Darwinian Biology Research Articles

Evolution and the Genre of Scripture: Why Evolution Shouldn’t Bother Jewish Theology

ABSTRACT I outline a Jewish response to theological problems emerging from Darwinian biology and contemporary cosmology. This response is rooted in an argument from genre, regarding the relationship between divine revelation and fiction. I then bring this Jewish response into conversation with Shoaib Ahmed Malik’s Islam and Evolution.

Darwin's Orchids

AbstractIs there a queer Darwin? It is often assumed that Darwinian biology is an ally of conservative approaches to sexuality and gender. The Christian legal framework known as natural law philosophy, for instance, reads Darwin as a champion of heterosexual coupling, proving the biological imperative of straight sex. Some feminist readings of Darwin (such as that of Elizabeth Grosz) find in Darwin a confirmation of the necessity of sexual difference organized around masculinity and femininity—an approach Myra Hird has called the “ontology of heterosexuality.” But these interpretations are incorrect. Schaefer argues that far from being an advocate for the ontology of heterosexuality, Darwin provides tools to demolish it. Turning to his research on barnacles and orchids and his speculation on the sources of organic variation, this essay highlights the irreducible importance of diversity and change for Darwin's framework. The ongoing ferment of variation that is the guideline of all life on earth extends not only to the morphology of sex organs but to desire itself. Darwin shows that the ontology of heterosexuality is an arbitrary snapshot, a single moment in the fluid trajectory of life, rather than a law that can be arbitrarily cast over the whole arc. In this, Darwin supports Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's first axiom for queer theory: “People are different from each other.” The essay concludes by connecting a Darwinian approach to sex with José Esteban Muñoz's call for a queer ecstasy that anticipates the futurity of desire.

Revisiting the ‘Darwin–Marx correspondence’: Multiple discovery and the rhetoric of priority

Between the 1930s and the mid 1970s, it was commonly believed that in 1880 Karl Marx had proposed to dedicate to Charles Darwin a volume or translation of Capital but that Darwin had refused. The detail was often interpreted by scholars as having larger significance for the question of the relationship between Darwinian evolutionary biology and Marxist political economy. In 1973–4, two scholars working independently—Lewis Feuer, professor of sociology at Toronto, and Margaret Fay, a graduate student at Berkeley—determined simultaneously that the traditional story of the proposed dedication was untrue, being based on a long-standing misinterpretation of the relevant correspondence. Between the two, and among several other scholars who became their respective allies, there developed a contest of authority and priority over the discovery. From 1975 to 1982, the controversy generated a considerable volume of spilled ink in both scholarly and popular publications. Drawing on previously unexamined archival resources, this article revisits the ‘case’ of the so-called ‘Darwin–Marx correspondence’ as an instance of the phenomenon of ‘multiple discovery’. A familiar occurrence in the natural sciences, multiple discovery is rarer in the humanities and social sciences. The present case of a priority dispute in the history of ideas followed patterns familiar from such disputes in the natural sciences, while also diverging from them in ways that shed light on the significance of disciplinary norms and research infrastructures.

Religion, Evolution and Scottish Philosophy

This paper explores developments in the defence of theism within Scottish philosophy following Hume's Dialogues and the advent of Darwinian evolutionary biology. By examining the writings of two nineteenth-century Scottish philosophers, it aims to show that far from Darwinian biology completing Hume's destruction of natural theology, it prompted a new direction for the defence of philosophical theism. Henry Calderwood and Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison occupied, respectively, the Chairs of Moral Philosophy and Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh in the late nineteenth century. Their books reveal that the challenge of articulating new grounds for philosophical theism was not motivated by a conservative desire to see off a new intellectual threat, but by a desire for a proper understanding of evolutionary biology.

