James Mark Baldwin with Alfred North Whitehead on Organic Selectivity:
The “Novel” Factor in Evolution
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to show how James Mark Baldwin’s theory of Organic Selection (also known as the “Baldwin effect”) can be fruitfully integrated with Alfred North Whitehead’s speculative philosophy, as part of the endeavor to develop a comprehensive process-relational evolutionary cosmology. In so doing, it provides an overview of the theory of Organic Selection and points to several concrete examples from the Galapagos Islands which elucidate Baldwin’s claim that organisms, through their selective activities and behavioral adjustments, play a causal role in directing evolutionary processes. I emphasize some of the affinities between Baldwin’s theory of Organic Selection and Whitehead’s theory of prehensions, especially focusing on the latter’s notion of “prehensive selectivity.” Overall, while Baldwin’s theory of Organic Selection provides a biological ground for a comprehensive process-relational evolutionary cosmology to be developed, illuminating the importance of Whitehead’s theory of prehensions for evolutionary theory, Whitehead’s overall speculative scheme can, in turn, strengthen the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical foundations of Baldwin’s theory. In the course of merging the two views, I arrive at an enlarged conception of Organic Selection, placing it in context with Darwin’s principle of Natural Selection. At the end of the paper, I take up the resulting question of the ethics of selectivity in general, arguing that the merger of Baldwin’s and Whitehead’s ideas constitutes a “non-reductionistic critical pan-selectionism.” This position stands in contrast to the antagonistic standpoints of “Selectionism” and “Anti-Selectionism” in the ongoing debates over the ethical dimensions of Darwinian evolution.
Keywords: James Mark Baldwin; Alfred North Whitehead; The Theory of Organic Selection; The Baldwin Effect; Habit; Accommodation; Process-Relational Evolutionary Cosmology; Prehensive Selectivity; Natural Selection; Selectionism; Anti-Selectionism; Critical Pan-Selectionism
Introduction
Over the last century, a perennial controversy has concerned the notion of whether the psychologist and philosopher, James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934) is truly a discoverer of a legitimate, “new” factor at work in evolution, in which organisms are considered to be selective agents, having a meaningful, causal role in evolutionary processes. Baldwin’s description of “A New Factor in Evolution,” as the title of his seminal 1895 / 1896 paper suggests, implies that an explanatory principle, previously undeveloped, in relation to evolutionary processes had been arrived at, namely, one supplementary to Darwin’s principle of Natural Selection.[1] Of course, Baldwin, in describing his theory as “new,” was not so much interested in its “newness” as he was in its “trueness.”[2] In his writings, Baldwin uses the notion of Organic Selection to explain how it is the case that by learning, by making behavioral accommodations, and by developing new habits of activity, namely, by their own mentality and selective activities, the individual organism can indirectly chart the course of the evolution of their species.[3] As expressed by Baldwin, the theory of Organic Selection “extend[s] the general principle of selection through fitness to the activities of the organism.”[4] As such, Baldwin’s theory may be termed a form of “organismic evolutionism,” as contrasted with “materialist evolutionism.”[5] Baldwin, along with British psychologist, Conway Lloyd Morgan (1852-1936), and paleontologist, Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935) arrived independently at the theory of Organic Selection in 1895 / 1896. The name of the theory, “Organic Selection” was proposed by Baldwin and adopted by Morgan and Osborn.[6] Much later, in 1953, George Gaylord Simpson termed a version of the theory, “the Baldwin effect.”[7]
At first glance, the theory of Organic Selection seems to offer questionable theses in light of mainstream biological research which operates under the paradigm known as “the modern synthesis.” “The modern synthesis,” a development in biology which took place from the 1920s to the 1950s and was assisted by figures such as Julian Huxley, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and Ernst Mayr, largely involved the merging of Darwin’s theory of evolution by Natural Selection with Mendelian and population genetics. “The modern synthesis” also involved a rejection of views running counter to these core principles, such as was found in Lamarckian,[8] orthogenetic, and saltational theories. Philosophers and psychologists have employed the term “neo-Darwinism”[9] to designate a rigid adherence to the set of assumptions emerging from “the modern synthesis” that is found in the mainstream of biology. From the “neo-Darwinist” perspective, the theory of Organic Selection is generally characterized as a residue of Lamarckism or of Vitalism, or is dismissed as offering explanations based on notions of “purpose” and of “final causality.” In mainstream biology, Larmarckian explanations, holding that phenotypic variations take place as a direct result of the environmental conditions that organisms face, have essentially been relegated to an instantiation of the fallacy of “false cause,” and have been summarily dismissed as “in conflict with the principle of causality in vogue in the materialistically-minded modern science.”[10] In a parallel manner, proponents of “the modern synthesis” have recommended that Baldwin’s theory of Organic Selection be disbanded altogether “as either a trivially true example of normal natural selection at work or a flatly false regression to Lamarckism.”[11] However, throughout his work, Baldwin maintains that the hypothesis of Organic Selection is explicitly “Darwinian.” Consistent with the theory of Natural Selection, it attempts to provide an account for the appearance of the inheritance of useful variations on the part of organisms arising by way of the influence of the environment, without the need to embrace Lamarckism or neo-Lamarckism. It is also not a Vitalistic theory, because it does not assume that the minds of organisms are directly responsible for evolutionary advances.[12] Rather, it claims only an indirect causal role for mentality in evolutionary processes that is consonant with Natural Selection. From these considerations, the theory of Organic Selection deserves a deeper investigation and should not be simply made subject to the Semmelweis Reflex, or the habit of biologists to automatically reject appeals to the mentalities, the behaviors, and the activities of organisms as playing a role in evolutionary processes.
