Charles Darwin

12 Key excerpts on "Charles Darwin"

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  A Short History of British Psychology 1840-1940

  • L.S. Hearnshaw(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The science of geology was not, however, sole forerunner of evolutionary biology. It was but one of many contributory streams. Comparative anatomy, embryology, palaeontology, prehistoric archaeology, and other new disciplines, all sprouted vigorously during the early half of the nineteenth century. We tend to forget how recent was the discovery of much of the basic data of the biological sciences. The manlike apes, for example, were not scientifically described until the late eighteenth century, though the subject of travellers’ tales from 1600 onwards. It was not till 1835 that Owen, later Director of the Natural History Museum, first examined the skeleton of an adult chimpanzee. The remains of the giant reptiles were revealed to an astonished world in the 1820’s and 1830’s, and in what has been called ‘the heroic period’ of palaeontology some kind of system was gradually imposed upon the extraordinary panorama of ancient life. In Germany the researches of von Baer between 1819 and 1837 “first clearly demonstrated the great events in a life history”, and laid the foundations of embryology. His work was one of the formative influences upon Spencer, and when related to the discoveries of the palaeontologists led to the formulation of the law of recapitulation, which saw in the development of the individuai a re-enactment of the main stages in the development of the species. Finally man himself was shown to have an ‘antediluvian’ pre-history first by the discovery in 1846 of flint instruments at Abbeville in France which were unquestionably of great antiquity, and then by the discovery in 1857 of the Neanderthal skull. The theory of evolution alone could make sense of these numerous discoveries.

  2. Charles Darwin (1809–1882)

  Charles Darwin’s reputation as a biologist is so great, and his influence on many branches of science has been so extensive, that it is easy to forget that he was in his own right a considerable psychologist. The Copernican revolution which he effected in the biological sciences was bound to have profound consequences for psychology. Darwin realized that this must be so. “In the future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on the foundations already well laid by Mr Herbert Spencer, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”1 Less than nine years after the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 Darwin himself began to till these fields. He notes in his diary for 4 February 1868, “began work on man”. This work led to two books, first, The Descent of Man (1871), which contained a long comparative study of the mental powers of man and the lower animals, and, in connexion with the theory of sexual selection, an account of the courtship behaviour of animals and of psychological differences between the sexes in both animals and men; and second, The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals

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  A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness

  • Walter Veit(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  human consciousness science and the philosophy of mind, regarding what the bearing could possibly be of work on animal consciousness. Watson's response to his detractors could hardly have been more Darwinian. In his 1913 paper “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It” – the founding manifesto of the behaviourist tradition that was meant to put these critics to rest – Watson explicitly defended the Darwinian view that there is “no dividing line between man and brute” (p. 158). To understand behaviour as a natural, rather than a human, phenomenon, he maintained was how we could only truly advance a science of behaviour as a natural phenomenon. Those inspired by Jamesian psychology, he harshly accused of being stuck in a pre-Darwinian mindset:

  [T]o make consciousness, as the human being knows it, the center of reference of all behavior, forces us into a situation similar to that which existed in biology in Darwin's time.

  John B.

  Watson (1913

  , p. 124) [italics added for emphasis]

  To understand the phenomenon of life, biologists readily recognized that an exclusive look at humans would lead to a biased picture, if not because of its complexity then because of the appeal to thinking of the human body plan as “perfect” or “higher” than other species. What was needed to truly revolutionize our understanding of life as a natural phenomenon was an evolutionary approach based on phylogeny, the comparative method, and sound ecological thinking. Yet, early work in evolutionary biology was initially held back by its focus on the question of human descent.

  This starting point was perhaps not surprising in a historical sense, since a sharp dividing line between humans and the rest of nature was considered to be the greatest challenge to Darwin's theory of natural selection. An assumption of human uniqueness had to be overcome. After the continuity between humans and apes was settled, biologists were finally able to put humans in their place in nature, i.e. one among many species; man was dethroned. In trying to understand biological phenomena, biologists would henceforth use the comparative method – gathering evidence from many different species of animals and plants alike to learn general lessons about life. But from the perspective of Darwinism as a research program that placed us alongside rather than above all other life forms, this early focus on humans must have seemed strange. As Watson (1913)

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  The Biologising of Childhood

  Developmental Psychology and the Darwinian Myth

  • John R. Morss(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 Charles Darwin and the Origins of Developmental Psychology

  The work of Charles Darwin has been seen by many developmentalists as the single most influential source of ideas in the theory of child development.1 In this chapter, Darwin’s own views on developmental issues are investigated. These views are then set in the broader context of evolutionary thinking towards the end of the 19th century, a context in which Darwin’s theory of natural selection was only one of several competing doctrines. This context, rather than Darwin’s theory as such, was the intellectual background from which early developmental psychology emerged. The chapter includes a discussion of the impact of Darwin on his contemporary developmentalists, especially Wilhelm Preyer, George Romanes, and James Sully.

