Psychogenesis in Evolution and History
摘要
This chapter proposes a criterion for critically addressing the nature-culture duality, replacing it with a non-dual conception in which evolution, which includes organisms capable of experience and learning, is the matrix of culture, of artifact production and of the start of history. The thread that makes it possible to understand this continuity is psychogenesis, that is, adaptive, innovative behavioral processes. Psychogenetic processes are mediated by biological and social conditions and in turn participate in evolution (by organic selection) and in the production of artifacts, action systems and cultural meanings. The proposal is supported by recent developments in epigenetics, comparative psychology’s critique of instinct, recent findings about animal cultures and the long tradition of genetic (developmental) psychology. It includes a critical review of the usual conception of organic selection as a mere transformation of habit into instinct. It also includes a critique of materialistic-monistic conceptions of biology and the causal-deterministic explanations of behavioral processes. Psychogenetic processes are not determined unidirectionally by the genome, the brain, the environment, cultural habits and norms, language, power, etc., nor by the “sum” of them all, but contains—mediated by all of them—its own empirical dynamics of determination. As an alternative to deterministic explanations, the chapter offers a distinction between and an integration of probabilistic and (psycho)genetic explanations. After the epigenetic revolution, the articulation of evolutionary biology with the behavioral and social sciences by incorporating a genetic point of view seems a little more feasible.