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Darwin's Psychology: The Theatre of Agency
Darwin has long been hailed as forefather to behavioural science, especially nowadays, with the growing popularity of evolutionary psychologies. Yet, until now, his contribution to the field of psychology has been somewhat understated.
This is the first book ever to examine the riches of what Darwin himself wrote about psychological matters. It unearths a Darwin new to contemporary science, whose first concern is the agency of organisms -- from which he derives both his psychology, and his theory of evolution.
A deep reading of Darwin's writings on climbing plants and babies, blushing and bower-birds, worms and facial movements, shows that, for Darwin, evolution does not explain everything about human action. Group-life and culture are also keys, whether we discuss the dynamics of conscience or the dramas of desire. Thus his treatment of facial actions sets out from the anatomy and physiology of human facial movements, and shows how these gain meanings through their recognition by others. A discussion of blushing extends his theory to the way reading others' expressions rebounds on ourselves -- I care about how I think you read me. This dynamic proves central to how Darwin understands sexual desire, the production of conscience and of social standards through group dynamics, and the role of culture in human agency.
Presenting a new Darwin to science, and showing how widely Darwin's understanding of evolution and agency has been misunderstood and misrepresented in biology and the social sciences, this important new book lights a new way forward for those who want to build psychology on the foundation of evolutionary biology.
This is the first book ever to examine the riches of what Darwin himself wrote about psychological matters. It unearths a Darwin new to contemporary science, whose first concern is the agency of organisms -- from which he derives both his psychology, and his theory of evolution.
A deep reading of Darwin's writings on climbing plants and babies, blushing and bower-birds, worms and facial movements, shows that, for Darwin, evolution does not explain everything about human action. Group-life and culture are also keys, whether we discuss the dynamics of conscience or the dramas of desire. Thus his treatment of facial actions sets out from the anatomy and physiology of human facial movements, and shows how these gain meanings through their recognition by others. A discussion of blushing extends his theory to the way reading others' expressions rebounds on ourselves -- I care about how I think you read me. This dynamic proves central to how Darwin understands sexual desire, the production of conscience and of social standards through group dynamics, and the role of culture in human agency.
Presenting a new Darwin to science, and showing how widely Darwin's understanding of evolution and agency has been misunderstood and misrepresented in biology and the social sciences, this important new book lights a new way forward for those who want to build psychology on the foundation of evolutionary biology.
432 pages, Hardcover
Published October 8, 2020
17 people want to read
About the author
Ben Bradley
33 books1 followerBen Bradley, Professor Emeritus, Charles Sturt University
Ben Bradley was educated at Oxford and Edinburgh, where, with Colwyn Trevarthen, he began his pioneering research on infancy. He later migrated to Australia, where he was appointed Foundation Professor of Psychology at Charles Sturt University in 1998-and where he is now Professor Emeritus. He wrote the widely-translated Visions of Infancy (1989), and Psychology and Experience (2005). Amongst many research highlights are studies: with Jane Selby and Michael Smithson, proving young infants can participate in social groups; and, on the literary structure of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). His film Darwin's Babies, received its world premiere at Darwin 2009: A Celebration of the bicentenary of Darwin's Birth in Cambridge, UK
Ben Bradley was educated at Oxford and Edinburgh, where, with Colwyn Trevarthen, he began his pioneering research on infancy. He later migrated to Australia, where he was appointed Foundation Professor of Psychology at Charles Sturt University in 1998-and where he is now Professor Emeritus. He wrote the widely-translated Visions of Infancy (1989), and Psychology and Experience (2005). Amongst many research highlights are studies: with Jane Selby and Michael Smithson, proving young infants can participate in social groups; and, on the literary structure of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). His film Darwin's Babies, received its world premiere at Darwin 2009: A Celebration of the bicentenary of Darwin's Birth in Cambridge, UK
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 18, 2022
Overall this is the best book on evolutionary psychology I've read so far.
First of all, I'd like to thank the author for doing the reading and research I would have done, had I not found this book in early 2021. My awareness of several things made me want to read Darwin's writings on psychology, which I assumed existed only in his correspondence. For weeks I had the Darwin Correspondence Project open as a tab on my browser, while being preoccupied with the Ancient Greek Economy in preparation for studying economic history at university. After seeing an article about the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment on Darwin and reading a chapter on Karl Popper's psychological approach, which Popper calls "active Darwinism", it intrigued me to know what Darwin himself wrote on the topic and what place he occupies in the history of empirical psychology, including moral psychology, pioneered by Bernard Mandeville in the early 18th century (a big influencer of Scottish thought), avoiding or debunking --depending on the evasiveness of the styles of authors-- an absolutely static (anti-evolutionary) Christian morality.
