Adaptations, exaptations, and spandrels.

Adaptation and natural selection are central concepts in the emerging science of evolutionary psychology. Natural selection is the only known causal process capable of producing complex functional organic mechanisms. These adaptations, along with their incidental by-products and a residue of noise, comprise all forms of life. Recently, S. J. Gould (1991) proposed that exaptations and spandrels may be more important than adaptations for evolutionary psychology. These refer to features that did not originally arise for their current use but rather were co-opted for new purposes. He suggested that many important phenomena—such as art, language, commerce, and war—although evolutionary in origin, are incidental spandrels of the large human brain. The authors outline the conceptual and evidentiary standards that apply to adaptations, exaptations, and spandrels and discuss the relative utility of these concepts for psychological science. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The mismeasure of desire: The science, theory, and ethics of sexual orientation.

Reviews the book, The mismeasure of desire: The science, theory, and ethics of sexual orientation by Edward Stein (see record 1999-04230-000). It would hardly be overstating the matter to say that perhaps the single most hotly debated issue in both psychology and contemporary American culture is the nature and origins of human sexual desires. In opposition to the currently more widely accepted thesis that sexual orientation is determined at birth, philosopher and educator Edward Stein argues in this new book that much of what we think we know about the origins of sexual desire is probably misguided and incomplete. Carefully examining a broad range of research on sexual orientation, Stein suggests that many of the most frequently cited findings are deeply flawed—not only methodologically but also in light of certain unquestioned philosophical assumptions and cultural stereotypes. Although the arguments in Stein’s book are more than a little likely to create controversy, and, indeed, some may well be found to be specious, his book is nonetheless a very welcome infusion of thoughtful philosophical and psychological thinking into the all-too-often muddled arena of contemporary academic and political debate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Naturalistic ethics and the social sciences.

This article discusses naturalistic ethics and the social sciences. It is noted that some of those who believe science is (or should be) ethically neutral have fallen into a naturalistic fallacy. The author believes that we all have equal cause to reject the naturalistic fallacy and what he calls the "counternaturalistic fallacy," that is, the belief that ethics cannot have a naturalistic basis but must have supernatural origins or sanctions. The fallacy of these points of view are discussed in this article, as well as evolutionary ethics and human nature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Many voices, many selves.

Reviews the book, Invisible guests: The development of imaginal dialogues by Mary Watkins (see record 1986-98003-000). Watkins seeks to convince the reader that the dialogues we carry on silently—"with our reflection in the mirror...with a figure from a dream or movie, with our dog...with critics, with our mothers, with our god(s)..."—are not an incidental aspect of mental life but central phenomena, laden with both cognitive and emotional significance. Agreement with this beginning point commits the reader to two further ideas which are conceptually independent but systematically interwoven in this book: that the imaginative life deserves analysis based on appreciation of its centrality and generative nature, and that dialogue is a fundamental—perhaps the primary—form in which we think. Watkins draws upon a range of sources in psychology, philosophy, literature and religion to develop an integrated and original interpretation of the meanings of imaginal dialogue in mental life. Readers may take issue with one or another theme, or with Watkins' overall approach, but they will find themselves engaged in a meaningful and thought-provoking dialogue. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Darwin’s eclipse concerned function versus mechanism.

Comments on a article by Dewsbury (February–March 2009) (see record 2009-01602-013) in which he stated, “Darwin provided a viable mechanism for evolutionary change, natural selection” (p. 67). Although this view is consistent with the modern synthesis, the author argues that (a) the natural selection “mechanism” provided by Darwin was not initially accepted by scientists because (b) natural selection is a functional explanation, and functional explanations are always incomplete because they describe how things work but not why they work; that is, they lack mechanism information. This explanatory deficiency led to what Bowler (1983), uncited by Dewsbury (2009), described (in a book of the same name) as “The eclipse of Darwinism,” the initial rejection of natural selection by most scientists. The importance of the distinction the author is making between functional explanations and mechanism information for the future of psychology is that efforts to advance psychological science by clarifying causal mechanisms must first understand how mechanism explanations differ from functional explanations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The uncertain sciences.

Reviews the book, The uncertain sciences by Bruce Mazlish (1998). In this very wide-ranging book, Mazlish examines the achievements, failings, and possibilities of the human sciences—understood broadly to include history, anthropology, political science, psychology, sociology, economics and other related disciplines. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Passionate men, emotional women: Psychology constructs gender difference in the late 19th century.

The author examines British and American scientific psychology's portrayal of natural and ideal masculinity and femininity in the late 19th century to show how purported differences in emotion and reason were critical to explaining the evolutionary foundation of existing social hierarchies. Strong emotion was identified with heterosexual manliness and men's purportedly better capacity to harness the power of emotion in the service of reason. "Feminine" emotion was portrayed as a comparatively ineffectual emotionality, a by-product of female reproductive physiology and evolutionary need to be attractive to men. The author argues that constructions of emotion by psychology served an important power maintenance function. A concluding section addresses the relevance of this history to the politics of emotion in everyday life, especially assertions of emotional legitimacy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Motivation and explanation: An essay on Freud's philosophy of science.