Pandemics and the development of scientific methods in the history of epidemiology


 The Covid-19 pandemic has made me see the history of epidemiology differently. Pandemics are such impressive events that they can exert urgent pressure to identify new modes of research and new methodologies to replace methods that have failed in the past. Some examples seem to corroborate this idea.
 The plagueThere is no doubt that one of the most important events in the history of science occurred in the 17th century when population thinking was discovered. All human and social sciences such as sociology, demography, Darwinian biology, political economy, statistics and epidemiology, have their origin in the discovery that dictates that events in populations can be predictable and have a probability of occurrence. Then the occurrence of events in populations can be quantified, can be compared between populations and can be the source of scientific knowledge. This true revolution in scientific thought is a consequence of changes in society that occurred due to plague pandemics.Since the great pandemic of the 14th century, outbreaks of plague in Europe caused great confusion in cities and increasingly threatened existing powers. It was the case of the monarchical society of England. In the event of an outbreak of plague in London, the nobles, the wealthy, and the army left the city, where only the poor remained. The situation became chaotic in London. It was quickly clear that there was a certain chronological regularity in the outbreaks. They started with a small but growing number of deaths in some parishes before spreading throughout the city. In the 16th century the city of London began to collect data on the number and location of pest deaths. The system was improved in the 17th century and extended to all causes of death, making it possible -by the end of the century- to organize orderly outings from London in the event of an outbreak of plague, preventing chaos. These data were printed and placed on the walls of the city. They were called the “Bills of mortality”, death posters. In this process, a temporal series of mortalitydata was established in London over decades.

The Darwinian dynamic of sexual selection that Thorstein Veblen missed and its relevance to institutional economics

AbstractThorstein Veblen was a pioneer in recognizing the necessity of grounding social science in Darwinian biology and exploring how evolving institutions channel biological proclivities. He especially focused upon how capitalism's social institutions guided the innate need for social status into conspicuous consumption. But why do humans seek status? Surprisingly, Veblen did not pick up on Darwin's concept of sexual selection and recognize it as the driving force behind behavior intended to favorably impress others. This article adds the Darwinian depth that Veblen missed to his understanding of the biologically driven quest for status and its channeling by social institutions. It then explores the turn of most institutionalists away from Veblen's focus on innate behavioral drives in favor of viewing human behavior as more exclusively determined by social conditions. It concludes with reflections on the implications of sexual selection and biological grounding more generally for a theory of institutional economics.

Scientific Discovery and Inference: Between the Lab and Field in Biology

An adequate account of how inferences and discoveries are made in modern biology is a difficult prospect for a philosopher. Do we really deduce conclusions from Darwin’s principles? Once Darwinian biology is integrated with molecular biology, can we deduce the organism from its DNA? What does induction look like in an era where data sets are often too large to be processed by a human being? What is the role of abductive explanatory claims that try to define the biological individual in relation to the microbiome with which it may be associated, or to revise the notion of evolution when the interaction of organism and environment comes to seem much more complex than earlier generations imagined. How should we evaluate “origins of life” experiments conducted in the laboratory, where chemistry shifts to biology and we try to recreate early conditions on earth to which we have no empirical access? How are the carefully controlled conditions in the lab to be brought into productive relationship with the messy, contingent outdoor work of biologists in the field, studying crabs or eelgrass at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, or prairie plants at the end of woods, on the plains of the Midwest. To answer these questions, I sent my graduate student Tano Posteraro to work with Ted Grosholz, a marine biologist at the University of California / Davis, and my undergraduate student Alex Grigas to work with Ruth Geyer Shaw, a population geneticist at the University of Minnesota. They came back with complex and interesting answers to these questions.

Opal Adsorbs and Stabilizes RNA – A Hierarchy of Prebiotic Silica Minerals

A widely held ‘RNA first’ model proposes that RNA gave organic matter on Earth its first access to Darwinism. Such a proposal, which requires a mechanism to generate RNA from a prebiotic ‘soup’, must also manage the intrinsic instability of any RNA so formed. Here, we show that silicon dioxide (silica, SiO2), in the form of synthetic opal, adsorbs and stabilizes RNA from aqueous solution. The extent of adsorption on fully amorphous silica is less, as is the extent of adsorption on the surface of crystalline quartz. We show that the RNA adsorbed on opal is considerably more stable than the same RNA molecule free in aqueous solution at pH 9.5. This provides a mechanism by which any RNA formed in a prebiotic environment could have been concentrated and stabilized so that it could have later participated in the first Darwinian biology.

