What is most at play in these sections dedicated to the theory of evolution is to show how the notion of organism came to be and the issues it has raised. As we will see, the organism is an entity that evolves over time through self-differentiation. Only gradually did mental and body mechanisms differentiate themselves more and more from each other. The new organisms gained the capacity to integrate, in a more or less coherent way, the diversity of emerging mechanisms. In this way of thinking, the opposition of body and soul disappears, but it becomes more difficult for the psychologists to defend the specificity of the mental mechanisms. Most of the models of psychotherapy situate their reflections within the framework of the theories of evolution, which were formulated during the past two centuries. I concentrate on the first formulations by Lamarck, Darwin, and Wallace. It seems to me that when the high stakes raised in their discussions are well understood, it is possible to approach recent developments with greater acuity.
Our senses, you say, are fallacious, our understanding erroneous, our ideas even of the most familiar objects, extension, duration, motion, full of absurdities and contradictions. You defy me to solve the difficulties, or reconcile the repugnancies, which you discover in them. . . . Your own conduct, in every circumstance, refutes your principles; and shows the firmest reliance on all the received maxims of science, morals, prudence, and behaviour. (Hume, 1776, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, I, p. 39)
In the preceding chapters, I have indicated that philosophers did not succeed in explaining the following points:
Kant is one who reflected the most on these issues. He died in 1804, two years after Lamarck’s first book on the theory of evolution. Yet Kant never envisioned, even in passing, a single solution that resembles the solutions brought forth by Lamarck’s theory. This theory is an example of the ability that certain individuals have to facilitate the emergence of a theory that no one had ever thought about before and without which no one can henceforth think. Lamarck’s theory gathers a whole series of formulations that were already in circulation. The synthesis that emerged in his thoughts is so new, so useful, so relevant, and so simple that one can only be astonished that no one had thought about it before. Humanity had already known this type of discovery with the invention of the wheel, the mastery of fire, as well as the physics of Galileo and Newton. The mechanisms that foster the emergence of this type of key pivotal idea are poorly understood.1
If we admit, like Descartes and Leibniz, that God did “preset” the appropriateness between the perceptions and the stimulations of the organism, it is difficult to understand why he did not construct it any better. The philosophers who assume that this appropriateness was constructed by nature (as do Lucretius and Hume) have a difficult time explaining how material dynamics were able to build a perceptual system that seems to work relatively well. Ever since the formulations of Lamarck, Wallace, and Darwin, the evolutionists can provide an explanation that answers these questions in a plausible and empirically robust way. For them, the evolution of the organism includes the exploration of different forms of perception that correlate better and better with what is going on in their environment, all of this without implying that perceptions are identical to what exists in their surroundings. For example, the fact that the eye makes grass green does not mean that grass is not red. But as the choice of colors made by the eyes correlates well with what surrounds us, this type of question does not impose itself for ordinary human practices or for the survival of the species. This answer confirms that what is perceived is not necessarily what exists, but it also shows that a partial appropriateness is inevitable when the criteria of survival are taken into consideration.
Thus, nature, always active, always impassible, renewing and changing all sorts of bodies, preserving none from destruction, offers to us an imposing never ending scene, and shows to us that in her lies a particular power which only acts out of necessity. (Lamarck, 1820, Système Analytique des Connaissances Positives de l’Homme, I.II.2, p. 58; translated by Michael C. Heller)
An outstanding aspect of this revolution in the history of human theories is the introduction of a time scale in the analysis of the structure of living beings. Before Lamarck, a system (the universe, a planet, an animal) has a fundamental structure (its essence) that can only suffer “surface” modifications during its life (an amputation, for example). These changes are often referred to as “accidental.” They do not influence the structure of the soul, which shapes the essence of an individual. From Lamarck onward, the fundamental structure of a system constitutes itself progressively on a time scale that varies according to systems. A few seconds for a cell can correspond to thousands of years for the human species, millions of years for a planet, and billions of years for the universe.
It is only after Lamarck’s death that Hegel integrated time into a philosophical conception of human nature2 and created a philosophy of human history.3 This history describes the way the human mind developed by creating increasing complex civilizations across the centuries.4 Time thus becomes a part of the mechanisms that generate the human mind, because the capacity to structure oneself in time—to be in becoming—is now part of the properties of the human mind. It was then only a matter of time before scientists would discover that there had been humanoids who, in the prehistoric period,5 did not walk and did not think like a human being of the nineteenth century. Finally, in 1830, Scottish geologist Charles Lyell began to publish a series of volumes that demonstrated that the Earth has been shaped for millions of years by forces that are still presently active.6 Before the nineteenth century, the Europeans, inspired by the Bible, imagined a history of only some thousands of years. Today, we think that the first humans appeared several million years ago.
Lamarck7 remarks that thoughts not only grasp the organismic system of which they are a part with difficulty but that they also poorly evaluate the impact of time on what is happening and on the way they function. From the point of view of the mind, to include time as a variable is experienced as a complication that requires much attention. Psychologists know that it is equally true when they want to organize a developmental research study. An experimental design that wants to study the unfolding of a behavior at different moments in a lifetime exponentially multiplies the costs, work time, quantity of data to consider, and complexity of the statistical methods. It is not for nothing that theories integrating the notion of time are rare and recent. Even today, it is difficult to integrate the implications of a developmental and historical approach in psychological theories.
Count George-Louis Leclerc Buffon (1707–1788) was one of the great French botanists. He published a marvelously illustrated reference catalog of plants: Natural History, General and Particular, from 1749 to 1788. He is also known because he transformed the King’s Gardens in Paris into an immense Museum of Natural History. The Botanical Gardens that surround the museum contain a great variety of plants. In the same spirit, the museum preserves examples of most of the inventoried animal species on the planet. Buffon died in time to avoid witnessing the torments of the first French Revolution. During this period, the different succeeding governments maintained the operation of this museum.
Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (1744–1829), a botanist trained by Buffon, participated in the establishment of the Museum of Natural History, where he became in charge of the section on invertebrates (insects, mostly). His major work is the Natural History of Animals without Vertebra, made up of seven volumes published between 1815 and 1822. This work quickly became a reference for many biologists.
At least since Aristotle, many authors had proposed refined classifications of animals. Anatomical studies had showed physiological similarities between species and had confirmed the animal status of the human body. Nonetheless, it was the common belief that God had conceived of each species and each creature. The similarities observed in different species demonstrate that God had used the similar organs to create different creatures. The idea eventually emerged that certain creatures, like the monkey, were closer to God (and humans) than others, like the amoeba,8 for instance.
The theory of evolution began to take form in Lamarck’s thoughts while he walked the corridors of the Museum of Natural History and wondered how the countless samples of species should be placed. He also benefited from the many projects undertaken by his colleagues at the museum and from the scientists with whom he was in contact, like Charles Bonnet of Geneva. Yet he is the only member of this community of brilliant biologists to have conceived of the possibility that there might be a history of the species. This required not only a great imagination and intelligence but also the courage of a warrior who jumps across a precipice. The difficulty was not only to imagine that such a history could have generated the human species, but also to accompany this hypothesis with arguments capable of making a theory of it that could be acceptable to his colleagues. He detailed this view in 1802 in Research on the Organism of Living Bodies. This volume presented the theory of evolution to the ordinary citizen. Beautifully written, it is still pleasing and surprising to read.
Lamarck’s pedagogy, developed in the first part of his work, is stimulating and effective. He starts from what is particular to humans and shows that it is possible to classify the species of animals according to what they do not possess. He conjectures that the simpler the organism, the more it is constitutionally distant from humans, the more it is ancient. The creatures lose their limbs, lay eggs instead of giving live birth. The regulation of the body temperature becomes less efficient when the animal is “cold-blooded.” Insects do not have vertebrae. In moving backward, Lamarck helps the reader feel how life progressed in its development from matter, by becoming plants and then ever more complex creatures. This complexity gradually builds itself up, differentiating itself from what existed previously, by creating a growing variety of mechanisms. This progressive differentiation allows for the creation of the capacity to have a social life (ants and bees already have such a life), an affective life (manifest in mammals), and intellectual capacities (developed particularly in humans). The differentiation of organs, sensorimotor actions, and the capacity to think all make up the history of organisms. The organism, or the individual system, thus becomes the basic building block of the theory of evolution in the nineteenth century.
Lamarck’s theory follows, in its broad lines, the coherent and systemic vision of the universe proposed by Spinoza. Time does not alter this coherence, because nature did not, in its history, jump from the mollusks to humans to end up with crocodiles. This development is nonetheless not linear. For example, the dog’s keen sense of smell is more developed than that of humans.
