The Cybernetics Group by Steve J. Heims

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 843 The Cybernetics Group. By Steve J. Heims. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991. Pp. xii + 335; notes, appendix, index. $25.00. The Cybernetics Group concerns a series of meetings on the applica­ tion of cybernetics to the social sciences. The group was organized when Frank Fremont-Smith of the Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation arranged the Cerebral Inhibition Meeting in 1942. It picked up again in 1946, with the Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biology and the Social Sciences Meeting, where participants discussed ideas put forward by Warren McColloch and Walter Pitts in their 1943 paper, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.” This paper, together with their 1947 “How We Know Universals,” now serves as a foundation for neural networks. At the time, it served as the foundation for presentations on computers, the nervous system, and cybernetics, thus providing a model of how mind, machines, and other systems worked. The group came to include such notables as Gregory Bateson, Molly Harrower, Paul Lazarsfeld, Kurt Lewin, Margaret Mead, War­ ren McColloch, Filmer S. C. Northrop, Walter Pitts, Arturo Rosenblueth , John von Neumann, and Norbert Weiner. Visitors included Ross Ashby, Max Delbriick, Erik Erikson, Leon Festinger, Wolfgang Kohler, Clyde Kluckhohn, Claude Shannon, W. Grey Walter, and Jerome Wiesner, while Talcott Parsons was among those who attended an extra session on cybernetics and society. The author, Steve J. Heims, devotes part of the book to how the meetings influenced group members’ work, especially Bateson and McColloch, particularly in the social sciences in the United States. However, Heims’s greater concern is with the importance of the group, a topic he wishes to have “taken seriously as belonging to the history of scientific developments” (p. 29) because it illustrates “how the process of science worked” (p. ix). His main themes include (1) the relationship between science and political milieu, (2) how “science” was defined, (3) the influence of elite groups on fields of inquiry, and (4) the role of philanthropic foundations in both public policy and research. Heims is particularly good at pointing out how the Cold War political milieu shaped the makeup of the group and the kinds of inquiry undertaken. He argues that it was a time of political, and scientific, conservatism. This conservatism was reflected in the ab­ sence of economists and political scientists, even though the concepts were presented as useful in those fields. Of the sociologists invited, Parsons was known for his conservative approach, and, like his colleague Kluckhohn, was part of a secret arrangement between Harvard University and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Many group members, friends of Mead, Bateson, Fremont-Smith, and Lawrence Frank (also of the Macy Foundation), subscribed to Frank’s vision of mental hygiene as the way to solve problems of warfare and 844 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE bring about world community. They accepted the prevailing wisdom of Western superiority and did not seem to notice that problems existing in other countries also existed in the United States. The topics and makeup of the group also reflected a view of science that favored reductionism, individualism, and a mathematical basis for scientific work. Psychology was represented by those who sought explanations in neurophysiology. With the exception of Lewin, psy­ choanalysts and gestalt psychologists were not well accepted. The McColloch-Pitts model by which mind could be explained according to the activity of neurons was a reductionist explanation that focused on individuals and individual neurons. The book is written thematically rather than chronologically. Nev­ ertheless, I had difficulty following the thematic flow. Meetings are treated as one unit, “a moment when a new set of ideas impinged on the human sciences and began to transform some traditional fields of inquiry” (p. 1), “an event in the history of science” (p. 29). There is little sense of development or change, even though the group met from 1946 to 1953. Heims considered dialogue among researchers as the organizing principle for the study (p. ix), and, indeed, each chapter is devoted to the group’s discussion ofa topic. These chapters do not show how the dialogue developed over time or related to other issues the group was discussing...