"Plants that Remind Me of Home": Collecting, Plant Geography, and a Forgotten Expedition in the Darwinian Revolution.

In 1859, Harvard botanist AsaGray (1810-1888) published an essay of what he called "the abstract of Japan botany." In it, he applied Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory to explain why strong similarities could be found between the flora of Japan and that of eastern North America, which provoked his famous debate with Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) and initiated Gray's efforts to secure a place for Darwinian biology in the American sciences. Notably, although the Gray-Agassiz debate has become one of the most thoroughly studied scientific debates, historians of science remain unable to answer one critical question: How was Gray able to acquire specimens from Japan? Making use of previously unknown archival materials, this article scrutinizes the institutional, instrumental, financial, and military settings that enabled Gray's collector, Charles Wright (1811-1885), to travel to Japan, as well as examine Wright's collecting practices in Japan. I argue that it is necessary to examine Gray's diagnosis of Japan's flora and the subsequent debate about it from the viewpoint of field sciences. The field-centered approach not only unveils an array of historical significances that have been overshadowed by the analytical framework of the Darwinian revolution and the reception of Darwinism, but also places a seemingly domestic incident in a transnational context.

Science, Divine Providence and Human Choice

We often suppose that science forces our hand when it comes to theological options. Thus, in the twentieth century, some argued that Darwinian biology rules out the possibility of a loving, caring God, and that quantum mechanics, by disclosing the intrinsic chanciness of nature, problematizes the traditional Christian belief of God’s providential involvement in our lives. Yet science underdetermines religious belief--the so-called scientific evidence is insufficient to rule out belief in divine providence. If we choose not to believe in such, we choose freely, not because science constrains us. If anything, the choice not to believe precedes scientific judgment, not the other way around. To illustrate this thesis, one may compare the religious world-views of Charles Darwin and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The striking difference between the two is not the result of scientific discovery, but rather a shift in Western culture regarding the propriety of letting God figure into scientific explanations of nature.

A mechanistic framework for Darwinism or why Fodor’s objection fails

Fodor (Mind Lang 23:1–24, Mind Lang 2008a, 23:50–57, 2008b and Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (What Darwin go wrong, Picador, New York, 2011) argue that Darwinism cannot be true on the grounds that there are no laws of selection to support counterfactuals about why traits are selected-for. Darwinian explanations, according to this objection, amount to mere ‘plausible historical narratives’. I argue that the objection is predicated on two problematic assumptions: A nomic-subsumption account of causation and causal explanation, and a fine-grained view of the individuation of selected-for effects. Against the former, I argue that Darwinian explanations are a historical species of mechanistic explanation and that mechanisms are causally productive and counterfactual supporting in the absence of appropriate laws. Once this mechanistic framework is in place, the demand for laws of selection vanishes and the historical cum causal coherence of Darwinism is restored. As for the second assumption, I argue that it is an artefact of the teleosemantic program with no basis in evolutionary biology and that properly understood, Darwinian evolutionary biology shows just why teleosemantics cannot succeed.

Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence by Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola (review)

Reviewed by: Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence by Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola Franklin G. Miller Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence By Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2015. Pp. 192. $20 (cloth). Plants comprise over 99% of the biomass of the earth, and without them there would be no animal life on the planet. Moreover, the thriving of trees and other plants will be necessary for life on earth to survive, and continue to cope with, the negative consequences of human-induced climate change. The importance of plants is not just biological. Imagine the impoverishment of life in great cities like London, Paris, and New York without the green spaces and flowers of Hyde Park, the Tuileries Garden, and Central Park. Metropolitan Washington, DC—my home environment—is graced by the presence of Rock Creek Park, an expansive woodland resource in the center of the city. In the first spring of my retirement, I have been walking the trails adjacent to the creek, admiring and transported by the profusion and beauty of plant life. A recent sojourn in the park brought to mind Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (1798), in which he relates that he is A lover of the meadows and the woods,And mountains; and of all that we beholdFrom this green earth; [End Page 569] … well pleased to recognizeIn nature and the language of the sense,The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul. … (ll. 105–12) Wordsworth here and elsewhere suggests a spiritual connection between the plant world and the human psyche. In his famous poem about encountering daffodils “dancing in the breeze,” he exclaims that “A poet could not but be gay, / In such a jocund company” (“I wandered lonely as a cloud” [1815], ll. 6, 15–16). Indeed, the memory of the daffodils fills his heart with pleasure when at later times, “In vacant or in pensive mood,” he thinks of them (l. 20). One doesn’t have to be a Romantic poet to feel a deep connection with plants. Walking many years ago in a quiet and remote mountainous grove of bristlecone pines, breathing the thin air and experiencing the sight of these ancient dwarfs had an effect on my atheistic self that I wouldn’t hesitate to call spiritual. It would be a sacrilege for someone to willfully damage them. To be sure, some are indifferent to the greenness of the earth; indeed, the existentialist philosopher and writer, Jean-Paul Sartre, according to his companion Simone de Beauvoir, was “allergic to chlorophyll” (Barnes 1959, 391). But this is unusual, and virtually anyone can appreciate what plants have to offer. Readers of Brilliant Green will have that appreciation greatly enhanced. This short book is written by a professor at the University of Florence and director of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology in Italy (Mancuso), and a science journalist (Viola). The authors pose the central question of their book in the first paragraph: “Are plants intelligent? Do they solve problems and communicate with their surroundings—with other plants, insects, and higher animals? Or are they passive, unfeeling organisms without a trace of individual or social behavior?” (1). In an entertaining and thought-provoking way, they endeavor to answer to this question by making the case for plants being intelligent, and even sentient. They proceed by describing and characterizing the behaviors—including the relationships between plant and animals—that plants rely on for reproduction, defense against predators, and even in some cases for nourishment. Under the impact of Darwinian biology over the past 150 years, humans have embraced, or at least been forced to recognize, the continuity between their mental abilities and those of animals. The authors demonstrate that when the impressive abilities of plants are contemplated, the many similarities between plants and animals come into view. Plants, of course, are not inert like rocks; they not only grow and reproduce, but they respond to stimuli. Mancuso and Viola relate that “plants use their senses to orient themselves in the world, interacting with other plant organisms, insects, and animals, communicating...

Evolutionary Biology and Classical Teleological Arguments for God's Existence

Much has been made of how Darwinian thinking destroyed proofs for the existence of God from ‘design’ in the universe. I challenge that prevailing view by looking closely at classical ‘teleological’ arguments for the existence of God. One version championed by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas stems from how chance is not a sufficient kind of ultimate explanation of the universe. In the course of constructing this argument, I argue that the classical understanding of teleology is no less necessary in modern Darwinian biology than it was in Aristotle's time. In fact, modern biology strengthens the claims that teleological arguments make by vindicating many of their key features. As a consequence, I show how Aristotle and Aquinas' teleological argument for an intelligent First Cause remains valid.

