Darwinian View Research Articles

Strategies and goals in Emotion Regulation models: a systematic review.

Studies examining the role of Emotion Regulation (ER) do not consistently explain the underlying model or theory they are employing, resulting in a conflation of different strategies and goals within the ER scientific literature. This study aims to conduct a systematic review and conceptual analysis of the primary strategies and goals advocated in the ER models, theories, and frameworks. Furthermore, we explored the distinctions between the prevailing contemporary ER models and classical conceptions of emotional dynamics, such as those proposed by Aristotle, Descartes, and Darwin. An electronic search was conducted in the Web of Science, Medline, and Scopus databases in November 2023. The key search terms used were grouped into two different topics: Emotion Regulation and Models/Theories/Frameworks. Articles were included if they reported one or more ER model in healthy individuals or emotionally disordered individuals and if they were published in a peer-reviewed journal in English in the last 5 years (from 2019 to 2023). A total of two reviewers independently assessed the titles, abstracts, and full texts. Models identified were summarized and classified based on the different ER strategies and goals. Of the 1,012 titles for initial consideration, 139 articles met the full eligibility criteria and were included for data extraction and synthesis. The review identified 10 ER models, and the most commonly used were the Process Model of Emotion Regulation and the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation. There was a great deal of homogeneity among the proposed ER strategies and goals: the cognitive dimension is the core of ER strategy, and the ER goals are primarily hedonic or instrumental in nature. Both Descartes and Darwin views were present in the ER models; however, some of the most significant contributions in Aristotelian proposal seem to be forgotten, such as the integration of the physical, operational, and growth dimensions (eudaimonic goals). This systematic review was conducted in accordance with the PRISMA guidelines and was preregistered at Prospero platform (CRD42023491948).

In search for evolutionary roots of a mindful cognition: A Darwinian view on sustained intentional awareness

The attention system underwent important evolutionary changes and specializations in the human genus. In fact, our outstanding social and technological complexity strictly depends on our attentional ability, which is sustained, intentional, and conscious. Attention, intention, and awareness are key features for what can be defined a mindful cognition, and we may wonder whether a specific combination of these cognitive traits may be the result of a natural selective process, or else an accidental by-product of mental complexity. In this article, basic concepts in evolutionary anthropology are reviewed, to consider whether positive, neutral, or negative selective forces might have influenced the evolution of a mindful cognitive ability. At present, all these alternatives are potentially supported by different kinds of evidence. Hybrid hypotheses, considering stabilizing mechanisms or distinct social roles and intra-specific variation, are also likely. An evolutionary approach to the cognitive abilities involved in attention and awareness can reveal potentialities, limitations, and drawbacks of our individual and collective natural behaviors, especially when dealing with the evolution of the human consciousness.

DARWIN NO BRASIL: A DIVULGAÇÃO CIENTÍFICA EM QUADRINHOS

ABSTRACT: This article aims to analyze the comic book “Darwin: no Brasil”. The magazine in question is a comic approach that aims to show children and teenagers some ideas about the naturalist and his journey in Brazil of the 19th century. In the work analyzed, the serious figure takes on a different version of most materials, with a profusion of colors printed on paper with a higher quality than that of comic books. It is not easily found on magazine stands, but rather in physical and virtual bookstores. For the analysis of the magazine, some pages were investigated with the purpose of indicating how the comic artist uses visual resources in combination with verbal language, and how they complement each other, contributing to the propagation of the scientific message. The results indicated the complexity of disseminating scientific knowledge in a compact verbal-visual format. As a strategy to communicate the naturalist's journey to readers, the author created a narrative with a visual and linguistic nature in the comics. The attempt to present scientific questions in comics fulfilled the purpose of conveying part of Darwin's story in Brazil, exploring the emotions, but did not provoke reflections, possibly due to the author's intentions in discussing the issues of slavery as well as Darwin's view of the Brazilian society at the time. However, the reflections presented should not be seen as a rejection to the work “Darwin in Brazil”, but as a precaution for those who make the material available to children and adolescents.

PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS AND SCIENTIFIC SIGNIFICANCE OF HENRI BERGSON'S INTUITIONISM AND THE IDEA OF "VITAL ENTHUSIASM"

The article analyzes the views of the famous French philosopher Henri Bergson on vitality and intuitionism. Bergson contrasted his theory of creative evolution with Darwin's theory of evolution in a rationalistic spirit. He reveals that Darwin's views were mechanistic in nature. It also shows the difference between intellect and intuition. Since natural processes are characterized by vitality, they prove to be creative in nature.