  THE “NATURAL HISTORY OF BABIES”: DARWIN ON CHILD DEVELOPMENT

  Charles Darwin (1809–1882) is widely regarded as the greatest biologist of the 19th century.2 Many of his ideas were developed on his round-the-world voyage on H.M.S. Beagle which took place between 1831 and 1836. Within two years of his return he had opened the first of a series of notebooks on issues relating to human, as well as to animal, evolution. At the end of Notebook M, which was completed in 1838, Darwin wrote the following:

  Natural History of Babies Do babies start (i.e., useless sudden movement of muscles) very early in life Do they wink, when anything placed before their eyes, very young, before

  experience can have taught them to avoid danger Do they know frown when they first see it?3

  The notebooks covered numerous topics, including much material on emotional expression in man and animals. Darwin’s notebook material on human babies was based on secondhand evidence, but a year later his first child, William, was born. Darwin made careful observations on William’s early development, including the issues he had identified in 1838. This material remained unpublished by him until 1877, when some extracts appeared as “A biographical sketch of an infant.” 4

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  Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology

  Volume III

  • Gregory A. Kimble, Michael Wertheimer(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  After realizing that his theory was so godless in its implications, Darwin experienced an intense approach-avoidance conflict (personal ambition vs. social fear). He suffered from frequent episodes of serious illness. These periodic bouts of illness, which persisted throughout Darwin’s life, have been interpreted by Freudians as manifestations of a psychosomatic disorder. However, more sympathetic sources assign causes related to his travels (e.g., a bite by a particularly ugly beetle while hiking in the Andes). His severe personal conflict, extending at least 20 years, came to an abrupt end only after he received a friendly and modest letter from Malaya by Alfred Wallace, indicating that he, too, had discovered natural selection.

  DARWIN’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHOLOGY

  Darwin’s contributions to psychology were of two kinds: direct and indirect. The direct contributions are in his books, The Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) and The Descent of Man (1871), and in the chapter on instinct in The Origin of Species (1858). In The Descent of Man , he takes up the evolution of the “higher faculties of human mental life” and traces them from animals through savage and barbarian stages inferred from his observations of the aborigines in Tierra del Fuego and the slaves, masters, and natives in South America. In both books, Darwin used the anecdotal method that was standard at his time, but only after he had recited the homologous anatomical structures among humans and animals. His underlying argument was that, given clearly homologous structures (facial muscles or brains), their use must be at least analogous.

  It can be argued, however, that the most important contributions to psychology of the theory of natural selection were not those that can be found in Darwin’s own writings or in those of his contemporaries. Instead, these lasting contributions were indirect. They came through the impact of the theory on Darwin’s contemporaries: Spencer, Gaiton (chap. 1 , Pioneers I ), Romanes, and their intellectual progeny, who were pioneers in the functionalist and behavioristic schools of psychology, such as William James, Edward L. Thorndike, John B. Watson (chap. 2 , 10 , and 12 , Pioneers I ), Robert Yerkes (chap. 7 , Pioneers I

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  The First Century of Experimental Psychology

  • Elliot Hearst, Eliot Hearst(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  As one reads the great philosophers from Aristotle onward, it seems as if each has issued an opinion on the question of psychological continuity and discontinuity of man and animal; in fact, major philosophical treatises have been devoted to it. Schooled as we “moderns” are to expect weighty pronouncements to be based solidly on experimental fact or, at the very least, on extensive and systematic naturalistic observation, it is a dismaying experience to search out and eventually discern the slim empirical basis of many of the older and heady tracts on comparative psychology: The ratio of speculation to evidence is just the inverse of what it is today. No wonder the French naturalist Charles Georges Leroy (1802) said that he treasured the comparative-psychological opinion of hunters more than those of philosophers because the former at least had considerable first-hand experience with the behavior of their prey, while the latter seemed largely ignorant of the functional capabilities of wild animals.

