Many years ago I was part of a group touring the Shenandoah Caverns in Virginia.  At one point, our guide showed us some fascinating straw-like shapes that had formed on the ceiling above us.  When I asked him what had caused these strange-looking formations, our guide admitted he didn’t know the answer. 

     Just then, a man behind me in the group piped up, “It’s a freak of nature.”  At the time, I had the impression that he wasn’t joking, that he believed he was actually providing an answer.  But what does ‘freak of nature’ mean?  Isn’t it really a way of saying we don’t have a clue about one of millions of  intricate structures in the natural world?

     I have been thinking about this incident lately, as I have been contemplating the notion of ‘instinct.’  We explain the actions of many animals with that single word.

     For example, how do birds know to fly thousands of miles to the very same place each winter?  Instinct. 

     How does a kangaroo rat know to perform an escape jump maneuver when it hears the sound of a rattlesnake, even if it has never encountered a snake before?  Instinct. 

     How does a spider know to avoid the sticky threads in her web that could ensnare her along with her prey?  Instinct.

     Instinct has been defined as a ”stereotyped, species-typical behavior that appears fully functional the first time it is performed, without the need for learning.” 

     I am not knocking instinct–survival strategies that animals seem to be born knowing.  But I think we humans tend to forget that this single word covers millions of complex processes in our fellow creatures (and in ourselves) that we cannot begin to understand.  

    I have come to think of the term ‘instinct’ as short-hand for the mind-boggling array of behaviors that thousands of species have evolved over millions of years, behaviors that awe me, that appear so mysterious, that work.

    And as I muse on the term ‘freak of nature,’ I see it as implying a single occurrence, something accidental, a mistake.  But in  fact, what is called a ‘freak of nature’  is actually the result of some deeply complex process that is beyond our understanding. 

     We humans often don’t want to admit that we don’t understand.  We would rather employ some simplistic explanation, even if it explains nothing.  But in doing so, we miss out on the wonder, the sense of mystery, the awareness that nature is not only more complex than we know, but more complex than we can ever know. –April Moore   

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