If Lamarck described the course of evolution in a convincing fashion, he was not able, with the data available to him, to understand the mechanisms of this evolution in a convincing way. The mechanisms he imagined are expressed in two laws that we must consider because they are still often discussed:
The best-known example is that of the giraffe:
It is interesting to observe the result of habit in the peculiar shape and size of the giraffe (Camelo-pardalis): this animal, the largest of the mammals, is known to live in the interior of Africa in places where the soil is nearly always arid and barren, so that it is obliged to browse on the leaves on the trees and to make constant efforts to reach them. From this habit long maintained in all its race, it has resulted that the animal’s fore-legs have become longer than its hind legs, and that its neck is lengthened to such a degree that the giraffe, without standing up on its hind legs, attains a height of six meters (nearly 20 feet). (Lamarck, 1809, 1.VII, p. 122)
Expressed in this fashion, after a century and a half of debate, it is admitted that these two laws do not adequately explain what is happening. The laws of natural selection, genetics, and the function of DNA permitted biologists to propose different and considerably more refined models.9 Yet Lamarck had reason to think that behavior is one of the great levers of the mechanisms of evolution. Both he and Darwin believed that a habitual behavior could be part of what a parent transmits directly to its descendants. Ever since the discovery of the genetic code by Mendel,10 it seems that the relationship between habitual behavior and lineage is indirect. The relationship exists to the extent that the new behavior is associated to a mutation of the genes and that it favors survival. The survival of a mutation has become the determining aspect of what is biologically transmitted to its progeny. Modern genetics often assume that mutations are random. However, I have some difficulty with this assumption, as I do not see why genetic dynamics should be the only dynamics of the universe that are guided by pure randomness. Associating the core of biological dynamics to the notion of pure randomness may have been useful to free the human mind from religious thinking during the first half of the twentieth century, but only ideological preoccupations can guarantee that pure randomness can exist.
The theory of evolution is presented by Lamarck as one of the branches of a new science of the living that he calls biology. The need to gather all of the knowledge about life was felt by several scientists. Karl Friedrich Burdach and Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus also simultaneously and independently proposed this term. The term biology can be understood in two ways:
The curriculum for biology is detailed by Lamarck in his Zoological Philosophy (1809):
The second part of this curriculum is the testimony to what was considered physiology at the time, but the advances in this domain are so formidable that that has all been surpassed. I therefore concentrate on the third part, which presents the beginnings of an evolutionary psychophysiology. This psycho-physiology is developed in the first volume of the Natural History of Invertebrates.
The decade of the 1990s saw the appearance of a series of books, often written by philosophers, who presented a psychology inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution.13 It is in this context that it was discovered that Lamarck, now blind at the end of his life, had dictated a first draft of the implications of the theory of evolution for psychology to his eldest daughter. It is The Analytical System of the Positive Knowledge about Man (my translation of his French title, Système analytique des connaissances positives de l’homme), which was published in 1820.
Lamarck’s basic finding is that evolutionary biology points to a parallel evolution of the organism,14 the nervous system, the mind, behavior, and socialization. These different dimensions participate in building up the organism. In other words, the mind would be a biological phenomenon like the other dimensions. The irrational and destructive behavior of humans demonstrates that they are not animated by forces superior to those that bring life to animals.15 It is almost as if Lamarck avoids writing that the complexity of humans is beyond their resources and that this is what renders them more dangerous than the other creatures. The last species to appear is probably the most complex, but certainly the least complete. Its complexity makes the integration of its heterogeneity particularly difficult.
For Lamarck, everything that will be said about the soul “is baseless and purely imaginary” (1809, III.I, p. 294). This paragraph is, for scientific thought, the tomb in which he buried the soul such as it existed from Plato to Descartes.
All animals, whose brains are provided with two wrinkled hemispheres, possess the power of muscular movement and of feeling, the faculty of experiencing inner emotions, and, in addition, that of forming ideas, making comparisons and judgments and, in short, of carrying out various acts of intelligence, corresponding to the degrees of development of the hypocephalon.16 (Lamarck, 1809, Zoological Philosophy, III.I, p. 310)
Lamarck divides the human nervous system into five principal parts:
This division, inspired by the neurology of the period and by the evolution of the species, remains pertinent for some present-day authors.20 In Lamarck’s conception, there is no relationship between a zone and a mental function,21 but there are more complex forms of the organization of the neurological activity that open into various modes of treating information that are experienced as sensations (in the brainstem), as feelings (in the limbic system), or as thinking (in the neocortex). I find it important to insist on the fact that intelligence is not situated in the neocortex, but that the neocortex allows for a more complex organization22 of the entire neurological activity that unfolds into the capacity to think. This explains that the intelligence of mammals is more or less developed according to the advanced degree of the organization permitted by the neocortex of a species.23 The notion that each structure of the brain permits the creation of more complex organizations of the whole nervous system already announces some of the present neurological models.24 An essential point is that consciousness requires a simultaneous coordination of many parts of the nervous system, but not necessarily of the entire system.
The relevance of this division is justified by the fact that these five parts of the nervous system correspond to its evolution and to the development of mental capacities. There exist animals with a neocortex (down to the rat), others without a neocortex, others without a brainstem, some without a spinal cord, and finally some that do not even have isolated sensorimotor centers. However the neurological hierarchy is not as strict as Lamarck and Darwinians of the first half of the century had assumed. For example, the highly intelligent and skillful octopus has a nervous system that cannot easily be fitted in the classical evolutionary frame.
This model was taken up in the 1950s by MacLean. His formulation, presented in Darwinian language, became fashionable with “psys” (see the Glossary) and philosophers.25 However useful it might be, when used as a metaphor or a shortcut, this model does not take into account the complexity of the connections in the brain.26
Instinct is, in all sensitive beings, the production of an inner sentiment which it possesses, a very obscure sentiment which, in certain circumstances, leads it to execute actions without knowing it, without previous cause, and without the use of an idea, and then, without the participation of will. (Lamarck, 1820, Système Analytique, II.II.2, p. 228f; translated by Michael C. Heller and Marcel Duclos) As man thrived in different regions of the globe, he increased in number, established himself in society with fellow creatures, and finally progressed and became civilized. His delights and his needs increased and became more and more diversified. He developed increasingly varied ways of relating to the society in which he lived; which, among other things, generated increasingly complex personal interests. His inclinations subdivided endlessly, generated new needs that activated themselves beyond the scope of his awareness. These grew into a huge mass of connections that control, outside of his perception, nearly every part of him. (Lamarck, 1815, Natural History, p. 278; translated by Michael C. Heller and Marcel Duclos)
A natural propensity can be calibrated either with the help of “reason,” either thanks to different forms of education, or by entering in competition with other innate or acquired propensities.28 There is passion, according to Lamarck, when a propensity manifests itself without being contained by reason, education, or acquired propensities.29 The innate central purpose of these propensities renders them recognizable as independent from the modifications brought about through education. To drink at a spring demands a different series of coordinations than to ask a dinner companion to pass the carafe of water at a banquet. In this example a common core instinctual procedure is included in two different propensions.30 This flexibility of the behavioral organization of the organism has had a profound impact on the development of human social behavior.
According to Lamarck, it was always thus that the initial human propensities developed and differentiated gradually as more complex social systems made the social exploitation of the propensities’ flexibility possible. This complexity is such that its organization is necessarily nonconscious. This is why the diverse developments of the natural propensities form today, in every human being, a web of activities “unbeknown to him” and that continuously “govern him” (Lamarck, 1820, II.II.1, p. 207; translated by Marcel Duclos).31 As a good systemic thinker, Lamarck does not defend a linear development that would have first occurred in one’s imagination, then at the level of the propensities, and then in social organization.32 All these factors structure each other continuously.
Lamarck already introduces the idea, exploited by Darwin, that this network of influences is not necessarily coherent and leads to conflicts of interests between the different heteroclite constituents of a propensity. The propensities, such as they exist today in humans, connect a network of natural and acquired propensities that calibrate every behavior. Even when it consists in being thirsty, the natural stakes can be associated to other interests like those of manipulating a speaker by the way one holds a cup of tea: “Therefore, for those who know how to study humans, it is curious to observe the diversity of masks under which one can disguise a personal interest according to their status, their social ranking, their power, etc.” (Lamarck, 1820, II.II.1, p. 209; translated by Marcel Duclos). The relevance of this analysis for the psychotherapist is that we must advance prudently when we try to reduce behavior to a unique biological constituent. For example, asking for more tea to protect oneself by controlling others and the need to drink enough water for self-preservation both activate different mechanisms, which are nevertheless associated to the core of the same instinct. These two ways of using thirst are so intermingled that any attempt to understand them by a cause that might be “more basic” than others could lead to an error in understanding.
Lamarck seems to center his psychology on schema,33 skills, or action systems34 that inevitably lead the psychotherapist to approach the human being as if it were but a combination of gestures and thoughts. Thoughts move the body, and gestures create thoughts. To analyze a representation without taking into account the behaviors associated to it often leads to an incomplete analysis of a person’s propension.35
Lamarck is fascinated by the power with which an instinct mobilizes the resources of the organism needed to accomplish a task. From the point of view of consciousness, all that is perceived is an imperative feeling experienced as a rational desire. It shows that the study of the evolution of the mind is possible only by studying how physiology and behavior are coordinated.36 His knowledge of evolution allows Lamarck to understand how certain biological dynamics become active components of the psychological development of individuals.
Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) is an exceptional version of a familiar personage in the landscape of the body psychotherapies.37 He was a self-taught individual who was brilliant, curious, and learned as he practiced without any follow-up studies. He read everything with the same passion, the same curiosity, without preoccupying himself with any academic prejudice. Brilliant and honest, he adhered to whatever interested him. This is how he came to be passionate about the classification of vegetable and animal species, cartography, mesmerism, and phrenology. In all of these domains, he mostly read the books written for the layman. He discovered the theory of evolution in books that are often more moralistic than scientific. These British authors only mention Lamarck to disqualify his studies because he worked during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.38 For an English person of this period, these political involvements are unacceptable. Such an out-of-hand rejection is similar to that of past disqualifications of any theory elaborated in the Soviet Union or in fascist regimes. All that Wallace knew of Lamarck was that his theory would be simplistic and based on an unprovable “second law.”
In this vast landscape that makes up Wallace’s reading, certain works influenced him so profoundly that they guided his career. While reading Darwin’s book on his voyage to the Galapagos, written in 1839,39 he discovered his desire to become an explorer. Wallace, like Darwin ten years earlier, was also taken by the Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Robert Malthus (1826).40 Wallace and Darwin were both astonished by the fact that it only takes ten generations for a pair of birds to produce 100,000 offspring on condition that the creatures were able to survive the dangers in their environment (predators, variations in the climate, sickness, famine, etc.) before reproducing.
Wallace became an explorer and traveled into the jungles of South America and Indonesia, where he gathered plant and animal specimens for collectors. Darwin was one of his clients. Wallace also amassed numerous observations of the indigenous peoples who inhabited these jungles, for whom he had a profound respect.
If Lamarck was able to conceive of the theory of evolution thanks to his Museum of Natural History, Wallace had an even more stimulating environment. He had, in his head, the theories developed by Lamarck’s students and Malthus’s theory; all the while, the jungles of South America and Asia seethed around him. He observed animals in their own environments and could note how the species varied from one landscape to another. As he needed to satisfy a demanding clientele, he quickly learned to distinguish the subspecies of plants and animals, to observe the details that change from one part of the jungle to another.41 Lamarck had had the opportunity to reflect on a variety of creatures already classified, without having to observe their environment.
In 1855, while in Borneo, Wallace wrote his first article on the theory of evolution. At first glance, this article does not seem to contain anything new. Nonetheless, in it he presented a first version of what became the principal law of the theory of evolution: “Every species has come into existence coincidentally both in time and space with a pre-existing closely allied species.” Wallace was flattered to learn that well-known personalities, like geologist Charles Lyell42 and Charles Darwin, had discussed his article.
In 1558, Wallace sent Darwin his second article, written in Indonesia. This time, Wallace’s great law has taken a definitive form. The idea developed in this text is so simple that it appears almost absurd at first. How is one to pretend to explain so many things with what is a sort of “nonlaw?”
On one hand, we have this nature as prolific and dynamic as the lava of an erupting volcano. On the other hand, we have an environment that exists quite contentedly. And that is it! Wallace merely observes that certain products of nature survive, and others do not. If a family survives, it can proliferate at an astonishing pace.43 According to Wallace’s law, there is no force that selects and sorts. It is not even the strongest or the most intelligent who survives. It is the one that reproduces the most easily in a given environment. The one that can reproduce in many regions propagates more easily than one that can survive in only one region. This vision is close to the laws that Hume describes in A Treatise of Human Nature. There is no logic, no criteria for validation, or even rules of the game. To survive and reproduce without knowing why suffices.
Another brilliant idea, which Wallace had already sketched in his previous article, is that everything changes, and certain changes “take hold” and others do not. These changes are always small, as those that differentiate one brother from the other, and nothing more.44 However, if these changes have characteristics that are genetically transmitted, and if they help an organism reproduce over many generations, their impact may modify the chances of the survival of a progeny. It is, therefore, step by step that the species would have modified themselves over millions of years, which explains the variety that exists today.
According to Wallace, there is no necessity for any other law to explain the evolution of the species. Lamarck’s two laws are therefore useless.
As the preservation of incapables is habitually secured by our social arrangements; and as very few except criminals are prevented by their inferiorities from leaving the average number of offspring (indeed the balance of fertility is probably in favour of the inferior); it results that survival of the fittest, can scarcely at all act in such a way as to produce specialities of nature, either bodily or mental. (Herbert Spencer, 1864, The Principles of Biology, p. 469)45
Wallace uses the expression survival of the fittest, which is often understood as the survival of the strongest.46 Survival, according to Wallace, depends mostly on health and behavior. These two dimensions of the organism can integrate themselves more or less easily with the resources of an environment. For Wallace, fitness is a way of doing things that is particularly well adapted to an environment, like a shoe in which a foot is comfortable. A piece of a puzzle fits with another piece when they can fit together and form the part of the design that is sought. This has nothing to do with the notion, driven by certain neo-Darwinian movements, that only the strongest survive. Not all tyrants and geniuses had children; those that did, did not necessarily beget particularly powerful or brilliant offspring.47
Health is the assimilating factor that rules survival. If an organism cannot withstand the temperature or the available food in an environment, it becomes ill and dies. The accommodating factor is the capacity to calibrate behavior. This behavior can be motivated by many types of thoughts and physiological mechanisms. Without knowing it, Wallace thus confirmed the importance that Lamarck gave to behavior, even if the framework of their thinking was different:
It is not the organs, which is to say the nature and shape of the parts of the body of an animal, which have created its habits and particular faculties. On the contrary, it is his habits, the way he lives, and the circumstances in which its parents met that have with time created the shape of his body, the number and the structure of his organs, and finally the faculties he possesses. (Lamarck, 1802, p. 44; translated by Marcel Duclos)
The principal disagreement between Darwin and the positions of Wallace concern the mind. Wallace was attracted not only by mesmerism and phrenology but by the spiritualism that was developing in the United States.48 He talks about ghosts, telepathy, and the communication between the dead and the living. He is not speaking of belief, but from a conviction based on numerous experiences that he evaluated critically. He identifies two levels of the mind:49
For Wallace, evolution advances in small increments. The changes in mental capacity between humans and monkeys are so important that they cannot be explained by the small steps of biological evolution.50 Some mental capacities are more developed in one culture than in another. These are referred to as potential capacities. An individual born in the wild can go to London and become a pianist who plays classical music.51 If such a person had stayed in the wild, this potential capacity would have never expressed itself. Therefore, it cannot have been selected by biological processes. It is probably because of this argument that scientists eliminated Wallace from the current references related to the theory of evolution. On that point (mind and evolution), Lamarck remains the reference.
Charles Darwin (1809–1882)52 is halfway between Lamarck and Wallace. He is a rich man who pursued university studies in theology and became an enlightened amateur biologist. He does not defend a theory or a coherent vision of nature. He felt an inner urge to observe animals in a detailed way and improve Lamarck’s theory of evolution. This passion increased with age. He was one of those explorers for whom an obsessive interest for details leads to the emergence of global theoretical issues. For example, because he would record every minute detail of each individual animal, he became keenly aware of the infinite variety that is generated by nature.
Darwin’s family acquired their wealth during the English Industrial Revolution. They were profoundly influenced by the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment, especially Voltaire.
Charles Darwin’s paternal great-grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a renowned physician who introduced Lamarck’s theory in Great Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. As Lamarck was perceived as a French revolutionary and an enemy of Great Britain, this interest was followed with ambivalence: British intellectuals could not repress a fascination for the general frame of the theory of evolution, but they refused to integrate a theory produced by the guillotines of the revolution and the horrible wars undertaken by Napoleon. A passionate defense of Lamarck’s theory was part of the intellectual world in which Charles Darwin grew up.
Darwin studied theology at Cambridge. His family hoped that he could then become a minister in the Anglican Church. Influenced by his grandfather, he followed the discussions of the biologists concerning the works of Lamarck. One of his professors in Cambridge put him in contact with Captain Fitzroy,53 who was looking for a companion for a research trip to the Pacific Ocean. That is how Darwin reached the Galapagos Islands, where he transformed himself into a passionate observer of nature. The material he gathered during this trip provided him with what he needed to write the book that made his reputation: The Voyage of the Beagle. This work tells of a journey full of interesting observations, but it does not develop any theoretical theme, and it does not mention the theory of evolution.
Darwin became a renowned intellectual who frequented the greatest scientists of his time, like geologist Sir Charles Lyell. Darwin set himself the task of improving Lamarck’s theory, which was still severely criticized. This was a private pastime about which he said very little. But with the aid of his obsessive tendencies, he became, in his time, one of the greatest specialists on the details and the potential still hidden in the theory of evolution.54
He wrote in his notebooks of his attempts at formulating laws that would complete Lamarck’s two laws. While reading Malthus’s Essay, he sensed vaguely that the notion of survival is important, but he did not find an explicit formulation.
