Give your opinion about instinctand reasonInstinct ppt

Give your opinion about instinct
and reason

Instinct is, properly, the innate and inherited aptitude
which drives living creatures to do certain things which
seem to be quite natural, without any conscious design.
More precisely, “It is a natural spontaneous tendency or
impulse in the lower animals or in men, moving them
without reasoning towards action essential to their
existence, preservation, or development; as the instinct of
self-preservation.

Take a few examples of instinct Bees make six-sided cells
for storing their honey. They always make them the same
size and the same shape (mathematically perfect
hexagons). Yet they never learn to make them; for the
young worker-bees, as soon as they are born, set to make
these cells as perfectly as the old experienced bees.
Apparently, they do it spontaneously and have no
conscious purpose in doing this.

In the same way, young birds have never seen a nest
built, and have had no lessons in the art of nest-building;
yet when the nesting time comes round, they know exactly
how to do it. And a bird of one species will never build the
type of nest as that of another species, sparrows never
make nest as swallows do, not swallows like those of
bees.

We cannot explain these actions of insects and birds. As
they are naturally done without reasoning or conscious

design, but are due to some blind inner impulse, we say
they are due to “instinct”. And we can sum up the
characteristics of instinct as the following:
1. instinct is adaptive, that is, directed to some end;
2. that end is somehow connected with the welfare of the
species or the individual;
3. the action is immediately perfect;
4. it is natural or inherited and not learned

By reason we mean the power of drawing certain logical
conclusions from given premises: the power of thinking of
choosing to do certain things because we consider them
wise or advantageous, and of doing things with a
conscious end in view. For example, men do not build
houses as birds build nests. They have a clear idea in
their minds what kind of house they want, and of what
material they need to make it. The architect, after much
thought, draws a plan; and the builders calculate how
many bricks and how much mortar needed. At every step,
there exists deliberate thought and conscious design and
choice. So reason is quite different from instinct.

Instinct is merely a natural ability to do something.
Reason, on the contrary, can afford us much knowledge in
every field of endeavor. Instinct does not make any
progress, but reason always does. Instinct has no
consciousness in action, but reason has.

It is commonly said that animals act on instinct and men
on reason. But some higher animals, such as dogs,

horses and elephants have a certain amount of reason,
and we call them intelligent; and there is a lot of instinct in
men. On the whole, however, reason is a characteristic of
men, and instinct of animals, such as bees, ants, spiders,
birds etc…