Reviews the book, Motivation and explanation: An essay on Freud's philosophy of science by Nigel Mackay (1989). The book under review is not only an essay on Freud's philosophy of science (as the subtitle has it) but more particularly, a determined attack on the "separate-domain" thesis. This thesis asserts that psychoanalysis belongs to "a domain of explanation separate from explanations of nonhuman phenomena." In refuting this claim, Mackay argues that psychoanalysis falls clearly within the domain of normal science and, by implication, deserves all the rights and privileges of other established disciplines. We hear the echo of Freud when he wrote that "I have always felt it as a gross injustice that people have refused to treat psycho-analysis like any other science." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Where is the psychology going? Structural fault lines revealed by psychologists' use of Kuhn.

Psychologists' appropriation of language and ideas from Thomas Kuhn's (1962, 1970b) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions reveals deep and contradictory concerns about truth, science, and the progress of the field. The author argues that psychologists, uncomfortably straddling natural and social science traditions, reference Structure for 2 reasons largely overlooked: first, because it presents an intermediate, naturalistic position in the war between relativist and rationalist views of scientific truth, and second, because it presents a psychologized model of scientific change. The author suggests that the history of this mutual influence--psychologists being influenced by Kuhn and vice versa--may usefuly inform current practices of psychological science. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Alas, poor Darwin: Arguments against evolutionary psychology.

Reviews the book, Alas, poor Darwin: Arguments against evolutionary psychology by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose (2000). In this book, the authors have gathered together from across a wide range of disciplines many of the leading and most outspoken critics of evolutionary psychology. The result of this joint work is not only a critique of evolutionary psychology’s reductionism, but also a new perspective that offers richer understandings of the biosocial nature of the human world. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The adaptive design of the human psyche: Psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, and the therapeutic process.

Reviews the book, The adaptive design of the human psyche: Psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, and the therapeutic process by Malcolm O. Slavin and Daniel Kriegman (see record 1992-98703-000). The authors have been "absorbed and possessed" for some 25 years by "vexing questions...about whether psychoanalytic notions about the seemingly irrational, conflict-filled nature of the human mind could be reconciled with the Darwinian search for the fundamentally adaptive designs that govern all living creatures" (p. vii). They are knowledgeable and sophisticated psychoanalytic theorists eminently qualified to address such questions, experienced and insightful clinicians, and deeply informed students of modern evolutionary knowledge and theory. This book records their current thinking; their passionate quest for answers continues. This review discusses three significant contributions this book makes to psychoanalytic thought: (a) Slavin and Kriegman's discussion of how evolutionary biology is relevant to psychoanalytic discourse, (b) their analysis of the underlying assumptions of two main psychoanalytic narratives--the classical and the relational--and their integration of these narratives into a new synthesis informed by evolutionary biology, and (c) their exploration of the hidden adaptive dimensions of familiar psychodynamic processes when these processes are viewed in an evolutionary context. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Research notes: San Lázaro Psychiatric Hospital, “El hospicio de Quito”, Ecuador.

The author had heard of “El Hospicio de Quito” from colleagues in Colombia who had informed the author that it was one of the oldest psychiatric hospitals in Latin America, but yet it merits barely a mention in the English language literature and surprisingly little in the Spanish. Those wishing to investigate further may want to obtain Mariana Landázuri Camacho’s (2008) book Salir del encierro. Medio siglo del Hospital Psiquiátrico San Lázaro, which apparently contains a more complete history, although it seems only available from select shops in Quito. Archives relating to the hospital are held in Quito’s Museo Nacional de Medicina. The building is not open to the public, but the staff were friendly and welcoming, and, at the very least, the exterior is worth a visit for its architectural beauty and evocative location. There are no histories of this important institution in the English academic literature, and Landázuri Camacho’s book is apparently the only serious attempt at historical scholarship anywhere. Clearly, there is still much to be investigated about the history of this important institution. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Current aspects of infectious diseases in industrialized countries: development or history?

Man's conception of nature is a historically dated phenomenon. Thus the recent development of infectious diseases in industrialized countries could either be a real phenomenon or simply an artifact related to our current conception of medical progress and research. Is the return of infectious disease a natural process or has modern civilization been less prudent than its predecessors? What are the characteristic features of modern pathogenesis? Are these "changes" the result of some natural dynamics or an evolution in our means of investigation? Modern civilization has not invented technological deviation or diseases of civilization, phenomena well know in the past, but what is new is the fact that science today, with an ever growing amount of information on molecular epidemiology, is still raising questions about infection, recognized new unsuspected forms of the living world which do not fit into our well-knitted outline of infectious agents. We have applied our simplistic and mechanistic schemas designed for the timespan of human life to the evolutionary processes. The effects of evolution and history are thus combined today in a novel way composing a new future for infectious diseases. This new way of looking at infectious diseases is not totally natural nor totally historical. It is perhaps an epistemological revolution going on within epidemiology. The return of infections disease would appear to have a direct effect on magnifying the knowledge and the delinquency of our culture.     

