The Genesis of Living Forms by Raymond Ruyer

Author:Raymond Ruyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Published: 2019-10-04T16:00:00+00:00

MIXED BEHAVIOUR

151 The contrast between this type of behaviour, such as it is interpreted by the American school, and the first type, such as it is interpreted by the German school, appears abrupt. In the second type, central, innate, preformed behaviour, separable into acquired elements and independent of sensations and external stimulation – which, in Lorenz’s conception, can only bring about a change at the level of details – cannot be found. And, properly understood, the American psychologists call the German interpretation into question even for behaviour of the first type. In their view, practice and apprenticeship are present everywhere. Doubtless, the innate exists, but it is inseparable from the acquired. There is no central pattern* of movement, entirely innate, always ready to be performed, present in the structure of the central nervous system, and triggered en bloc by a hormonal state or an external state. Peripheral sensations, or irritations and engorgements caused by hormones, provide more than orientations of detail. They are the motor of the act itself insofar as the animal tries to diminish tension or irritation. The animal is equivalent to a homeostat – to a self-regulating perfected automat with feedback*, not to an automat such as they were built in the eighteenth century or a barrel organ furnished with fully pre-written melodies. Regulation by organic ‘proprioceptive’ sensations plays a decisive role in instinct, above all when it involves an instinctive need. Respiration, for example, is an ensemble of movements coordinated by specialised nervous centres when it takes place normally. But as J. B. S. Haldane has emphasised, for an aerial, breathing animal submerged in water, or for a human being buried alive, the sensation of suffocation caused by the abnormal accumulation of carbonic acid makes of the respiratory act an instinct which demands priority over every other act. It demands improvisatory activity: to return to the surface or to break through the soil or snow thus becomes as much the ‘respiratory act’ as normal inspiration or expiration. Sexual instinct is, correlatively, very often presented in psychological experiments as an improvised effort, a matter of trial and error, often aberrant, of releasing a tension and maintaining agreeable sensations that, like a sort of triggered motor sequence, is triggered once and for all.

Examining the matter more closely, there are many instances of ‘proprioception’ even in the cases cited by Lorenz and Tinbergen. The exact nature of the crawling motion of the earthworm or the swimming motion of the eel, for example, has not yet been entirely clarified. It is believed that contraction or torsion is propagated like a chain of reflexes, each muscular contraction depending on the proprioceptive stimulation caused by the contraction of the previous muscle. Then again, as we have seen, von Holst’s experiments appear to refute this conception: a worm’s nervous system continues to direct crawling even if it receives no proprioceptive sensation from the muscles or the skin. Locomotive movements in eels do not begin at the cephalic extremity before being propagated further back;

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