Later in the twentieth century, theoretical biologist Conrad Hal Waddington’s notion of “genetic assimilation” was held to be analogous to some aspects of Baldwin’s theory of Organic Selection.[13] As Jablonka and Lamb (2005) suggest, Waddington’s
genetic assimilation experiments show how Darwinian mechanisms can produce apparently Lamarckian evolution … [but far more importantly] they show how, when faced with an environmental challenge, induced developmental changes unmask already existing genetic variation, which can then be captured by natural selection.[14]
In one experiment, Waddington
raised fruit flies on a high-salt medium and selectively bred flies that developed larger anal papillae in response, which helped the flies to excrete salt from their bodies. After twenty-one generations of selective breeding, this new phenotype (larger anal papillae), although initially elicited only in response to an adverse environmental condition, developed in the absence of the high-salt condition.[15]
This experiment, as well as many others, provided evidence for the phenomenon of “genetic assimilation,” since it is probable that in response to an environmental stress, the flies’ evolutionary pathway was directed toward a particular phenotypic character of adaptive value (i.e. larger anal papillae, which became encoded genetically), regardless of the continuance of that environmental condition.[16]
In carrying out his genetic assimilation experiments, Waddington was preoccupied with achieving a “synthesis of development and evolution, to resolve what he experienced as a conflict between the ordered transformations of epigenesis on the one hand and the randomness of neo-Darwinism on the other.”[17] In so doing, Waddington hypothesized that there is an “analogous interaction between developmental processes and evolution, whereby developmental adaptations ‘guide’ or ‘canalize’ evolutionary change”[18] along a developmental path or “creode,”[19] in a manner that has been interpreted to be akin to the theory of Organic Selection.[20] Although Waddington maintained that there were strong conceptual differences between his own findings and Baldwin’s ideas, his results ended up helping to revive them from within the mainstream of biological research. Interestingly-enough, Waddington was also an avid reader of the philosophical works of Alfred North Whitehead.[21] Like Whitehead, he was devoted to re-conceiving life and evolution in a holistic, “organismic” light.
As described by Brian Goodwin (1994), who was a pupil of Waddington’s, one problem that has arisen due to the dominance of “reductionist” biology, is that it has obscured the true complexity of biological processes and has led to the “disappearance of organisms from Darwinism” as “the fundamental units of life,” since they are seen as “nothing but the vehicles for genes.”[22] Goodwin continues, “in neo-Darwinism, organisms [are seen to] have no agency, because they do not exist as real entities, reduced as they are to genes and their products.”[23] In contrast to this “genocentric” viewpoint, Goodwin argues for an “expanded” and more “balanced biology,” in which “inheritance and natural selection [do] continue to play significant roles … but [are] parts of a more comprehensive dynamical theory of life that is focused on the dynamics of emergent processes.”[24] From this perspective, which contrasts especially with Richard Dawkins’ brand of neo-Darwinism, “organisms [would] cease to be [considered] mere survival machines [or ‘vehicles’ that are subordinate to their genes conceived as ‘replicators’] and [would] assume intrinsic value, having worth in and of themselves.”[25]
Partly as a result of the interest that was generated by Waddington’s researches, and partly as a result of the urge, on the part of biologists and philosophers of biology such as Goodwin, to go beyond neo-Darwinism and to develop a broader view of the biological world, in the last twenty years, there has been a small resurgence in terms of scholarly and scientific attention to the theory of Organic Selection. For instance, in Developmental Plasticity and Evolution (2003), Mary Jane West-Eberhard argues that in the attempt to develop a more coherent picture of evolutionary processes in biological research, beyond the mainstream gene-centered biology, “there is good reason to resurrect a modern expanded version”[26] of the theory of Organic Selection. According to her, the theory rightly challenges the mainstream assumption, held by “most biologists,” that genetic “mutation is ultimately the only legitimate source of evolutionary novelty.”[27] The theory of Organic Selection is, for West-Eberhard, consistent with the notions that genes can be “followers in evolution” and that “behavioral change often precedes and directs morphological change.”[28] West-Eberhard further suggests that “certain conventional ideas about adaptive evolution have to change.”[29] Other publications, such as Bruce Weber’s and David Depew’s Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered (2003) have also contributed to this resurgence, providing an occasion for “Baldwin boosters,” namely, those who think that the theory has real scientific merit, to “face off” with “Baldwin skeptics,” or those who think that it does not. One notable contributor to that volume, Daniel Dennett, has been described as a “Baldwin Booster” in utilizing Baldwin’s theory to advance his philosophy of mind, although he may be seen to emphasize it from what may be termed a “neo-Darwinist” perspective.