Even such physically well-organized creatures as Crustacea stand at
an amazingly low mental level. The other day I was reading a careful
account of experiments on the behaviour of crabs. The method by which
the sexes recognize each other is so crude that I am not sure whether
it deserves the term recognition at all. Before mating, which takes
place immediately after a moult, the female is carried about for some
time in the claws of the male. The mature males will attempt to lift
up and carry off any members of the same species, male or female: but
the only ones which will permit themselves to be thus carried about are
females just before moulting. Hence by a general instinct to lift any
members of the same species on the part of the males, and on the part
of the females an instinct to allow themselves to be lifted when in
the physiological condition which precedes moulting, the required end
is brought about. But of any mental operation such as is involved in
sex-recognition in man or any other mammal, there is no evidence.
Fish, to take another example, possess associative memory; they can
learn. But they learn very slowly, and learn only the simplest things.
The jump from their powers of memory to those of a dog, who can be
trained comparatively quickly to carry out complicated tricks, is as
great as the further jump from the powers of a dog to those of a man
capable of learning a page of print by heart in two or three readings.
The first organs connected with mind to become elaborated are the
organs of sense: but such _receptor_ organs are useless to their
possessor, however elaborate, unless put into relation with proper
_effector_ organs--organs for action, whether locomotor or secretory.
So that the first steps are the elaboration of sense-organs, the
increase of efficiency of muscles and glands, and, equally essential,
the construction of an improved “_adjustor system_,” whereby the
stimulus falling on the sense-organ may be translated into action and
into the right kind of action. This adjustor mechanism is the central
nervous system. Most of the further history of organisms may be summed
up in one phrase--the evolution of adjustor mechanisms.
At first, it is chiefly of importance to be brought into relation with
more and more of the happenings of the outer world, to be able to see
and hear and feel and smell more and more delicately; and to react upon
the outer world more and more efficiently and powerfully, to be able
to move and to handle matter more quickly and with finer and finer
adjustment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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