Unreliable Instincts, or Why Bad Mothers Are Found Among People. Column for Kompyuterra #104

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Dmytro Shabanov
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Multifaceted conflict: individuals, genes, and memes; individuals and groups; short-term goals and long-term perspectives... Unreliable instincts, or Why there are bad mothers among people The Paradox of Wallace, or Why we have such a large brain

Column for Kompyuterra #103 Column for Kompyuterra #104 Column for Kompyuterra #105

Instincts are by their nature not something vague and indefinite, but are specifically organized motivating forces that, long before they enter consciousness, and then, regardless of the degree of awareness, pursue their inherited goals. Thus, they are very close analogues of archetypes, so close, in fact, that there are serious grounds to assume that archetypes are subconscious images of instincts, in other words, that they represent forms (patterns) of instinctive behavior. Carl Jung

Comparing their behavior to that of other animals, humans often fall into one of two extremes. Often, to say someone behaves "like an animal" means to accuse them of brutality, of unacceptable behavior. In other situations, "honest" and "sincere" animals are praised, while corrupt and immoral people are condemned. Debates also continue about whether humans have instincts. Some consider instincts a source of evil that must be fought with culture and upbringing. Others argue that humans have no instincts. I want to reflect on this topic, avoiding extremes, and for example, I will consider a common situation in which, it seems, humans lack the instincts they should have. ...The debates about adoption laws cannot hide a simple and sad fact. Many mothers in post-Soviet countries abandon their children after carrying and nurturing them in their own bodies, and then successfully giving birth. They do not go mad with grief – they live on as they lived... ...One of the most common forms of violence seen on the streets is parental violence towards their own children. You watch a preening woman beat her own child, for example, first for getting dirty, and then for not being able to hold back and rushing after her mother on shaky legs from childish grief, and you don't know what to do. It seems that for any attempt to intervene, the child will ultimately be held responsible... ...The relationship expressed in a cruel anecdote: "— Dad, we have no money, can you drink less? — No, son, you will eat less!" – is not fiction, but reality in many families... Why is such behavior widespread, when parental care is one of the most important instincts of mammals? The situation with bad parents is more complicated, but with bad mothers it's simpler – they should be weeded out by selection. Does such behavior prove that humans are devoid of instincts? No, they are not devoid. And if your heart ached when you imagined a frightened little human, you have already proven the existence of innate programs that protect children. But why do such programs work incorrectly everywhere and nearby? First, let's clarify the concept of "instinct." This word is used in different meanings, which leads to misunderstandings and conflicts. Without going into detail, I will remind you that it can be used in a broad and narrow sense. In a broad sense, regarding humans, Sigmund Freud used it, for example. Instinct in this sense is an innate, universal human predisposition to actions of a certain character. Konrad Lorenz gives an example of a narrow interpretation of the concept of instinct. Lorenz's scheme is as follows. Specific energy accumulates in the animal's psyche, ensuring the satisfaction of a certain need. As a result of an external stimulus (releaser, literally - "releaser") or due to excessive accumulation of this energy, motivation is activated, which ensures the initiation of instinctive actions. Currently, what Lorenz called instinct is called FAP - fixed action pattern. FAPs are performed with a high degree of automatism. Simplifying, Lorenz's scheme can be represented as: need → (releaser) → motivation → FAP. The set of needs concerns the entire life cycle, and motivation is an actualized need. In a typical situation, FAP is an effective and economical way to solve current problems. However, if an animal performs an FAP in different conditions, its actions are striking in their inadequacy, stupid automatism. Have you seen a dog burying a bone in the ground for a rainy day? It digs the ground with its paws, hides the cache, and covers it with earth with sideways movements of its muzzle. But sometimes the same FAP is performed somewhere in the corner of the apartment. Why doesn't the dog see that it hasn't dug any earth? It doesn't assess the situation, it just performs the FAP. Therefore, humans have no (or almost no) FAPs. How could this have happened, why was the link that ensured their functioning in our closest relatives destroyed? I believe that we have simply lost the final stages of maturity of the behavior control mechanism. The fact is that the ability for FAPs is activated at a certain stage of the life cycle, after the neurological mechanisms that control its activation have been formed. And we know that one of the universal paths of evolution, which allows us to get rid of unnecessary adaptations, is the cessation of development before reaching full maturity. In evolutionary biology, a delay in the development of certain systems is called paedomorphosis. The extreme case of paedomorphosis is neoteny: a delay in the development of all systems except the sexual ones. I will tell you how the phenomenon of neoteny was discovered. In the first half of the 19th century, zoologists distinguished (among others) two different families of American tailed amphibians – axolotls and mole salamanders (in modern terms). Axolotls are permanently aquatic, with large external gills; mole salamanders resemble terrestrial salamanders. In a water lily pond at the Paris Botanical Garden, axolotls brought from America swam. When they began to transform into mole salamanders and swim out of the pond, zoologists at the time were shocked. It turned out that axolotls are neotenic larvae of mole salamanders. In cold, deep water, they reproduce while remaining larvae, and in warm, shallow water, they can transform into mole salamanders. Ambystoma mexicanum: a reproductively capable larva, the axolotl (top), and an adult, the mole salamander (bottom). Photo commons.wikimedia.org and www.biolib.cz Paedomorphosis also played a role in our evolution. After our separation from the common ancestor with chimpanzees, some stages of our development slowed down significantly. The development of our facial skull slowed down more than that of our brain. A newborn human, by chimpanzee standards, is born prematurely and then gets stuck in childhood for a long time. We