Theodore Roosevelt and the American political tradition

Rough Rider, hunter, trust-buster, president, and Bull Moose candidate. Biographers have long fastened on TR as man of action, while largely ignoring his political thought. Now, in time for the centennial of his Progressive run for the presidency, Jean Yarbrough provides a searching examination of TR's political thought, especially in relation to the ideas of Washington, Hamilton, and Lincoln--the statesmen TR claimed most to admire. Yarbrough sets out not only to explore Roosevelt's vision for America but also to consider what his political ideas have meant for republican self-government. She praises TR for his fighting spirit, his love of country, and efforts to promote republican greatness, but faults him for departing from the political principles of the more nationalistic Founders he esteemed. With the benefit of hindsight, she argues that the progressive policies he came to embrace have over time undermined the very qualities Roosevelt regarded as essential to civic life. In particular, the social welfare policies he championed have eroded industry and self-reliance; the expansion of the regulatory state has multiplied the special interests seeking access to political power; and the bureaucratic experts in whom he reposed such confidence have all too often turned out to be neither disinterested nor effective. Yarbrough argues that TR's early historical studies--inspired by Darwinian biology and Hegelian political thought--treated westward expansion from an evolutionary and developmental perspective that placed race and conquest at the centre of the narrative, while relegating individual rights and consent of the governed to the sidelines. Although his early career showed him to be a moderate Republican reformer, Yarbrough argues that even then he did not share Hamilton's enthusiasm for the commercial republic, and substituted an appeal to abstract duty for The Federalist 's reliance on self-interest. As New York governor and first-term president, TR attempted to strike a just between democratic and oligarchic interests, but by the end of his presidency he had tipped the balance in favour of progressive policies. From the New Nationalism until his death in 1919, Roosevelt continued to claim the mantle of Washington and Lincoln, even as he moved further from their political principles. Through careful examination of TR's political thought, Yarbrough's book sheds new light on his place in the American political tradition, while enhancing our understanding of the roots of progressivism and its transformation of the Constitution.

Ammonites

Ammonites were amongst the most successful marine animals during the Mesozoic. They evolved to fill a large variety of ecological niches across a wide spectrum of open‐ocean and marine shelf environments. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands have been collected in the last 200 years and are available for study in museum collections, the biology of ammonites—how they lived—is very difficult to understand. They lived such exotic and strange lives comparable with no group alive today, and seemed to break all the rules of Darwinian biology. Their importance in stratigraphy is due to their rapid evolution, which gave rise to a more refined zonal scheme than is possible with any other group of fossil, making the need to understand ammonite biology of more than academic interest.

Book Review: The Ecological Thought

Ecological Thought. By Timothy Morton. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-674-04920-8. Pp. 163. $39.95. In his latest book, Timothy Morton provides those scholars who are interested in growing field of ecocriticism but not sure what all fuss is about with a provocative, accessible introduction to radical implications and intriguing possibilities that ecology offers for cultural theory. Those looking for literary analysis or an overview of current state of environmental literary theory should turn elsewhere--starting with Lawrence Buell's excellent, if now slightly dated, Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2005). In Ecological Thought, Morton leaves behind close textual analysis, high-level theory, and, thankfully, impenetrable prose, of his previous book, without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007). Instead, he offers a series of probing thought experiments and far-reaching cultural and theoretical analyses that explore ecology's cultural implications. Morton's style embodies provocative irony that he argues ecological thought demands as he takes on role of the irritating Columbo-style guy at back of room, one who asks unanswerable question (115). So while many of Morton's answers suggest that his conception of ecological thought is not as radical as he thinks it is, or as it perhaps should be, his questions challenge scholars in liberal arts to wrestle with consequences of ecology's recent scientific discoveries. In his introduction, Morton helpfully pushes standard boundaries of environmentalism, as he did in his previous book, by claiming, Ecology can do without a concept of a something, a thing of some kind, 'over yonder,' called Nature. This Nature connotes hierarchy, authority, harmony, purity, neutrality, and mystery, all ideas that Morton rejects (3). Instead, he proposes, The ecological thought is thinking of interconnectedness.... It is a vast, sprawling of interconnection without a definite center or edge. It is radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient and otherwise--and how can we so clearly tell difference? (7-8). One of key ways that Morton develops this thought is by drawing on thinking of Darwin, whom he positions alongside Freud and Marx as one of forerunners to post-structuralism (62, 65, 118). Thus, at beginning of his book he asks, Are we ready to admit world of mutation and uncertainty that Darwin opens up? (18). In Thinking Big, his first chapter, Morton jumps into this world, combining Milton's cosmic vision in Paradise Lost with Tibetan culture and Darwinian biology to argue that environmentalists need to ditch notions of local and place in favor of what he terms mesh (28). This allows us to imagine interconnectedness of all living and non-living (28), and Morton uses it to describe interrelatedness of all things and absence of any fixed, teleological identity (30-31, 44). Because of our existence in mesh, and hence our intimate familiarity with others, Morton, drawing on Levinas and Derrida, proposes that we should conceive of other as stranger[s] (41). Morton expands definition of strange strangers in his chapter Dark Thoughts, to include not only animals and humans, but also other life forms and even artificial intelligence (71ff). Drawing on Darwin's thought, Morton imagines an existence with no fixed identities; he argues we live in an ecological with who are simulated (69), queer (81-87), contaminated (66), and mutagenic (87), and thus we need to learn to love disturbing, disgusting beings who share this life with us (92). Morton develops this ethical account of how we should choose to live entangled with other strange strangers from Levinas' reflections on severe responsibility that derives from our encounter with face of another. …

