at work I keep a little notebook with me,
and yesterday, we were very busy and yet, I still
had idea’s that I wanted to get down, so in between
customers, I would write down idea’s… I have several small
pieces of paper with writings on it that I can barely read… let us see how this
goes…
we on occasion sell very large stuff animals,
and yesterday, across from the checkstands, up very high
on an empty shelf, someone put a very, very large stuffed bear…
cuddly thing, but over 5ft tall…
a lady came into my line, she was an older lady with a walker
and came with a dog, a very large dog… this dog took one look at this
very large bear and wanted nothing to do with it…in fact, this bear scared this
dog so much it refused to even walk near it and the lady had to back up and get out
of the checkstand the way she came because the dog would not go anywhere near this
bear…this is instinct… some very large creature that was clearly bigger then
the dog and the dog wanted absolutely nothing to do with it…this is instinct at work…
the dog could not have overridden this total fear of this bear even if the dog
wanted to…this is in part why animals like dogs have survive because of instincts
like this, stay the hell away from animals much larger then you, because you never know…
babies and toddlers would have also freaked out over this bear because it was so large…
I am not sure at what age a child would have been to overcome this total fear
of some very large animal even a stuffed bear…but that is the age where
a child can reason and be talked into coming near this bear… the child has seen
stuffed animals before and has experienced this, with experience comes understanding…
now to my experienced eyes, this bear was cute if not overly big…
not to mention expensive… anyway, this is one such example of
an animal having instinct… many, many other exists…
now how was this type of instinct created? it seems to me to have been
fashioned over long period of time… dogs for example, the ones that
survived and passed on its genes, were the dogs that had fear when
seeing a large creature of this size… these dogs survive and the instinct
to fear when seeing these large creatures was passed on…now is this
fear in the genes? or has it been imprinted in the dog in some fashion?
how exactly does the dog know to be afraid of this bear? now I have personally
seen smaller dogs go after a larger animal like a bear or deer… so this
instinct can be overridden especially when overridden by the dog’s desire
to protect its human…so we have two conflicting instincts…
but where does the instinct to protect its humans come from?
are dogs born that way? now, but originally, did dogs have this
instinct to protect their human? when human and dogs first met,
at least 30,000 years ago, were dogs this protective? No, I don’t think so…
no gene existed that created the instinct that the dog has that makes
the dog protect its human… the dog over the 30 thousand years has learned
or been imprinted upon it, something, to protect its human…
I would say, that over the last 30 thousand years, the relationship between
dog and human has been imprinted upon both the dog and the human…
this imprint, this instinct has been installed into dogs over the many centuries…
but once again, where does this imprint lie? does it lie in the dogs genes or does
it lie imprinted somewhere else? I would suggest that part of the imprint on
dogs about loyalty to human is imprinted in the brain… isn’t part of the DNA, but
is part of the dog in terms of its standard operating workings in the brain…
but is it innate? only because it was imprinted over the 30,000 years
of dog/human relations… it isn’t part of the DNA but it is from evolution
and the relationship between dogs and humans that has lasted so long…
let us look at another aspect that evolutionary psychology has looked at,
language…a certain gene, I don’t remember it designation, has been identified
as the gene for language…FOXP2 is the gene’s designation and the protein that
is in humans is Forkhead box protein P2… and is required for proper development
of speech and language…now, Chomsky has said that language is innate,
that children learn language because it is coded into the human, pre-programmed
as it were…just like the dog and large teddy bear… it has been pre-programmed
to avoid very large animals and we have been pre-programmed to language…
now it is said, that every human being unless something prevents it,
has both the protein and the gene for language, every single human being alive…
but it is my contention that very, very few if any human beings, creatures classified
as human, one million years ago had this protein or gene…language as a trait
has been passed down from generation to generation… in the beginning,
one person had something resembling language and it proved to be very
convenient and that trait was passed along… but I believe that language is
not passed on in DNA, but like the dog, is passed along in programming in
the brain…it is imprinted on us and over the many centuries we have expanded
our language use…but it is not genetic which means it is not instinct…
it is part of the brains standard operating process because language was
imprinted into our brains over a million years… you can ask did the gene exist
before language or did language exist first? I would say that language
existed before the gene did and the imprinting of language created the gene…
of course this is all idle speculation and many will claim I have no idea of
what I am talking about and that is certainly their right…
now let us turn to an idea like god… I would say that the idea of god
did not exist in prehistoric man… in other words, when human kind first
began, the idea of god did not exist… those million of year ago, when
we climb out of the tree for the first time, the idea of god didn’t exist…
we didn’t have that programming inside of us… we weren’t coded for god
in the beginning… but then how did we become so programmed?
have you ever thought about prayer? what exactly is a prayer?
you are asking for something… that is a prayer… you want something…
a million years ago, human beings were asking for something, please let me
survive this hunt or please get us some food or please let my child live…
after some time, this asking for something became asking some power
to give you something… please sun, give me some food, or the land
to give some game to eat… again after some time, it shifted to
some higher power we would call god… please god, give me something
to hunt… and hundreds of thousands of years later of imprinting that
desire for something has become the imprinting of god into our wiring…
we created the programming of god into our system by our asking for something…
a thousand generations of humans asking for something as created the
imprinting of god into our brain…we rewired ourselves to this belief in god…
it didn’t exist in the beginning of human existence, we created it…
just as the dog has been rewired to defend it human, because a dog didn’t do that
in the beginning of our relationship, but it was reprogrammed into protecting its human…
just like any software program can be rewritten, our program can be rewritten,
our coded software can be rewired to something else…and the idea of god
is simply the rewriting of some human programming we have…
this programming was part of instinct that all animals have…
all animals have been wired in some aspect by evolution…
look at the turtle that automatically goes to the sea after being hatched…
it has no choice in that programming… it is instinct…
there is no difference between this programming and instinct… for instinct
is really just coding or programming of some sort for animals…
the existence of language or the belief of god is part of human
reprogramming of our original programming or instincts…
we rewired ourselves to have language and we rewired ourselves to
believe in god…it just took a million years to do so…
now is this “innate” or “instinct” if we rewired ourselves?
I don’t know…
Kropotkin