ABSTRACT
Granted that there are inherited tendencies affecting human behaviour, what terms should we use to describe them? The three words which most naturally come to mind are drive, program and instinct. All three have their separate problems. Drive is a dynamic word, a word about forces. It answers the question ‘why is this done at this intensity?’ Program is a communication word, a term concerned with information ‘coded’ in the genes. It answers the question, ‘why is this done, rather than something else?’ These two technical models are very different. Both are useful; both need watching. Instinct, on the other hand is a much older, broader, less technical word, with a rich crust of associations, some of them misleading. Many people like to throw out all such words, crying with B.F.Skinner that ‘the vernacular is clumsy and obese’.1 They want clean equipment. This wish is what has made drive and programme so popular. But to take this line you have to be sure that you have grasped the underlying problem. New words only help where the thought has been cleared up. Confusions in traditional conceptual schemes usually reflect some difficulty in the subject-matter; they are not just surface dirt. Whatever new scheme we propose will have some relation to the traditional one, and that connection had better be clear and explicit.
