The Critical Test

Darwin used observations of infants as evidence for his evolutionary hypotheses about human agency, in three ways. First, human actions that appear fully formed at the start of life, like sucking, were deemed reflexes or instinctive fruits of evolution. Second, infant actions show in a clear and simple form the foundations of human agency. Third, when there is no direct way of proving how complex forms of human action evolved, their growth in infancy provides a working model for natural, simple-to-complex development that is analogous to evolution. Two texts exploit these arguments: Expression (1872) and ‘A Biographical Sketch of an Infant’ (1877). The former concentrates on crying and weeping. The latter focuses on some of the distinctively human forms of agency described in Descent. A key omission in the evidence Darwin’s infant observations provide for his theory is a test of infants’ capacity for group-interaction. Evidence from such a test is critical to acceptance of Descent’s thesis that adaptations to group-life ground the most distinctive forms of human behaviour. Only recently have scientists sought this evidence. From these we know that preverbal infants do have a capacity for ‘groupness.’ Darwin’s observations of young children show a robustness and prescience borne out by contemporary research.

Agency and Its Effects

Throughout his life Darwin collected and investigated a host of creatures from a wide range of relatively simple species—zoophytes, sea pens, corals, worms, insects, and a diversity of plants. These studies aimed to answer fundamental questions about the characteristics of life, the nature of individuality, reproduction, and the implications of agency. Central amongst these implications were interdependencies between organisms, with their conspecifics, with different species, and with their conditions of life. In this way Darwin built up a picture of the living world as a theatre of agency. The derivation of evolution from this living theatre—which he called ‘the struggle for existence’—gave Darwin’s vision of nature its distinctiveness. While twentieth-century biology sidelined the agency of organisms in favour of the gene, the twenty-first century has returned to Darwin’s view that evolution is led by organisms (or ‘phenotypes’)—with implications for psychology differing considerably from contemporary evolutionary psychologies.

Conclusion

This book gives readers a point of access to Darwin’s writings about psychological matters. This concluding chapter reviews Darwin’s concept of agency: stressing the interrelations that result from agency; the laws that describe its long term effects (evolution by natural selection and sexual selection); and the ways it structures Darwin’s approach to the study of non-verbal expressions and other features of human sociality. I then examine the caution with which Darwin regarded what the Victorians called psychology, as represented by the works of Bain, Spencer, and Lewes—the point of difference upon which Darwin insisted being the priority he gave to observation, as opposed to definitional niceties and deduction. I show that Darwin’s prioritization of observation contrasts with the ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ which has given rise to a flight from reality in psychology, both practically—from the observable world we all know, into the laboratory—and theoretically, toward a rendition of the visible world in terms of invisible inner processes. I suggest that several current moves to reframe psychological research, and evolutionary theory, are converging on the place where Darwin’s treatment of agency has been standing for a hundred and fifty years. If pursued further today, Darwin’s approach to the study of agency would restore significance to the natural world, and the lives of its inhabitants.

Culture

The concepts of civilization and culture play a structuring role in Descent’s discussion of human agency. The evolutionary history Darwin described found continuity between animals and proto-humans. Thereafter, human history took on the idealized form of a single stairway rising in stages. Despite his enlightened opposition to slavery, Darwin placed on the stairs’ bottom step ‘the lowest savage,’ pictured in a disturbingly derogatory way. On the top step were certain nineteenth-century Europeans. Descent does not hold the progress of civilization to be inevitable, however. Indeed, Darwin holds natural selection to play a subordinate role in shaping contemporary human agency. While the foundations of human action are laid by our descent from animals, agency is specified—for good or ill—by the social customs and institutions which structure the development and group-life of a given individual: evolution proposes, culture disposes. This formula is fleshed out through Descent’s discussions of language use, moral agency, religious belief, virtue, and aesthetics. Resonances are explored with perspectives on social organization in Social Darwinism, Evolutionary Psychology, and theories of cultural evolution.

Being Read

Blushing is unique to humans. So Darwin could not show it had evolved by studying its occurrence in animals. Neither do infants blush. Hence, unlike crying, it was not easily shown to be innate. Furthermore its triggers appear to be immaterial. Expression solves the problem of why and when people blush by hypothesizing a reflexive process of reading: I blush because I read you as reading and judging me—my appearance, or conduct. This dynamic of meta-recognition or self-attention requires the construction of a complex theory of human agency, involving: a dual self; the operation of innate sympathy; a physiological hypothesis; and an evolutionary derivation. Meta-recognition underpinned Darwin’s understanding of sexual attraction, group cohesion, and conscience. It also served as a formative influence on later psychologies of symbolic interaction.