Review of The Development of Modern Behavioural Psychology.

Reviews the book, The Development of Modern Behavioural Psychology by John McLeish (1981). The title of McLeish's book contains two terms that may be somewhat misleading. Describing his efforts as encompassing the "Development" of ideas suggests that the approach is historical, while the term "Modern Behavioural Psychology" might be taken to mean almost anything depending upon one's restrictive use of the term. McLeish, as it turns out, attaches a very restrictive meaning to "Behavioural Psychology". There will probably always be argument about what constitutes a proper historical approach but the reviewer doubts that the tact McLeish takes will ever satisfy. In his review of the history of radical behaviourism, McLeish highlights the work of some writers who have not been given a prominent place by other historians, and discusses, or notes only in passing, authors who have ordinarily been considered prominent. As a history, then, McLeish's book is a disappointment and often annoying. Perhaps the best that can be said about this book is that McLeish hints at a form of behavioural theory which would expand the present boundaries of our thinking. In his enthusiastic advocacy of an account that would recognize the historical, social and cultural origins of human behaviour as well as its complexity (including language, thinking and consciousness), McLeish points to the biological rather than the physical (or mathematical) sciences as the source of appropriate models to develop a science of behaviour. In this he is to be congratulated. It is too bad he did not devote the book to a full development of these notions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Brave new mind: A thoughtful inquiry into the nature of mental life.

Reviews the book, Brave new mind: A thoughtful inquiry into the nature of mental life by Peter Dodwell (see record 2000-08633-000). The author poses the major question for cognitive science: "Can mental life be exhaustively studied as a purely natural phenomenon, or must we go beyond the mundane, the merely physical, to grasp its reality?" (p. viii). His answer is, that "absolutely no psychological consequence follows from a model couched in exclusively algorithmic, physical, or physiological terms, which is the way contemporary cognitive science proceeds" (p. 190). Planned as a history of cognitive science, and its contributory disciplines of psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and computing science, and a contemporary survey of its strengths and weaknesses, the project, according to its author, one of this country's most respected researchers, "got out of hand" (p. vii). While documenting the achievements of cognitive science, this volume is much more a mature retrospective on its limitations and, implicitly, its failures of intent, and this by a participant in the enterprise whose reflections reach back more than 40 years to the beginning of his academic career. It is a courageous endeavour and deserves to be read not only as a critique of cognitive science, of the reductionism of the standard model, but as an autobiographical account of the enlightenment of one participant in that science. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bringing history to life: Simulating landmark experiments in psychology.

The course in history of psychology can be challenging for students, many of whom enter it with little background in history and faced with unfamiliar names and concepts. The sheer volume of material can encourage passive memorization unless efforts are made to increase student involvement. As part of a trend toward experiential history, historians of science have begun to supplement their lectures with demonstrations of classic physics experiments as a way to bring the history of science to life. Here, the authors report on computer simulations of five landmark experiments from early experimental psychology in the areas of reaction time, span of attention, and apparent motion. The simulations are designed not only to permit hands-on replication of historically important results but also to reproduce the experimental procedures closely enough that students can gain a feel for the nature of early research and the psychological processes being studied. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Operant behavior.

"Reinforcement may be contingent, not only on the occurrence of a response, but on special features of its topography, on the presence of prior stimuli, and on scheduling systems. Operant techniques are important in defining the behavioral effects of physiological variables—surgical, electrical, and chemical—in specifying what aspects of behavior are to be attributed to hereditary endowment, in tracing features of mature behavior to early environment, and so on. They are important in clarifying the nature of defective, retarded, or psychotic behavior." Within the field of human behavior "the contingencies of reinforcement which define operant behavior are widespread if not ubiquitous. In its very brief history, the study of operant behavior has clarified the nature of the relation between behavior and its consequences and has devised techniques which apply the methods of the natural science to its investigation." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Damasio's proposition: A review of Damasio, A. (1994).

Reviews the book, Descartes' error: Emotion, reason and the human brain by A. Damasio (1994). This book proposes that emotion and reason are inextricably linked, an idea that runs counter to common folk wisdom but with potentially profound implications for neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy. In the first section, the author tells the tale of Phineas Gage, the colorful character who sustained both brain damage and severe personality change following an explosion that blew a 3-foot tamping iron through his skull. In the second section, Damasio starts to assemble an explanation to account for the phenomena presented in the first section, that is, the "mysterious alliance" of emotion and reason. In the third section of the book, Damasio presents some of the initial attempts to test experimentally the somatic-marker hypothesis. Descartes' error is an entertaining, educational and thought-provoking journey. Damasio does a remarkable job of bringing together a diversity of topics that are often studied and discussed separately--cognition, emotion, learning, neuroanatomy, personality, evolution, and philosophy of mind. The author's presentation of the somatic-marker hypothesis will pique interest and may serve to guide new research to test the tenability of this theory. He has highlighted the importance of that ill-defined aspect of human existence known as "emotion," and brought it to the forefront, a step that may make it not only respectable to consider in future research, but necessary. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)