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CHAPTER
1
Piagetâs Legacy in Cognitive Constructivism, Niche Construction, and Phenotype Development and Evolution
Sue Taylor Parker
Professor Emeritus, Sonoma State University
JPS 2001 was organized around implications of Piagetâs epigenetic concept of cognitive constructivismâhis view that the developing child constructs sequentially more powerful schemes as he adapts (through assimilation and accommodation) to feedback he receives from his own actions on himself, on others, and on objects (Inhelder & Piaget, 1964; Piaget, 1952, 1954, 1962; Piaget & Inhelder, 1967), and as he reflects on this feedback (Piaget, 1985). The seminal idea is that the developing child constructs much of his own environment, which transforms him, and which he, in turn, transforms, and so on. (Likewise, of course, parents, siblings, and others construct much of the childâs environment and transform it in response to his changing nature.)
The term epigenetics, derived from the Aristotelian word epigenesis, was introduced in 1947 by Conrad Waddington (1975) to describe the âbranch of biology, which studies the causal interactions between genes and their products which bring the phenotype into beingâ (p. 218). He describes the elementary processes of epigenetics as having two aspects: âchanges in cellular composition (cellular differentiation, or histogenesis) and changes in geometrical formâ (p. 219). Although Waddington focused on the embryological period of phenotype development, Piaget and others have extended the usage to later developmental stages because the interactions between genes and their products in transformations of the phenotype continue throughout the life cycle.
Piaget argues that construction is an epigenetic phenomenon that continues processes of embryogenesis into postnatal life. It is this conception of epigenesis that we have adopted in the subtitle of our book. This view of epigenesis is not unique to Piaget. It was also emphasized by the neuropsychologist Colwyn Trevarthan (1973), who noted that psychogenesis is a continuation of embryogenesis outside the womb. Whereas Piagetâs research on cognitive epigenesis began with the reflexes of neonates, some of his contemporaries studied continuities between behavioral development inside and outside the womb. The research pediatrician Arnold Gesell (1945), for example, noted that fetal infants continue their developmental course outside the womb much as they would have inside the womb had they not been born prematurely.1
In a related study, the embryologist, Viktor Hamburger (1964), demonstrated that normal brain development in the fetus depends on feedback to the sensory nerves from spontaneous motoric output of the developing fetus, which proceeds sensory nerve development. Taken together, these approaches suggest that brain development is driven by the assimilation of stimuli to developing schemes, whether these stimuli are produced solely by direct proprioceptive feedback from the childâs own actions during prenatal life or by feedback from social and physical objects acted on by the childâs vision, vocalizations, prehension and/or other motoric patterns during postnatal life. They demonstrate the genesis of the phenomenon of experience- and activity-contingent brain development, which continues to operate throughout development (Deacon, 1997; Edelman, 1987; Gibson & Peterson, 1991). Behavioral embryology is part of Piagetâs larger interest in the relationship between development and evolution.
Piaget (1971) points to this neurological substrate when he notes that, â. . . the fundamental truth on which we base our argument is that the nervous system alone constitutes a specialized organ of functional regulation as well as being the instrument of cognitive functionâ (p. 30). On this topic he concludes
One process that strikes us as being an intermediate point between the hereditary organization and the laws governing thought is cortical functioning, which has the double quality of being hereditary functioning . . . but having almost no hereditary programming by way of cognitive structure. In fact the functioning of the brain is hereditary, since the progress made in cerebral and cortical development among primates and hominids, including man, rather precisely determines the progress of intelligence. . . .
(Piaget, 1971, pp. 327â328)
This chapter focuses primarily on Piagetâs ideas about behavioral development and evolution. The first section presents a summary of Piagetâs ideas; the second section focuses briefly on a history of ideas about the role of behavior in evolution. It begins in the 17th century with a discussion of Jean Baptist Lamarck and Pierre Jean Canabis in France, and Erasmus Darwin and his contemporaries in England, continues with a discussion of the naturalist-clerics who influenced Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer in the 19th century, and ends with a discussion of influential figures at the turn of the last centuryâLloyd Morgan, James Mark Baldwin, and William James.
Then, following a review of critiques of the neglect of the role of behavior in the modern synthesis of evolution, I argue that these and related strands culminate in the concepts of phenotype-centered evolution and niche construction. The final section of this chapter describes the contributions to this volume in light of the notions of epigenetic construction, experience-contingent brain development, phenotype-centered evolution, and niche construction.
Piagetâs Constructivist Model and the Evolution of Behavior
In the first part of his introductory chapter of B&K, Piaget challenges the modern synthesis of evolution to explain the creative role of behavior in evolution. This challenge pervades the following constructivist themes in B&K: The first is the continuity between embryogenesis and psychogenesis; the second is the role of behavioral feedback and autoregulation in epigenesis and subsequent development; the third is the acquisition of knowledge through assimilation of and accommodation to environmental information by pre-existing structures; the fourth is construction of powerful logical-mathematical models of reality, which facilitate environmental transformations; the fifth is the neurological basis of cognitive construction and its historical/evolutionary continuity in brain evolution.