The Art and Craft of Describing

The greatest contrast between Darwin’s and today’s psychologies concerns method. A century of the idealization of controlled experiments in the behavioural sciences has led many to discount without due consideration the highly refined discipline of observation and description at which Darwin excelled. Darwin’s lifelong labours as a naturalist grounded both his evolutionary theory and his psychology. The august tradition of natural history provided him with many of the concepts, practices, and attitudes that, in his own eyes, made his approach to psychological matters incompatible with that of more widely celebrated Victorian psychologists. This chapter outlines and contextualizes the practices which framed Darwin’s scientific investigations, whether of plants, animals, or human beings. These challenge some of the modernist truisms which circulate in contemporary psychology, forcing a reconsideration of the places of observation and description therein.

Sex, Difference, and Desire

The parts of The Descent of Man dealing with sexual desire and difference have sparked more controversy and misrepresentation than any of Darwin’s other publications. Crucial to Descent’s arguments is the derivation of sexual selection from the dramas of display and desire observed among animals. The book describes four plotlines structuring the theatre of sexual agency in animals, each having different implications for the roles played by males and females. When Descent extends these plotlines to humans, they alter and modulate into an even more varied array of scenarios, again, each with its own distinctive roles for women and men. A mirror-dynamic figures centrally in both animal and human sex—the need to recognize or predict others’ desires so as to act in a way to arouse them. However, several nodes of concern disturb Darwin’s presentation of human sex: tensions between his three epochs of human history; Victorian racial politics; Victorian ideas about male and female superiority; and the imperatives of propriety. The chapter illustrates some of the muddles that result from these concerns, including: confirmation bias; aporia in argument; grammatical kinks; and overlap between sexual and natural selection. Finally, the chapter instances some of the main resonances in more recent scholarship of Darwin’s discussion of sex, instancing debates in feminism, about anthropomorphism, in evolutionary biology, and evolutionary psychology.

Introduction

Twentieth-century psychology took a modernist form, giving Darwin’s approach to agency an unscientific look. Meanwhile, twentieth-century biologists were reconstructing evolutionary theory to highlight molecular genetics, reducing Darwin’s far-reaching writings about the living world to one grand idea: natural selection. Advances in biology today, which ground evolutionary thinking in a theory of the organism (or phenotype), find new wisdom in Darwin’s vision of the world. This vision has two axes. One describes the interwoven lives of the creatures who fill a given habitat, making interdependence central—a theatre of agency or ‘struggle for life.’ The other is what that struggle effects over time periods measured in millions of years, namely: evolution. Like his law of natural selection, Darwin’s psychology drew primarily on his understandings of the theatre of agency, whether discussing the actions of humans, animals, or plants—as the chapters of this book will show.

Life in Groups

From its earliest days, Darwin’s theory marked off social from non-social animals. As his ideas developed, he suggested that several processes, would produce natural selection in social animals, which did not occur in their non-social cousins. These included processes based on: blood-relationships (kin selection); dependable reciprocity; and group selection. Complementing his view of evolution as promoting increasing inter-communication between parts of the hominid brain, group dynamics provide the key to understanding the evolution of humanity’s most distinctive and complex forms of agency, according to Descent. While the book deals with a range of the ‘highest’ forms of human agency, including the origins of language, it focuses most on conscience and moral action. It develops a complex theory of conscience in which several different characters play parts: the self-gratifier; the praise-seeker; an arbitrary monitor; a supremely rational judge; and an impulsive hero. Darwin’s group-based approach to understanding humanity was an inspiration to Freud and has widespread resonances in later scholarship—some discordant, many harmonious.

Reading Expression

As early as the 1830s, Darwin nominated the study of non-verbal expression as the most convincing way to demonstrate that human agency had animal origins. His book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), offers us the best point of access to his human psychology. Central to its approach is interdependency. While the language which frames Expression has proved ambiguous, its overarching argument, and the five methods of research it exploits, forge a strong link between facial displays and the ways they are read or recognized by other people. His book argues that expressions themselves have no evolutionary purpose—they are not designed to communicate, or to reveal inner emotional states. It proposes three principles which have governed such evolution—none of which depend on natural selection. Being non-communicative, any significance expressions have comes from the parts they have played in the dramas of social life. Expression would today be said to proffer an ‘externalist’ or ‘situational’ account of the relations between expressions and emotions. The book also bears on contemporary debates about the universality of expressions and emotions.