are closer to the embryos and newborns of chimpanzees, not to their adult representatives with normal development for the species. By the way, Aldous Huxley's novel "After Many a Summer" is based on this idea. In it, a means of prolonging human life contributed to their transition to a state corresponding to other hominids: chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. Does a person resemble a baby chimpanzee or an adult representative of this species more? Photographs from Stephen Gould's book The Mismeasure of Man, 1981 (I won't risk translating the title of this book, but it's related to the words "mistake" and "measure"). Above are age-related changes in chimpanzee skull proportions (from newborn to adult), below – the same in humans. So, I assume that paedomorphosis in human evolution affected not only the structure of its body but also the mechanism of control of its innate behavior. This mechanism "shed" the last stage – FAPs. This state is characteristic of all hominids: chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans (unlike, for example, marmosets) have also completely or almost completely lost FAPs. The abandonment of FAPs in favor of experience and intellect is a trend in the evolution of our group that has been manifesting for tens of millions of years. For example, in the care of offspring in all primates, there is a transition from rigidly defined innate patterns to cultural acquisition of childcare techniques. And what remains of Lorenz's scheme without FAPs? Need → (releaser) → motivation. This is what Anatoly Protopopov and Alexey Vyazovsky call instinct, for example. Whether the concept of "instinct" is applicable here can be debated, but it does not change the essence of the matter. I would talk about the innate system of behavioral motivation (ISBM), avoiding terms that different authorities interpret differently. Our intellect, our culturally determined experience, is a means of solving the problems posed by the ISBM. Normally, intellect is not used to figure out why we are driven by a particular motivation, but to implement its requirements. That is why the ISBM itself is "invisible" to people who do not engage in serious self-analysis. The innate nature of what we have called ISBM is understandable even to people far from biology. For example, Abraham Maslow, when talking about the "pyramid" of needs he proposed (now mentioned appropriately and inappropriately), emphasized that the needs he discussed characterize all people, are innate, and are of an "instinctoid" nature. Jung, as is clear even from the epigraph, associated archetypes with instincts. It seems to me that many of Jung's archetypes are releasers, key stimuli that trigger the restructuring of the motivational system. Their ability to overturn the inner world (read: change the hierarchy of motivations) may seem mysterious. For a person capable of self-observation (as Jung himself was), these symbols are filled with deep meaning... And now we can return to parental behavior. The dismantling of FAPs during evolution and their replacement with more complex, culturally determined behavior based on intellect inevitably affected the care of offspring, complicated by the increased duration of the helpless childhood period. Such restructuring was likely driven by the advantage of individuals capable of more flexible responses to various life challenges, but it also affected relatively conservative forms of behavior, such as childcare. When you were in school, in the general biology course, you were told about directional selection using a diagram like the one on the left. The reality is more complex, and the typical picture of selection is a sequence of stabilizing and destabilizing effects, as shown in the diagram on the right. We are currently at stage 2, when selection, having destabilized the previous norm, has not yet managed to achieve a stable implementation of the new norm. Results of selection according to simplified ideas related to STE (A) and according to ETE (B) ideas, which are confirmed in numerous experiments. 1, 2, 3 – sequential distributions of individuals in a population subjected to selection. The same idea can be explained more simply: traits that have recently changed due to selection (in evolutionary terms) are much more variable than evolutionarily stable traits. This is especially true for traits that were not themselves the target of selection but changed as a result of the evolution of other characteristics. The mechanism that ensures human parental behavior has significantly changed in our recent past. It generally worked well within traditional society, where the behavior of each individual was reliably controlled by established culture, where the flow of perceived stimuli (potential releasers) was predictable and regular. The future mother observed the parental behavior of her relatives, reinforced the connection between releasers and the behavior she studied, and then easily entered her own parenthood. Selection for maintaining normal parental behavior was not strong: it was realized quite stably and organically... Our world is different, and there are several reasons for this. Children of mothers (and even more so fathers) with destroyed parental behavior survive and often even have an increased number of offspring (due to socialization problems). Children and adolescents are bombarded with a real stream of chaotic stimuli, many of which are brighter, stronger than natural ones, and not included in normal regulatory mechanisms. Releasers of parental behavior bombard us in the most diverse situations. They are used, and in an artificially amplified form, in toys, cartoons, advertisements, and who knows where else. Unnaturally cute puppies and fluffy attractive kittens (filling the social media friend feeds) offer surrogates for the realization of parental feelings. In our world, we have to interact with a huge number of people who do not know us or know us only in a narrow sphere. We do not have to care about reputation as much as people in traditional societies do. Often we can afford not to repeat the behavioral norms characteristic of stable social groups. So it turns out that the instinctive (in the narrow sense of the word) control of parental behavior has been destroyed by evolution, the functioning of the innate system of behavioral motivation is unstable and destabilized by our lifestyle, and socio-cultural mechanisms of behavioral channeling are ineffective. Are you still surprised that not all modern women turn out to be good mothers? ← Dmytro Shabanov →

Multifaceted conflict: individuals, genes, and memes; individuals and groups; short-term goals and long-term perspectives... Unreliable instincts, or Why there are bad mothers among people The Paradox of Wallace, or Why we have such a large brain

Column for Kompyuterra #103 Column for Kompyuterra #104 Column for Kompyuterra #105