[30] While Dennett questions Baldwin’s motivations in coming up with the theory, believing that what Baldwin truly aimed at was a “skyhook,” he does admit that “the Baldwin effect” is a useful, explanatory “crane” that does not rely on an appeal to the power of a capital-M “Mind” for its legitimacy. In contrast, “Baldwin skeptic,” Paul E. Griffiths, in his contribution to the volume, argues that “excessive attention has been given to the theory,” simply because it gives false hope that in allowing “‘mind’ to ‘direct’ evolution” we may be saved “from the barren Darwinian vision of a world ruled by chance and necessity.”[31] Also, in the book, Terrence Deacon, associates Baldwin’s theory with the concept of “niche construction,” the notion that by their actions, organisms modify their environment, thereby impacting on their own chances of survival as well as those for other organisms.[32] In another recent work, Evolution in Four Dimensions (2005), Jablonka and Lamb point to the “Baldwin effect” as part of their overall thesis that there are four legitimate, interconnected inheritance systems (the genetic, the epigenetic, the behavioral, and the symbolic) which need to be taken into account if we are to truly arrive at a comprehensive interpretation of evolutionary processes. Baldwin’s theory figures prominently in the book, especially in their account of the behavioral dimension, as they argue toward their more holistic understanding of evolution.
A host of other publications that either claim that certain investigations of biological phenomena provide proof of the theory, or give descriptive relevance to the theory of Organic Selection have also emerged.[33] Some of these are constituted by creative reinterpretations of the theory, which have gone beyond the intentions of the original. Moreover, the “Baldwin effect” has recently been assimilated by researchers in other emerging domains of investigation, such as in evolutionary computation. This development was spurred on by the research of Hinton and Nowlan (1987), who initiated a computational model of how the theory “works” in relation to simulated evolution of neural networks. Others, such as prominent geneticist, Francisco Ayala suggest, although questionably, that the theory of Organic Selection has already been assimilated into the mainstream of biology, in the sense that it is already employed by biologists as a viable explanatory tool.[34] West-Eberhard warns, however, that in order to avoid conflating Baldwin’s ideas with more recent developments and theories, readers and researchers should read Baldwin’s original work, “rather than rely on second- or third-hand accounts.”[35] It is in this spirit that this paper has been written. At the very least, whether or not they are fully understood by researchers, the persistence of Baldwin’s ideas demonstrates that they constitute an irreducible chapter in the unfolding of the history of biology.
Process philosopher, Ian Barbour has recently suggested that scholars of philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne should
welcome this renewed interest in the Baldwin effect, even though it is [still] only found in a minority of evolutionary biologists. Process metaphysics postulates at least a minimal novelty and creativity in integrated entities at all biological levels. In this framework, one would expect that initiatives of organisms to have significant long-term consequences.[36]
In a similar vein, in his recent book, Back to Darwin: A Richer Account of Evolution (2008),[37] process theologian John Cobb recounts that the “Baldwin effect” is one of the keys to rescuing the process philosophical conception of the living organism from some of the more rigid assumptions of mainstream biological research. According to Cobb, some of this research is dominated by the search for laws, material causal explanations, and mechanisms which underlie evolutionary process, thereby assuming a reductionist metaphysics and imposing it onto reality. To be sure, Cobb makes the case that, from the “neo-Darwinist” outlook, there is a tendency to view organisms as complexes of mechanical parts that are entirely conditioned by their environment, or as mere potentialities for mutational variation, or to presume that they are “nothing but”[38] subordinate vehicles for the reproduction of their genotypic constitutions.[39] Cobb also takes issue with the widespread view that genes are largely considered to be “atomic” structures that are entirely insulated not only from the phenotype, but also from the environment.[40] On the contrary, Cobb notes that a Whiteheadian conception of organisms sees them as “unit[s] of emergent value”[41] which are constituted by their relations to other organisms, as well as to their environment, and which are thoroughly engaged in their own creative life-processes. Like Baldwin’s theory of Organic Selection, a process-relational view of evolution will emphasize the notion that the mentalities, activities, behaviors, and purposes of organisms play a role in the struggle for existence and in the direction of evolutionary processes.
