Review Lecture The evolution of mind

Abstract

It was Darwin himself who first raised the question of an evolution of behaviour in his Expression of the emotions in man and animals in 1872. The book had little direct effect on psychology, which at the time concerned itself solely with normal adult man as a unique being, mentally if not physically. But Darwin’s ideas were as revolutionary for psychology as for zoology and could not be escaped indefinitely. In this century psychology has been reluctantly ‘ biologizing ’ itself, slowly absorbing the full implications of the idea that man’s behaviour (and therefore the mind that controls it) is as much the product of evolution as his erect posture or the structure of his hand. Revolutionary ideas in science are often accepted slowly, but in this case the resistance was extreme and continued long after Darwin’s ideas were accepted in other fields. The reason may be partly that it took long to work out biological or behavioural theory to the point where it was viable, but the reason is partly that here the conflict between theory and common sense was unusually sharp. The situation draws attention to a feature of scientific thought which may be obscured in other fields by the tremendous successes of physics, for example, or biochemistry or genetics. Psychology has given no such dazzling performance, and thus may allow us to see more clearly the nature of scientific thought. It should be added that the problem of scientific thought is a proper professional concern of the psychologist, and the history of science an important source of information about man’s thought processes, for it is a record of real problem-solving as contrasted with the more or less artificial problem-solving one may set up for study in the laboratory. Thus in the present discussion I am concerned with the scientific method in itself, as well as with the effort by psychologists to apply it rigorously to the problem of mind.