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The question Niko set for me was a version of the question often labelled with the ‘nature or nurture?’ Cliche derived from The Tempest:A devil, a born devil, on whose nature Nurture can never stick….

Philosophers down the centuries have pondered the question. How much of what we know is natively built in, and to what extent is the young mind a blank slate, waiting to be written over, as John Locke believed?Niko himself, like Konrad Lorenz (with whom he is credited with co-founding the science of ethology), was earlier associated with the ‘nature’ school of thought. His most famous book, The Study of Instinct which he later pretty much disowned, used ‘instinct’ as a synonym for ‘innate behaviour’, defined as ‘behaviour that has not been changed by learning processes’. Ethology is the biological study of animal behaviour. Various schools of psychology also study animal behaviour, but with different emphasis. Psychologists historically tended to study animals like rats or pigeons or monkeys as substitutes for humans. Ethologists historically were interested in the animals in their own right, not as proxies for anything. Consequently they have always studied a much wider range of species, and they tend to emphasize the role of behaviour in the natural environment of the species. Ethologists also, as I have said, historically emphasized ‘innate’ behaviour, whereas psychologists were more interested in learning.

In the 1950s, a group of American psychologists started to take an interest in the works of the ethologists. Prominent among them was Daniel S. Lehrman, a big man with the deep knowledge of natural history as well as of psychology. He also spoke adequate German, which made him an effective bridge between the two approaches to animal behaviour.In 1953 Lehrman wrote a very influential critique of the traditional ethological approach. He strongly criticized the whole nature of innate behaviour, not because he thought everything was learned (although some psychologists whom he quoted did), but because he thought it was in principle impossible to define innate behaviour: impossible to devise an experiment to demonstrate that any particular piece of behaviour is innate. Theoretically, the obvious method was the ‘deprivation experiment’. Imagine if humans were given no verbal instruction in how to copulate and no opportunity to observe others species- not even the smallest inkling. Would they know how to do it when the opportunity finally presented itself? It’s an intriguing question, and there might be telling anecdotes, perhaps about over-sheltered and naive Victorian couples. But in non-human animals we can do experiments. Deprivation experiments.If you rear a young animal in deprived conditions without the opportunity for experience, and it still knows how to behave properly, that must mean the behaviour is innate, inborn, instinctive. Mustn’t it? But Lehrman objected that you couldn’t deprive the young animal of everything-light, food, air etc-and that it is never obvious how much deprivation is needed in order to satisfy the criterion of innateness.

The dispute between Lehrman and Lorenz got personal. Lehrman, whose family background was Jewish, caught Lorenz out in some suspiciously Nazi-inflected writings from the war years and did not shrink from mentioning this in his famous critique. Lorenz, on first meeting Lehrman after the critique was published, said (approximately): I thought from your writings that you must be a small, mean, wizened little man. But now that I see you are a BIG man, [and Lehrman was indeed a very big man] we can be friends. This avowal of friendship didn’t stop Lorenz trying – Desmond Morris tells the story as an eye-witness from inside the car-to intimidate Lehrman by almost mowing him down with an enormous American car that he was driving in Paris.

But back to the controversy over nurture and nature. Male sedge warblers( to take just one example) have a complex and elaborate song, and they can perform it even when reared in isolation, never having heard another sedge warbler. The Lorenz – Tinbergen school would therefore have said it must be ‘innate’. But Lehrman emphasized the complexity of developmental processes and always wondered whether learning was involved in some less obvious way. For Lehrman, it wasn’t good enough to say that the young animal has been reared under deprived conditions. For him, the question was: ‘Deprived of what?’

Since Lehrman’s critique was published, ethologists have indeed discovered that many young songbirds, including sedge warblers, even when reared in isolation, learn to sing their correct species song by listening to their own fumbling efforts, repeating the good fumbles and discarding the bad. So that looks like nurture after all. But in that case, Lorenz and Tinbergen might reply, how do the young birds know which of their fumbles are good and which bad? Surely that ‘knowledge’- a template for what their species song ought to sound like- has to be innate? All learning does is transfer the song pattern from the sensory part of the brain (the built-in template) to the motor side (the actual skill of singing the song).

Excerpted from ‘An Appetite For Wonder: The Making of a Scientist’ by Richard Dawkins