Insects, Age, and Failure: The Suppressed Chapter of “The Wasp in a Wig”

ABSTRACT Why did Lewis Carroll decide to suppress “The Wasp in a Wig” from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871)? Certainly, he was acting on the advice of John Tenniel. However, the chapter’s suppression was likely not just because a wasp in a wig is hard to draw but because Carroll determined that the chapter was weaker in literary value than the rest of Looking-Glass. This article will argue that the weakness of the chapter follows from Carroll’s lifelong habit of digging at ideological sore points (in this case, how insects should be understood within a Christian as opposed to Darwinian view), conjoined with his growing anxieties about aging. These two themes work in tandem inadvertently to reach beyond the pleasures of nonsense to fall into genuine pathos; the human wasp, far more anthropomorphized than the looking-glass insects, is indeed both a social failure and close to death. Perhaps even a child reader cannot be much consoled by Alice’s reflection when she leaves the wasp that she was “quite pleased that she had gone back and given a few minutes to making the poor old creature comfortable” (AA 298).

EVOLUTIONARY EMERGENT SELF IN THE POETRY OF BULLEH SHAH

This paper affirms the significance of mystic love as a higher mental faculty in human evolutionary process. Man as evolutionary emergent self is the operational definition of mysticism; a process in which individual self of a person gains Unique Self Enlightenment through operational interaction of higher mental faculties and aspires for Love intelligence in order to get one with the Absolute. Emergent evolution is an anti Darwinian view of Evolution which runs quite contrary to Darwin’s theory of Evolution. Mystic literature in general and Bulleh Shah’s poetry in particular answers many queries of fundamental importance related to man’s existence and evolution in this universe and the nature of relationship between man and man, man and universe and man and God. Bulleh Shah (1680-1757), a mystic poet of Punjabi language, through his poetry offers a study of human existence and his mental and psychological evolution in this universe affirming that love is the cause of man’s creation and the very Eros of his evolution. The present paper explores how does individual love in mystic literature serve as a mode of evolution to get one with the whole (Deity) to attain the level of mystical union by fusing subject self into the object (Divinity) to complete the process of Emergent Evolution of consciousness with the lens of Morgan’s (1927) Emergent Evolution and Gafni’s (2011) Unique Self in Evolutionary Process. Bulleh Shah’s poetry affirms mysticism as a study of spiritual faculties of human beings which demolishes ethno-cultural and dogmatic boundaries and has a natural tendency towards pluralistic aspect of universalism as a counter narrative to ethno-centric global agenda. The basic theoretical assumption of this paper has been taken from my PhD dissertation in which the same theoretical framework has been applied on the poetry of Shah Hussain and John Keats.

When intimate relationships improve immune functioning: More than a gut feeling

The immune system, which evolved as a protective system, can paradoxically mediate lethal effects when it is over-activated. These effects can be traced back to infected insects and are mainly mediated by phylogenetically old cytokines that have been found already in starfishes and sponges. We hypothesize that these anti-homeostatic effects are important for restricting the cumulative risk of transmission of highly mutating environmental pathogens that may endanger species, particularly when they start to originate and expand. Considering the Darwinian view that evolution is a permanent process, this anti-homeostatic program is preserved and expressed even when there is no risk for the species. Here, we review these aspects and discuss how evolutionary-imposed anti-homeostatic immune programs are expressed during acute and chronic human diseases, which can be further aggravated in the absence of medical interventions. The relevance of early identification of ancestral biomarkers that predict a shift from protective to deleterious immune outcomes is emphasized.

Origin of the Human Soul: Making Sense of Emotional Fossils (trans. by Andrey Korchevskiy)

