Origin of Instinct

Evolutionist scientists use the word instinct is to describe certain behavior that animals possess from birth. However questions such as "How did they acquire these instincts?" "How did instinctive behavior first emerge? "how is such behavior transmitted from one generation to another?" always go unanswered.

The evolutionist geneticist Gordon Rattray Taylor makes this admission regarding the dilemma represented by instincts: "When we ask ourselves how an instinctive pattern of behaviour arose in the first place and became hereditarily fixed, we are given no answer." 109

Certain other evolutionists do not make such admissions. They try to gloss over these questions with veiled answers that do not actually mean anything at all. According to evolutionists, instincts are behaviors programmed in living things' genes. According to this explanation, a honeybee, for example, instinctively builds its marvelous hexagonal combs that are marvels of mathematics. To put it another way, the genes of all the honeybees in the world are programmed with the instinct to construct perfect hexagonal combs. If living things perform the majority of their behaviors because they are programmed to do so, then who programmed them? Since no program can come into being of its own accord, this program must have a programmer. What evolutionists attempt to explain in terms of "instinct" or by saying "Animals have been programmed to do this," is actually the inspiration of Allah.

Charles Darwin, who first proposed the theory of evolution, realized that animal behavior and instinct represented major threats to his theory. In The Origin of Species, he openly admitted as much, several times:

Many instincts are so wonderful that their development will probably appear to the reader a difficulty sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.110

Chapter III. of the Sketch, which concludes the first part, treats of the variations which occur in the instincts and habits of animals . . . It seems to have been placed thus early in the Essay to prevent the hasty rejection of the whole theory by a reader to whom the idea of natural selection acting on instincts might seem impossible. This is the more probable, as the Chapter on Instinct in the Origin is specially mentioned (Introduction, page 5) as one of the "most apparent and gravest difficulties on the theory." 111

When left without an answer, evolutionists sometimes claim that animals learn some behavior by way of experience, and the best of that behavior is favored by natural selection. This good behavior is later handed on to subsequent generations by way of heredity.

1. The erroneous claim that "useful behavior is favored by natural selection."
This thesis implies that Nature is a conscious force able to distinguish between useful and harmful behaviors and of making decisions. No consciousness or force in nature is capable of this distinction. An animal itself may decide what behavior is useful, but it cannot pass this insight along through its genes alone.  Only an Entity possessed of consciousness and reason-namely, the Creator of nature and the life form in question-can make that selection.

Darwin himself admitted the impossibility of complex and beneficial behavior being acquired through natural selection, although he stated that he persisted in that claim despite it being nonsensical:

Finally it may not be a logical deduction, but to my imagination it is far more satisfactory to look at such instincts as the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers, ants making slaves . . . not as specially endowed or created instincts, but as small consequences of one general law leading to the advancement of all organic beings-namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.112

Professor Cemal Yıldırım, one of Turkey's leading evolutionists, admits that behavior such as a mother's love for her young cannot be explained by natural selection:

Is there any possibility of accounting for a mother's love for her young through any "blind" order [natural selection] not including a spiritual element? It is certainly hard to say that biologists [at this point Darwinists] have given a satisfactory reply to this question.113

Since these organisms, lacking any reason and foresight, have a number of miraculous features; and since it is not possible for them to have acquired these features of their own will, some power must have bestowed these features on them. The mechanism of natural selection and nature itself has no consciousness and no such spiritual features, for which reason these cannot be the source of the characteristics these creatures possess. The obvious truth is this: all living things exist by the will and under the control of Allah. For this reason, we frequently see exceedingly conscious and astonishing behavior in nature, inhabited by unconscious entities, of the kind that makes people ask. "How does this animal know how to do that?" or "How did this creature ever think of doing that?"

2. It is impossible for behavior acquired through natural selection to be transmitted genetically to subsequent generations.
In the second phase of evolutionists' claims, behavior acquired through natural selection must be genetically handed on to subsequent generations. However, such claims are full of various inconsistencies. First, , even if animals learned behavior through experience, it is impossible for subsequently acquired behavior to be passed on genetically. Learned behavior belongs uniquely to the animal that learned it. It is absolutely impossible for any learned behavior to be encoded into a living thing's genes.

[I]t would be a serious error to suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation, and then transmitted by inheritance to succeeding generations. It can be clearly shown that the most wonderful instincts with which we are acquainted, namely, those of the hive-bee and of many ants, could not possibly have been acquired by habit.114

If a working ant or other neuter insect had been an ordinary animal, I should have unhesitatingly assumed that all its characters had been slowly acquired through natural selection; namely, by individuals having been born with slight profitable modifications, which were inherited by the off-spring; and that these again varied and again were selected, and so onwards. But with the working ant we have an insect differing greatly from its parents, yet absolutely sterile; so that it could never have transmitted successively acquired modifications of structure or instinct to its progeny. It may well be asked how is it possible to reconcile this case with the theory of natural selection?115

3. The invalidity of the claim that instincts evolve together with living things
Darwin was aware of the inconsistencies and impossibilities regarding evolutionary explanations for instincts and questioned the claim that instincts, following their acquisition, changed through natural selection:

[C]an instincts be acquired and modified through natural selection? What shall we say to the instinct which leads the bee to make cells, and which has practically anticipated the discoveries of profound mathematicians? 116

This inconsistency can be made clearer by citing examples of fish, which have their own unique ways of reproducing, hunting, defense and nest-building. These characteristics have been perfectly regulated according to underwater conditions. In their mating season, some fish adhere their eggs to an undersea rock and provide them with oxygen by fanning their fins.

In that case, according to evolution theory, as these fish evolved their instincts must also have undergone great changes. Indeed, their instincts would have to change almost entirely for these fish to start clearing perfect round nests, in much the same way terrestrial animals do for the protection of their eggs.

It has been objected to the foregoing view of the origin of instincts that the variations of structure and of instinct must have been simultaneous and accurately adjusted to each other, as a modification in the one without an immediate corresponding change in the other would have been fatal." 117

As you have seen, instinctive behavior in animals cannot be explained in terms of any evolutionary process, chance, or "Mother nature". The source of animals' behavior lies neither in their own bodies nor in nature. Under the inspiration of Allah, all living things behave in the manner most suited to their own structures and to their surroundings.

109. Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Great Evolution Mystery, London: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, 1983, p. 222.
110. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, The Modern Library, Random House, p. 184.
111. Francis Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. I, New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1888, p. 374.
112. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, The Modern Library, Random House, p. 208.
113. Cemal Yıldırım, Evrim Kuramı ve Bağnazlık, (Evolution Theory and Bigotry), p. 185.
114. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Elibron Classics, 2005, p. 206.
115. Ibid., p. 229.
116. Ibid., p. 133.
117. Ibid.