In this paper, I intend to show how Baldwin’s theory of Organic Selection can be integrated with Whitehead’s theory of prehensions, as part of the endeavor to arrive at a comprehensive and systematic process-relational evolutionary cosmology that is inclusive of the vital role of the behavior of organisms as agents of selection. Furthermore, a process-relational evolutionary cosmology will maintain that the selective activities of organisms are to be placed among the efficient causes of evolutionary processes. Such a standpoint is validly sought by Cobb and other scholars of process-relational philosophy as an alternative to the dominant mechanistic-materialistic outlook which is assumed in mainstream biological research.[42] In the process of bringing Baldwin’s and Whitehead’s ideas together, I show, on the one hand, that Baldwin’s theory of Organic Selection provides a biological ground for such a cosmology to be developed, illuminating the importance of Whitehead’s theory of prehensions for evolutionary theory. On the other hand, Whitehead’s overall speculative scheme can, in turn, strengthen the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical foundations of Baldwin’s theory. For example, it helps Baldwinian thought to overcome some of the lingering sensationalist presuppositions regarding cognition and experience which are present in Baldwin’s theorizing. In the process of integrating the two views, I further propose an enlarged conception of the theory of Organic Selection, one that is more thoroughly reflective of Whitehead’s notion of “prehensive selectivity.” This enlarged conception of the theory is placed in context with Darwin’s principle of Natural Selection. At the end of the paper, I take up some of the imminent questions concerning the ethical dimensions of notion of selectivity, as it pertains to evolutionary theory, which emerge from this enlarged conception of the theory of Organic Selection. However, first, I shall provide a brief sketch of Baldwin’s intellectual career as it pertains to the genesis of the theory of Organic Selection.
PART 1: Baldwin and the Genesis of the Theory of Organic Selection
James Mark Baldwin lived and worked in the blooming period of the American intellectual scene at the turn of the twentieth century. Prior to receiving his doctorate at Princeton under James McCosh in 1888 for a thesis which was largely constituted by a “refutation of materialism,”[43] Baldwin studied briefly in Germany under Wilhelm Wundt. Over the course of his career, he taught psychology and philosophy at Lake Forest, Toronto, Princeton, and Johns Hopkins. In 1889, Baldwin published the first volume of his Handbook of Psychology, subtitled, Senses and Intellect in which he articulated the basic assumptions of his integrative mental philosophy and his physiological-psychology that he had developed in his earlier studies and travels. The second volume of the Handbook, entitled Feeling and Will (1891), extended his mental philosophy “to the problems of feeling, emotion, and voluntary action.”[44] In it, he established the conceptual foundation for his later writings, focusing on the meaning of the notions of habit, accommodation, and the importance of imitation and the exercise of choice in the cognitive development of children.
In between the publication of the two volumes of the Handbook, he took up the project of editing two of an eventual three volumes of the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1887, 1891, 1905), to which many major intellectual giants such as Royce, Peirce, James, Dewey, Bosanquet, and G. E. Moore contributed. This work was a seedbed for the further development of his ideas. It also helped him to cultivate and advance many mutually cross-fertilizing scholarly relationships and friendships, such as with James, Dewey, and Royce, and it was a “ladder” to establishing his own intellectual prominence. Furthermore, at this time, Baldwin developed a focus on the central role of “selection” in cognitive attention and interest. In this regard, Baldwin’s work was mutually influencing on James’ Principles of Psychology (1890), who refers to Baldwin’s Handbook as a chief resource.[45] Along with several of his other writings, it also inspired Royce, especially, in the latter’s Outlines of Psychology (1903).
In his 1894/1895 book, Mental Development in the Child and the Race (by which he means “species”), Baldwin’s investigations were in the domain of comparative psychology. He examined the psychology of children[46] and developed parallels with animal behavior. His genetic analysis centered on the notion that cognition was “a growing, developing activity” in the individual child, namely, a process, “instead of a fixed substance.”[47] In this work, as well as his other earlier works, his reflections oscillate between two poles of study: the ontogenetic, namely, involving the study of the development of the single individual from the “point of view of the [learned] functions which an organism performs in the course of his life history” and the phylogenetic, by which he means the study of the development of the history of the species and of animal life in relation to “the factors … which show themselves in evolutionary progress from generation to generation.”[48] Methodically, he extrapolates his findings surrounding the individual child’s development of advantageous behaviors, habits, and functions to an interpretation of their development in the species and their adoption by society. He also establishes parallels between cognitive development in human beings and the psychologies of non-human organisms in their interaction with, and adaptation to their environment, which, in turn, leads him back to consider further insights into the mental development of the child.
