Worms and Tunes

• Two Cultures by James Brody, 11/11/98
  
  

John posted these remarks earlier today on the Paleopsych listserve. They are repeated here with his permission. JB.

Jim is going to rival Lorraine as a poet on this site. The image of "rigid little worms" is pretty good! Squishy worms represent some of the fluidity that we see in developmental events. As Jim suggests, there are basic structures that can be tuned, within limits. We have not a great job tracing these limits, but there ARE limits. No matter how we raise a baboon we will not attain a wolf. (Pity, wolves are nice.......).

I agree that the language literature is a good focus. The rules of constraint and plasticity can be surprising. For example, in one of the major talks at Neurosciences Helen Neville (from Oregon, rah, rah), noted that in deaf signers the previously defined 'auditory-semantic' cortex is now 'visual-semantic'. The developmental constraints were driven more tightly by function than by modality.

Here those in the behavioral sciences have an enormous opportunity to contribute to biology. Biologists, of the purely reductionistic variety, rarely deal with higher-order functions (too "complicated") even though it is through these functions that evolution must have some of its most basic constraints....modality be damned, so to speak. The potential down side of this is that if we have deeply rooted "social functions" (functions that served our ancestors well) then these "higher-order" properties of human life may be tightly constrained (even when underlying biological bits and pieces are 'squishy').

There is a temptation to think of "lower-order" processes in living systems are being more tightly constrained in a variety of senses. This is an extrapolation from the reductionistic philosophy that has done such good deeds for biological inquiry, but which is now offering blinders to those who do not deal with multiple levels of operation, organization and constraint.

By analogy one can think of "equifinality" in motor performance. We reach for a glass, successfully, in often variable ways. The key is to pick up the glass, details be (more or less) damned. Picking up the glass is "function", individual muscle twitches are not "function" in a direct behavioral sense. Developmentally one can see people with a variety of muscular disorders succeed in picking up a glass. Developmentally we may see individuals perform "social functions" even though the bits and pieces are distorted through environmental variations, etc.

If this is true (better, to the extent that this is true) paleopsych. has potentially vital contributions to make, both to the behavioral AND to the biological sciences (the boundary blurs, of course). The study of muscle twitches will not explain social constraints. Each level has its own 'rules', so to speak, and these may develop somewhat independently of rules at other levels. I do not know of many data directed at this particular target, but they are worth pursuing.

So, worms and tunes might be a good analytical image to hold, poetry aside.

John F.

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