In his three books on evolution, Biology and Knowledge (B&K; Piaget, 1971), Behavior and Evolution (B&E; Piaget, 1978), and Adaptation and Intelligence (A&I; Piaget, 1980), Piaget questions the adequacy of neo-Darwinian theory to explain the origins and evolution of logical-mathematical cognition. He proposes a nexus of related problems expressed at different levels of generality including (a) how humans evolved the capacity for constructing logical-mathematical structures; (b) how these structures can so accurately describe the world; (c) how organic and cognitive regulations correspond; and the most general question, (d) how behavior and morphology could have co-evolved. The core of Piagetâs argument is that none of these phenomena can be explained by orthodox neo-Darwinian evolutionary models.
In the Introduction to B&K, Piaget (1971) says: âThe aim of this work is to discuss the problem of intelligence and of knowledge, in general (in particular, logical-mathematical knowledge) in the light of contemporary biologyâ (p. xi). Later in B&K, Piaget describes the following three forms of knowledge: instinct, perception, and a third category including conditioned behavior, habits, memory, and levels of intelligence. The latter category includes empirical and logical-mathematical intelligence. He then reiterates his well-known view that âknowledge is not a copy of the environment but a system of real interactionsâ (Piaget, 1971, p. 27), which are â. . . originally set offby spontaneous activity of the organ as much as by the external stimuliâ (Piaget, 1971, p. 28). As elsewhere, he argues that all knowledge is based on assimilation of environmental information to previous structures through action schemes: Physical knowledge arises from actions on objects, logical-mathematical knowledge arises from reflection on outcomes of coordinations of actions, which, because they are necessarily on objects, inform physical knowledge.
Throughout B&K, Piaget (1971) emphasizes continuities and discontinuities between higher and lower forms of cognition as well as the problem of explaining their origins. Early on, he argues that there are no innate ideas:
On the contrary, heredity and maturation open up new possibilities in the human child, possibilities quite unknown to lower types of animals but which still have to be actualized by collaboration with the environment. These possibilities, for all they are opened up in stages, are nonetheless essentially functional . . . in that they represent a progressive power of coordination.
(p. 21)
Toward the end of B&K, Piaget (1971) stated
. . . although every kind of knowledge, including instinct, includes information about the environment, it nevertheless presupposes, in learning as in everything else, some âstructurationâ imposed upon it as a previous and necessary condition by internal functioning allied to the subjectâs organization. This structurization, however, takes two forms, though remarkably isomorphic one to the other: first a hereditary form innately programmed down to the last detail the structures . . . whose inner logic we have shown to be closely connected with the forms and schemata of sensorimotor intelligence; . . . the second form, not programmed in detail by heredity, intervenes with a kind of assimilatory mechanism, wherever learning, however, elementary, is going on.
(p. 264)
In the section titled âBursting of Instinct,â he elaborates further on the purported connection, saying
. . . intelligence does inherit something from instinct although it rejects its method of programmed regulation in favor of constructive autoregulation. The part of instinct that is retained allows the intelligence to embark on two different but complementary courses: interiorization in the direction of its sources, and exteriorization in the direction of learned or even experimental adjustments.
(Piaget, 1971, p. 366)
He argues that the externalization or phenotypic accommodation to the environment produces physical knowledge, whereas the internalization or formal structuration through reflective abstraction produces l-m knowledge.2 Logical-mathematical knowledge interacts with and informs physical knowledge, but cannot be reduced to it.
Piaget expresses the crux of his major theme in B&K, when he asserts that it is
. . . unthinkable that the human brainâs capacity for constructing logical-mathematical structures that are so admirably adapted to physical reality should be explained away by mere selection, as the mutationists do, for factors of utility and survival would have led only to intellectual instruments of a crudely approximate kind. . . .
(Piaget, 1971, p. 274)
Subsequently, in B&E, Piaget raised the question of the role of behavior in evolution, noting that discussion of this issue had been dominated by two alternatives, which he characterizes as either chance or auto regulation:
Either organs come into being independently of behavior, both being the result of mutations, so that we have two more or less autonomous sets of chance occurrences which it falls to selection alone to reconcile . . . or else organs and behavior are of necessity correlated from the very moment of their inception, in which case behavior must play the principle role in this process . . . either chance or selection can explain everything or else behavior is the motor of evolution.
(Piaget, 1978, p. 147, italics added)
Although this may be a false opposition, both the theory of phenotype-centered evolution and the concept of niche construction to be described support the idea that development, especially behavioral development, is the motor of evolution!
Historical Views of the Role of Behavior in Evolution
Pre-Darwinian and Darwinian Ideas About the Role of Behavior in Evolution
Many of the ideas Piaget expresses about instinct and intelligence and the evolution of behavior have a long history going back at least to the Enlightenment. As is well known (see discussion in chap. 2), Lamarck (1984) believed that habitual behavioral adaptations to changing environments preceded and engendered heritable changes in body form and behavior. Less often appreciated is the fact that Lamarckâs contemporaries and subsequent early evolutionists (or transformists) also argued that behavior, both instinctive and intelligent, played an active role in evolution.
As Robert Richards (1987) described it, âEarly evolutionists, such as Lamarck and Cabanis, through Darwin, Wallace, Spencer, and later Darwiniansâall proposed, though a variety of ways, that behavior and mind drove the evolutionary processâ (p. 6). Richards (1987) continues by arguing that these thinkers regarded instinct as âthe paradigm of evolved behavior, the model for weaving ...