Overall, Baldwin’s research in Mental Development is premised on the notion that “all stages of mental accommodation and development can be construed by the same principles of [biological] adaptation.”[49] In this regard, Mental Development constituted a chief step toward the development of the theory of Organic Selection and to a coherent position standing in contrast to the Weismannian “neo-Darwinism” of his day. As Baldwin describes,
neo-Darwinians hold that natural selection, operating upon congenital variations, is adequate to explain all progressive race gains. This theory, therefore, is able to dispense with the ontogenetic acquirements of the particular organism. It accordingly denies that what an individual experiences in his lifetime, the gains he makes in his adaptations to his surroundings, can be transmitted to his sons.”[50]
However, Baldwin outlined a valid, non-Lamarckian explanatory principle which could account for their, albeit indirect, transmission to future generations.
Baldwin’s paper, “A New Factor in Evolution,” in which he first advanced the theory of Organic Selection in a fully coherent form, was presented just after Christmas before the Academy of Science in New York in 1895, and was published in American Naturalist in 1896. In it, he showed that “evolution is, not more biological than psychological,”[51] and that organisms have a degree of agency in directing evolutionary processes. According to Baldwin, organisms do “not wait for chance, but go right out and effect new adaptations to [their] environment,”[52] in turn, playing a causal role in channelling the direction of the evolutionary novelties appearing in subsequent generations of a species. Baldwin postulated that, especially in times of environmental duress, members of a species may manage to make accommodations to their dominant modes of behavior, developing and selecting new habits or functions which allow them to adapt to their conditions and keep themselves temporarily alive. Such new habits may be imitated, learned by, or passed on to other members of the species. Meanwhile, certain individuals in subsequent generations of the variety may, with reference to the eliminative processes belonging to the principle of Natural Selection, inherit congenital or mutational variations which will serve to accentuate, amplify, or perfect the performance of the new behavior, habit, or function, giving them an advantage in the struggle for existence. In this way, the evolutionary destiny of a species will have been indirectly “channelled” by way of the behavioral selections, initially, of one or a few organisms.
Baldwin’s paper was paralleled at the same conference by Lloyd Morgan’s own independent articulation of the “new” idea. A few months later, Osborn announced his discovery of an idea which turned out to be virtually the same as Baldwin’s. Baldwin further developed the theory of Organic Selection in Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development (1897) and The Story of the Mind (1898). He then consolidated the theory in Development and Evolution (1902), extending to it the notion of “orthoplasy,” referring to “the general fact that evolution has a directive determination through organic selection,”[53] and indicating that such directive determination could be studied scientifically. In it, Baldwin further aimed to bring psychology and biology closely in line by investigating evolution as a psycho-physical phenomenon, taking the mind and body as mutually dependent on one another. While this work is exceedingly repetitive in style due to his effort to unify his various articulations of the theory of Organic Selection, it constitutes Baldwin’s most mature and comprehensive expression of it. Afterward, he did not revisit or expand the theory in a direct or substantial manner.
A scandal, which forced him to resign and to depart the American intellectual scene, largely divides Baldwin’s early intellectual career from his later work. He left the United States and pursued intellectual work in Paris and Mexico. During the First World War, he played a role in strengthening ties between France and America. While in Paris, he became associated with the Institut de France and came in contact with such notable French philosophers as Henri Poincaré, Pierre Janet, and Henri Bergson. During this time, he completed three volumes of Thought and Things (1906, 1908, 1911), which lead to a final volume, The Genetic Theory of Reality (1915). This stream of work culminated in his theory of Pancalism, which emphasizes that “the organ of the apprehension of the real in its complete, synthetic, and … absolute form” is “aesthetic contemplation.”[54] His Pancalist standpoint was constituted largely by the merging of many of the main ideas attributable to Darwinian evolution, Jamesian Pragmatism, and Roycean Absolute Idealism. Since Whitehead was also influenced by the writings of these figures, and placed emphasis on beauty and on aesthetic experience in his own speculative philosophy, scholars may, perhaps quite fruitfully, compare it with Baldwin’s Pancalism. At any rate, in what follows, I shall focus on Baldwin’s earlier research in order to provide a more detailed account of Baldwin’s “two-part” theory of Organic Selection.
