Instinct or Reason

Over the years I’ve discovered many of the things I was taught to be true have turned out to be false. It’s happened often enough to have engendered a healthy amount of skepticism in me. Now, when someone tells me something is absolutely true, part of my brain almost invariably whispers, “Really? Maybe.”

One thing I was taught as a child was that animals operate on instinct, not by rational thought. I’ve learned there are two things wrong with that belief. First of all, I haven’t detected an overwhelming amount of rational thinking among humans. People regularly operate on emotion and make dec...