Psychology and 'Human Nature'

Peter Ashworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415212991
• eBook ISBN: 9781134614424
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychology and 'Human Nature' problematizes what psychology usually takes for granted - the meaning of the psyche or 'human nature'. Peter Ashworth provides a coherent account of many of the major schools of thought in psychology and its related disciplines, including: sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, radical behaviourism, existentialism, discursive psychology and postmodernism. For each approach he considers the claims or assumptions being made about 'human nature', especially regarding issues of consciousness, the self, the body, other people and the physical world.
Psychology and 'Human Nature' will be essential reading for all students of psychology.
Series Details; The Psychology Focus Series provides students with a new focus on key topic areas in psychology.
Each short book:
* presents clear, in-depth coverage of a discrete area with many applied examples
* assumes no prior knowlede of psychology
* has been written by an experienced teacher
* has chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary of key terms

Chapter 1

The ultimate biological motive: The evolutionary perspective

■	What the evolutionary perspective is trying to do
		Human characteristics are an evolutionary product
		Proximal motivations are explicable in terms of the ultimate motivation of (evolutionary/genetic) survival
■	Evolutionary theory
		Distinguishing and rejecting Lamarckian evolution
		The theory of inheritance
		The rejection of mutationism
		DNA and the gene
■	The unit on which evolution acts and the question of ‘altruism’
		The individual organism
		The group
		The notion of ‘inclusive fitness’ and kin selection
		The gene or ‘replicator’
■	The problem of ultimate and proximal motives
■	Memes: the quasi-evolution of culture?
■	Criticisms
■	Summary
■	Further reading

CAN PRESENT-DAY HUMAN BEHAVIOUR be explained as the outcome of natural selection? A range of authors have argued that this is a fruitful way of viewing human nature. In this chapter I am going to treat sociobiology (Wilson, 1975, 1978), evolutionary psychology (Barkow et al., 1992), and kindred viewpoints (e.g. Dawkins, 1976, 1982, 1989) together. However, it is right to register the fact that there are differences of emphasis between these accounts. Wilson’s sociobiology puts forward an evolutionary explanation of certain characteristics of human social behaviour. The evolutionary psychologists do not seriously dissent from Wilson’s analyses, but do insist that cognitive processes must be explicitly taken into account. For them, evolution is best seen as selecting particular tendencies of mental activity, which then appear in various guises in a wide range of human behaviour. They consider Wilson’s concern with the evolution of social behaviour to neglect the evolution of the functions of the brain.

The other major way in which the authors discussed in this chapter differ is on the question of whether social behaviour is directly explicable in terms of biology and evolution, or whether culture has become somewhat independent of biology. Tooby and Cosmides (1992), for instance, take the view that mental organisation has tendencies which are ‘ingrained’, and that it is only in conformity with these evolved characteristics that a particular form of culture or social behaviour can exist. Wilson takes this view, too, and writes:

culture is ultimately a biological product.… It has been said that there are no genes for building airplanes. That of course is true. But people build airplanes to conduct the primitive operations of human beings, including war, tribal reunions, and bartering, which conform transparently to their biological heritage.

(Wilson, 1996:107)

In contrast, Dawkins insists that a quite different process from Darwinian evolution is involved in social behaviour. As we shall see, he believes that the elements of culture are propagated through human communication, and this accounts for the fact that they change far more rapidly than biological evolution allows. Dawkins has been castigated by other evolutionists for not showing orthodox Darwinian thinking in allowing such independence to social behaviour (see Dawkins, 1989:193).

What the evolutionary perspective is trying to do

Human characteristics are an evolutionary product

Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology attempt to account for the behaviour of animals, including human beings, in terms of evolutionary adaptation to the environment. This means that there is a universal human nature based in evolved psychological mechanisms. Cultural variability exists, certainly, but this is taken as providing ‘insight into the structure of the psychological mechanisms that generated it’ (Barkow et al., 1992:5). Basic, universal human nature is the product of natural selection. Human characteristics are, in fact, ‘adapted to the way of life of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, and not necessarily to our modern circumstances’ (ibid.). It is a basic assumption, then, that human psychological mechanisms have been selected by the evolutionary process because they were functionally adaptive. Note, however, that the main impact of evolution was during the millions of years of human prehistory.

