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Homes Without Hands
Instinct or intelligent design?
The nineteenth-century debate on animal architecture -
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, philosophers, natural theologians, and scientists engaged in heated debates over the question: Why do animals build? Specifically, was it instinct or intelligence that propelled spiders, birds, bees, and beavers to construct their webs, nests, hives, and dams? The answer had everything to do with that other burning question: What distinguishes animals from humans?
Before the nineteenth century‚ the dominant view of animal behaviour, inherited in various forms from Aristotle‚ Thomas Aquinas, and Descartes‚ was that animals operated according to innate instincts given by a divine source. The natural theologian William Paley (1743–1805) asserted that the wonders of nature could only be explained by recourse to a higher power. He reasoned‚ “There cannot be design without a designer; contrivance without a contriver”. As prime evidence‚ Paley cited the beehive‚ with its apparent swarm intelligence and its strict social order.
By the mid-nineteenth century the debate over animal instinct had intensified as scientific evidence mounted and as the philosophical and theological stakes increased. In 1868 the American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan weighed in with his book The American Beaver and His Works‚ which encapsulated years of research into the beaver genus Castor. Morgan analysed the extensive “net-works” of dams‚ canals‚ and lodges that the animals created‚ postulating that beavers erected them in order to create and regulate water flow through artificial ponds‚ allowing the creatures to flee from land-bound predators into the underwater entrances of their lodges and burrows.
For Morgan, the nature of beavers’ large-scale artificial reshaping of the land demonstrated that their “mental principle” was essentially the same as that of humans and that beavers too possessed faculties of memory, reason, imagination and will‚ as well as passions‚ appetites‚ and even the ability to go mad.
Previous page: “Yuansu II #8-1, 2013-2014”, by Ren Ri. (Photo courtesy Ren Ri)
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Above all, it was the animals’ ability to adapt their constructions to a variety of site-specific conditions − incorporating part of a fallen tree‚ or fitting a series of dams in a gorge − that demonstrated to Morgan the beaver’s intelligence.
Charles Darwin saw claims about the divine origin of animal instinct as one of the strongest challenges to his developing theory of evolution. Hence‚ he took special pains to develop a counter-explanation for the perfection of beehives in his On the Origin of Species (1859). Darwin adopted the old natural theologians’ idea of “instinct” but replaced the divine cause with a natural one. He argued that the refinement of the bee’s works resulted from natural selection − that is‚ through the accumulation of numerous slight, successive modifications.
Illustration of the Great Beaver Dam at Grass Lake, Michigan from Lewis Henry Morgan’s “The American Beaver”, 1868. (Image: Public domain)
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Examples from artist Ren Ri’s “Yuansu II”, an artistic collaboration with bees to create complex honeycomb sculptures. Each box is rotated every seven days to allow the bees to build new sections of the work. (All photos courtesy of the artist.)
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Irene Cheng is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the California College of the Arts and principal of the multimedia design firm Cheng + Snyder. She is currently working on a book about nineteenth-century utopian architecture in the United States. She is the co-editor with Bernard Tschumi of The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century.
A version of this essay first appeared in Cabinet magazine issue 23 (Fall 2006) under the title The Beavers and the Bees.
Illustrations showing a prairie dog town and an extensive beaver dam system filling a gorge, both taken from Morgan’s “The American Beaver”, 1868. (Images: Public domain)
The test of fitness was the more economical use of wax‚ which manifested as a geometrically rigorous structure. To support his theory he cited the progressive range of hives‚ from the crude cells of the honey bee to the “perfect” hexagons of the hive bee.
In Morgan’s account, the beaver’s intelligence was seen as directing the activity of building; animal architecture was an expression of consciousness. In contrast‚ Darwin saw the beautiful forms of beehives as accidental‚ the result of agents operating according to natural laws but with no awareness of the means and ends. The differences between the thinkers should not be overstated; in a sense‚ they were like two jousters aiming for the same spot and bypassing each other. Whereas Morgan sought to show that animals had intelligence – akin to humans‚ Darwin was trying to demonstrate that humans operated‚ like animals‚ on instinct. Although Darwin refrained from stating it explicitly‚ the implications of his theory were clear: men were essentially like bees‚ moved by natural forces beyond their control. It was this drone-like aspect of Darwin’s bees that proved most threatening to nineteenth-century sensibilities surrounding the concept of free will. I
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