That humans evolved to be hyper-cooperative has always been problematic for the Darwinian view of evolution: a struggle among individuals for scarce resources. The most fundamental fossil findings are consistent with the proposal that the appearance of humans 6 million years ago represents a rare major biological transition. For the first time, individual mammals (humans) began dividing and coordinating their functional activities while assembling into organism-like groups. The refinement of this collective capacity for teamwork is the decisive human adaptation and constitutes our core human instincts evolved over millions of years, referred to as the “old mind.” Our own Homo sapiens species appeared 300,000 years ago. Because the evolutionary mechanisms of sexual selection and group selection became predominant, 1) cultural evolution, 2) the rise of economic behavior, 3) chronic war, and 4) mental illness resulted. The major mental illnesses are viewed as “emotional fossils” that provide insight into the evolutionary development of our emotions and motivations. The symptoms of bipolar disorder reflect the breakdown of instincts evolved by sexual selection for the benefits of cohesion among groups. The symptoms of schizophrenia reflect the breakdown of instincts evolved by group selection for the benefits of groups prevailing in competition with each other. These often-disruptive instincts constitute our “new mind” that seeks equilibrium with our old mind, which persists as the humanizing legacy of collective functioning refined through the ages by our hominin ancestors and now experienced as our innermost soul.

"En fullkomlig man"

“The Complete Man”: Body and Society in Viktor Rydberg The article treats the place of the body in the cultural criticism of Viktor Rydberg, not only as a central theme but also as an image with the potential to figuratively describe societal and even cosmic relationships. Rydberg’s ideal of the symmetrical and athletic body is seen in the perspective of his dependence on German neo-humanism and the gymnastic movement. The ideal of bodily symmetry figures as an image of universal man who defies the division of labor, while the deformed body inversely figures as an image of the lack of wholeness in a stratified bourgeois society. This is further elucidated by an analysis of Rydberg’s view of Darwinism and his fear of degeneration. In the final section, special attention is given to Rydberg’s broodings on the “Future of the White Race”. In this text, the body is a figure of the collectivity (the body politic) and its diseases signify political and moral crisis, while the remedy for this state of affairs lies in recognizing the unity of the living, the dead and the unborn in the body of Christ.

The Fourier-Laplace Transform-A Conjugate Link Between the Material Brain and the Conscious Mind.

Recent attempts to establish the quantum boundaries of life is pursued. A pre-existing view of quantum biology is supplemented by the formulation of modern advances in theoretical chemical physics and quantum chemistry. The extension to open system dynamics entails a self-referential amplification supporting the signature of life as well as consciousness via long-range correlative information, ODLCI. The associated negentropic coherence permeates hierarchical and functional organization at multiple levels. In this communication we will derive and review one of the most important mathematical tools, i.e., the combined use of the Fourier- and the Laplace transform. It is shown that an underlying operator algebra facilitates the formulation of the conjugate relationship between energy-time and momentum-space. Implications from augmented general dilation analytic operator families provide novel information-based representations and yield, inter alia, a thermo-qubit syntax for communication, which are required to support the quantum Darwinian view of life.

A Darwinian View of Behçet's Disease.

Behçet's disease (BD) is a multisystem inflammatory disorder of unknown etiology, characterized by oral and genital ulceration, with other complications including eye, skin, joint, and central nervous system (CNS) lesions. Diagnosis is based on clinical findings, which may differ between patients. There is a strong genetic basis for BD; however, only a few genes have been associated with the disease across the geographical spread of BD. In this article, we discuss the history and combination of genes involved in this complex disease in relation to the geographical range and present our view that the disease has developed from a Darwinian perspective, with different gene polymorphisms that affect the same biological pathway. Moreover, these mutations individually are protective mechanisms against the disease relevant to each region, which affected both archaic and modern humans.

EFFECTS OF ACADEMIC DEGREE AND DISCIPLINE ON RELIGIOUS AND EVOLUTIONARY VIEWS IN CHILE AND COLOMBIA

AbstractRelationships between degree/area of academic formation and religious and Darwinian views are controversial. This study aimed to compare the religious beliefs and acceptance of Darwinian evolution between two contrasting South American scientific communities (Chile and Colombia), accounting for different degrees and areas of academic formation. In 2018, 115 last year bachelor students (surveyed as freshmen in 2014 for a previous study) from Chile, and 283 first/last year bachelor students, graduate students, and professors from Colombia, all belonging to biology, chemistry, or physics, were surveyed. Chilean students/faculty were significantly more agnostic/atheist, more accepting of Darwinian evolution, and less creationist than their Colombian counterparts. Academic degree and area differently affected these views in both countries, as only in Chile there was a clear tendency among biologists and physicists with higher degrees to hold less religious and creationist views. Marked differences between the history, socioeconomic contexts, and especially in high school and university curricula of both countries might explain these results.

A Cretaceous bug with exaggerated antennae might be a double-edged sword in evolution.