Thankfully, I typed in "Darwin psychology" on the Blackwell's bookshop website, finding my project had been made a whole lot easier by Ben Bradley, who fully deserved my gratitude, for that matter. To know Darwin had a very central interest in the human moral and rational capacity that belies his reasoning on human and animal evolution, with which he passionately critiques biblical and/or clerical authority, has greatly surprised me --in a good way. Furthermore I was quickly able to answer my query: Darwin's psychology is definitely "active", leaving little justification for Popper's attribute when applied to the name of Darwinism. This equivalence was foreshadowed in my reading of Gerhard Medicus' book "Was uns Menschen verbindet" (unreadable in English, IMHO), yet never established until discovering Darwin's writings through Ben Bradley, learning about Darwin's book "Expressions", indeed, by reading a few letters of Darwin myself.
The first significant thing about this book is Ben Bradley's radical institutional criticism of today's psychology and how for the last hundred years it managed to be a field ignorant of Darwin's bio-psychological conclusions, while taking on views quite opposed to behavioural science based on biological observation, preferring a wildly speculative approach contrary to the facts about human and animal agency provided by Darwin. This criticism astonishingly applies to current evolutionary psychology, as shown by Bradley, who traces resonances from each topic discussed by Darwin, like roots sprouting from Darwin's theoretical tree into the fertile theories of a number of influential thinkers, but stopping short almost every time, because almost everyone in modern psychology failed to take notice.
The second thing I'd like to note is the satisfyingly logical structure of the book as a whole. It tells a holistic story, every chapter of which has its own importance, its own message and thoughtful illustrations that help bring home that message.
What did he miss? In my opinion, the political thought of Darwin is missing some more depth. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's nothing about which one could go into depth. I have read some of Darwin's letters touching on slavery and democracy, they are very shallow and unsubstantive. I had hoped there was more to be exploited. Apparently, it seems, Darwin let himself be influenced by Hooker on some weird theories about aristocratic "selection" mentioned to Darwin in letters and incorporated by the latter in print, which were practically baseless. Darwin remained ignorant until death about matters of political freedom, but he was aware of that and refrained from talking bullshit (joking about it with De la Candolle, the Genevan plant evolutionist, in their correspondence; who --interestingly-- finds Darwin's psychological theories entirely original and convincing).
But what would interest me is to find out more about Darwin's interpretation of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, because their theories of a political economy were connected with their theories of human nature and morality. It might be possible to make a direct connection between Darwin's psychology and Scottish Enlightenment psychology (or their Political Economy and Darwin's ecological "economy of nature") simply by understanding both sides. I have only elements of such an interpretation (some of which provided by Ben Bradley in Darwin's Psychology and some inspired by F.A. Hayek), but no systematic analysis, which I would like to complete by reading The Cambridge Companion of the Scottish Enlightenment (which I fear could be too reductionist, though it's in its second edition, of 2019) as well as an article from the year 2000 by Alain Marciano and Maud Pélissier called "The Influence of Scottish Enlightenment on Darwin's Theory of Cultural Evolution (with an interpretation of Darwin's theory of cultural evolution that, as I understand, is incompatible with Ben Bradley's interpretation).
Concerning my own discovery about Popper's proximity to Darwin's psychology, this resonance Ben Bradley somewhat misses. I say somewhat, because the last chapter on the testability of Darwin's psychological theory does invoke Popper's book "Objective Knowledge"; only that there is much more to Popper's contributions to science than Ben Bradley has realised; Gerhard Medicus, instead, this time, deserves credit for mentioning Popper's late works on psychology; yet it is Arne Friemuth Petersen, in chapter 3 of the Cambridge Companion to Popper, who has researched how Popper came to those conclusions from early on, independently from Darwin, and later, after he researched biology in more depth (around the late 50s, it seems to me, maybe earlier), converging with Darwin without fully knowing to what extent Darwinism was "active" or "phenotype-led", as Bradley calls it.
What have I learned? I have learned how to fully understand Charles Darwin's theory of evolution as layed out in his books, only one of which I have read --Origins-- when I was a bit too inexperienced to understand what to take away from this flood of facts. Now I know: the theater of agency.
