7/28/2019 Lesson 03 - Heredity and Instinct Cooley
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Heredity and Instinct
The stream of this life-history, whose sources are so remote and
whosebranchings so various, appears to flow in two rather distinct
channels. Orperhaps we might better say that there is a stream and
a road running along the
banktwo lines of transmission. The stream is heredity or animal
transmission;the road is communication or social transmission. One
flows through the germ-plasm; the other comes by way of language,
intercourse, and education. Theroad is more recent than the stream:
it is an improvement that did not exist at allin the earliest flow
of animal life, but appears later as a vague trail alongside
thestream, becomes more and more distinct and travelled and finally
develops intoan elaborate highway, supporting many kinds of
vehicles and a traffic fully equalto that of the stream itself.
How does this idea apply to the life of a given individualof you
or me, forexample? His bodyand his mind too, for that matterbegins
in a minute,
almost microscopic, bit of substance, a cell, formed by the
union of cells comingfrom the bodies of his parents, and
containing, in some way not yet understood,tendencies which reach
back through his grandparents and remoter ancestorsover indefinite
periods of time. This is the hereditary channel of his life, and
thespecial kind of cells in which heredity is conveyedcalled the
germ-plasmareapparently the only source of those currents of being,
those dispositions,capacities, potentialities, that each of us has
at the beginning of his course.
The social origin of his life comes by the pathway of
intercourse with otherpersons. It reaches him at first through his
susceptibility to touches, tones ofvoice, gesture, and facial
expression: later through his gradually acquired
understanding of speech. Speech he learns from his family and
playmates, who,in turn, had it from their elders, and so it goes
back to the earliest human history,and farther still to the
inarticulate cries of our pre-human ancestors. And it is thesame
with the use of tools, with music, art, religion, commerce, and
whateverelse he may learn to think and do. All is a social heritage
from the immemorialpast.
Man has a natural hunger [] and a natural mechanism of tasting,
chewing,swallowing, and digestion; but his way of getting the food
varies widely atdifferent times of his life, is not the same with
different individuals, and oftenchanges completely from one
generation to another. The great majority of us
gain our food, after we have left the parental nest, through
what we call a job,and a job is any activity whatever that a
complex and shifting society esteemssufficiently to pay us for. It
is very likely, nowadays, to last only part of our livesand to be
something our ancestors never heard of. Thus whatever is
mostdistinctively human, our adaptability, our power of growth, our
arts and sciences,our social institutions and progress, is bound up
with the indeterminate characterof human heredity.
Cooley, C.H. Human Nature and Social Order. London: Charles
Scribner and Sons, 1922.