When Alfred Russel Wallace sent him his article of 1858, Darwin sensed that he has just read the formulation that was on the tip of his tongue. He used his influence to ensure that both of them would be recognized as the originators of the theory of natural selection. If Wallace had the genius to make explicit the law of natural selection, Darwin had all the examples necessary to support this hypothesis in his copious notes. He was then able to publish a convincing argument for a theory of evolution based on Wallace’s nonlaw in one year, The Origin of Species. In this book, where Darwin must demonstrate that Wallace and he discovered the same thing, he describes all the aspects of the theory of evolution that can be explained by the principle of survival of the fittest. However, those among you who read Darwin’s other books will soon see that for him, this mechanism may be the principal tool of evolution, but it is not the only one. Darwin still uses Lamarck’s two laws to explain a number of observations.
Ethologists, like Konrad Lorenz and Desmond Morris, have tried to present a kind and coherent Darwin. Every element of nature seems to have a clear function, like Lamarck’s example of the giraffe. This view allows for the appearance, like in the films of Walt Disney (I am thinking of Perry the squirrel), of a cruel world in which everyone must learn how to survive but where everything has a cause, everything is explainable.55 The tears of sadness and the wide eyes of astonishment have a function adapted to the expressed emotion. When someone attacks me, I show my teeth to scare him, to show him that I could bite him. These would be the functions that allow for survival. These signals were selected and related to a behavior because they give an individual a greater chance at survival. Thus, to frown and wrinkle one’s nose, as often happens when a person cries, protects the eyes against an eventual blow.56 This view may be relevant, but those who hold it are wrong when they associate it with Darwin. Wilhelm Reich caricatures this type of thinking when he speaks of biologist Oscar Hertwig:
What disturbed particularly in biology was the application of the teleological principle. The cell was supposed to have to have a membrane in order to better protect itself against external stimuli; the male sperm cell was so agile in order to better get to the ovum. The male animals were bigger and stronger than the females, or more beautifully colored, in order to be more attractive to the females; or they had horns in order to beat off their rivals. (Reich, 1940, I, p. 5)
In an article on Reich’s bioenergy, David Boadella57 manages to find a quote from Darwin where he writes that to express our emotions is good for our health and to inhibit their expression represses emotional sentiments.58 This quote illustrates two aspects of Darwin’s thought:
Darwin’s intelligence makes me think of a rat in a maze. The rat I have in mind does not really think. He does not elaborate a strategy, does not synthesize things in any relevant manner, remembers poorly the route traveled, and often ends up in the same impasses. However, he persists! He ceaselessly advances in every which way and eventually finds the exit by chance. Wallace certainly proceeds with more elegance. He reflects, reasons, and finds the exit more quickly. But Darwin’s way of proceeding has an advantage. By rushing all around before thinking, he covered all of the nooks and crannies of the maze that he has gotten to know by heart. With his bullet-proof skepticism, Darwin’s way of proceeding prevents him from drawing conclusions that others too easily adopt.
Wallace and Darwin thought that only a few details changed from one generation to another. Therefore, these details distinguish one individual from another and can influence the chances of survival. Let us imagine that cats that were able to see at night had a greater chance of survival than those who ran faster but could not see at night. The first species will survive better than the second, and the capacities of the second will be lost. Not all of the capacities of an organism favor its survival. An animal is a complex coordination of inherited traits. Only some of them influence the chances of survival in a particular way. However, if a cat survives, the totality of his traits is transmitted.
This is how Wallace and Darwin explained that a creature often possesses traits that enhance his capacity to survive and others that diminish this capacity.59 Thus, humans may have been favored by the fact that their hands and feet were different. The advantage brought about by this trait in terms of survival allowed them to reproduce even if they also had other traits that were useless or even self-destructive. To confirm this analysis, Darwin (1872) undertook a study of the emotional expressions in man and in animals.
Darwin’s idea was that the domain of emotional expressions was an ideal terrain to find (1) psychological reactions inherited from other species, (2) which had a functional value for the survival of certain species, and (3) which had no useful function for humans.60 If a trait is of no use for the survival of a species and is innate, it is highly probable that it was produced by evolution. The coccyx is a well-known example in the human species of all that remains of the tails of our ancestors, the monkeys. Thus Darwin chose to study emotions because they were an example of “purposeless”61 psychological mechanisms that are “not at all useful.”62 His research led to such powerful and abrasive considerations that he tried to soften his analysis at the end of his work on the human and animal expressions with the famous phrase quoted by David Boadella. Darwin’s idea was that once he had proven with this research that some psychological mechanisms had been produced by evolution, biologists could then tackle more complex psychological mechanisms influenced by evolution but still have a constructive function for the human species (e.g., some psychological dimensions of the instincts).
Consequently, for Darwin, to tremble with fear is not necessarily a useful reaction, and can even be “of no service.”63 It is not possible, for him, that this reaction was preserved by human organisms because it positively influenced their survival. He remarks that the angry vocalizations that we inherited from some animals are often less expressive and powerful than some musical melodies.64 Tears often reveal “pitiful” thoughts (Darwin, 1872, VI, p. 173). They are not even advantageous when we are with our loved ones. Darwin65 thinks that to cry is as useless as the tears that flow after a blow near the eyes, a sneeze, or too bright a light projected into the eye. The fact remains that the same tears, for totally incidental66 reasons, can alleviate some suffering. In the first chapter of his book on the expressions, Darwin insists on the idea that all the practical habits of a human organism activate themselves independently of conscious thoughts.
To the extent that Darwin thinks that these inherited reflexes have no relevance, it becomes reasonable to imagine that the same reflex acquired some useful and useless functions on the way. Darwin even notices that the more violent or “hysteric” the crying (Darwin, 1872, VI, p. 175), the more they bring a sense of relief. It is the same when someone who is suffering turns every which way, clenches his teeth, and makes ear-splitting screams. He observes these reactions in children and concludes that they are innate. But as a fine English gentleman of the Victorian period, he does not see the usefulness of these “simian” behaviors in a salon or in a meeting of scientists. In other words, the human emotional expressions sometimes procure a certain momentary relief, but they sabotage the survival of an individual in a socialized environment more than they help.
Darwin so liked to describe what he observed in minute detail that he could never have been content to reduce the emotional expressions to a few traits or a few basic emotions. What he includes in his list of emotional expressions is, at the same time, varied to the extreme and heterogeneous. Here is the list of the expressive traits and the emotions identified in the chapter headings of Darwin’s book (the numbers correspond to the chapters):67
<EXT>(III) General principles of expression. The principle of the direct action of the excited nervous system on the body, independently of the will and in part of habit—Change of colour in the hair—Trembling of the muscles—Modified secretions—Perspiration—Expression of extreme pain—Of rage, great joy, and terror—Contrast between the emotions which cause and do not cause expressive movements—Exciting and depressing states of the mind.
(IV) Means of expression in animals. The emission of sounds—Vocalsounds—Sounds otherwise produced—Erection of the dermal appendages, hairs, feathers, &c, under the emotions of anger and terror—The drawing back of the ears as a preparation for fighting, and as an expression of anger—Erection of the ears and raising the head, a sign of attention.
(V) Special expressions of animals. The Dog, various expressive movements of—Cats—Horses—Ruminants—Monkeys, their expression of joy and affection—Of Pain—Anger—Astonishment and Terror
(VI) The screaming and weeping of infants—Form of features—Age at which weeping commences—The effects of habitual restraint on weeping—Sobbing—Cause of the contraction of the muscles round the eyes during screaming—Cause of the secretion of tears.
(VII) General effect of grief on the system—Obliquity of the eyebrows under suffering—On the cause of the obliquity of the eyebrows—On the depression of the corners of the mouth.
(VIII) Laughter primarily the expression of joy—Ludicrous ideas—Movements of the features during laughter—Nature of the sound produced—The secretion of tears during loud laughter—Gradation from loud laughter to gentle smiling—High spirits—The expression of love—Tender feelings—Devotion.
(IX) The act of frowning—Reflection with an effort or with the perception of something difficult or disagreeable—Abstracted meditation—Ill-temper—Moroseness—Obstinacy—Sulkiness and pouting—Decision or determination—The firm closure of the mouth.
(X) Hatred—Rage, effects of, on the system—Uncovering of the teeth—Rage in the insane—Anger and indignation—As expressed by the various races of man—Sneering and defiance—The uncovering of the canine tooth on one side of the face.
(XI) Contempt, scorn and disdain, variously expressed—Derisive smile—Gestures expressive of contempt—Disgust—Guilt, deceit, pride, &c.—Helplessness or impotence—Patience—Obstinacy—Shrugging the shoulders common to most of the races of man—Signs of affirmation and negation.
(XII) Surprise, astonishment—Elevation of the eyebrows—Opening the mouth—Protrusion of the lips—Gestures accompanying surprise—Admiration—Fear—Terror—Erection of the hair—Contraction of the platysma muscle68—Dilatation of the pupils—Horror.
(XIII) Nature of a blush—Inheritance—The parts of the body most affected—Blushing in the various races of man—Accompanying gestures—Confusion of mind—Causes of blushing—Self-attention, the fundamental element—Shyness—Shame, from broken moral laws and conventional rules—Modesty.
