Teleonomy, a redefinition of purpose

In the previous chapter we discussed the release of behaviour patterns in terms of general control mechanisms without considering how and why such mechanisms might have evolved. In his preface to the 1965 edition of Darwin's book Lorenz cites as a key to modern behavioural biology ‘the fact … that behaviour patterns are just as conservatively and reliably characters of species as are the forms … of bodily structures; … (they) unite the members … of taxonomic units … (and) can become “vestigial” or “rudimentary” just as the latter can. Or on losing one function they may develop another.’

The idea of purpose has for many years been problematic in biology. However, it is possible to discuss some classes of purpose in biology from a scientific point of view – by referring to ‘purposes’ which specifically exclude the existence of any purposive entity as their source. One such alternative is ‘function’ as used by Lorenz.

What is an emotion?

Emotion is a striking feature of human experience. In any one day we may experience fear, love, pity, rage and many more. Emotion colours our everyday thoughts and actions and generates most of the behaviour which makes our friends and neighbours interesting. Much of Art and Literature is devoted to exploring its subtleties and, at a more practical level, emotions sway events in politics and commerce to a frightening extent. Psychology, the science of the mind, might therefore be expected to give pride of place to emotion as a topic of concern.

Unfortunately, there has never been any clear agreement as to what the word means. Amongst philosophers, ‘emotion has almost always played an inferior role … often as an antagonist to logic and reason … Along with this general demeaning of emotion in philosophy comes either a wholesale neglect or at least retail distortion in the analysis of emotions’ (Solomon, 1977, cited by Lyons, 1980, p ix). Psychologists have followed this lead.

Why do physiological changes accompany emotion?

The work of Cannon discussed in Chapter 1 centred on pain and fear as ‘great emotions’. It is also now obvious that ‘in the natural state and particularly in subhuman species, the aggression, attachment and sexual patterns are usually accompanied by autonomic discharge …. The same functional stimuli activate the behaviour pattern and the autonomic nervous system arousal’ (Mandler, 1975, p.136). Cannon suggested, essentially, that most such changes can be viewed as physiological preparations for the situation facing the animal. Even with the broader selection of emotions presented by Mandler, this view is unlikely to be contentious in either mechanistic or teleonomic terms.

Let us consider mechanism first. Particularly with examples like the let-down reflex or salivation (Section 2.4) to guide us we can accept that certain stimuli or the interpretation of those stimuli could result in activity in either the autonomic nervous system or glands under nervous control. The release of compounds such as adrenaline or direct action of the autonomic nervous system can then produce extensive changes in the animal's physiology which can involve increased muscular power, decreased bleeding, etc.

Teleonomy, physiological change and feelings

Chapter 5 discussed a variety of physiological changes which can accompany emotions and which, we argued, adjust the organism's bodily systems in preparation for classes of action frequently required when that emotion is present. Chapter 6 concluded that such changes are not merely of physiological utility but can also play a controlling role in the psychology of emotion. As was noted, the presence of some compound such as adrenaline, or the changes in particular organ systems induced by such compounds, could come, through further evolution, to act as controllers of psychological states. Why, teleonomically speaking, they should do so is, however, not at all clear – and is quite likely to involve rather different reasons for different internal changes and different emotions.

In the present chapter I will discuss a particular behavioural phenomenon, the partial reinforcement extinction effect, and its underlying control. I will present a provisional account of the teleonomy of this phenomenon which will, I hope, show that reasonable teleonomic accounts of the psychological role of physiological changes can be constructed.

Dialectical and non-dialectical interactions in emotion

The previous chapters have, as far as possible, treated the various components of emotion in isolation. One reason for doing this has been simplicity. However, a more important reason has been that, given the likely evolution of emotional systems (Chapters 2, 3), there is no guarantee that the individual ‘components of emotion’ do not have entirely separate control systems from each other. Such separation would not require us to give up emotion as a concept, since teleonomy alone could provide a conceptual link between different components. However, the normal use of the word emotion implies some direct connection between the different components. This chapter, therefore, considers interactions between those aspects of emotion which have been separated by the previous chapters. Throughout, it should be borne in mind that the usual co-occurrence of such components is no justification for treating them as linked. As a corollary to this it should also be remembered that mechanistic links between components of one emotion do not imply mechanistic links between the same components of some other emotion.