PART 2: An Overview of Baldwin’s Theory of Organic
Selection
Baldwin is largely in agreement with Darwin in respect to the latter’s stance on the existence and scope of animal mentality. In The Descent of Man (1871), while Darwin held that “no animal has the power of abstraction, or of forming general concepts, is self-conscious and comprehends itself, … [or] believes in God,” he placed the human species on a continuum of intelligence with animals, distinguishing between them merely by the level of the “higher development of … mental powers.”[55] Darwin believed that, like human beings, the higher animals have instincts, even social instincts, as well as many of the same “senses, intuitions, sensations, passions, affections, and emotions,”[56] including curiosity and wonder. For Darwin, evidence of mentality in animals was indicated through the expression of emotions, as he studied thoroughly in The Expression of the Emotions (1872). Darwin also defended himself against the critical claim that in The Origin of Species (1859), he had “attribute[d] all changes of [both] corporeal structure and mental power [in the animal world] exclusively to [heredity and] natural selection.” He stated that he was open to the notion that “some amount of modification [is due] to the direct and prolonged changed conditions of life”[57] and that “intelligent actions, after being performed during several generations, become converted into instincts and are inherited.”[58] Furthermore, it was Darwin himself who had opened the door to the psychological investigation of the behavior of non-human animal. At the end of Origin of Species, he anticipated “open fields for far more important researches” suggesting that “psychology will be based on a new foundation [and will investigate the] … acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation”[59] in the animal world.
In light of the fact that Darwin had held that mental life was a function of biological life, in Development and Evolution, Baldwin writes that “the occurrence of a psychological change in an animal is a fact in the same sense that the animal’s process of digestion is. And the genetic explanations which we find it possible to offer, in this case or that, may draw upon the facts of psychology.”[60] In addition to being inspired by Darwin, Baldwin was also influenced by George Romanes’ Mental Evolution in Animals and by Spencer’s System of Synthetic Philosophy, in their respective investigations of animal mentality.[61] Especially, Baldwin adopts Romanes’ notion that animals have a “function of selective discrimination—[a] power of discriminating among stimuli and responding to those which are the stimuli to which responses are appropriate,”[62] and he incorporates Spencer’s analysis of animal reactions to pleasurable and painful experiences into his scheme.
Coinciding with William James’ definition that “the pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment [are] … the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality”[63] as well as his investigations of the animal psyche, Baldwin maintains that animals of various species satisfied, to lesser or greater degrees, the attribution of mentality. Like James and Royce, and in a way reminiscent of Whitehead’s analysis of consciousness in Process and Reality, Baldwin emphasizes that the chief characteristic of mentality is attention, which implies operations of discrimination[64] and selection. He describes that “the central fact of consciousness, its prime instrument, its selective agent, its seizing, grasping, relating, assimilating, apperceiving—in short, its accommodating element and process—is attention.”[65] Baldwin believes that such selectivity is potentially universal through the organic world. For even if the purposes of organisms simply involve the choice of, and pursuit of food and a mate out from a multitude, the selection of function or behavior, the determinate growth in directions as a discriminative response to the stimulations from the environment, the relation to objects in the environment, or the selective response to what was beneficial in their environment in contrast to what was damaging in it, then a degree of mentality could be attributed to them. He suggests that “even plants must grow in determinate or ‘select’ directions in order to live, and their reactions are responses to stimulations from the environment.”[66] Additionally, Baldwin thinks that Darwin’s notion of Sexual Selection involved psychological processes, and more accurately, a selective activity, stating that “one animal’s recognizing another and being led by this recognition to carry out the act of mating, we have a complete series of events involving the psychological process of recognition, joined with that of mating.”[67] Baldwin further notes that “Darwin’s personal use of the principle of sexual selection … seemed to require a very high psychological development on the part of the choosing mate, the female.”[68] Consequently, Baldwin agrees with Romanes’ notion that “it is best to draw no line at all between life and life with consciousness.”[69] This is not to say that Baldwin attributed consciousness or even self-consciousness to all organisms, since some animals have a very low degree of sentience. Rather, he holds to a “middle position” in this regard, by recognizing that experience does not necessarily involve consciousness, but experience is never completely void of mentality. For Baldwin, mentality is not to be considered a static substance, but is rather to be constituted as itself a process of growth and development, with reference to the organism’s ongoing struggle to become better adapted to its environment. For him, mentality is not completely unconditioned or transcendent. At the same time, mentality is not shackled to sensation and to outer experience. Rather, very much like Whitehead (although we must here recall the latter’s criticism of the sensationalist doctrine as presupposing consciousness), Baldwin holds to a realism in which the sensations from outer experience
give the mind its material to work upon; and it gets no material in the first instance from any other source. All the things we know, all our opinions, knowledges, beliefs, are absolutely dependent at the start upon this supply of material from our senses; although, as we shall see, the mind gets a long way from its first subjection to this avalanche of sensations which come constantly pouring in upon it from the external world. Yet this is the essential and capital function of Sensation: to supply the material on which the mind does the work in its subsequent thought and action.[70]
Furthermore, in Baldwin’s view, mental life is not to be conceptualized as somehow disconnected from the body. Rather, it is a function of organic life. Hence, his analysis is what he terms a “psycho-physical” interpretation in which “the development and evolution of mind and body [are] taken together.”[71] For him, body and mind are considered to be parallel, continuous, uniform, and mutually dependent on one another, yet they are distinct. For instance, he holds that although mind and brain are mutually dependent terms, mentality cannot simply be reduced to the inherited “hard-wiring” of brain functioning.