In the text, Darwin mentions an even greater variety of mental and bodily traits. In the lists for chapters IV and XI, he included the sign “&c.” to indicate that in his mind, the emotional domain includes a greater number of traits.
AN INSTINCTIVE BEHAVIOR ARISES IN ASSOCIATION TO SOME FUNCTIONAL COVARIATIONS OF THE DIMENSIONS OF THE ORGANISM
We find in Darwin’s thinking examples of external propensities (the milieu participates in their calibration) that reorganize the heteroclite mechanisms. A species that survives especially because of a series of characteristics of the organism conserves other traits that do not influence its survival. It is possible that afterward, another detail that has nothing to do with the precedent becomes pertinent and would be “selected.” It is thus the association of these two details that favors survival while the rest of the body varies independently. If such is how evolution functions, the organism is nothing other than a heap of disparate mechanisms that more or less hold together just enough to ensure survival. Regulating such messy architectures could explain why evolution is so slow. A mutation does not generate a global reconstruction of the organism. Only the changes that do not destabilize the totality of the organism too much can perpetuate themselves.
It is eventually possible for Darwin that there exists a kind of functionally coordinated covariation of mental and bodily traits in the domain of the instincts.69 An herbivore (a cow) does not have an anatomy and physiology that permit it to become, on a daily basis, a carnivore; the large cats do not have the capacity to become exclusively herbivores. The anatomy and physiology of these species correspond to a certain type of food resource, and the organism of these species (the digestive tract, the teeth, the shape of their feet, etc.) little by little adjusted itself to be more effective at exploiting such resources in the environment. If we adopt Darwin’s way of thinking, this adaptation can only have a relative, fuzzy coherence. It is nonetheless possible to define an instinct as being what associates certain mental and anatomical traits. This relative coherence disappears in the construction of the emotions that mostly exploit and connect the parts of the body that no longer have any function.70
Darwin distinguishes between several types of emotional schemata:
This type of flexibility follows rules that are activated by default. Body psychotherapists know of many cases of persons who cry every time they are angry, who get angry when they are sad, who stimulate the two forms of expressions when they are sad or angry, or who cannot get angry without becoming sad. Here, we again find Descartes’s idea, as expressed in The Passions of the Soul. He observed that an emotion can modify another emotion by amplifying or attenuating its intensity or even by concealing it. This kind of flexibility of the emotional schemata is often perceived today in psychotherapy as a manifestation of the defense systems. This type of interpretation sometimes forgets a little too quickly that this flexibility exists in any case. In some instances, defense systems exploit this flexibility to fulfill the regulation of an unconscious agenda. In other words, flexibility in the expressivity of the emotions can sometimes be the sign that a defense system is activated, but not always. I can only repeat that before concluding that crying instead of yelling is certainly brought about by a defense system, the therapist must also consider other alternatives.
DO WE HAVE TO CRY WHEN WE ARE SAD?
For Darwin, the emotions relate mostly to the parts of the body and the physiological mechanisms that have been conserved for reasons of general equilibrium, like serving as a counterweight for a segment of the body in the gravity field. This position is particularly well illustrated by the analysis of the expressions of sadness that Darwin develops in chapter 6 of his book on emotional expressions. This discussion remains a reference in the literature on emotions.
The basis for Darwin’s analysis is the idea that a too rapid flow of blood to the eyes can raise the blood pressure at the back of the eyes, which can become dangerous.73 Every time that a person exhales violently while laughing, crying, or sneezing, there is an acceleration of blood flow to the face, which risks modifying the ocular tension abruptly. The dilation of the retro-ocular arteries sometime pushes the eyes forward and makes them appear as if they are bulging. A rapid increase in vascular blood activity in the eye unleashes a reflex that contracts the muscles around the eyes to diminish the flow of blood in the eyes. This reflex often produces tears.
For Darwin, the reflex that produces tears is not unleashed by exhalation but by the activity of the muscles that provoke the exhalation. If a person contracts the muscles of the thorax and the abdomen while holding his breath, the reflex around the eyes is automatically unleashed. There is also a risk that the eyes will become engorged when a person vomits or when the muscles of the belly are suddenly contracted to expulse a bowel movement. Releasing fluids can then help lower that pressure. This reflex is therefore useful for the health of the eyes.
In this discussion,74 Darwin indicates that many causes can activate the muscles used by a person who cries without it being necessarily related to sadness. It only consists, for the moment, of a reflexive sequence linked to the contraction of the muscles of the thorax and the belly. The first function of this reflex is to protect the eye when this type of respiration raises the pressure in it.
TEARS
To support his analysis of emotional expression, Darwin quotes several authors who presume that tears are part of the mechanisms that participate in the regulation of eye pressure. They can be associated to a variety of emotions (Darwin mentions laughter) and can sometimes be provoked by nonemotional reactions like violent coughs and yawning.75 It is possible that this “nucleus” could have been associated with sadness for generations and could have finally become genetically transmissible. It is even possible that the attitude of parents could have participated in the construction of this association. For example, if they perceive tears as an expression of sadness, the infant may discover that tears are useful to convey his sentiment of sadness. In this example, Darwin describes an association between body and emotions that is constructed in two stages:
Contrary to the instincts, there is therefore no covariation between the history of one part of the body and the affect that associates itself to it.
Today, physicians clearly distinguish between tears and the aqueous humor that rinses the interior of the eye socket. Only the aqueous humor has an influence on the ocular tension. Tears would therefore not have the function of protecting the eye from changes in pressure but only that of keeping the surface of the eye clean. On the other hand, physicians still think that respiration influences both the tears and the ocular pressure.76 This complicates Darwin’s analysis a bit. But it also confirms it because, finally, the inclusion of tears in the expression of sadness, distress, joy, and anger touches functions still less central than Darwin thought. Whatever are the underlying mechanisms of tears, it is undeniable that a profound activation of respiration stimulates tears. Emotions also often activate such deep breathing. Therefore by grouping existing heterogeneous mechanisms, emotions produce a series of impacts on self and on those around us.77
You know that Darwin based his hypothesis of the origin of species by “natural selection” upon two principles—the principle of variability and the principle of inheritance of individual characteristics. (Wilhelm Wundt, 1892, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, 26.II, p. 385)
Hegel and Marx were Idealists because they believed that history was taking us to a transpersonal goal. For them, humans build themselves through improvements and will eventually become perfect. We find this point of view in some research carried out in industry; for example, in those enterprises that want to find the perfect apple, the perfect computer, the perfect medicine, the product that meets a maximum of needs (lowest cost and indestructible), and so on.
For Darwin, more than for Wallace, nature’s strategy is altogether different. It does not aim for perfection but for variety.78 It does not consist in producing a hero capable of vanquishing all situations but a multitude of keys with the hope that there will always be one that will be fit into the keyhole of a door that blocks our passage. As a whole, this is the strategy of the immune system when it generates antibodies. The more a species produces varied organisms, the more it has a chance to beget offspring that will survive. Wilhelm Reich summarizes the relevance of this point of view for psychotherapy in this way:
Darwin’s theory of natural selection, also, corresponded to the reasonable expectation that, although life is governed by certain fundamental laws, there is, nevertheless, ample room for the influence of environmental factors. In this theory, nothing was considered eternally immutable, nothing was explained on the basis of invisible hereditary factors; everything was capable of development. (Reich, 1940, I, p. 7)
Darwin includes his cult of variety in his theoretical constructs. Contrary to Wallace, he does not believe that all evolutionary mechanisms could be explained by a single law or by a coherent assembly of laws. In his way of thinking, there is no problem including (1) Wallace’s law of survival and (b) Lamarck’s second law, according to which acquired habits can become hereditary. It is not only in his early writings, influence by his grandfather Erasmus, but also in his last works that Darwin defends the second law. Thus, in his 1872 book on emotional expressions, he repeatedly defends the position without making any reference to Lamarck.
Darwin assumes that habits can influence the material structure of the nervous system, because without this argument, he cannot explain how acquired habits can enter into the domain of what can be inherited.79 He states, in several places in his book, that habits acquired in a culture can “become permanent and inheritable.”80 For me, one of the bases of the ethic conveyed by psychotherapists is this respect (1) of the variety and heterogeneity of what exists and (2) of the variety and heterogeneity of the mechanisms that regulate the living.
A wild population of any species consists always of individuals whose genetic constitution varies widely. In other words, potentiality and readiness for change is already built into the survival unit. The heterogeneity of the wild population is already one-half of the trial-and-error system which is necessary for dealing with the environment.
The artificially homogenized populations of man’s domestic animals and plants are scarcely fit for survival. (Gregory Bateson, 1972, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, II.V.5, p. 451)
For some, the founder of the theory of evolution is Alfred Russel Wallace. Charles Darwin used his influence to be recognized as co-discoverer and then quickly published the The Origin of Species while Wallace was still in the jungle. For others, Darwin is the only one who could have produced a convincing theory of evolution. His book was an immediate best-seller. This was recognized by Wallace, who was content to be co-inventor of Darwinism. His social position became much more comfortable than he had expected. Apparently, he and Darwin became great friends and respected each other.