  In the present essay, I sketch the leading figures and ideas in the recent history of comparative psychology and ethology, beginning with Charles Darwin and his British successors (Romanes, Morgan, Hobhouse), followed by the theoretical contributions of the Canadian Wesley Mills and the Americans Baldwin and Thorndike and a brief discourse on ethological thought, and closing with a summary account of contemporary thinking and a glimpse into the future.1

  II. THE INFLUENCE OF Charles Darwin

  The widespread scientific acceptance of Charles Darwin’s brilliant insight that evolution takes place via natural selection (among other means) is certainly attributable to the enormous data base he brought to bear on the subject in his Origin of Species, published for the first time in 1859. In fact, that treatise, which was to go through six revised editions, is the starting point of “modern” or recent comparative psychology, as well as the field of ethology. The respect for evidence (however indirect: Darwin did not describe the origin of a single species in the Origin of Species)

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  Darwinism and Pragmatism

  William James on Evolution and Self-Transformation

  • Lucas McGranahan(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 Individuals in evolution James’s Darwinian psychology      

  The rise of scientific psychology coincided with the acceptance of evolutionary theories into mainstream science. Just as sensation, cognition and behaviour came to be studied as organic functions, the very concept of an organic function took on a radically historical dimension. As a result, evolutionists were now claiming that mental processes derive from a nervous system that had developed over millennia to manage the concrete exigencies of life. Mind was no longer an exalted faculty of knowledge but a set of instrumental functions tethered to an environment that had slowly ground them out.

  Nineteenth-century evolutionism does not speak with one voice, however. The competing mechanisms of natural selection and the inheritance of acquired characteristics, for instance, suggest different relationships between ontogeny and phylogeny – individual development and the history of species – and each mechanism has been subject to competing interpretations that emphasize different internal and environmental factors. Tracing the influence of evolutionism in psychology therefore requires attending to the specific logics of particular evolutionary theories.

  The present chapter does not attempt to map out this entire territory but instead traces one instructive path: that of William James. James was among the most influential psychologists in the decades following the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), especially in the US. Known as the Father of American Psychology, James is credited with founding the first psychology laboratory in the US in 1875;1 teaching the first physiological psychology course in the US in the same year; supervising the country’s first PhD in psychology in 1878; and publishing the seminal text of early US psychology, The Principles of Psychology, in 1890. An examination of James’s scientific education and early writings show how he understood Darwinism to be emblematic of the uncertainty of science. James nevertheless embraced Darwin’s theory, not just in explaining mental evolution, but also in modelling individual cognition and behaviour. James thus employs selectionist logics at both phylogenetic and ontogenetic levels, making him the first double-barrelled Darwinian psychologist

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  Social Psychology, Past and Present

  An Integrative Orientation

  • Jay M. Jackson(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  social behaviorism : Influenced by Darwin, he said that mind was not a separate type of “stuff” but an activity of the organism in its efforts to survive (Mead, 1903). But he was not widely read nor understood. Watson (1930, p. 274) confessed in his autobiography: “I took courses and seminars with Mead. I didn’t understand him in the classroom, but for years Mead took a great interest in my animal experimentation, and many a Sunday he and I spent in the laboratory watching my rats and monkeys. On these comradely exhibitions and at his home I understood him.” Mead’s theory has been influential thoroughout social psychology, although often misinterpreted. We discuss it later in this chapter.

  Even though behaviorists were adamantly opposed to instinctual theories, they were strongly influenced by Darwin. The evolutionary assumption that behavior develops as an adaptation to the environment in the struggle for survival is a central pillar of behaviorist theories (Berkowitz, 1969). That keystone of learning theory, the Law of Effect , has been recognized as “a special case of Darwin’s Law of Natural Selection , applied to habits (social or otherwise)” (Berger & Lambert, 1968).

  Social Darwinism

  The amorphous field of social psychology always has been concerned with social entities and processes more comprehensive than the individual person: With groups, collectivities, culture, and social change. Evolutionary theory was the impetus for the rise of Social Darwinism in many countries: The biological theory was applied to social groups instead of to organisms. Theorists disagreed on the nature of groups and on the individual’s relation to society but they all assumed essentially the same evolutionary process in social change (Sahakian 1974). Central to their credo was Darwin’s idea of the survival of the fittest, applied to societies. This provided a rationale for ordering nations and ethnic groups in terms of their power and eminence, which they believed was positively correlated with their degree of advancement on the presumed evolutionary scale. Thus, some people were the most civilized and culturally advanced, and others were retarded and undeveloped.