Baldwin’s theory of cognitive development and learning depends on the fluctuating interplay of two factors: habit and accommodation. On the one hand, Baldwin defines the notion of “habit” as the “readiness for function, produced by previous exercise of that function” which, in general, involves the “loss of oversight, diffusion of attention, subsiding consciousness.”[72] On the other hand, the notion of “accommodation,” involving an effort to learn and to acquire new movements and co-ordinations of new movements, means the “breaking up of a habit, the widening of the organic for the reception or accommodation of a new condition,” which, in general, implies “reviving consciousness, concentration of attention, voluntary control.”[73] In a parallel manner, in relation to the biological world, he states that by habit and accommodation,
two great gains are made possible to the organism: first, the repetition of what is worth repeating, with the conserving of this worth: this is Habit; and, second, the adaptation of the organism to new conditions, so that it secures, progressively, further useful reactions, which at an earlier stage would have been impossible: this is Accommodation.[74]
In respect to human psychology, Baldwin discovers that the child carries out novel actions by way of a variety of interconnected factors, such as through imitation and copying (for example, of parents and siblings), maternal instruction, play, use and disuse, trial-and-error, spontaneous reflex and motor reaction, sheer luck and accident, and by way of variations on overproduced movements. Also, he finds that a selective activity, which has for its criteria the feelings of pleasure and/or the feelings of pain produced by the new movements, is central in respect to the child’s repetition and transformation of them into habits. In one passage in Development and Evolution, Baldwin employs the term “selective accommodation,”[75] to designate the process of the organism forming new mental structures. In any event, as part of his theory of Organic Selection, Baldwin carries all of these notions over into his analysis and his description of the “exploratory activities” of organisms which produce novelties in terms of behavior and of habit, from which it selects.
Imitation is one of the chief ways in which new movements and new combinations of movements are selectively acquired and assimilated by organisms.[76] The ability to imitate constitutes one chief characteristic of mentality. Baldwin describes imitation as a “‘circular’ process” in which, internalized reproductions or copies of the actions of another organism are selected by a subject, and are modified. According to Baldwin, in imitation, the actions are then “reinstated by the act of imitation,”[77] namely, by a re-enactment of the selected, modified copy on the part of the subject. Baldwin claims that “the young of animals, and especially of young children [learn new] functions [and develop new Habits] by direct conscious imitation of their elders.”[78] As evidence, he quotes Lloyd Morgan’s citing of Douglas Spalding’s experiments in relation to the fact that young chicks imitate the movements of older fowl (i.e. throwing their heads up in the air) when learning to drink water.[79] In relation to the acquisition of necessary functions, such as recognizing warning colors signaling a distasteful or poisonous food source (e.g. the redness of a Virgin Tiger Moth), one can imagine the holocaust of organisms that would occur if each organism had to learn by its own experience each time, instead of imitating its kin.
In further pointing to the importance of imitation, Baldwin hypothesizes that “it is probable that many of the most ‘innate’ powers of the animals, are brought out, perfected, and constantly kept efficient, by imitation within the group or species.”[80] Imitation is not always successful, and organisms generally need to develop the muscular coordination in order to perform the copied actions. Also, there are limitations to the types of movements that can be learned or performed, pertaining to the bodily and muscular apparatus with which the creature is endowed. Nevertheless, for Baldwin, imitation is a chief means which enables the individual organism to acquire novel movements, and to repeat them. In the course of attempting and repeating such movements, accidental, chance, and sometimes creative variations may arise. From Baldwin’s account, no two instantiations of a similar action are ever exactly the same and learning by imitation does not involve a strict one-to-one reproduction of it. Rather, learning by imitation depends on novel variations made on the part of the organism. To be sure, as Jablonka and Lamb (2005) argue in relation to the behavioral dimension of evolutionary processes, in learning, each organism “develop[s] its own, idiosyncratic technique.”[81] According to them,
what is learned and transmitted depends on the ability of an individual to select, generalize, and categorize information relevant to the behavior and, no less important, to reconstruct and adjust the behavior about which it has learned. The receiving animal is not just a vessel into which information is poured … Neither the transmitting nor the accepting animal is passive in [social] learning.[82]
As Baldwin points out, some of these variations are useful sources of novelty. They may be selected, repeated, and/or developed into new habits of behavior.[83] Some novel movements may need to be developed gradually and laboriously, requiring several stages in which the organism selects from among its activities and makes slight adjustments. In any case, according to Baldwin, the “process of taking in elements from the social world by imitation and giving them out again by a reverse process of invention … —this process never stops. We never outgrow imitation, nor our social obligation to it.”[84] Imitation is the chief means by which organisms cross-fertilize each other’s behavior, and when it comes to survival in the natural world, the ability to imitate is, for him, crucial.
