
here is the tantalizing notion of a single cause. Discussions on the
cause of some phenom enon—say, Truancy, W ife-beating, or the
Decline of the M odern T heater—often begin by listing a
num ber of alternative possible causes, and go on to try to elimi­
nate all of them but one. On this list there is often now some­
thing called “the genetic cause.” But as it is not adequate alone to
produce the effect, it gets elim inated in an early round of the
com petition and is heard of no more. But everything that people
do has its internal as well as its environm ental aspect, and there­
fore its causes in the nature of man as well as outside him.
Picking out “the cause” often does mean, as Skinner suggests,
looking for som ething that we can change. But in order to see
what change is going to be any use to us, the internal factor
ought always to be investigated, because it is not isolated, but
connected with a complex system that will respond in one way or
another to anything that we may do. Ignoring it because we
cannot alter it really would be rather like ignoring the weather,
or the shape of the earth.
I am suggesting, tentatively, that there has been a quiet, but on
the whole benign, change in the m eaning of the word be­
haviorism. People who call themselves behaviorists now often
seem to m ean simply that they study behavior. T he ism—the
defense of a creed—seems to have m atured into a m ore m odest
ology—a nam e for the topic studied. Such gradual changes are
 Have We a Nature?
benign because they allow crude positions to be m ade more sub­
tle without a public outcry. But they are m ore benign still when
they can become explicit. If one drops the general dogm a that
the only causal factor which can affect behavior is m ore be­
havior, there is really no reason why what affects it should not be
inherited, why there should not be innate tendencies. W hether
there are is an empirical question, not a m atter of party loyalty.23
Behaviorists could afford to be less defensive. T heir becoming
so would be a great help in the joint exploring expeditions by
various disciplines which are now needed to m ap the disputed
area. At present, social scientists tend to appear on these occa­
sions loaded with weapons and protective clothing—technical
language, unnecessary assumptions, and control experim ents of
doubtful relevance—while Lorenz usually turns up speaking or­
dinary language and using a very wide fram e of reference—
wearing, as it were, only binoculars, jeans and a pair of old tennis
shoes, but with an excellent hom em ade m ap.24 I try not to let my
delight at this spectacle bias me. I know he is in some ways
oversimple, and has m ade mistakes. But I still think he has a far
better idea of the kind of problem he is up against than most of
those present. He has understood that it is no use, at present,
trying to make anything look final. And the view he takes of
professional rigor is the right one. Rigor is not ju st a m atter of
ducking down inside the presuppositions of one’s own subject
and defending them against all comers, but of understanding
them so fully that one can relate them to those needed for other
inquiries. We do not just have to verify our hypotheses carefully,
but also to form them intelligently. As they are bound to tie up
with m atters that we do not know yet, and indeed with the gen­
eral structure of hum an thought, this requires collaboration. It
cannot be properly carried out in private, between consenting
colleagues who stay within the confines of a single subject.
Lorenz and his party have, however, a difficulty about m ethod
23. I shall say some more about behaviorism, and particularly about the ques­
tion what behavior is, in Chap. 5.
24. This applies particularly to King Solomon's Ring (New York, 1952), which
some people fail to recognize as a serious and seminal book, simply because it is
nontechnical and delightful to read. In his technical papers Lorenz can be as
hard to understand as any other scientist.
Conceptual Problems of an Unusual Species
which also dogs me constantly in this book. T he point of my
discussion is to show how and in what cases com parison between
man and other species makes sense, but I m ust sometimes use
such com parisons in the process. I think the circle will prove
virtuous, however, if it abides by the following rule: com parisons
make sense only when they are put in the context of the entire
character of the species concerned and of the known principles
governing resemblances between species. T hus, it is invalid to
com pare suicide in lemmings or infanticide in ham sters on their
own with hum an suicide or infanticide. But when you have
looked at the relation of the act to other relevant habits and
needs, when you have considered the whole nature of the
species, com parison may be possible and helpful.25
This would not be true if the Blank Paper view that “man has
no instincts,’’ that there simply was no innate determ ining ele­
m ent in hum an behavior, were right. But it cannot be right. It is
not even clear that it can be m eaningful.26
25. The thorough, painstaking background surveys with which the field ob­
servers I quote support and explain their conclusions are a necessary supple­
ment to what I say. I refer to only a few, for the sake of simplicity, but there are
now a great many good ones. About the lemmings, see p. 58, below. About the
principles for comparing species, I say a little more in Chap. 13, in the section on
intelligence and instinct. For good and full discussions, see Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Love
and Hate, chap. 3, also Lorenz, On Aggression (New York, 1963), chaps. 4-6, and
many astute observations in Tinbergen’s Study of Instinct (Oxford, 1961).
26. For an admirable and moderate discussion of the matter, see Love and
Hate, chap. 2.
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