First of all, I'd like to thank the author for doing the reading and research I would have done, had I not found this book in early 2021. My awareness of several things made me want to read Darwin's writings on psychology, which I assumed existed only in his correspondence. For weeks I had the Darwin Correspondence Project open as a tab on my browser, while being preoccupied with the Ancient Greek Economy in preparation for studying economic history at university. After seeing an article about the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment on Darwin and reading a chapter on Karl Popper's psychological approach, which Popper calls "active Darwinism", it intrigued me to know what Darwin himself wrote on the topic and what place he occupies in the history of empirical psychology, including moral psychology, pioneered by Bernard Mandeville in the early 18th century (a big influencer of Scottish thought), avoiding or debunking --depending on the evasiveness of the styles of authors-- an absolutely static (anti-evolutionary) Christian morality.
Thankfully, I typed in "Darwin psychology" on the Blackwell's bookshop website, finding my project had been made a whole lot easier by Ben Bradley, who fully deserved my gratitude, for that matter. To know Darwin had a very central interest in the human moral and rational capacity that belies his reasoning on human and animal evolution, with which he passionately critiques biblical and/or clerical authority, has greatly surprised me --in a good way. Furthermore I was quickly able to answer my query: Darwin's psychology is definitely "active", leaving little justification for Popper's attribute when applied to the name of Darwinism. This equivalence was foreshadowed in my reading of Gerhard Medicus' book "Was uns Menschen verbindet" (unreadable in English, IMHO), yet never established until discovering Darwin's writings through Ben Bradley, learning about Darwin's book "Expressions", indeed, by reading a few letters of Darwin myself.
The first significant thing about this book is Ben Bradley's radical institutional criticism of today's psychology and how for the last hundred years it managed to be a field ignorant of Darwin's bio-psychological conclusions, while taking on views quite opposed to behavioural science based on biological observation, preferring a wildly speculative approach contrary to the facts about human and animal agency provided by Darwin. This criticism astonishingly applies to current evolutionary psychology, as shown by Bradley, who traces resonances from each topic discussed by Darwin, like roots sprouting from Darwin's theoretical tree into the fertile theories of a number of influential thinkers, but stopping short almost every time, because almost everyone in modern psychology failed to take notice.
The second thing I'd like to note is the satisfyingly logical structure of the book as a whole. It tells a holistic story, every chapter of which has its own importance, its own message and thoughtful illustrations that help bring home that message.
What did he miss? In my opinion, the political thought of Darwin is missing some more depth. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's nothing about which one could go into depth. I have read some of Darwin's letters touching on slavery and democracy, they are very shallow and unsubstantive. I had hoped there was more to be exploited. Apparently, it seems, Darwin let himself be influenced by Hooker on some weird theories about aristocratic "selection" mentioned to Darwin in letters and incorporated by the latter in print, which were practically baseless. Darwin remained ignorant until death about matters of political freedom, but he was aware of that and refrained from talking bullshit (joking about it with De la Candolle, the Genevan plant evolutionist, in their correspondence; who --interestingly-- finds Darwin's psychological theories entirely original and convincing).
But what would interest me is to find out more about Darwin's interpretation of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, because their theories of a political economy were connected with their theories of human nature and morality. It might be possible to make a direct connection between Darwin's psychology and Scottish Enlightenment psychology (or their Political Economy and Darwin's ecological "economy of nature") simply by understanding both sides. I have only elements of such an interpretation (some of which provided by Ben Bradley in Darwin's Psychology and some inspired by F.A. Hayek), but no systematic analysis, which I would like to complete by reading The Cambridge Companion of the Scottish Enlightenment (which I fear could be too reductionist, though it's in its second edition, of 2019) as well as an article from the year 2000 by Alain Marciano and Maud Pélissier called "The Influence of Scottish Enlightenment on Darwin's Theory of Cultural Evolution (with an interpretation of Darwin's theory of cultural evolution that, as I understand, is incompatible with Ben Bradley's interpretation).
Concerning my own discovery about Popper's proximity to Darwin's psychology, this resonance Ben Bradley somewhat misses. I say somewhat, because the last chapter on the testability of Darwin's psychological theory does invoke Popper's book "Objective Knowledge"; only that there is much more to Popper's contributions to science than Ben Bradley has realised; Gerhard Medicus, instead, this time, deserves credit for mentioning Popper's late works on psychology; yet it is Arne Friemuth Petersen, in chapter 3 of the Cambridge Companion to Popper, who has researched how Popper came to those conclusions from early on, independently from Darwin, and later, after he researched biology in more depth (around the late 50s, it seems to me, maybe earlier), converging with Darwin without fully knowing to what extent Darwinism was "active" or "phenotype-led", as Bradley calls it.
What have I learned? I have learned how to fully understand Charles Darwin's theory of evolution as layed out in his books, only one of which I have read --Origins-- when I was a bit too inexperienced to understand what to take away from this flood of facts. Now I know: the theater of agency.
Displaying 1 of 1 review