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So, in other words,

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if you try to think of anything that’s self-activating-...

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Again, when I was a kid, they told me that

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the sunflower turned towards the sun to receive the sunlight.

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You know, and I wrote it down, it made sense.

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But later on I learned that the sunflower doesn't turn toward the sun.

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The sun, hitting the sunflower at a given angle,

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causes shrinking and pulling of certain membranes,

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and the sun turns the plant, which is quite different.

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Do you see what I mean? There?

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Another interesting experiment was-...

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If you're familiar with these experiments

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it helps you to better understand the situation.

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So we take Estonian fish, which is easier now -

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If you take a tank,

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and put little guppies in there, or any other kind of fish ...

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The question that started this experiment was one done

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in the presence of Loeb, Jacques Loeb, the physiologist.

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And everyone was saying that this fish have instincts,

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and they swim up to spawning grounds.

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They can find a river, like the Orinoco River,

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and they’ve never been there. And they’ll swim across the ocean,

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up the Orinoco River, or up any other river, a thousand miles away,

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and they will have their offspring, and then they will die.

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And they used to think that there was an instinct in these fish,

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some inborn inheritance, that takes them there.

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They call the word 'instinct'. And Loeb said

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that he could not conceive of a fish born with a blueprint for behavior,

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never having studied geography, and never having an imprinted map,

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how the fish can possibly do that.

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So he made assumptions, or

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worked upon certain hypotheses. He said: Possibly,

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all animals orient themselves into oncoming shadows.

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Now that’s very, very different. Here’s what he did.

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He took a single fish and put it in a bowl,

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and he took a glass cylinder and mirror-coated it.

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That is, it was covered with a mirror like surface,

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and he rotated that glass, and he painted black dots on the glass.

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So, when you rotate a glass, like this,

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chromium with black dots and shine a light on it this way,

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shadows will go across the water that way, you understand that? Do you?

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It was silver, and there were black dots on it; you turn it

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and you can see those black dots moving across the floor.

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Well when he turned this above the fishbowl, all of the fish,

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no matter how many he had in there, turned right on into the shadows.

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Is that clear? Immediately.

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But, he then rotated it at an angle,

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and all the fish turned at an angle into the shadow. So he said,

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the running stream of a river ... with the waves on top,

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reduce shadows going against the fish,

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and the fish do not swim against the water,

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they swim against the oncoming shadows.

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Because when he turned the wheel around and spun it faster

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than the stream was moving, they turned around.

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Then he said this:

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that the mechanism that orients the fish to direction is oncoming shadows.

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Is that clear? He tried to find the mechanisms behind the movement.

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In the early days, when a child would play the piano at 9 years old,

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they said they were gifted, had an instinct for music,

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talented, all of those shitty words; and he tried to define those terms.

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He tried to find-... he called himself a mechanist.

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He tried to find the mechanical relationships, that’s what mechanistic means.

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It means, when you roll your eyes to the right,

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there are muscles that pull the eyeballs. There are things that-...

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and there are chemicals that cause the muscles to do that, see what I mean?

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There's a whole series of events, so when you come back to the old question:

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what makes a fish swim upstream? Oncoming shadows.

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So by taking oncoming shadows,

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and throw them over a bunch of baby chickens, same thing.

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They all orient themselves into the oncoming shadows.

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Think you know what I mean there?

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And on down the line, all his work

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that was backed up with words like 'instinct' were thrown out.

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And he said there are certain patterns of behavior

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we haven't been able to decipher as of yet; let's hunt them out.

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Let's try to find the mechanisms that generate behavior. Is that all right?

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Fresco's Classic Lecture Series
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