However, there is a twist to this story. In 1889, seven years after Darwin’s death, Wallace published a volume that summarized their theory, titled Darwinism. This book influenced several generations of intellectuals, who believed it was the best summary of the Darwinian theory and therefore mostly referred to this book and Darwin’s The Origin of Species when they wanted to clarify the particularities of Darwinism. This strategy helped academics avoid endless discussions on the respective contributions of each man. It was more urgent to accumulate additional data on the subject, which would inevitably lead to constant reformulations. Darwinism became the part of the theory on which the two pioneers agreed. The particularities of each thinker were thus soon forgotten. Keeping “the best of both worlds” is a typical English attitude when one wants to be on the safe side. It is this “averaged” vision of Darwinism that has been used when Darwinism was associated to Mendel’s genetics to form the current vision of Darwinism taught in schools and universities.81 Only a few thinkers found it interesting to discuss the particular options that Darwin or Wallace could have supported.82
It is only recently that a careful reading of all of Darwin’s publications has highlighted the less conventional ideas that Darwin developed on the fuzziness, variety, and lack of coherence of biological dynamics. The impact of this rereading of Darwin’s theory on contemporary psychology is what I now summarize. It is possible than an equally thorough reading of Wallace could inspire other new developments.
Is there any reasonable ground to conclude, that the inhabitants of other planets possess thought, intelligence, reason, or anything similar to these faculties in men? When nature has so extremely diversified her manner of operation in this small globe; can we imagine, that she incessantly copies herself throughout so immense a universe? (Hume, 1776, “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,” II, p. 50)
The preceding sections permit us to distinguish between at least three neo-Darwinian trends:
I only discuss the third trend in the following sections because it allows for a synthesis of the themes that I initiated, while talking about Hume and Darwin, about a world and a mind that makes no sense, save for the meaning the human imagination attributes to it. Even the enlightened Darwinians have a difficult time integrating such a radical analysis. Australian philosopher Paul E. Griffiths83 mentions Darwin’s remarks on the uselessness of the emotional expressions, and he is ready to admit that they have lost the functions they had for other species. However, he assumes that if they are always present in the genetic repertoire, they have acquired new functions. Like most of the scientists and philosophers, he reluctantly accepts the notion that nature selects useless behaviors, even self-destructive ones.
There is in this a difficulty given the tools that reason uses. Consciousness likes beautiful and grand edifices that architects refer to as “classical.” Each element is in harmony with the others; their organization is coherent and their structure contains no useless elements. Spinoza’s theory is one of the most beautiful examples of a classical theory. Reason has difficulty appreciating more baroque and less functional architecture. The rococo style is an example of this kind of architecture. The facades follow the associations of the imagination. The walls change shape at every turn; they are decorated and then plain, all without any necessity for the solidity of the building. In the discussions at the end of the twentieth century, philosophers contrasted a classical or modern style to the rococo or postmodern style.84 In Darwin’s theory, the bricks are stacked on top of each other without any architect ensuring the coherence of the whole. The only criterion is that some constructions survive better than others, even when the makeshift arrangement that constitutes them contains weak and poorly constructed elements.
This discussion has a profound influence on the theories of today. To understand what is at stake, I begin by going back over the way this discussion was expressed, a short time after Lamarck’s death, in the debate that occurred between Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier.
Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844) and Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) are two great biologists who worked at the Museum of Natural History of Paris. Saint-Hilaire pursued the reflection begun by Lamarck by studying the unfolding of the anatomy of animals, as if all the species were partial manifestations of the same underlying structure. There would be on one side—in the world of Ideas or God’s plan—a perfect architecture, and on the other side, species that incarnate this plan in a more or less complete way. For him, the theory of evolution shows how the forces of life gradually approach the Ideal architecture.85 In his research, Saint-Hilaire attempted to define the anatomy of each species and the links that can exist between each organ. He was one of those who reinforced the evolutionary theory that anatomical links exist between all of the species. He demonstrated, among other things, that the anatomical similarities between species of mammals are particularly salient when biologists study their respective fetuses.
On a theoretical plane, Saint-Hilaire presents three laws that characterize the relationship between anatomy and evolution:86
Cuvier was one of the principal adversaries against the theory of evolution. He was especially well known for his ability to reconstruct the overall anatomy of a fossil starting with mere fragments. This skill made it possible for him to become the first great specialist of the vanished species, such as prehistoric animals. He explains these disappearances with the theory of geological catastrophe proposed by certain geologists of his time.
It was his thesis that each animal has a coherent anatomy and no element of this architecture can be modified without deeply upsetting the general equilibrium. There would not have been any survival possible if things had come about as Lamarck and Saint-Hilaire claimed. This led Cuvier to propose a law of the necessary correlation of the parts. Darwin often used Cuvier’s law to demonstrate the opposite of what Cuvier wanted to prove. For Darwin, the need to maintain a minimum of general equilibrium can explain the maintenance of the parts of organs that had a precise function but that are then maintained uniquely to guarantee the equilibrium of the whole in the gravity field. It would be mostly these remnants, kept for architectural reasons, to which the emotions are related.
The discussion between Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire became one of the great popular debates of the 1820s. Cuvier represented a scientific vision compatible with the views of the aristocracy and the Catholic Church. Saint-Hilaire’s evolutionary vision was associated with the progressive forces that were about to take power in Western Europe. The following anecdote demonstrates to what extent this debate had become a major high-profile stake:87
Anecdote about Goethe at breakfast. The debates that were the rage concerning Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire were temporarily interrupted by the second French Revolution which erupted in July 1830. On the afternoon of the second of August, the elderly Goethe was reading the newspaper while eating breakfast. He asked his secretary, Johann Peter Eckermann, what he thought about the events in France: “The volcano has come to an eruption, everything is in flames, and we have no longer a transaction with closed doors!” Eckermann thought that Goethe was referring to the upheaval in the streets and to the abdication of King Charles X. But in fact he was referring to the debate between Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire that was heating up now that the present government supported Saint-Hilaire. (Based on Eckermann, 1848, p. 290f)
The following sections are a tightly written theoretical summary of neo-Darwinian models. Some readers may prefer to read this material once they have a general vision of the content of this manual.
In the previous sections, we have seen Darwin’s propensity to catalog all of the small variations of nature, as well as his aversion to those theories that, like Wallace’s, try to explain everything with a single model.88 Still more deeply anchored is his aversion to those grand theories that try to render everything coherent and functional, like those of Spinoza and Cuvier.
An admirer of Lamarck, Darwin freely accepted a systemic vision that situates the details in the elaboration of the great movements of history. However, he mostly admired how Lamarck had begun to undermine theories based on the notion that the world was a coherent entity. For Darwin, nature is an unbelievably imaginative makeshift of small mechanisms. That aspect of his thought rejoins the thought of the young Hume and was taken up in the 1970s to establish a movement that blends neurology, artificial intelligence, and psychology. This movement is called, according to its components, evolutionary psychology, the neurosciences, or the neuro-cognitive sciences. The best synthesis of these movements that I know remains the book of philosopher Andy Clark (1997): Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again.89 I quote the title of his book in full because it aptly gives the impression of a tinkering nature.
In the following sections, I summarize concepts without which the recent developments inspired by Darwin in psychology, and consequently in psychotherapy, remain greatly unintelligible. It consists of the global/local distinction and the notions of modular and parallel activity.
I employ the procedures used to write software programs as a basic metaphor for the contemporary discussions on the mind. Building machines that can automatically reproduce certain performances of the mind have forced engineers to invent practical ways of accomplishing psychological tasks for which no one has a convincing explanation. The “tricks” they discovered are efficient enough, but are often “messy.” The term messy is used for a set of procedures that are not necessarily coherent, logical, or satisfying from a purely intellectual point of view but that are good enough to satisfy those who use computers. These messy procedures have what one sometimes calls bugs. A bug, in this context, is usually a few lines of a program that do not accomplish what one expects them to do. The problem is that huge software is composed of millions of instructions, written for decades by sometimes thousands of engineers. Some of these engineers may have left the company, died, or changed profession. Even if one can still contact an engineer who wrote an old routine, he often cannot remember all that he did when he worked on that program.
Detecting where bugs are can sometimes take more time than rewriting a part of the program. Given the financial pressure of the software industry, this second strategy is often used. The problem is that there may be a few lines in another routine that still need to use some parts of the old program that functions. Such big programs, like the operating systems of computers,90 are typically composed of old routines and new routines, forming an incredibly messy entity that has no coherence. Given the size of the program and the teams that participated in its construction, there probably is no single engineer who knows how such large software really operates. They have a general idea of the particularities of the program they work with, of the general rules used by all the engineers that developed that program, and a more intimate understanding of those parts of the program they have worked on. But they cannot know how each individual procedure (also called a subroutine) operates and associates with a web of other procedures. The present situation is even more complicated when one considers that the set of general rules used to coordinate all the engineers that work on a program today may not always be exactly the same ones that were used 10 years ago.
