From The New International Dictionary:
"Instinct: natural inward impulse; unconscious, involuntary or unreasoning prompting to any mode of action, whether bodily or mental. Instinct, in its more technical use, denotes any inherited tendency to perform a specific action in a specific way when the appropriate situation occurs; furthermore, an instinct is characteristic of a group or race of related animals."

So a behaviour pattern or inclination which has persisted over a sufficiently huge span of time to be passed on genetically may be considered instinctive. That instincts govern animal behaviour is a statement that few would dispute. Except for certain religious elements, most would agree with Charles Darwin that mankind has evolved through an evolutionary process. It follows that Man is an animal. Animals are very much subject to their instincts.

It is important to remember that the remote ancestors of the first true humans were also governed entirely by their instincts. The situation would not change until the human brain had evolved enough to allow the first stirrings of primitive logic. This was probably in the time of Homo Habilis, about 2.5 million years ago.

This change would take many long years to evolve. As the brain's neocortex grew in size, reasoning abilities also developed. For the first time, logical thought processes started to impact on decision making. The instinct/rationality slider started to shift from the 100% instinctual end to a more balanced setting, as the long ages rolled by. The key question is, where does this slider sit as regards modern humanity?

When it comes to modern human instincts, we enter an area of scientific controversy. By the close of the 19th century most repeated behavior was considered instinctual: indeed one researcher chronicled 4,000 human instincts. During the 1920's, this view fell into disrepute among American psychologists, although it persisted in Europe.

Jacob Robert Kantor of the University of Chicago "A Functional Interpretation of Human Instincts." (1920) went so far as to say that as a child's reasoning abilities developed, the role of instincts dwindled to zero by the time they became adults.

A 1960 conference chaired by Frank Beach, a pioneer in comparative psychology, declared that to be considered instinctual a behavior must a) be automatic, b) be irresistible, c) occur at some point in development, d) be triggered by some event in the environment, e) occur in every member of the species, f) be unmodifiable, and g) govern behavior for which the organism needs no training.

If these criteria are used in a rigorous scientific manner, application of the term "instinct" cannot be used in reference to any human behavior. Some psychoanalysts use the term instinctual drives to describe forces such as sex and aggression. Human interactions that are derived from instincts but have been modified by rationality and environment may be classified as instinctive behaviour.

The argument over the role of instincts is still hotly debated in many introductory sociology and biology textbooks. Much of this is professional hair-splitting over definitions, or the degree to which instincts have been modified by culture and rational thought.

If the scientific community is divided over the role of such primal instincts as sex and aggression, then clearly support for the idea of spirituality as an instinct will not be forthcoming from the establishment.

Scientists measure things, and if they can't measure it, they can't test a hypothesis about it. The difficulty when it comes to instincts is obvious. This is especially so given that some psychologists hold the view that adult humans literally have no instincts. This implies that the rational mind is in full control by adulthood.

Before ascribing to this view, it might be instructive to have a few words with the survivors of Hurricane Katrina and the New Orleans Superdome, to see if they noted any evidence of basic instincts at work. Any time the thin veneer of civilisation gets fractured, the beast behind every human brow fights for dominance with the rational part of the brain. How can it be otherwise when the primitive parts of our brains are still there, and ceased their evolutionary development millions of years ago?

For our purposes here, we are not attempting to write a paper to present to a scientific body. Precise definitions of basic instincts as versus instinctive behaviour may be left to competing schools of psychology. It is also worthwhile to note that it is not the concept of behaviour being passed on genetically that is in debate, but to what extent modern humanity is still hostage to ancient programming.

Definitive answers will have to wait until scientists understand much more of the Human Genome than they do now. However, some scientific support for the idea of spirituality being passed on genetically is now in print. See: Book Reviews: The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes, by Dean H. Hamer.

It remains a central tenet of this web site that religion is based upon a spirituality instinct that has been around since the dawn of humanity, and this is why it persists in one form or another in today's modern world. Side by side with religion is an instinctive love of ritual. How else can you explain such irrational activities?

The bottom line is, people are drawn towards some form of spirituality as if to a magnet. There is no other explanation for the persistence of religion in today's world with its scientific focus.