Ethical Naturalism and the Constitution of Agency

Neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalists generally claim that human beings need virtues, where their claim is understood to mean that human beings need virtues in order to flourish or prosper. They aim to establish a connection between goodness and flourishing for human beings. Advocates of this view must respond to the apparent possibility that we can be good human beings without flourishing or be flourishing human beings without being good. Rosalind Hursthouse argues that being virtuous is the only reliable path if we want to flourish, just as a modest diet and exercise are the only reliable way to become healthy. Yet, as Julia Annas points out, this argument is unsatisfactory. There are circumstances, such as living in a depraved society, in which it would not benefit someone to live virtuously, and it is reasonable to ask why human beings should commit themselves to virtue when the desired result, to flourish, relies on many factors that are beyond our control. In addition to the contingencies of the world, there are contingencies of our psychology. As Nietzsche and, more recently, Bernard Williams argue, it is at least equally plausible to believe that human psychology is such that instead of being fulfilled by morality, we will instead be frustrated by it. As Williams puts it, the Aristotelian view seems to presuppose an inner nisus to virtues, which is called into question by Darwinian biology, since it is ‘‘an open question whether the evolutionary success of humanity, in its extremely brief period of existence, may not rest on a rather

Evolution of immunity: no development without risk

Signal transduction by cell surface receptors in the context of heterogeneous and variable cellular environments plays a pivotal role in regulating many biological processes, including development, activation, and homeostasis of the immune system. In some receptors, extracellular ligand-binding and intracellular signaling domains are located on the same protein chain (single-chain receptors), while in the so-called multichain immune recognition receptors (MIRRs), recognition and signaling functions are separated between different protein chains. Why did nature separate recognition and signaling functions for MIRRs, thereby increasing the risk of malfunction and potential attack by pathogens? The risk is real: in order to escape the immune response, viruses are able to disrupt functional coupling between recognition and signaling aspects of MIRR machinery. Intrinsic disorder of intracellular signal-generating regions of MIRRs adds further intrigue to the story. Why did nature select protein disorder for MIRRs to translate recognition of distinct antigens into appropriate activation signals that would induce specific functional outcomes? Here, I suggest that nature takes the risks associated with intrareceptor separation of functions as well as with the chaos and indeterminacy of protein disorder in exchange for providing diversity and variability of signal transduction. Not only does this phenomenon serve as the molecular basis for the development and evolution of the immune and other complex biological systems, but it fits closely to Darwinian evolutionary biology.

Field Studies: Novels as Darwinian Niches, Poetry for Physicists and Mathematicians

This brief forum contribution reflects upon some historical factors in the formation of nineteenth century science and of the literature and science discipline that has since arisen to study its literary receptions. Noting the preponderance of studies focusing upon forms of scientific developmentalism, principally Darwinian biology, and of novels and other prose, and more broadly, on literary figures, rather than the writings of scientists, the paper introduces some poetry on science by scientists. It concentrates principally on those working and writing in the fields of physics and mathematics, areas that have been neglected in literature and science studies.