An increasing number of psychologists and neurologist observe that the brain and the mind have the same sort of messy architecture. No one knows the exact biological history of each mechanism, how each mechanism is influenced by other mechanisms, and what changed when the organism that contained this mechanism had a mutation and developed new forms of habitual behavior. I use the term messy to designate this type of loose organization that somehow manages to survive and reproduce because it is often used in the contemporary literature. This type of approach to the mind is becoming increasingly popular. In the chapters on philosophers, I opposed schools that assume a coherent organization of the mind and schools that had an intuition about the messiness of the mind. In artificial intelligence these two trends may describe forms of organization that exist in parallel, as illustrated in the following quotation:
Over the years, I’ve written a number of books in praise of the Computational Theory of Mind. . . . It is, in my view, by far the best theory of cognition that we’ve got; indeed, the only one we’ve got that’s worth the bother of a serious discussion. . . . But it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone could think that it’s a very large part of the truth; still less that it’s within miles of being the whole story about how the mind works. (Fodor, 2000, p. 1)
If I describe respiration globally, I must first describe the large meteorological and social movements that in their interaction regulate the quality of the air. Gradually, I arrive at a global description of the physiology of respiration. At the interior of these large movements of the environment and of the organism, the scientist will study some local events. For example, he can study the interaction between the nostrils and the air. This is a local interaction if we think that the nostrils automatically inhale the air that is near the nose. As soon as a local environment is situated in a global mechanism, the question of the organization that relates one global mechanism to a local mechanism becomes relevant.
MODULES
The notion of module is an example of a local mechanism. A modular mechanism attends to a number of events. When these events occur, it extracts a certain amount of information, treats this information in a standard way, and produces a behavior that varies according to the information received in a standardized way. Here are three domains that illustrate different ways of using the concept of a module.
PARALLEL AND SEQUENTIAL PROCESS OF INFORMATION94
When I described the pillars that analyze the visual information entering the visual cortex, I spoke not only of modularity, but also of the parallel activity of the modules. From the moment that each module works independently at the same time on the same flow of information, the management of the information is considered parallel. As the activity of each module occurs simultaneously, each module acts without waiting for the results of the analysis of the other modules. Imagine a patient who arrives at the emergency room of a hospital. Medical personnel will take blood and urine samples, for example. They will send what they have obtained to different laboratories, which will each analyze a specific aspect of those samples without waiting for the results of the other tests. During this time, the patient will be sent to radiology for more tests. The synthesis will be done later. Only at the moment of determining the diagnosis and the sequence of care will the attending physician know what test results are pertinent. That form of analysis is different from a sequential analysis procedure. Sequential analysis requires that each analysis is undertaken one after the other and only once the result of the previous analysis is known. This procedure is used in traditional causal models and logic.97 Take, for example, a laboratory that runs tests on blood samples:
The syllogism is an example of sequential reasoning:
If A = B,
And B = C,
Then A = C.
A parallel analysis of the syllogism made by the subroutines of a program runs according to the following procedure:
Module 1: Question: A = B? Answer: yes or no.
Module 2: Question: B = C? Answer: yes or no.
Module 3: If answer 1 and answer 2 = yes, then A = C; if answer 1 and 2 are not equal, then A and C are not equal.
In fact, in modular thinking, it is often simpler to have a routine that directly compares A and C without needing the answers from the two other modules. There is therefore no longer a logical linear thought, even if the empirical result is the same.
Fodor, Johnson-Laird, and Crick95 think that conscious reasoning follows a sequential logic, whereas the rustling of imagination96 and the nonconscious mechanisms function mostly in a modular and parallel fashion. This type of model implies that the organism is capable of generating independent responses to each stimulus that is perceived by an organism at a given moment.
When one talks of modular analysis, the term parallel is not used the same way as when one talks of the parallelism of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Even if there exists some relationship between these two ways to use the term parallel, it is important not to confuse them.
HILL CLIMBING
The limits of a mind functioning only with parallel modular procedures became apparent as soon as engineers tried to construct robots that could move on the surface of the moon. For example, they could not build a robot that was capable of climbing a hill.
When an officer orders a soldier to climb to the top of a hill, the soldier executes the order and climbs to the top with relative ease. When programmers have to detail what the soldier actually did to climb the hill, they suddenly discover the millions of small automatic skills that were accomplished in a relatively smooth way. As we have already seen, most of these activities are nonconscious, whereas others require the support of conscious dynamics. Before engineers began to write such programs, no philosopher or psychologist could have imagined the complexity involved to accomplish such a banal task.
At first, the engineers assumed that all they had to do was to give instructions to put one foot after the other on the ground ahead that was a bit higher and to stop when no higher ground could be found.97 What happened was that the machine would end up on top of a rock that was miles away from the top of the hill. The soldier that climbs a hill would have automatically realized that the top of a mound is not the top of the hill. He would also know that one must sometimes go downhill for a while before resuming the climb, as a hill does not necessarily rise in a straight line. This is how, slowly but surely, engineers began to explore all the procedures that are required to climb a hill. Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon98 worked on similar problems from 1956 onward for more than 20 years, “introducing fundamental ideas that are still the core of problem solving theory” (Newell, 1990). The crux of the analysis is that the robots need to define long-term goals (e.g., where is the top of the hill?) and short-term goals (the next step). Long-term goals require a different kind of thinking than what is needed for the next step. Indeed, the next step requires not only finding what is the most relevant next step but also the capacity to avoid falling into holes or bumping into a tree when one can walk around it. A poor analysis of such tasks would slow down the machine’s progress and could even cause its destruction. The machine must also analyze the geography that separates it from the top of the hill to find a manageable route. A manageable route goes to the top of the hill rather than to the top of a mound and will ensure the machine’s integrity.
The number of variables involved in such a task, from the point of view of an engineer, is staggering. Engineers found that an intellectual analysis (e.g., where is the top of the hill?) requires relatively small programs, whereas a machine that acts requires an immense amount of work. One needs software programs that coordinate hardware and environmental factors. Traditionally, it was thought that intellectual performances are the most complex accomplishments of evolution. Engineers are now showing that the coordination between mental acts and relevant behavior is the really remarkable achievement. This has led to a series of theories that differentiate computing skills from embodied intelligence:99
Processing is involved in routine behaviours such as driving, cooking, taking a walk, or manipulating everyday objects. These abilities, simple for humans, remain distant goals for robotics and seem to impose hard real-time requirements on an agent. . . . A local subsystem integrating sensory data or generating potential actions may have incomplete, uncertain, or erroneous information about what is happening in the environment or what should be done. But if there are many such local nodes, the information may in fact be present, in the aggregate, to assess a situation correctly or select an appropriate global action policy. (Rosenschein, 1999, pp. 410–412)
This quotation100 shows the compatibility between artificial intelligence and an evolutionary approach to the mind. It allows one to describe forms of mental computation that could have evolved into increasingly efficient dynamics that became capable of producing symbolic thought and conscious activity. Once again, if such mechanisms were used by human nature, consciousness does not have the means to grasp such complex dynamics. They are actually sufficiently simple to be implemented in a robot, but too complex to be perceived through individual conscious perception.
RITUALS SELECT A REPERTOIRE OF SCHEMA
Guy Cellérier is mostly known for his attempt to combine the theories of Kant, Darwin, and Piaget with the development of artificial intelligence.101 Cellérier’s reasoning appears simple, but it has multiple and complex implications. He takes up Wallace’s nonlaw while insisting that in fact the interaction between the dynamics of an environment and the repertoire of available schema in each individual structure each other. A way of thinking or a way of behaving can be more or less adapted to the needs of the environment at a given moment, but this equilibrium can change with time, as an environment can also be experienced as more or less comfortable by individuals. With humans, the survival of a practice often depends more on the social environment than on geographical constraints. Cellérier’s proposal, therefore, can be related to a form of social Darwinism he now calls “pluri-constructivism.”102 This coordination of practices is especially put in place by three types of mechanisms:
Cellérier’s originality lies in showing how social and mental practices are already part of the selection systems of behaviors. Certain accentuations of the voice, modulations of the movements of the arm, or ways of thinking create individual practices that will be automatically evaluated from different points of view:
Sometimes an individual likes a way of doing things, his environment also likes it, and the individual refuses to do it to express his resistance to the environment. This is the case of the anorexic who refuses to eat to oppose one of the parents.103 Let us consider the following typical situation:
Vignette on a typical form of anorexia. A child has an intrusive mother, who absolutely wants her to eat large quantities of food. Although the child needs to eat, when she refuses to eat her mother becomes frustrated and angry. So the child, as vengeance and a defense against a continuously intrusive mother, refuses to eat. This anorexic behavior tends to increase when the parents, at last, start to panic and worry about what their child feels.