Baldwin is open to the possibility that while some animal instincts are innate[85] in a species and/or are generally fixed traits passed down from generation to generation through biological heredity, others are acquired through “social heredity” and “tradition,” namely, the set of adopted habits of the species or group of organisms in question, to which the individual organism generally conforms by imitation of its peers and elders.[86] However, Baldwin thinks that organisms are neither completely determined by their environment to behave in fixed ways, nor are they completely unconditioned. While generally, sticking to a habit points the way to the survival of the species, at certain times, survival and living well is conditional on such habits being overcome. In his writings, Baldwin places emphasis on the notion that habits that procure a deficient survival value can be transcended. He stresses that organisms have the ability to select and to change their behaviors and habits, and do so, especially when under the “storm and stress”[87] of Selective pressures, such as when a food source has been outstripped in their environment or when migrating into a new environment.
Baldwin calls the organism’s process of learning new movements, “functional selection.” He uses this term to designate the selection of actions to repeat, largely, but not entirely, based on the pleasure and pain that they experienced on previous occasions. For example, a fishing or hunting strategy, or a killing method which has beneficially procured suitable nourishment for the organism stands a better chance of being selected and repeated by the organism, than actions which were unsuccessful or lead them into danger. Organisms generally react with adversion to pleasure and to react with aversion to pain, but the development of new behaviors cannot be said to be completely reducible to the contrast of pain and pleasure. For instance, higher organisms exhibit “will-power” which enables them to not be fully determined in their behaviors by the immediate feelings of pleasure and pain, sometimes taking on short-term pain for the sake of a higher pleasure or end, or even making decisions beyond the reference to pleasure or pain. To further explain Baldwin’s account of how animals learn new movements, under domestication, animals can be trained to perform certain tasks by their masters, usually with the inducement of food rewards. This ability to train animals proves that they learn, and that the selections of organisms can influence the selections of other organisms.[88] In contrast, in the wild, animals essentially train themselves, for instance, by the success or failure in procuring nourishment, which either produces feelings of pleasure or pain. In short, for Baldwin, the development of behavioral variations largely depends on the contrast of feelings of pleasure and pain, which, in general, acts as a guide to organisms in regards to whether or not to select and to repeat a certain action, thereby transforming it into a habit. Whereas, for the most part, movements which cause pain do not tend to be repeated, movements that cause pleasure are repeated by the organism.[89] As he writes, habit “expresses the tendency of an organism to repeat its own movements again and again ... [and thereby] to secure and to retain its vital stimulations.”[90] For Baldwin, the recollection of feelings of pleasurable and painful experiences in the higher organisms is a vital factor in recognizing and selecting which movements to repeat and which to disband, and in forming new habits. Memory enables the higher organisms to anticipate the probable future on the basis of the past, and it is therefore, a trait which heightens survival value. Baldwin, following Darwin, further hypothesizes that emotions in animals are exhibited through muscular contraction and arise largely, but not entirely, as a result of the contrast of pleasure and pain. Emotions, for him, are also acquired by organisms by way of the imitation of other members of their group, in a manner consistent with Darwin’s theories.
To recapitulate, in Baldwin’s analysis, novelty in terms of the behavior of organisms is due to the interaction of habit and accommodation, which are active functions of mentality. As he further explains,
a mental organism is subject, at any stage, to the two principles, Habit and Accommodation … Habit represents what is congenital with what it tends most naturally to do, under the guidance of experiences up to date. Accommodation represents the degree of openness or adaptability, in giving the new reactions, which new stimulations or arrangements of stimulations call upon it to make.[91]
On the one hand, since habit “is the tendency of an organism to continue more and more readily processes which are vitally beneficial,”[92] conformity to habit, in general, can preserve an organism, under “ordinary” circumstances. However, even through such conformity, new behaviors can be produced by way of chance variations on repeated, habitual movements, and those which are successful potentially lead to their selection by the organism and to behavioral adjustments. Again, Baldwin calls the operation by which the organism sets the direction for its behavior(s) in selecting
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