Categorizing Evolution

In today's day and age, people are being bogged down left right and center in how they think and how they understand how they think.

A theory of mind is an essential guidebook in helping ourselves relate with other people; and of course, hopefully, you would want to be true and sincere in your relationships. Right?

Another deep problem is values. People inherit values from their parents, right? Intuitively this seems true, but it is still vague sounding. What I want to know is how children inherit values, or, if not "inherit" in any linear sense, how they become who they are as a response and adaptation to the conditions of their early relational environment with others.

In modern neurodevelopmental lingo, the childs "attachment" has determinative effects because during the first two years of life, the human right hemisphere is substantially larger than the later developing - and language dependent - left hemisphere. What happens in this brain development, in this "building up of neurons and glia", is the childs coding of 'object relations with significant human beings it relates with'. codes'. The ontonogenetic core of self is emotional and affective. It responds to exteroceptive (perceptions in the environment) cues in faces, voices, and movements, and associates them with internal feelings, responses: essentially vitality affects. In this early phase of existential development, the childs brain 'contains' the way the future adult will come to feel most of the time. These first two years have profound affective effects because they involve brain stem metabolic processes and, in the language of brain architecture, the lower a structure is in the brain, the more 'vital' and 'basic' it is to life (i.e. for breathing, heart beating, muscle responses etc). These 'homeostatic' physiological functions become integrated with emotional hypothalamic related regions, essentially tying the bodies processes into emotional life. And for the adult, the 'cognitive life' often crystallizes basic elements of the core affective self.

So, you might wondering by now, "why the hell are you talking about this in the evolution forum?". Good question. I mention this because the people who think and reason about the existence or non existence of evolution - i.e. all of us - inherit emotional feelings, crystallized and encrusted by cognitive contents called "words" and "sentences" which form meanings for us. What does this mean? Or more importantly, what does this mean to a person who doesn't know this? And who doesn't have any mindful strategy in countering it?

Even more importantly, this shows how intrinsically biased we all are. Objective reality - if it exists - is not a given. It is something you have to strive to perceive. Truth, and honesty to self, are the only prerequisites to its ambiguous attainment. If you can FEEL, honest, sincere - a feeling of love or compassion - towards some subject, and can allow yourself to stay present and mindful to conflictual information - thus, to understand how strong emotional reactions induce dissociation or 'splitting' in your attentional awareness - then, I think you can do a better job in understanding how the world is made up.

Simple point:

Evolution, simply put, is the process from the Big Bang to the present moment. Everything from that ontological beginning, from the banging forth of the universe into being, has been 'evolving'.

Yes, the first elements and the bodies they formed are not, in the least bit, like the life that emerges on planets. Yet, they are the same process - properly divided into one part, the pre-life universe, and the second part - the life universe.

The life universe is what we tend to mean when we use the word "evolution". We mean prokaryotes to eukaryotes to multicellular organisms. And we also mean survival of the fittest, the coldly logical adaptation of "genes" to environmental inputs.

But does this negate the former? No! Random cosmic evolution continues forth. And yet within it, on a planet, something else emerges: life. Life is an addition, or an accretion, a "higher dimension", if you like, to the initial evolution started by the big bang.

Today, human beings are mapping the past. We've discovered our true origins, and yet, this has tended to spawn a cold, impersonal, and cynical nihilism towards life and the world. Why? Again. Since beliefs elicit fundamental, evolutionary inbuilt emotional reactions, something must be found - theoretically devised - to keep the deep anxiety of living in a world of no meaning away from being consciously felt. This is dissociation. A term I think deserves more attention.

So what is being dissociated? The clearest and most blatantly obvious thing: human beings represent another ontological shift, and thus, partially escapes the ontological narrowness of the category it bases itself upon.

Look: Lifeless Universe -> Life In Universe -> Self-Aware Universe

Imagine evolution from the beginning as one long chain of cause and effect. All of a sudden, there emerges a creature which is no longer delimited to automatic causation. Of course, one part of him remains that way: having inbuilt motivational systems, it responds automatically to relevant objects in the environment; yet another part of him, the "witness to his experiences", the "eye" that peers, as it were, from the center of our foreheads, is an alien to the whole system of reality it sees itself unfolding within. This ability to 'map the past', to reflexively 'know' what we have thought, felt, and perceived, creates an ontological switch-a-roo. Existence, instead of unfolding in a logically causative way, encounters a 'will' that is able to define for itself how it wants to orient towards the world. Imagine a U turn, turned inwards, and backwards.

Neo-Darwinian evolution can describe some of what we are, but not all of it. The person who we experiences ourselves to be is a real thing, and its thoughts, feelings and 'selfhood', is something that needs to be studied and dealt with in a manner similar to how biologists think about life and physicists think about matter. This notion that the former can swallow up the latter is nothing more than unresolved breakdown of the mind in connecting to the 'real nature' of the phenomena they are encountering.

Values, mind, self, morality - these form the deepest core of who we are. We should try to be aware of this. Particularly when we talk about evolution and how our affective tone (such as emotionless and valueless language) transfers into other areas of life.

a reply to: Astrocyte

I know you like to post and run, so can you fix this part before you go?

From your post:

What happens in this brain development, in this "building up of neurons and glia", is the childs coding of 'object relations with significant human beings it relates with'. codes'.

