By Henry Plotkin
This is often an amazingly compact precis of the way psychology has alternately embraced and missed advancements in evolutionary thought over the last centuries. The compactness is essentially as a result outstanding writing, which regularly without problems compresses 3 issues right into a unmarried brief sentence. So sturdy is the writing that after i attempted to isolate extracts to demonstrate this they begun operating into each other! Uncompressed, from one other pen, i believe this booklet may perhaps simply have run to four hundred pages.
I stumbled on this booklet strange in concentrating on psychology by myself. The usual levels in its heritage took on a totally new coloring whilst obvious as both the include, or extra curiously the denial, of evolutionary thought. i have no longer noticeable the 2 stitched so tightly jointly, specified from social technological know-how normally and social matters resembling racism and eugenics.
The writer boldly brings his account up with regards to the current, facilitating the weighing of ways new advancements in evolutionary thought similar to evolutionary psychology give a contribution to psychology itself.
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Extra resources for Evolutionary Thought in Psychology: A Brief History (Blackwell Brief Histories of Psychology)
Sample text
Minimal innate traits, a general learning process, and a reliable species-typical developmental environment and you have a highly effective means of generating complex and effective behavior. Complex problem solving and the ability for abstract reasoning are not required. Morgan’s canon, that one should not ‘‘interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale’’ is a famous criticism of the Victorian penchant for assigning higher psychical faculties to birds, bees, and baboons.
Whilst the second BEFORE DARWIN 23 of these principles is often invoked as the epitomy of Lamarckian theory, it is in fact an unoriginal idea that dates back to ancient Greek philosophy. Lamarck’s was less a theory of descent, as it became in Darwin’s hands, and more one of ascent because governing the operation of these processes is the tendency of all living things to change from simple and imperfect forms to states of increasing complexity and perfection. Here again we have the notion of the scala naturae with life beginning continuously and spontaneously in slimes and molds, and progressing via his principles of use and disuse and the inheritance of acquired characters through intermediate stages of complexity and perfection to arrive finally at its most complex and perfect form, us – human beings.
Selection, natural selection as Darwin called it, is the process by which some of these undirected (sometimes misleadingly called ‘‘blind’’) changes are incorporated into an integrated bodily structure and function better suited to survival and reproductive competence (fitness), and somehow transmitted to offspring. For Darwin, evolution is driven by selectionist processes in contrast to Lamarck’s instructionist paradigm. For Darwin, changes in organisms occur prior to, and independent of, the events in the world but then may become permanently incorporated into the lineage of an organism insofar as these features, adaptations, are heritable and furnish the organisms with increases in fitness.