Proximal motivations are explicable in terms of the ultimate motivation of (evolutionary/genetic) survival

Behaviour can be explained ‘proximally’ or ‘ultimately’. Proximal explanations are couched in terms of immediately apparent motives— defence of territory, courtship, food searching, etc. Ultimate explanations give a more fundamental account of such proximal motives. The proximal motives are taken to be expressions of the basic motive, which is the one which relates the animal’s behaviour to evolutionary advantage. So, if a particular pattern of courtship exists we can say that it has survival value. The ultimate explanation for the behaviour is simply that the behaviour was selected; that is, animals exhibiting it survived and reproduced.

Evolutionary theory

It is often stated that the major destructive impact of Darwin’s evolutionary theory on traditional thinking was the idea that homo sapiens ‘descended from the apes’ (as it is put). Human beings are merely one biological species among the rest. The dominant and noble position of humans over the natural world is debunked; evolutionary theory removes human beings from the central place in the order of things. Important though this implication of Darwin may be, I am convinced that there is a much more significant thought in the theory, and one which is in some ways more disturbing of our understanding of the natural world and our place in it. That is, the idea of purposelessness. Evolution has no plan or intention.

Within the culture there still seems to be a residue of a certain medieval world-view in which the whole of creation is engaged in striving towards perfection. For instance, Eckhart (1260–1329), whose approach to religion is masterly, is nevertheless a bad source for an evolutionary understanding of the natural world: ‘It is the nature of every grain of corn to become wheat and every precious metal to become gold and all procreation to lead to the procreation of the human race’ (Eckhart, 1994: 113). This purposefulness is precisely the imagery that evolutionary theory opposes.

What happens is roughly as follows:

■ Given that there is variation in characteristics between individual members of a species—whether it be in their physiology, anatomy or behaviour—and

■ given that there are aspects of the environment—climate, resources for survival (food, places for nurturing young, etc.), other biological forms (including predators, parasites, competitors for resources, and so on), and members of the same species with whom to compete, mate or cooperate— for which some of the variants between individuals are more appropriate,

■ then individuals who—by chance—have the more appropriate characteristics for the environment will be more likely to survive, reproduce, and have viable offspring who themselves survive to reproduce.

■ The statistical effect of this process is an unintentional selection of those variants with the more appropriate characteristics, and the extinction of the forms ‘less fitted’ to the environment. This is ‘descent with modification’.

Darwin’s summary statement towards the end of The Origin of Species (first published, 1859) runs as follows

That many and serious objections may be advanced against the theory of descent with modification, I do not deny. I have endeavoured to give them their full force. Nothing at first can appear more difficult to believe than that the more complex organs and instincts have been perfected…by the accumulation of innumerable slight variations, each good for the individual possessor. Nevertheless, this difficulty, though appearing to our imagination insuperably great, cannot be considered real if we admit the following propositions, namely, that all parts of the organisation and instincts offer, at least, individual differences— that there is a struggle for existence leading to the preservation of profitable deviations of structure or instinct—and, lastly, that gradations in the state of perfection of each organ may have existed, each good of its kind. The truth of these propositions cannot, I think, be disputed.

(Darwin, [1859] 1994:404)

‘Nothing at first can appear more difficult to believe than that the more complex organs and instincts have been perfected…by the accumulation of innumerable slight variations, each good for the individual posessor’. Yet this is the Darwinian claim. There is no ‘in order to…’ in evolution, despite the lax talk of popular accounts. I want to stress again the need for very careful language in discussing the evolutionary perspective. Even the most distinguished writers engage in the dangerous metaphors of ‘self-sacrificing ants’ and ‘intelligent genes’ (Hamilton, 1972:193, 195); ‘selfish genes’ and ‘arms races’ between parasite and victim (Dawkins, 1976, 1982:55), and of the ‘struggle among individual organisms to promote their own personal reproductive success’ (Gould, 1997:34). All these writers are explicit in acknowledging that the attribution of intelligence, selfishness, or struggle to genes or organisms is only a form of words, and that there is no purpose in what goes on. However, it is a (doubtless unintentional) betrayal of Darwin’s project to downplay in any way the purposelessness and directionlessness of evolution.