  William Graham Sumner (1906) was a social Darwinist whose concepts folkways and mores were precursors of the contemporary study of norms and normative processes. He proclaimed that patterns of social behavior that survive from experience must thereby be the fittest—consistent with his laissez-faire ideology. The massive pioneering studies of Folk Psychology

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  Perspectives On Psychology

  • Michael W. Eysenck(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  It is difficult to capture the essence of Aristotle's enormous contribution to psychology. Nevertheless, it can safely be said that he had a very sophisticated view of the scientific method, and of the proper relationship between experimental findings and theoretical models. The crucial significance of his contribution can be seen in this quotation from Charles Darwin, who was himself one of the most influential figures in the history of psychology: "Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle". What is perhaps the greatest compliment to Aristotle's eminence, however, is the fact that, for almost 2000 years after his death, psychology didn't advance significantly beyond the position he had reached.

  The seventeenth century

  For reasons that are probably best left to historians to explain, psychology (and most other sciences) went into relative decline for several centuries after the intellectual flourishing of Ancient Greece. This decline was halted and reversed by a number of outstanding scientists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the mid-sixteenth century, Copernicus argued that the earth and the planets moved around the sun; Galileo investigated issues such as gravity and the laws governing pendulum movements; and Sir Isaac Newton revolutionised great areas of scientific knowledge.

  Psychology was relatively slow to respond to the exciting intellectual atmosphere of the times, perhaps because of its comparative complexity. It is especially perplexing that the seventeenth-century approach to psychology was almost totally devoid of any attempts to conduct proper experiments, in great contrast to the approach taken by scientists such as Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton. Presumably it was believed experiments would be unable to shed any real light on the mind or soul, and so were of very limited potential value.

  Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was the first major figure in seventeenthcentury psychology. He claimed that animals resemble machines, in that their actions are predictable from physical laws. (This mechanistic approach to animal psychology is broadly consistent with the theoretical stance adopted by the behaviourists in the early years of the twentieth century.) But only part of human behaviour could be explained in the mechanistic terms applicable to animals. Human thought and rational decision-making illustrated the workings of the soul or mind, by which Descartes basically meant consciousness.

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  Evolutionary Psychology

  The New Science of the Mind

  • David M. Buss(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part 1 Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology

  Two chapters introduce the foundations of evolutionary psychology. Chapter 1 traces the scientific movements leading to evolutionary psychology. First, we describe the landmarks in the history of evolutionary theory, starting with theories of evolution developed before Charles Darwin and ending with modern formulations of evolutionary theory widely accepted in the biological sciences today. Next, we examine three common misunderstandings about evolutionary theory. Finally, we trace landmarks in the field of psychology, starting with the influence Darwin had on the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and ending with modern formulations of cognitive psychology.

  Chapter 2 provides the conceptual foundations of modern evolutionary psychology and introduces the scientific tools used to test evolutionary psychological hypotheses. The first section examines theories about the origins of human nature. Then we turn to a definition of the core concept of an evolved psychological mechanism and outline the properties of these mechanisms. The middle portion of Chapter 2 describes the major methods used to test evolutionary psychological hypotheses and the sources of evidence on which these tests are based. Because the remainder of the book is organized around human adaptive problems, the end of Chapter 2 focuses on the tools evolutionary psychologists use to identify adaptive problems, starting with survival and ending with the problems of group living.

  Passage contains an image

  Chapter 1 The Scientific Movements Leading to Evolutionary Psychology

  Learning Objectives After studying this chapter, the reader will be able to:

  • Identify the three essential ingredients of natural selection.
  • Define particulate inheritance.
  • List three common misunderstandings about evolutionary theory.
  • Identify when Neanderthals went extinct.
  • Explain why radical behaviorism went into scientific decline.

  In the distant future I see open fields for more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation.

