Paul Griffiths, The Quarterly Review of Biology

Accessible, accurate and entertaining, Basic Instinct is more evidence that we live in a golden age of popular science writing. Its neuroscientist author forcefully advocates a perspective on human nature derived from developmental psychobiologists Daniel Lehrmann and Gilbert Gottlieb. Blumberg recounts the main experimental results of their research tradition, and describes more recent work that has taken advantage of the molecular revolution, such as Michael Meaney's studies of DNA-methylation based behavioral inheritance in rats. Whilst remaining accessible to the general reader, the book has enough scientific content to be enjoyed by professionals in other areas of the life sciences.

This is an openly polemical work. Its targets are the form of evolutionary psychology popularized by Stephen Pinker and the mainstream, nativist tradition in contemporary cognitive developmental psychology. Blumberg's central thesis is that appeals to 'innateness' are at best intellectual laziness and usually far worse, actively blocking the experimental elucidation of the causes of human behavior. In a brief but excellent discussion of the human genome project Blumberg argues that the result has been to shine a spotlight into the last hiding place of the homunculus. In its place, he advocates an 'epigenetic' alternative, according to which the control network which regulates gene expression and guides development into species-typical outcomes extends beyond the DNA, and even the cell wall. The network includes a highly structured environment created by earlier generations and it exploits whatever other regularities the environment reliably affords.

My only criticism of this book is that it does not lay sufficient stress on the evolutionary design of complex developmental mechanisms, in contrast to an otherwise similar recent book, Patrick P. G. Bateson and Paul Martin's 1999 Design for a Life: How behavior and personality develop (Jonathan Cape, London). Juxtaposing the complexity of development with the role of natural selection as an opportunistic 'tinkerer' helps to defuse the intuition that the reliability with which behavior is transmitted across the generations verges on the miraculous, an intuition that surely underlies much of the enduring appeal of simplistic nativism.

MarthaLeah Chaiken, AAAS Science Books and Films

This book explores the origins of what we commonly call instincts. Often, an assumption that instinctive behaviors reside in the genes cuts short any further discussion of their causes. As a developmental psychobiologist, Blumberg argues convincingly that a true understanding of behavior will come only from the study of development; identification of genes is only a first step. This important branch of research is usually too subtle, intricate, and particular to make its way into the
popular press, but Blumberg succeeds brilliantly in making it both accessible and engaging to the general reader. The story begins with the author's attempt to understand the "herding instinct" of his Border collie. The reader is quickly convinced of the impossibility of attributing this complex set of behaviors to a single source. Chapter two further counters the impulse to see a unitary designer, divine or genetic, behind every complex design. We see how adaptive complexity can
emerge through natural selection, trial and error, or generations of human tinkering. The third chapter is devoted to those spooky similarities between identical twins. A review of probability theory and the mechanism of gene action make short work of the anecdotal evidence, although no mention is made of the quantitative results. Subsequent chapters detail the development of such "instincts" as imitation or
thirst. We see how a sensory preference, a biomechanical limitation, or an orienting response may be enough to bias the course of development towards a particular outcome. Such painstaking research is contrasted, in chapter six, with the evolutionary psychologists' facile assumption that a separate neural module must underlie each new instinct. The book has a conversational tone and reads almost effortlessly. The intrinsic interest of the examples, the logical flow of the arguments, and the clarity of the summaries make this a must for anyone interested in the
origins of behavior.

Science News:

What does it mean to say that something is in our genes? How much of our behavior is guided by the instructions in our DNA and how much is imposed on us by our environment? Neuroscientist Blumberg ponders these questions and describes how scientists are looking for connections between nature and nurture. In that context, the concept of instinct is confused by its many definitions, from all behaviors present at birth to certain propensities for sets of behaviors, such as the herding instinct in border collie. Just how much of what we consider instinct is actually a form of learned behavior? Blumberg asks. He then examines the debate between scientists who argue that people and other animals are born with a set of instincts about the world and researchers who hold that instincts must be re-produced in each generation. In doing so, the text recounts studies of animal and human behavior that have sorted the effects of environment and genes. One famous and controversial example is the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, which Blumberg asserts has repeatedly been misinterpreted to ascribe amazing power to genes in people's lives. Other studies have uncovered surprising effects of the environment on what were assumed to be strictly genetic traits, including determining the sex of an animal's offspring. Throughout the book, Blumberg derides the movement called intelligent design, which argues against evolution. This is a book for readers seeking to understand the origins of human behavior.

 

Publishers Weekly:

This is a passionate (and at times polemical) survey of what contemporary neuroscience has to say about the nature of instinct. Actually, as it turns out, it might be more accurate to say the "nurture" of instinct, since Blumberg firmly argues against the perspective that what we think of as instincts are innate--he reframes "instincts," ranging from a baby's tendency to mimic faces to monkeys' fear of snakes, as a consequence of reflexes rather than innate knowledge. Though initially a bit dense with scientific jargon, the book picks up midway through, and the then generally accessible prose skillfully unpacks behaviors that seem instinctive, ranging from the mundane (getting thirsty) to the astonishing (androgenital licking in newborn rats). The writing is as persuasive as it is rich in intriguing detail, and a reader may well find that, by the end of the book, the word "nativism" (the perspective that animals and humans are born with cognitive instincts in place, which Blumberg at one point calls "an intellectual and experimental red herring") has become a dirty word.