In the west of Sicily, at Segesta, there is an ancient Greek temple of extraordinary perfection. This elaborately designed structure, and the nearby theatre, were put up, at great cost in work and stone, by the people of a small and poor community. Both were results of millennia of learning to make and to use tools, and of centuries of devising methods of measurement and calculation. These skills had been transmitted, from generation to generation, by teaching and imitation and by the use of languages that conveyed both facts and abstract ideas.

The temple at Segesta can be matched by the works of human communities in all lands and in every period. Even before agriculture began, our ancestors made carvings in rock and paintings on stone or bark; and the gatherer–hunters that remain still do so. As well, they compose or repeat legends and myths. Members of the species that produce these monuments and myths also describe themselves. As A.A. Kwapong has said, ‘Every generation and every people have their own mythology on the origins and nature of man.’

This book examines current myths that are sometimes held out as explaining the whole of human existence, including the temples we build, the pictures we paint and the stories we invent about ourselves.

The self portraits derived from Darwinism reduce us to automata. An alternative movement, associated with the name of Pavlov, reduces our intelligence to mechanical ‘conditioning’. An influential successor to ‘Pavlovism’ explains all human action by the effects of rewards and punishments. These images pay attention only to behavior: feelings and even thoughts are excluded. They owe their impact partly to being based on experimental findings. Experiments have shown how we can regulate some of the activities of laboratory mammals in cages. Similar methods have been recommended for controlling human beings.

Problems that behaviorists have tried to solve include mental illness, the treatment of criminals, the education of children, the management of employed persons, and the design of an ideal society. But all attempts at such behavioral engineering have eventually had to face the complexities of human beings as persons: we have not only ‘senses, affections, passions’ with which behavioral engineering cannot cope, but also the ability (however imperfectly developed) to reach conclusions by independent investigation and reasoned argument.

To be useful, the results of experiments have to be combined with our commonsense, everyday knowledge of ourselves and of our history. When this is done, experimental studies can enlarge our understanding of ourselves in our social lives and in our work and play.

‘Behavioural science’, we are told, ‘really knows so much about the natural history of aggression that it does become possible to make statements about the causes of much of its malfunctioning in man’. Moreover, ‘aggression … is an instinct like any other’, and ‘in human social behaviour, innate species-specific … response norms play a far greater role than is generally assumed’. These are statements from an influential popular work by K.Z. Lorenz. Similarly, Nikolaas Tinbergen, the principal founder of the modern science of animal behavior (ethology), states: ‘In order to understand what makes us go to war, we have to recognize that man behaves very much like a group-territorial species.’ In saying this he equates his own species with, for example, baboons, of which some groups occupy regions of African plains to the exclusion of other groups. Although – Tinbergen tells us – ‘we are forced to speculate’, nonetheless ‘comparison of present-day species can give us a deep insight, with a probability closely approaching certainty, into the evolutionary history of animal species.’

In the epigraph of Chapter 7 I quote the Sokratic question: is virtue innate in a person, or must it be acquired by experience? In the dialogue that follows, Plato turns to asking whether knowledge is innate, and concludes that, in a sense, it is. But for more than two centuries it has been more usual to reject the idea of a store of wisdom (or of original sin) available at birth. Sociobiological doctrine is in this respect exceptional.

The two images outlined in the present chapter try to explain how knowledge arises from experience. The first was designed to give a physiological account of behavior and even of the mind, and so was a development of the notion that the body is a machine. Physiologists have been successful because they study what can be directly observed: they measure heart rate, blood pressure, electrical changes in nerves, the rates of secretion of glands and much else. When learning was to be similarly studied, it was clearly learned behavior that could be recorded and measured.

