Instinct (quote)

 Are the marvelous algorithms of animals mere "instincts" that we have lost or risen above? Humans are often said to have no instincts beyond the vegetative functions; we are said to reason and behave flexibly, freed from specialized machinery. The featherless biped surely understands astronomy in a sense that the feathered biped does not! True enough, but it is not because we have fewer instincts than other animals: it is because we have more- Our vaunted flexibility comes from scores of instincts assembled into programs and pitted in competitions. Darwin called human language, the epitome of flexible behavior, "an instinct to acquire an art" (giving me the title for The Language Instinct), and his follower William James pressed the point:

Now, why do the various animals do what seem to us such strange things, in the presence of such outlandish stimuli? Why does the hen, for example, submit herself to the tedium of incubating such a fearfully uninteresting set of objects as a nestful of eggs, unless she have some sort of a prophetic inkling of the result? The only answer is ad hominem. We can only interpret the instincts of brutes by what we know of instincts in ourselves. Why do men always lie down, when they can, on soft beds rather than on hard floors? Why do they sit round the stove on a cold day? Why, in a room, do they place themselves, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, with their faces towards its middle rather than to the wall? Why do they prefer saddle of mutton and champagne to hard-tack and pond-water? Why does the maiden interest the youth so that everything about her seems more important and significant than anything else in the world? Nothing more can be said than that these are human ways, and that every creature likes its own ways, and takes to the following them as a matter of course. Science may come and consider these ways, and find that most of them are useful. But it is not for the sake of their utility that they are followed, but because at the moment of following them we feel that that is the only appropriate and natural thing to do. Not one man in a billion, when taking his dinner, ever thinks of utility. He eats because the food tastes good and makes him want more. If you ask him why he should want to eat more of what tastes like that, instead of revering you as a philosopher he will probably laugh at you for a fool. . . . And so, probably, does each animal feel about the particular things it tends to do in presence of particular objects. To the broody hen the notion would probably seem monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to whom a nestful of eggs was not the utterly fascinating and precious and never-to-be-too-much sat-upon object which it is to her.

The human reactions described in the passage still may strike you as versions of animal instincts. What about our rational, flexible thought? Can it be explained as a set of instincts? In the preceding chapter I showed how our precision intelligence can be broken down into smaller and smaller agents or networks of information processing. At the lowest levels, the steps have to be as automatic and unanalyzed as the reactions of the most brutish animal. Remember what the tortoise said to Achilles. No rational creature can consult rules all the way down; that way infinite regress lies. At some point a thinker must execute a rule, because he just can't help it: it's the human way, a matter of course, the only appropriate and natural thing to do—in short, an instinct. When all goes well, our reasoning instincts link up into complex programs for rational analysis, but that is not because we somehow commune with a realm of truth and reason. The same instincts can be seduced by sophistry, bump up against paradoxes like Zeno's beguiling demonstrations that motion is impossible, or make us dizzy as they ponder mysteries like sentience and free will. Just as an ethologist unmasks an animal's instincts with clever manipulations of its world, such as slipping a mechanical bee into a hive or rearing a chick in a planetarium, psychologists can unmask human reasoning instincts by couching problems in devilish ways, as we shall see in Chapter 5.

-Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, ch 3 pg 184