Biology and Psychology in the 19th century

Evolution
1. Erasmus Darwin
  1. Formed a botanical society
2. Lamark
  1. Created a complete theory of evolution before Darwin
  2. Complexifying and adapting force, that animals strive for improvement, cited for the inheritance of acquired characteristics
3. Charles Darwin
  1. There is a perpetual struggle between individuals for resources
  2. Mathus, 1798 - essay on the principle of population
  3. Natural selection - organisms that are more adapted to conditions will reproduce
    1. Speciation
      1. Over time, adaptive changes in species accumulate and species become more or less adapted to their environment. After a while, animals from two separate groups can no longer produce fertile offspring and a new species arises.
  4. Darwin, C. R., 1859 - on the origin of species by means of natural selection
    1. significant for understanding human and animal behaviour today.
4. Christianity's great chain of being: God, Angels, Humans, Animals, Plants, Rocks
Ethology
1. Deals with instincts, aggression, learning, sexual selection etc
2. Tinbergen
  1. Studied herring gulls, fish and honey bees.
    1. With Gulls, baby birds pecked at a red spot on the parent's bill. With different designs he found some stimulu that gulls would peck at more than their actual parents mouth, aka the supernormal stimulus
  2. Tinbergen, N., 1953
3. Lorenz
  1. Imprinting
4. Von Frisch
  1. Measured bees smell, taste, and vision, and found that they communicated with each other with a 'waggle dance'.
  2. Von Frisch, K., 1927
Darwinian psychology
1. In his later work such as the "Descent of man" and "The expression of emotions" he mentioned human psychology
  1. Darwin, C. R., 1871 - the descent of man
2. Language
  1. Is our ability to use language a specific adaptation or a by-product of other factors
    1. Languages evolve culturally, with some words surviving and others dying out. Darwin applied the principle of natural selection to the development and distinctions between human languages.
3. Sexual selection
  1. He wrote about how females might prefer certain male traits. These could be biological differences which make particular animals more likely to reproduce
  2. Inter-sexual and intra-sexual selection
4. Facial expressions
  1. Facial expressions are innate and universally understood
    1. Margaret mead believes they are culturally conditioned, so Ekman went to different countries to test which was true
      1. Ekman found that facial expressions are universal and there are 6 basic ones: happiness, surprise, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger
Francis Galton
1. Victorian Polymath
2. Contributions were mainly individual differences and intelligence testing
  1. Nature versus nurture
  2. Twin studies
  3. The father of eugenics
    1. Eugenics is the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable
      1. Galton found mathematical relationships between parents and their children, and he concluded bodily and mental characteristics were largely inherited
        For example, weak and feeble-minded men have feeble-minded sons. He believes income and status depend on ability
        Twin-studies and trans-racial adoption studies determine the contribution of nature and nuture
    2. Galton, F., 1869 - the comparative worth of different races
  4. Intelligence testing began in WW2 to select people for jobs (IQ tests) and it entailed biological determinism
    1. Army alpha and Beta tests - Gould 1981 - Sample was 1.75 million US army recruits who completed 3 types of intelligence tests, the tests are culturally and historically biased, they don't measure innate intelligence
William James
1. Focussed on the function rather than the contents of consciousness (functionalism)
  1. Free will
  2. Dual aspectism
  3. Holistic approach - we should look at the whole stream of consciousness
  4. Pragmatic - beliefs and ideas should be judged on usefulness
  5. Roles of instincts and choice, we can override our instincts
  6. Physiology of emotions
Scientific racism
1. In the 1800s, anthropologists and naturalist studied skulls, such as shape and size.
  1. Morton
    1. He argued for racial hierarchies in society
      1. Gould attacked this proposition and pointed out the poor science behind it, claiming that prejudice was driving interpretation
Gould, 1981 - the mismeasure of man
Freud and Psychodynamics
1. Freud was influenced by Darwin, Charcot and Breuer.
2. In his psychodynamic theory, there are three levels of consciousness: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious
  1. We have repressed memories in our unconscious
  2. We can have freudian slips - parapraxes are repressed thoughts and actions that can arise, which can be expressed in dreams
  3. We can make unconscious conflicts conscious through analysis slips of the tongue, free association and looking at dreams
3. We are driven by two biological drives: eros (life instinct) and thanatos (death instinct)
4. Our personality comprises 3 components: the superego, the ego, and the Id. The struggle between these forces is psychodynamics
5. We develop in five psychosexual stages
  1. Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latency, and Genital.
    1. If our stage-dependent needs arent met this can result in fixations, which can determine later personality and behaviours
      1. Oral fixations can lead to compulsive behaviours and eating/drinking disorders, anal fixations can lead to retentive and expulsive behaviours, and phallic fixations can lead to extremes of dominant and submissive behaviour.
      2. Psychosexual conflict can create different problems
        Repression - pushing away from consciousness
        Identification - aligning with the enemy
        Reaction formation - adopt exaggerated opposition
        Projection - attributing thoughts onto others
        Rationalisation - excusing or de-valuing actions
        Displacement - shifting onto another
        Regression - reverting to earlier stage
        Denial
      3. Psychosexual conflicts and disorders include the oedipus complex and the electra complex

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Biology and Psychology in the 19th century

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