The misanthropic theme in European thought can be illustrated from the words of a few powerful writers, whose views reappear, variously transformed, in current writings on human nature. I begin with the most remarkable of them all.

Ancient pessimism

The whole of western philosophy has been described as a series of footnotes to Plato; but even this understates his achievement. Plato wrote profoundly not only on a great range of philosophical questions, but also on history, anthropology, sociology and politics. K.R. Popper describes him as one of the first social scientists and ‘by far the most influential’.

Plato was a member of one of the wealthy families that ruled Athens in the fifth century BC. In his early years he fought for Athens in her ruinous wars with neighboring city states. In about 387 he founded the Academy, the earliest European university on which we have detailed information. There he attracted a remarkable group of students and teachers; some of the former became prominent generals or statesmen. Women, too, it seems, were among his students. The Academy came to have a substantial political influence, partly through its pupils and partly by giving advice to governments on their legal codes and their constitutions.

On her deathbed, the poet, Gertrude Stein, turned to a friend and asked, ‘What is the answer?’ When the friend, unable to speak, made no reply, she said, ‘In that case, what is the question?’ In the late twentieth century, the first question that we face is not in doubt. Modern technology and modern politics combine to enable us to commit mass suicide, and we have to decide whether to do so. This book is written in the belief that we and our descendants will choose survival, not self-destruction, and that, in human society, there will be not only change but progress.

Like our ability to destroy ourselves, future progress depends in part on our use of scientific knowledge. The traditional image of science has two faces, both benign: science helps us to know the world; and it gives us power. But science is also a source of myths. When modern physics began, it became easy to think of the universe as a system of which all parts obey Newton's laws of motion. Yet this conclusion does not follow from Newtonian mechanics: it is an assumption. And indeed the whole notion was overthrown by Einstein's theory of relativity.

The image of humanity as intractably selfish includes some features of H. pugnax, but also uses the modern theory of evolution. We are told that even our social lives and attitudes can be fully explained by the action of natural selection on our ancestors. Just what the new Darwinism does and – equally important – does not tell us comes, with some unavoidable technicalities, in the next chapter. Many questions remain; in particular, no theory tells us how the human species acquired its special features. The explanatory value of natural selection has often been overrated, partly because, for some influential writers, it is more than a scientific theory: it has become a substitute for the workings of divine providence.

Evolutionary theory rests on genetics, and so does human biology: it is impossible to make sense of biological accounts of humanity unless one understands the interaction of heredity and environment. This, as we find in Chapter 7, is a continuing source of confusion. It is still usual to describe characteristics as inherited or genetically coded, and to write of genes for traits such as (for example) intelligence or mental deficiency. As a result, our genes come to be thought of as imposing an unchangeable destiny. The error in such expressions arises from disregard of the environment – one, moreover, that in part we create by our own choice.

The portrayal of human beings as inherently violent is supported by analogy. We, like other species, are a product of evolution, and are said to ‘inherit’ enmity from our animal ancestry. Social dominance among animals becomes social status in human communities, and the holding of territories by animals reappears as human ownership of property. These are represented as ‘instinctive’ or ‘innate’ and as involving destructive violence, or aggression.

Chapter 4 therefore compares the social lives of animals with those of human beings, and shows up the limitations of the idea of instinct. The argument from animals to humanity then breaks down at every important point: biological analysis cannot cope with either our intelligence or our social life.

Just as our violence has been said to reflect our animal ancestry, so ‘primitive man’ has been described as especially aggressive. In Chapter 5 we find that this belief is not based on authentic knowledge of our ‘Stone Age’ ancestors, or of any modern groups. People are often violent when they should be peaceful, and this is held out as natural; but, in that case, so are benignity, helpfulness, moderation and rationality. Violence is of many kinds, and cannot be reduced to a single impulse.