Clarification 1: Distinguishing and rejecting Lamarckian evolution

Since Darwin’s time the theory of evolution has been refined, so that the inheritance of acquired characteristics and the inheritance of genetically given characteristics have been sharply distinguished. The first of these, associated with Lamarck, is not currently accepted by biologists; the second is regarded as the basic process of evolution. Bodily features or mental skills which are developed in the course of life—strong muscles through exercise, speed in arithmetic through practice in book-keeping—would be instances of acquired characteristics, and these are not passed on to offspring. Inheritance has to pass through the filter of sexual reproduction, and if a characteristic is not represented in genetic material, it is not inherited.

The modern understanding of the process of evolution is that it occurs when, within the variation in the genetic constitution of members of a species, there is a characteristic which happens to be beneficial to survival. The advantageous characteristic will tend to be perpetuated since individuals who have it will be more likely to survive to breed and facilitate the survival of their offspring.

Clarification 2: The theory of inheritance

The major gap in Darwinian theory was the absence of any account of the process of inheritance. What was it that was actually transferred from parent to offspring, with variations on which natural selection would act? The theory of genetics, whose basic form was developed by Mendel, postulates discrete factors (genes) which carry information which guides embryo development. Each of the very large number of genes is one of a pair. Biological inheritance comes about from the fact that one gene of each pair is provided in the sex cells, or gametes, of each parent.

Clarification 3: The rejection of mutationism

If selection simply acts on naturally occurring variants in the genetic make-up of individuals, the immense range of species which has evolved seemed at first not to be explicable in terms of Darwinian evolution. Dobzhansky (1937) provided the first clear, detailed account of the evolutionary process expressed in genetic terms. Statistical modelling, with empirical support, showed that natural selection could, indeed, lead to the major evolutionary changes which are observed, without mutation having the central influence.

Clarification 4: DNA and the gene

Since 1953, with Watson and Crick’s work on the structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), the application of molecular biology to the theory of evolution has been the most significant line of research. DNA is the hereditary material contained in the chromosomes of the nucleus of every cell. The effect of the genetic information contained in the DNA is open to investigation by correlating (a) variations in genes at a particular location on the chromosome (answering the question, What allele—version—of the gene do we have here?) with (b) the anatomical, physiological or behavioural characteristics of the organism (that is, the ‘phenotype’ generated by the gene).

‘Genotype’ refers to the genetic make-up of the individual; ‘phenotype’ refers to the expression of the genes in actual bodily structure or function or in psychological tendencies. Aspects of the environment—even the fact that a gene has an environment of other genes—enter into any phenotypical expression.

The unit on which evolution acts and the question of ‘altruism’

The individual organism

Darwin certainly took the individual as the unit of selection. We may say that, for him, species evolve because individuals are differentially selected due to the relative adaptedness of their phenotypes to the environment. But a certain class of behaviour has been seen for many years as problematical for the view that it is on the individual organism that selection operates. The persistence of altruistic behaviour seems not to be explicable in this way.

How does altruism get established as characteristic, inherited behaviour of a species? After all, an altruistic individual may act in a self-sacrificial way in response to the perception that a fellow is under attack, in difficulties, or otherwise threatened. Altruism would put the individual animal in greater danger than would concern for self, and so the trait might be expected to quickly die out. For example, if there is genetic variation amongst bees in whether or not to sting an intruding bee which is not a member of the hive, alleles which promote such behaviour would lead to the death of the bee.

Human beings are regarded, within the evolutionary perspective, as sometimes behaving altruistically in a similar way. Wilson writes:

Such an explanation immediately poses a bas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Series preface
• Introduction: Psychology and ‘Human Nature’
• 1. The ultimate biological motive: The evolutionary perspective
• 2. Mental conflict: Biological drives and social reality
• 3. An inner world: Cognitive psychology
• 4. …Not separable from the world: Skinner’s radical behaviourism
• 5. The individual consciousness: Anxiously free in a meaningless world
• 6. Social being: Interacting, and presenting oneself as a person
• 7. ‘Human Nature’ as an outmoded cultural presupposition
• 8. Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index