Root System

Statements from individuals claiming that my animal nature is not a reason for socialization difficulties consistently provoke irritation in me. "You are in a human body, therefore you must behave as one." I have heard this phrase countless times from my mother and frequently from others as well. With ordinary people, I can comprehend their perspective. Accept it? No. However, I can certainly understand it. The last individuals I would expect to hear this from are therians. Who, if not they, should understand what it means to be a wild animal among humans, confined in a human body? Yet, this is where I have most often encountered such remarks in recent years.

What has always depressed me about the therian community is that many appear to underestimate the biological foundation of instincts, yet insist that all my behavior must be entirely under rational control, as if I could simply activate a switch. This is not how it functions. This perspective is not only naïve but also disregards biological reality. In this essay, I aim to explain why. To clarify from the outset: there will be no magic, mysticism, or romanticism here. Instinct is purely biological.

Let us begin with basic definitions. What is instinct? Instinct is a complex set of heritarily determined behavioral acts, triggered by external or internal stimuli and aimed at fulfilling essential biological needs. This is how science defines instinct. [0] The same holds for an animal in a human body, provided we mean instinct in its true, biological sense, rather than something else.

All animals confront essential tasks of survival, dominance, and reproduction. Behavioral motivations exist to achieve these objectives, while instinct serves as the practical mechanism for their realization. Learning overlays these, refining skills, and modulating these programs. Scientists debate whether learning constitutes part of the instinctive behavioral framework, but this is not our focus presently.

Instincts operate at the neurophysiological level. From this scientific perspective, instinct is manifested as a set of predetermined neural connections, which can only be modulated within certain boundaries through training or momentarily suppressed. Furthermore, instinct permits little variability: without training, the same instinct within a species functions similarly, adjusted for random genetic variations. Only the degree of expression may differ significantly. [2]

This explanation simplifies matters: instincts are also significantly realized through the architectural features of the central nervous system, particularly the limbic system. However, this is not critical here. Clearly, a human cannot possess the central nervous system of another species. Nevertheless, hypothetically, variations in the strength of connections between brain regions, their sensitivity to specific neurotransmitters, and activation thresholds could vary significantly among individuals, creating an innate predisposition to behaviors normative in other species. What is certain are neural connections. Ultimately, the same brain regions, shaped by shared mammalian evolution, govern basic behaviors in humans, canines, and felids. Biochemical reinforcement is also identical.

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