Abstract
This article is an attempt to reply to a number of theoretical and epistemological issues frequently addressed in contemporary evolutionary psychology. We adopt a critical approach to both the empiricist conceit so often underlying the discipline and its core premises around the relationship between mind and biological evolution. As an alternative we take a constructivist view from which we propose to broach that relationship through the so-called Baldwin effect. That phenomenon, widely known among evolutionary biologists today, enables us to elude simplistic approaches to the problem of the relationship between psychology and evolution. It also affords a perspective for re-focusing the issues on the activity of organisms and the classic inter-connections among phylogenesis, historiogenesis and ontogenesis. The study concludes with a warning about the limitations to explanation that should be assumed by any psychological postulate with universally comprehensive pretensions, an issue evocative of the inevitable and structural crisis in which psychology should agree to transpire.
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Notes
‘Tradition’ insofar as texts on the discipline’s crisis can be found in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century institutional ‘foundation’ of scientific psychology, a circumstance that has led to a proposal for a specific bibliographic genre (Blanco 2002). The authors who first addressed the crisis would include, for instance, Willy in 1897, Gutberlet in 1898, Stern in 1900, Kostilff in 1911 and Bühler and Vigotsky, both in 1927. Although not overly prevalent in the literature, texts and monographs on the crisis have periodically dotted the editorial landscape and even revisited more classic studies (Caparrós 1991; VV.AA. 2006; Sturm and Mülberger 2012; Wieser 2016). The question that may be posed, then, is whether such a belaboured crisis is more an opportunity than a stumbling block for psychology; or as Blanco (2002) perceptively asked, whether the history of the crisis of psychology is rather a history of the successive crises affecting western subjectivity from the Modern Age to date. That hypothesis will echo throughout the considerations with which we conclude this article.
Deeming biological to be more material than psychological reality is bias because the body is only more real than the mind in the (trivial) sense that its existence is bound to what we perceive as a touchable shape, something that takes up space. Unless we believe in immaterial reality, however, any manner of existence is tied to practice and objects, material things (Bueno 1990; Coole and Frost 2010; Fox and Alldred 2019). Some dimensions of the body are not phenomenic but conceptual (or phenomenic only through devices such as microscopes or mathematical formulae): our neurons, not to mention bodily motion or biomechanics, are cases in point.
Whilst the authors mention, albeit only in passing, that ‘the brain and the body are directly affected by the mind itself, which operates as a “social organ” that converts relational experiences in the brain and somatic processes’ (p. 2), they draw no theoretical implication from that assertion. The idea that the mind is a social organ, as we shall suggest later, can be readily reintegrated into a theoretical evolutionary-psychological structure that reverts to the starting point: biological reality on the one hand and psychological reality, fruit of the former, on the other.
Zagaria, Andò and Zennaro’s epistemic choices are not aseptic when identifying valid representatives: rather they entail visibilising certain psychological tendencies (such as psychoanalysis, cognitivism and neuroscience) and invisibilising others (cultural, genetic, ecological psychology, to name a few). The same can be said of the epistemological structure proposed, where they opt ‘naturally’ for certain conceits (using the Kuhnian idea of paradigm, for instance) over others. As we have been contending all along, no choice is devoid of values and commitments, no matter how objective it may claim to be.
The authors of the article mention epigenetic premises (marginally) (‘[e]pigenetic variations are comprehended as well, because it is demonstrated that they are hereditable and can be selected in the evolution process’, p. 15), while asserting that the gene is widely accepted as the unit of selection, a contention scantly compatible with epigenetic interpretations.
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José Carlos Loredo-Narciandi declares that he has no conflict of interest. Jorge Castro-Tejerina declares that he has no conflict of interest.
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Loredo-Narciandi, J.C., Castro-Tejerina, J. The Clay of Evolution: Megalomania in (Evolutionary) Psychology. Integr. psych. behav. 56, 297–307 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-020-09584-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-020-09584-7