Although it’s almost entirely off-topic here, this is an excitingly intelligent article, far better than other Aeon articles that Firefox has seen fit to recommend to me in recent months (the quality of Firefox’s “Pocket” recommendations seems to have gone down since they started):
In On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin draws a picture of the long sweep of evolution, from the beginning of life, playing out along two fundamental axes: physical and mental. Body and mind. All living beings, not just some, evolve by natural selection in both ‘corporeal and mental endowments’, he writes. When psychology has accepted this view of nature, Darwin predicts, the science of mind ‘will be based on a new foundation’, the necessarily gradual evolutionary development ‘of each mental power and capacity’.
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The Copernican revolution turned on a single shift in perspective. For 1,400 years, European scholars agreed with ordinary folk that Earth is the still point around which the heavens revolve. The Ptolemaic model of the cosmos had set the Sun, Moon, stars and planets moving in nested crystalline spheres around Earth. In 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus published a detailed alternative that replaced Earth with the Sun. By setting it in motion around the Sun with other celestial ‘wanderers’, our planet was dethroned as the cosmic centre, and modern astronomy was born.
Similarly, Darwin’s radical idea dethrones human and other brains from their ‘intuitively obvious’ position at the centre of the (Western) cognitive universe. In their place, Darwin sets an evolving, cognising being struggling to survive, thrive and reproduce in predictably and unpredictably changing conditions. This single shift of perspective – from a brain-centred focus, where Homo sapiens is the benchmark, to the facts of biology and ecology – has profound implications. The payoff is a more accurate and productive account of an inescapable natural phenomenon critical to understanding how we became – and what it means to be – human.
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As a PhD student in Asian Studies 21 years ago, my research focused on four Buddhist propositions that I aimed to subject to forensic Western philosophical and scientific analysis. Implicit in these propositions is a highly sophisticated Buddhist view of mind: what it is, how it works, what it does under benighted conditions, what it can do with training and practice. I looked for a Western comparator in what was then called cognitive science (in the singular) and found… nothing.
Four cartons of books and a laptop full of articles later, I had a collection of loose, dissonant ideas, and related streams of argument, none of which provided purchase on the experience of having a mind or its role in behaviour. As the neurobiologist Steven Rose observed in 1998 (and nothing much has changed), neuroscience had generated oceans of data but no theory to make sense of them. At the dawn of the 21st century, this struck me as outrageous. It still does.
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Biology and evolution, which I assumed must be of utmost importance, were largely absent; so were physiology, emotion and motivation. Researchers who believed the study of animal behaviour had something useful to offer cognitive science were just beginning to publish in the field and were not warmly welcomed. ‘Embodied’ and ‘situated’ cognition were gaining traction but were then more an acknowledgement of the bleeding obvious than a coherent framework. Without criteria for identification, attributions of biological cognition were all over the taxonomic shop.
I still needed a comparator, however. I decided to investigate whether biology held the answers I assumed it must. I opted to start at the rootstock of the tree of life – bacteria – to see if anything conceivably cognitive was going on; 20 years on, I am still mining this rich seam.
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Basal cognition – the study of cognitive capacities in non-neural and simple neural organisms (to which my PhD research led) – is in its infancy as a field. However, evidence already shows that evolution had laid a solid foundation of capacities typically considered cognitive well before nervous systems appeared: about 500-650 million years ago. Perception, memory, valence, learning, decision-making, anticipation, communication – all once thought the preserve of humankind – are found in a wide variety of living things, including bacteria, unicellular eukaryotes, plants, fungi, non-neuronal animals, and animals with simple nervous systems and brains.
No amount of positive evidence for basal cognition will persuade a diehard neurocentric, however. (What do you mean by memory, valence, decision-making? Isn’t it a matter of definition?) Darwin’s radical idea must solve problems that cognitivism cannot. The Copernican model didn’t become a revolution until the Ptolemaic model confronted findings it couldn’t predict or explain, but the heliocentric model could. This required Tycho Brahe’s meticulous, comprehensive astronomical observations, Johannes Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Galileo Galilei’s theorising based on optically improved observations, and Isaac Newton’s law of gravitation, which built on the previous work (‘the shoulders of giants’). It took time: 144 years.
Darwin’s thesis of the continuity of mental evolution is older than that but lies much closer to the bone of human identity. After all, ‘wise’ is in our Latin species designation (the ‘sapiens’ in H sapiens). Possession of an intelligent, rational mind is supposed to be humankind’s defining characteristic. Accepting a Sun-centred cosmos is as nothing compared with accepting a life-centred psychology. We might not have a choice, however.
Cognitive neuroscience currently faces several challenges that must be overcome to understand how brains and nervous systems work, a prerequisite to understanding how cognitive capacities are generated by such systems. Three are sketched below. What seems needed in all three cases are simpler model systems, from which it’s more likely that fundamental discoveries about the drivers of organisms’ interactions with their surroundings will be made. Such discoveries might lead to general principles that can be tested in more complex organisms.
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What is needed is a shift in perspective. In The Brain from Inside Out (2019), Buzsáki argues that many of the seemingly intractable problems that neuroscience faces arise entirely from ‘human-constructed ideas’ about how the mind/brain must work, based on philosophical and scientific conjecture over millennia, which are then shoe-horned on to observed brain activity. This is what he calls the ‘outside-in’ perspective: ‘the dominant framework of mainstream neuroscience, which suggests that the brain’s task is to perceive and represent the world, process information, and decide how to respond … in an “outside-in” manner’. This is what Maturana calls ‘observer dependence’, from the observer’s point of view, not the observed system’s. The spontaneously active brain has its own logic, of which almost nothing is understood. Deciphering this logic from the perspective of the system generating the activity – from ‘inside-out’ – should be the primary goal of neuroscience, Buzsáki argues, not mapping human assumptions on to neuronal observations.
I made a similar distinction 15 years ago. I called the view of cognition grounded in ideas originating in human experience and reflection the anthropogenic (human-born) approach, what Buzsáki calls ‘outside-in’. Although cognitivism asserts that cognition can be realised in different physical forms (including robots), the approach remains anthropogenic because it derives from the human capacity to compute numbers. The contrast case is what I call the biogenic (life-born) approach, which privileges the biological mode of existence as the source of cognition and entails the ‘inside-out’ view.
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At the end of Origin, Darwin describes a ‘tangled bank’ where the laws of natural selection play out in the evolution and current behaviour of plants and animals that appear so different from one another as to be utterly unrelated, but are not, and which depend upon one another for life. At a deep level, Darwin suggests, all living things are related. We know that now in ways Darwin could only imagine, because we have incomparably more sophisticated tools and a far richer understanding of how evolution works that includes developmental plasticity, epigenetics and whole-genome change, which provides – in addition to mutations of single genes – heritable variation for natural selection to act upon.
‘There is grandeur in this view of life,’ Darwin writes, and he is correct. We can now see ourselves – with scientific justification and with no need for mystical overlay or anthropomorphism – in a daffodil, an earthworm, perhaps even a bacterium, as well as a chimpanzee. We share common origins. We share genes. We share many of the mechanisms by which we become familiar with and value the worlds that our senses make. We are all struggling for existence, each in our own way, dependent on one another, striving to survive, to thrive and (for some) to reproduce, on this planet we share – which is not the centre of the Universe, or even the solar system, but is the only home any one of us has.
Just as we have come to think of our bodies as evolved from simpler forms of body, it is time to embrace Darwin’s radical idea that our minds, too, are evolved from much simpler minds. Body and mind evolved together and will continue to do so.
(There’s no mention of Freud or Jung in the article, but I think they’d have found it interesting.)