Repost: Gordon Allport & Active Darwinism

Allport the Behavior Geneticist
James Brody · 05/19/01 at 9:21 PM ET
I'm lately obsessed (egad, passive voice!) by the interaction of genes and environments, by the process not of adaptation but that of emerging constructions. Environments forge genes over millennia but genes also define and sculpt environments whether micro or macro, fleeting or very long term. I've looked for other's who admire life's ability to reorganize and recast environment. Karl Popper is one who nearly embossed the concept of "Active Darwinism" into the pages of one of his books, In Search of a Better World.

This polarity between active and passive organisms MUST have occurred to others but I was stumped until a comment by David Lykken in his elegant paper, "Research with twins: The concept of emergenesis." Lykken remarked in passing that if emergenesis has an important role in human development, then psychology will be more like that envisioned by Allport than by Eysenck.

Allport???

My last contact with Allport was in 1960 when I picked up Becoming for $0.95 from a reading list for the Centennial Scholars Program at Denver.

I rarely toss books, not even Allport. I dug it out, much like a letter written to myself in the summer of '60, and found ... gold.

Becoming:

On the Lockean tradition, positivism, and behaviorism:

"Special aversion attaches to problems having to do with complex motives, high-level integration, with conscience, freedom, selfhood. As we have said, in large part it is the relative lack of objective methods of study that accounts for this aversion. But the explanation lies also in the preference of positivism for externals rather than internals, for elements rather than patterns, for geneticism,* and for a passive or reactive organism rather than for one that is spontaneous and active."

On the Leibnitzean tradition and active searches by genes and by minds:

Locke commented that there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in our senses. Leibnitz amended: "nothing---save only the intellect itself." Wow!

And "To understand what a person is, it is necessary always to refer to what he may be in the future, for every state of the person is pointed in the direction of future possibilities."

Aristotle's doctrines of orexis and entelechy anticipated Leibnitz.

Intention was a prominent concern for Aquinas

Spinoza joins our club: "Conatus, the striving toward self-preservation and self-affirmation is the secret of all becoming."

Franz Brentano: "...at every moment of time the human mind is both active and pointed, engaged endlessly in judging, comparing, comprehending, loving, desiring, avoiding. To him the model for mind is the active participle. To John Dewey it was the verb, no less the token of an active intellect."

More from Allport: "We may view positivism (including not only behaviorism and operationism but also associationism) as the right wing of contemporary American psychology; so called cognitive theory as the left wing. But cognitive theory as found in America today is not very far to the left. It is still Lockean compared with a truly active intellect intrinsic to the personal self as envisaged by Leibnitz and his successors." (Somebody tell Tim Beck!)

There are also parallels to Goldstein's emphasis upon self actualization.

More from Allport: "Personality is less a finished product than a transitive process." ... "Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species." And: "... one of the capacities most urgent is individuation, the formation of an individual style of life that is self-aware, self-critical, and self-enhancing."

"That the cultural approach yields valuable facts we cannot possibly deny, for culture is indeed a major condition in becoming. Yet personal integration is always the more basic fact. While we accept certain cultural values as propriate, as important for our own course of becoming, it is equally true that we are all rebels, deviants, and individualists. Some elements in our culture we reject altogether; many we adopt as mere opportunistic habits, and even those elements that we genuinely appropriate we refashion to fit our own personal style of life. Culture is a condition of becoming but is not itself the full stencil."

So, the behavior genetics thread, the one that energizes the concept of active organisms and resists that of environmental determinism, starts with Aristotle, slips past Aquinas and Spinoza, encircles Leibnitz (gotta do some reading!) and Galton (probably the greater of Erasmus Darwin's grandsons), and surfaces again with Darlington, Plomin, Scarr, Rowe, and a pack of other "G- determinists."

How delicious, how strange that genetics gives us our sense of freedom. As Lindon Eaves commented: "If you're going to be pushed around, would you rather be pushed around by your environment, which is not you, or by your genes, which in some sense is who you are?"How delicious, how strange that Evolutionary Psychology, founded on "genes" founders on universal similarities, cast by environment! (Must be a social learning gene somewhere in our leadership!)

Gordon, after 41 darned years, welcome to behavior genetics!

* "I am not speaking of geneticism in the sense of inherited or constitutional predispositions but in the sense of early learning. It is unfortunate that 'geneticism' has these two divergent meanings."

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