Overcoming Patient's Stigma When It's Directed at You

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Professional NewsFull AccessOvercoming Patient's Stigma When It's Directed at YouAaron LevinAaron LevinSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:2 Jul 2010https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.45.13.psychnews_45_13_013AbstractSome people would prefer hearing they've been diagnosed with cancer than having to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, James Griffith, M.D., told listeners at an APA annual meeting session in New Orleans in May.James Griffith, M.D., says that psychiatrists can be stigmatized by patients, but they “can also learn to treat people who stigmatize psychiatrists despite their views and bring those skills into other areas of our practice.”Credit: David HathcoxThe mere fact that they will be having a psychiatric consultation may be seen as bad news by some patients, especially if they already harbor negative views of the profession and its practitioners.“Psychiatrists are not only bothersome for some patients, but a stigma to be avoided at all costs,” said Griffith, a professor of psychiatry and neurology at George Washington University School of Medicine.If the patient has not requested the consultation, the psychiatrist may be resented as a stranger with whom there is no reason to build a therapeutic alliance. For some, just the presence of the psychiatrist confers a mark of shame and lowers the patient's self-esteem, said Griffith.Some patients may even hold religious beliefs that psychiatrists are evil emissaries of Satan, complicating the clinician's task, he said.Those negative views stigmatize psychiatrists as much as prejudices against people with mental illness do in the outside world.In some ways, however, stigma simplifies life.“You only need to know one thing about a person and then you know everything” or at least think you do, said Griffith. Stigma allows an observer to make quick, decisive judgments about a person's social identity with little mental effort. Of course, that leaves out a lot of other things about the stigmatized individual.The origins of stigma lie not in ignorance or psychopathology but in Darwinian biology, said Griffith. Sociobiological systems involved in peer affiliation, social hierarchy, kin recognition, and social exchange operate through the dorsal anterior cingulate gyrus. That part of the brain detects information conflicts and prompts the prefrontal cortex to resolve them with reference to some quickly identifiable but potentially stigmatizing mark—race, gender, age, clothing, and so on.Stigma processes operate automatically, outside volitional control, and within tenths of a second, he said. They take precedence over more conscious reasoning, which may take seconds to minutes. They activate the amygdala, stimulate a threat/aversion response, and deactivate empathy. These processes increase the dominance of social identity relative to personal identity.These are normal sociobiological processes, but psychopathology may amplify a stigma's intensity.The psychiatrist's difficult job is to reverse that pattern, often under professionally stressful conditions, in a brief first encounter that lacks a therapeutic alliance, while already being stigmatized by the patient.“What happens in the first session is critical,” said Griffith. The interviewer must decide early what stigmatizing process is at work in the patient's mind.What is the patient's group of identity? How does the group perceive threats to its identity and interests? How does the group monitor outsiders? But those are just the first considerations.“The prime objective is to establish relatedness to the patient as a person, not a category,” he said.Griffith's strategy is to use “negative goodness,” that is, not attacking the group with which the patient identifies, while assuring him or her that the psychiatrist is not going to act harmfully.That reassurance opens the door to better communication. When psychological arousal is high, sociobiological barriers rise, and lowering arousal lowers the barriers, he said. “Then stigma shifts further into the background of the patient's awareness.”There are compelling reasons why a clinician must forge ahead with a patient's evaluation even when confronted with patients who hate or fear psychiatrists, said Griffith. Among these reasons are the potential risk of violence or suicide and other people's fears about the person's behavior.A sociobiological understanding of stigma does more than lead to a better evaluation of a few difficult patients, said Griffith. “We can also learn to treat people who stigmatize psychiatrists despite their views and bring those skills into other areas of our practice.” ISSUES NewArchived