In the past few decades, remarkable findings have been made in ethology, the study of animal social behavior. Earlier scientists had (21) that nonhuman social life was almost totally instinctive or fixed by genetics. Much more careful observation has shown that (22) variation occurs among the social ties of most species, showing that learning is a part of social life. That is, the (23) are not solely fixed by the genes (24) , the learn ing that occurs is often at an early age in a process that is called imprinting. Imprinting is clearly (25) instinctive, but it is not quite like the learning of humans; it is something in between the two. An illustration best (26) the nature of imprinting. Once, biologists thought that ducklings followed the mother duck because of instincts. Now we know that, shortly (27) they hatch, ducklings fix (28) any object about the size of a duck and will henceforth follow it. So ducklings may follow a basketball or a briefcase if these are (29) for the mother duck at the time when imprinting occurs. Thus, social ties can be considera bly (30) , even ones that have a considerable base (31) by genetics.Even among the social insects something like imprinting (32) influence social behav ior. For example, biologists once thought bees communicated with others purely (33) in stinct. But, in examining a "dance" that bees do to indicate the distance and direction of a pollen source, observers found that bees raised in isolation could not communicate effec tively. At a higher level, the genetic base seems to be much more for an all-purpose learn ing rather than the more specific responses of imprinting. Chimpanzees, for instance, gen erally (34) very good mother but Jane Goodali reports that some chimps carry the infant upside down or (35) fail to nurture the young. 29()
A. otherwise
B. still
C. yet
D. even
The table before which we sit may be, as the scientist maintains, composed of dancing atoms, but it does not reveal itself to us as anything of the kind, and it is not with dancing atoms but a solid and motionless object that we live. So remote is this "real" table--and most of the other "realities" with which science deals--that it cannot be discussed in terms which have any human value, and though it may receive out purely intellectual credence it cannot be woven into the pattern of life as it is led, in contradistinction to life as we attempt to think about it. Vibrations in the either are so totally unlike, let us say, the color purple that the gulf between them cannot be bridged, and they are, to all intents and purposes, not one but two separate things of which the second and less "real" must be the most significant for us. And just as the sensation which has led us to attribute an objective reality to a nonexistent thing which we call "purple" is more important for human life than the conception of vibrations of a certain frequency, so too the belief in God, however ill founded, has been more important in the life of man than the germ theory of decay, however true the latter may he. We may, if we like, speak of consequence, as certain mystics love to do, of the different levels or orders of truth. We may adopt what is essentially a Platonist trick of thought and insist upon postulating the existence of external realities which correspond to the needs and modes of human feeling and which, so we may insist, have their being is some part of the universe unreachable by science. But to do so is to make an unwarrantable assumption and to be guilty of the metaphysical fallacy of failing to distinguish between a truth of feeling and that other sort of truth which is described as a "truth of correspondence," and it is better perhaps, at least for those of us who have grown up in an age of scientific thought, to steer clear of such confusions and to rest content with the admission that, though the universe with which science deals is the real universe, yet we do not and cannot have any but fleeting and imperfect contacts with it ; that the most important part of our lives-our sensations, emotions, desires, and aspirations-takes place in a universe of illusions which science can attenuate or destroy, but which it is powerless to enrich. The author suggests that in order to bridge the puzzling schism between scientific truth and the world of illusions, the reader should ______.
A. try to rid himself of his world of illusion
B. accept his world as being one of illusion
C. apply the scientific method
D. establish a truth of correspondence