INSTINCT 143 



any goal; each forward step is always at the cost of many 

 failures; and the necessary configurations for success be- 

 come more and more intricate. Nature, then, must explore 

 more and more avenues of evolutionary trial before solv- 

 ing each new complex, herself driven by the deeply under- 

 lying organizers of mind-in-matter and matter-in-mind. 

 There are many highly desirable instincts, as the following 

 pages will show; nor is it to be assumed that the evolution- 

 ary axis toward inherited perceptual patterns is itself 

 doomed to failure. On the contrary, there is every reason 

 to assume that some instinctive drives and capacities, per- 

 haps beyond anything we can now imagine and tempered, 

 of course, by intelligence, are necessary to the high-level 

 expression of mind— of this, more in Chapter 12. 



Instincts appear in a much better light in the behavior of 

 some insects which form cooperative communities with the 

 storage of food and the beginnings of a real economic life. 

 Incipient stages of sociality where parents remain to help 

 their young are known in several orders of insects, but it is 

 only in the Hymenoptera (wasps, ants, and bees) and the 

 Isoptera (termites) that a high-order social organization is 

 accomplished. The ants are the most specialized and in many 

 respects the most successful, especially since all ants are 

 socialized— not, however, as a single species as in man, but 

 in more than 3,500 distinct kinds, each now evolving in its 

 own way and incapable of interbreeding. There is fantastic 

 variation in the ant group, particularly in size, where the 

 larger types outweigh the smaller four or five thousand 

 times. There are ants with formidable grinding mandibles, 

 others with swords and battle axes for war, others with leaf 

 cutting scissors, some with huge heads, some with tiny 

 heads, some with long bodies, some with short bodies, and so 

 on. From species to species they have varied the body along 

 a line leading to the evolution of tools, not made, but grown 

 into the body structure. They are equipped with instincts 

 which give them full use of these tools without a learning 