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  Experience and Beyond

  The Outline of A Darwinian Metaphysics

  • Jan Faye(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  © The Author(s) 2016 Jan Faye Experience and Beyond 10.1007/978-3-319-31077-0_2

  Begin Abstract

  2. Evolution and Human Cognition

  Jan Faye 1 

  (1) Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

   

  End Abstract

  As we all know, Darwin explained the evolution of biological organisms in a way that places human beings as one species alongside other animals. This is an explanation that most of us accept. The consequence of the explanation is that our present cognitive and physiological aptitudes were established in our long-gone ancestors and have been inherent in their successors ever since. The evolution made up our cognitive and physiological possibilities, but evolution also set the natural limits for how far these innate aptitudes can be used. All cognitive and physiological characteristics are due to biological selection and adaptation to a physical environment on which individual organisms in general have little influence.1 What is strange, however, is that many philosophers, including some well-known contemporaries, ignore this Darwinian legacy. They continue to do philosophy as if our sensory of experience and capacity of cognition were not the product of organic evolution. Instead these philosophers and philosophers of science occupy themselves with a conceptual analysis of propositions neglecting the fact that these propositions have a human origin.

  The Darwinian explanation of human cognition, however, understands cognitive dispositions as primarily a product of biological evolution, which among humans eventually originates in a (co)-evolution of social and cultural behavior with human organismic capacities. The selective development of human cognition has conditioned conceptualization, language, and the very nature of human subjectivity, not the other way around. Neither human consciousness nor the logic of language can be considered as a precondition for human cognition. Hence the Darwinian legacy should warn us against that philosophical hubris of which we can easily become a victim, if we naively believe that science gives us some kind of access to the world-in-itself and that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the scientific representation of nature and nature herself.

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  Darwin and the Naked Lady

  Discursive Essays on Biology and Art

  • Alex Comfort(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  II

  Darwin and Freud

  An potuisset Natura commodius alibi viri genitale collocare; et cur unum tantum, non duo, ediderit?

  IOH. BENEDICTOS SINIBALDUS : Getieatithropeia, sive

  de hominis generatione decateuchon . 1642

  T WICE in a century, the human self-estimate has been rudely upset by the work of one man. A hundred years ago Charles Darwin showed us that we are not unique, and before the turn of the century Sigmund Freud had showed us that we have no insight into our own motives. Darwin and Freud are the two caryatids who support the structure of hard-centred thinking about man by man, and their work forms an essential unity, intellectual and scientific. Freud has the greater effect on our understanding of behaviour, aesthetic behaviour in particular, but Darwin provides the groundwork for the understanding of Freud. We had better, therefore, take them together.

  Darwin's Origin of Species had its centenary last year. It has taken the whole of that century for its implications to leaven the mass of general sciences—they are just beginning to penetrate into the most resistant fragment of all to biologically fundamental ideas, the practice of medicine. Freud's principal discoveries have been published just on half as long. They originated in medicine, as a by-product of the search for a method of treatment. They have spread luxuriantly in the social sciences, and partly because of this luxuriance they are only just beginning to penetrate biology at all.

  In fact, in putting Freud and Darwin on the same footing, I still need, I know, to appease, if not convince, colleagues in all the sciences, including psychology. General scientists have treated Freud rather as the Americans have treated the Communist Chinese—by mixing a morose hostility with the public pretence that he is not there. I think this foreign policy—in relation to Freud, that is—is almost certain to change, and I think it is important for human biology that it should.

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  Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior

  • Robert J. Richards(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  He thought, though, that in man natural selection produced complex instincts and the higher mental faculties. A short time before the publication of his Principles of Psychology, however, he read of August Weismann’s experiments, which demonstrated that succeeding generations of mice with clipped tails failed to bear progeny with any shortening of their hind members. 100 James gratefully concluded, in the last few pages of his book, that Darwinian chance variation and selection could be the only agents of evolutionary change in human and animal behavior. James’s elaboration of theories of will, emotion, and instinct thus altered his perspective on the inheritance of mental categories in man. In the last chapter of Principles of Psychology, he summarized his conclusions and carefully specified those mental traits he believed were products of evolution. Certainly sensations of color, taste, sound, pleasure, and pain were evolved mental responses. Representations of space and time relations were also heritable; he agreed with Spencer (before reading Weismann) that they were forged through habitual exposure to real space and time connections in nature. But the two fundamental abilities that made rational thought possible—the discernment of differences and the ability to hold in consciousness a series of objects—these could not be the result of impressed experience, as a Spencerian approach would require. Rather they were necessary for coherent experience in the first place. These faculties must have spontaneously flashed in our ancestors, permitting them to survive and prosper. With such preformed equipment, then, along with evolved emotional capacities and instinctive responses, the child could initially organize experience and render it intelligible

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