The dynamic described by Cellérier lacks coherence because each option is a local choice that activates itself independently from other choices. Consciousness does not have a sufficiently powerful memory to remember all of the small choices made in a lifetime. The majority of the habits produced by these choices have not even gone through a psychological stage of learning. There are only functional accommodations of the body (nerve connections, muscle development, etc.) that have built up at the physiological level. As an individual, I have the conscious impression of being a coherent identity, but I cannot become aware of the millions of small habits that make up this impression. I am not able to achieve a conscious inventory of all of these built-up habits; I am even less able to perceive how they are coordinated. Thus, without my understanding how, one of my propensities can acquire a predominant role. I may suddenly discover that I am alcoholic, addicted to gambling, or so talented as a writer that editors and readers want me to write more books. Even when they have become public, such a propension is like an iceberg. Its mass and roots remain below the conscious surface of the mind. For example, alcoholism can have unconscious roots that may be elucidated in psychotherapy, but it has also created a form of equilibrium with metabolic dynamics that are more difficult to understand and integrate.
This implies that each little calibration develops almost independently of each other, sometimes in parallel fashion, that is, at the same time. The word almost makes reference to the constraints imposed by a choice. For example, once a connection between two neurons is fixed, these neurons are no longer available for other connections. Only constraints of this type can limit the number of physiological and psychological calibrations possible at any given moment.
AGENDAS AND PRIMING
I will now detail two models derived from this type of point of view that are often useful in psychotherapy: planning and priming.
The Agenda According to Cellérier. For Guy Cellérier, to the extent that a human organism is a heap of disorganized know-how, its needs necessarily impose an impossible agenda. This is unavoidable if we consider the following points:
To satisfy their need for food, the Chinese use an assortment of practices manifestly different than those used by Europeans. To become a couple, to have children, and to educate them corresponds to an instinctive and innate parental propensity, but the modalities vary in each social milieu, even for each couple. We are far from the standardized ritual behavior of fish like the stickleback, observed byTinbergen (1951).
The calibration of each propensity therefore requires such complex learning procedures that it is not possible to adequately develop all of its components. Take some of an individual’s few essential activities and try to discover a plausible agenda for them. You will soon discover that it is an impossible task. Every expert will explain that it suffices to accomplish a certain number of simple acts to achieve the proper unfolding of the propensity he finds to be central for human well-being. Once you have made the round of the specialists (sexologist, nutritionist, body worker, physician, professional coach, artist, priest, etc.), you will find yourself faced with the necessity to make choices, each of which will have their advantages and their dangers.
This argument assumes that the selection of behavioral skills comes about through practice. The more a propensity is practiced, the better it functions in this particular way. Behaviors that are seldom used become inefficient and lose contact with the know-how that could support its insertion into social practices. It takes time to become a good lover, a good parent, to work well, to maintain a constructive social network, to have a mindset that gives us the desire to continue to live, and so on. But to properly develop all of these practices demands an amount of time (100-hour days) that is available to no one. Furthermore, this calibration depends not only on the number of times that the practice is carried out but also on the way it is done, and on how it is supported by the organismic dimensions.
Hoey suggests that, as a word is acquired through encounters, it becomes accumulatively loaded with the contexts and co-texts in which it is encountered and we are primed with certain expectations about its collocations, colligations, semantic and pragmatic associations among other things. Our knowledge, use and expectations about words are determined by our exposure to words in context. (Alison Duguid, 2008, Men at Work)
The theory of “priming,” proposed by linguist Michael Hoey (2005), goes in the same direction.104 It shows that each individual’s ways of thinking are affected by a complex network of influences. Priming is at the same time “what is highlighted” and “what prepares.” Hoey analyzes how key words or key sentences used by an individual and their associated thoughts depend on the number of times such a formulation appears in his life and on the intensity of how these stimuli relate to a listener’s habitual practices. Priming activates a network of associations that links several dimensions:
For Alison Duguid (2008), everything happens as if these associations formed sediments that mass together around certain habits already in place in the organism. These old habits are then recalibrated—perhaps even modified—without the person concerned being aware of it. These practices are gradually associated to expectations, to habits that link the individual to formulations. These processes are nonconscious and consequently difficult to master by introspection.
Researchers have observed that this process is sometimes consciously activated by institutions. Duguid studied specifically how Tony Blair’s group, while he was prime minister of England, suggested key words that were to be used every time a collaborator faced a journalist from the press, radio, or television. Her study shows how this strategy was established in a conscious and systematic way to orient the opinion of the English citizens in a moment of crisis, without them being aware of it. In this, we see a form of soft but profound manipulation utilized in our democracies—one that is transmitted virally, thanks to the media and publicity spots. This phenomenon is a good example of the power of association that links the mind and institutions to each other.
What I am describing here is a form of mental manipulation carried out deliberately and lucidly, using the media as the intermediary. The strategy is close to that of computer viruses, which spread through the Internet and manage data on hard disks in an invisible way. Computer users and the media become at least passive accomplices of such strategies if they do not actively install procedures that detect viruses or priming to protect not only themselves but also all those with whom they communicate.
There is no reason that nonverbal, postural, and even sometimes respiratory habits would escape this type of mechanism while following dynamics a bit different than those of language.
Fuzzy Causality and Logic. Philosopher Andy Clark (1997) describes a nature that can appear disorganized for someone who expects a coherence defined by the rules of logic and the mathematics of Leibniz’s time, but perhaps less so for an individual born in the twenty-first century. What is at stake is to find a formulation that tolerates not only the heterogeneity of the elements but also the heterogeneity of the mechanisms and the goals of a system.105 This heterogeneity can lead to competing contradictory mechanisms that are sometimes automatically and simultaneously activated in the same system. In this new vision of systems, there can be a blend of direct and indirect relations and many ways of accomplishing an apparently identical action.106 A gesture can be mobilized by a series of regulatory systems; then, during its execution, it can activate another series of regulatory systems that do not necessarily have the same goals and functioning as the systems that initiated the gesture. Recent theories are looking for ways of describing this mode of functioning by using expressions such as “fuzzy logic” and “soft causal matrices.” Here are a few examples of such notions:
Like the movements of the oil, an organism can give the impression to its mind and to the mind of others that it acts with coherence, while in fact what is going on is often an accumulation of small mechanisms that interact locally. In sociology, the same type of model can, for example, be used to analyze the traffic patterns of vehicles and predict when and where the traffic jams will occur in a city.
It sometimes happens that the functioning of a family generates schizophrenia in a child, as it also happens that the innate schizophrenia of a child traumatizes the family. In most of the cases, the factors that reinforce a tendency toward schizophrenia are multiple and hardly coordinated. Possibly the organization of these factors would be close to the organization that I summarized with regard to heating oil, but the underlying mechanisms are probably more complex. There would be, once again, a combination of dynamics that are activated in parallel on many levels, but that lead to the formation of an apparently global emerging movement that then coordinates all of the dynamics involved (notably genetic, neurological, organismic, familial, institutional). This type of model makes it possible to understand what is going on at the occasion of a treatment that combines neuroleptics, psychotherapy, and psychiatric support.112
Arteriosclerosis is a good example. In a population of people who consume foods that contain little cholesterol and who have a varied postural repertoire, arteriosclerosis is a rare occurrence. In the United States, there is a significant population that consumes a large amount of cholesterol and uses a restricted postural repertoire. Some of these people will develop arteriosclerosis, and some will not. For this illness, there are no direct cause-and-effect relationships, but there are lifestyles that have a higher probability of producing arteriosclerosis.
This type of fuzzy engineering posits a number of questions for the psychotherapeutic practitioner. For example, if we accept this point of view, it becomes difficult to use the notion of psychopathology. In all populations, there will be immense variations of every imaginable trait: bodily (height, width, regularity of the traits, etc.), mental (intelligence, feelings, imagination, type of memory, etc.), and behavioral (endurance, ability, frigidity or impotence, impulsivity, violence, etc.).113 This variation is inevitable as soon as we accept that the randomness of genetic mechanisms have a profound influence on each human being.114 All that a Darwinian psychotherapist can evaluate is a pile of mechanisms and practices that more or less hold the course, that more or less have the chance of mental as well as bodily survival in a given environment. That is what a Darwinian neuropsychiatrist like Boris Cyrulnik (2004) designates in the way he uses the term resilience: close to the word fitness as used by Wallace.
A therapist must therefore be able to evaluate the resources contained in a mass of mechanisms that have been agglomerated by nature as well as their capacity to survive more or less comfortably in an environment where human traits (physiological health, the performance of the body, behavioral skills, and mental flexibility) are stressed by constant competition (within and between each organism).115 The finesse of a psychotherapist who uses a conception that combines the models of Clark and Cellérier is to perceive—with the patient—which interventions allow for the calibration of a detail (a way of thinking, a postural readjustment, a change in the style of communication), which allows for a slight realignment of an organismic system within the social system. Having observed the effect of the first calibration, it becomes possible to proceed to a following calibration that will permit consolidation of the one first acquired, and so on. We are following here—in fast forward speed—the process of evolution such as it was defined by Wallace and Darwin. After more than 100 years of psychology and psychotherapy, clinical research allows us to identify some causal chains that are particularly pertinent for certain types of individuals. This clinical research can help a therapist perceive and more precisely use forms of intervention to help a patient better understand himself and survive in a more comfortable way.