SummarySexual selection can favor production of exaggerated features, but the high cost of such features in terms of energy consumption and enemy avoidance makes them go to extinction under the influence of natural selection. However, fossils preserved with specialized features are very rare. Here, we report a new nymph from Burmese amber, Magnusantena wuae Du & Chen gen. et sp. nov., which has exaggerated leaf-like expanded antennae. Such bizarre antennae indicate that sensitive and delicate sensory system and magnificent appearance in Hemiptera have been already established in mid-Cretaceous. Our findings may provide evidence for Darwin's view that sensory organs play an important role in sexual selection. This nymph with the leaf-like antennae may also represents a new camouflage pattern. However, the oversized antennae are costly to develop and maintain, increasing the risks from predators. Such unparalleled expanded antennae might be the key factor for the evolutionary fate of the coreid.

Charles Morris Lansley. Charles Darwin's Debt to the Romantics: How Alexander von Humboldt, Goethe and Wordsworth Helped Shape Darwin's View of Nature. Bern: Peter Lang, 2018. Pp. 274. $90.95 (cloth).

Charles Morris Lansley. Charles Darwin's Debt to the Romantics: How Alexander von Humboldt, Goethe and Wordsworth Helped Shape Darwin's View of Nature. Bern: Peter Lang, 2018. Pp. 274. $90.95 (cloth). - Volume 59 Issue 3

Charles Darwin and the scientific mind.

Although often presented as an essential, ahistorical or innate psychological entity, the notion of a 'scientific mind' is ripe for historical analysis. The growing historical interest in the self-fashioning of masculine identities, and more particularly the self-fashioning of the nineteenth-century scientist, has opened up a space in which to probe what was understood by someone being said to possess a 'scientific mind'. This task is made all the more urgent by the recently revived interest of some psychologists in the concept and the highly gendered and culturally conditioned understanding of the scientific mind displayed in some contemporary debates. This article contributes to that task, and fills a rare gap in Darwin studies by making the first detailed exploration of Charles Darwin's understanding of the scientific mind, as revealed in the psychological self-analysis he undertook in his 'Recollections of the development of my mind and character' (1876), and supplemented in his Life of Erasmus Darwin (1879). Drawing upon a broad range of Darwin's published and unpublished works, this article argues that Darwin's understanding of the scientific mind was rooted in his earliest notebooks, and was far more central to his thought than is usually acknowledged. The article further delineates the differences between Darwin's understanding and that of his half-cousin Francis Galton, situates his understanding in relation to his reading of William Whewell and Auguste Comte, and considers what Darwin's view of the scientific mind tells us about his perspective on questions of religion and gender. Throughout, the article seeks to show that the 'scientific mind' is always an agglomeration of historically specific prejudices and presumptions, and concludes that this study of Darwin points to the need for a similarly historical approach to the question of the scientific mind today.

Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Jonathan Farina

Reviewed by: Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Jonathan Farina Michael Hollington Jonathan Farina. Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017. Pp. xxii + 286. £75. ISBN 9781107181632 Alighting on the phrase "a curate's egg" to characterize my overall reaction to this book, I decided (in the hope of gaining precision in the use of it) to satisfy a longstanding curiosity about its history, and so went online. What I found there was instructive: the phrase originates in an 1895 George du Maurier cartoon in Punch, which depicts a timid curate at table with a bishop. The latter regrets that the curate seems to have been given a bad egg. Anxious to please, the curate replies "'Oh no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!'" From this, I learnt that the sense in which I want to use the phrase here (like that in which it is mostly used nowadays) is not that of the original joke. Parts of Farina's book are indeed excellent–unlike the curate's egg–but I found it less than thoroughly satisfactory as a whole. Dickens is a constant presence, as one would expect of a book devoted to "everyday words" in the nineteenth century, but to my mind the best chapter in the book is principally about Jane Austen. It pays attention to a cluster of words in the novels–"attentions," "particular" and "general"–from an epistemological point of view, one that distinguishes Farina's perspective throughout the book. Providing us with a valuable sketch of the progress of pragmatism in the eighteenth century (constituting a worthwhile contribution to the intellectual history of that period in relation to the rise of the novel), Farina offers acute commentary on Jane Austen's fine calibrations of the "particular" and the "general," going beyond Byron's Alexander "Suwarrow, who but saw things in the gross–/ Being much too gross to see them in detail" (Don Juan VII, 77) to achieve a razor edge of balance between these binaries. He convincingly proposes this as one source of her universal appeal as a novelist. Everything is right in this chapter–the choice of relatively unambiguous "everyday words" (at least, through their pairing in opposition), the firm grounding in scholarship, the close reading of the relevant texts. Alas, this [End Page 185] is not everywhere the case. The very first chapter, for instance, entitled "Darwin's View from Todgers's: 'A decided turn' for Character and Common Words," fails to convince. It seeks to establish a connection between the repeated use of the word "turn" in the enumeration of Todgers's lodgers–"a gentleman of a sporting turn," "of a debating turn," or of "a smoking turn," etc.–and Darwin's overtly quite different use of the word in expressions like "may well turn the nicely-balanced scale in the struggle of life," or "let us now turn to the nectar-feeding insects"–and, I believe, fails. Although Farina partly redeems himself at the epistemological level again–the comparison between Darwin and Dickens as classifiers and taxonomists of different species within a genus is apposite, for example–there is much vagueness and imprecision in this chapter. Paying attention to "everyday words" seems at times to imply a rejection of analytic close reading, and, concomitantly, something like tone deafness to Dickensian humor. The comparison he makes between the Todgers bachelors and Odysseus the "man of many turns" can surely only make sense as mock-epic, but he solemnly proclaims that they achieve the same "versatility and variety collectively." Nowhere does he seem to investigate the humorous primary meaning and connotation of Dickens's "turn" here–that these are wannabes who dabble in separate favorite hobby-horses (thoroughly traditional in its descent from Sterne etc.) and are very remote from Darwin in every respect except the purely formal resemblance between collections of species. A much better chapter on Dickens, belonging for the most part amongst the good parts of the egg, concerns the conditional analogy "as if." I have long looked forward to reading an in-depth discussion of this quintessential Dickensian phrase, and...

The descent of nations: social evolutionary theory, modernism and ethno‐symbolism

AbstractThis article explores the use of a revised conception of social evolutionary theory towards an understanding of nationalism. First, I review the debate between ethno‐symbolism and modernism, through the lens of the Warwick Debate between Gellner and Smith, arguing that both are partly right. Secondly, I outline what the revised conception of social evolution is looking first at its traditional conception before outlining a Darwinian view of social evolutionary theory. Finally, I examine how Darwinian social evolutionary theory can help fruitfully bring the ethno‐symbolic and modernist perspectives together. This is done by a sustained engagement primarily with the theories of Anthony Smith and Ernest Gellner pointing to how Darwinian social evolutionary theory can provide a link between the two theories that makes them mutually supportive rather than opposed.

Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History

Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History

DARWIN AND CHRISTIANITY: TRUTH AND MYTH

AbstractIn recent years many historical myths about the relations between science and religion have been corrected but not always with sensitivity to different types and functions of “myth.” Correcting caricatures of Darwin's religious views and of the religious reaction to his theory have featured prominently in this myth‐busting. With the appearance in 2017 of A. N. Wilson's depiction of Darwin himself as a “mythmaker,” it is appropriate to reconsider where the myths lie in discourse concerning Darwin and Christianity. Problems with Wilson's account are identified and his provocative demeaning of Darwin is contrasted with an image gleaned from Darwin's friend and colleague George Romanes. The article concludes with a brief reference to the problem of suffering and to the work of Christopher Southgate.

The Ensemble Hypothesis of Human Cognitive Evolution

The Darwinian view is that human cognition is continuous with non-human cognition. Comparative mental abilities differ quantitatively but not qualitatively. A predominant alternative hypothesis is that language qualitatively separates human beings and other primates. The ensemble hypothesis examined here suggests that language is but one of five human capacities that produce a qualitatively unique form of cognition because of their interactions with each other. Each one taken separately has a likely precursor in non-human cognition, but taken together, their effects on cognition are not additive but interactive. The human mental ensemble proposed here includes an advanced executive attention component of working memory, a theory of mind augmenting social cognition, language, the ability to interpret information using inner speech and causal inference, and an episodic memory capable of mental time travel. Only in the evolution of Homo sapiens did these five components come together to enable non-linear changes in cognition on multiple fronts, resulting in the emergent form of cognition we experientially know and scientifically study today. Empirical evidence from behavioral studies, lesion studies, and studies involving neuroatypical populations provide tentative support for the hypothesis.