Are you saying that in a child's development [of their brain's left hemisphere] they encode relationships as actual neurological objects or are they simply quasi-psychological objects? As in, neural synapses are the object form of, and not merely the representation of, thoughts?

Is said "code" quasi-code or are you saying it is code in an object form?

Here again:

i.e. all of us - inherit emotional feelings, crystallized and encrusted by cognitive contents called "words" and "sentences" which form meanings for us.

You put them in quotes as "words" but refer to the emotions as crystallized, and encrusted, as to give solidity to their objectivity.

Just how do you perceive this "emotional code" in object form?

a reply to: Bleeeeep

Are you saying that in a child's development [of their brain's left hemisphere] they encode relationships as actual neurological objects or are they simply quasi-psychological objects? As in, neural synapses are the object form of, and not merely the representation of, thoughts?

I mean things in the outer world - certain other people - are carried as psychological objects in the neurological hardware of the right hemisphere - and its sub-cortical emotion generating and somatic processing areas.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'object-form'. At this point in our technological ability, we do not know how or in what way object-relations are coded in the brain. All that really needs to be understood is that a) object relations exist (as any psyhotherapist knows) b) they combine with pre-conscious emotional and somatic reactions. But of course, these responses are usually unconscious to us.

Object relations are not merely associations with 'external' things, but also internal 'objects', such as the thoughts we have, perceptions we have of our body or our emotions; these too become 'associated' - thus hebbs law, what 'fires together wires together'.

You put them in quotes as "words" but refer to the emotions as crystallized, and encrusted, as to give solidity to their objectivity.

Well, the solidity of our emotions is the early forming neurological hardware of our early childhood - where arousal and regulation patterns become 'defined' - arguably permanently (minus intensive psychotherapy) - in the specific fiber tracts between homeostatic brain stem functions (vagus nerve, reticular formation, periaquaductal gray) limbic regions (hypothalamus, pituitary and insula/cingulate regions) and the frontal lobes where regulatory functions usually happen (orbito-frontal cortex).

To just give you a quick example. People often talk of "shy people" and "extroverted" people. as if these were inbuilt, genetic categories. Recent neurodevelopmental research (Schore, Belsky, etc) are beginning to show that these differences are mostly developmental in origin - and not "genetic predispositions". Belsky in particular has emphasized the sociobiological underpinnings of attachment processes by locating genetic differences between different alleles in serotonin and dopamine producing genes - the former 'down-regulates' while the latter generates arousal levels - and certain relational environments.

It is true that genetic predispositions make people differentially sensitive, but that does not mean that a neglectful or abusive early environment wont leave its psychological imprints on the developing right brain - and the various defenses, dissociations, and enactments that people will unconsciously utilize to deal with their affective disturbances.

The human right brain constructs its early relational environment; and if there is one thing that people should take away from this fact - it is not the idea that people are 'resilient' - only someone ignorant of modern psychoanalytic theory (dissociation, and enactments) would think that - but that people are enormously ADAPTIVE.

So, as to the topic of this thread, and more generally: beliefs "encrust" in the sense that they are ADAPTATIONS, and STRATEGIES, of the organism, to deal with the deeper (subcortical/brain stem) affective experiences that 'shock' and disturb psychological functioning (i.e sanity). Dissociation is an unconscious response mechanism that spans from the brain stem to the highest cortical areas, and it works by keeping away from conscious awareness certain ideas and feelings from being felt.

The idea that organisms 'adapt' to survive applies to the mind as much as it does to the body (or genes). But it would be wrong to reduce the one (mind) to the other (genes). The mind is thoroughly permeated by culture, and culture has its own features which the mind needs to adapt towards; whichever 'genes' become 'selected' in this process (such as through epigenetic processes; and yes, this means that the neo-darwinian doctrine of the supremacy of the gene is not totally true; the brain and its responses affect genetic processes by influencing chromatin structure; and, in the case of mindfulness, the self-aware mind can influence neurochemical and hormonal processes by inhibiting and activating different events).

Eventually, when we reach adulthood, we have people who can't 'think' certain things. Take christian fundamentalists. When they read what you write, or what I write, how much do they actually 'take in'? Probably, not much. Dissociation can be taken to mean, in the clinical sense, a 'blanking out', but neuropsychoanalysts are beginning to speak of normative dissociation in the sense that emotive responses are activated when the "self-system" of 'self-affirming beliefs' becomes threatened by dissonant information. The unconscious mind is so efficient that things which can potentially destabilize awareness (forcing reflection of issues which tend to arouse anxiety or shame) will activate response profiles such as aggression or, a cool disinterest. In traditional kleinian theory, this is called "paranoid-schizoid"; the person who reads what I wrote is actively (or rather, instinctively) searching his mind for 'reasons' to disagree, in a paranoid fashion, he is thinking more about his own beliefs when he reads what I write than actively integrating what he's reading. Another strategy is 'schizoid', or, disinterest, a low affect disregard that rejects all-together the meanings that might exist.

This entire process works at different levels in the brain, but it seems to begin from the bottom up: with the reticular formation (arousal) and vagal nerve (and its massive networks) 'depressing' higher cortical functions, literally blocking stimulation of higher neurons by preferentially activating dorsal (hypometabolic) areas in the vagal system.

Dissociation, then, is a basic, and I would argue, pernicious process that infects human relations. It is the ultimate basis for partisan political beliefs. It is what prevents empathy and compassion for other people, gays, the mentally ill, homeless, disadvantaged minorities, people with a different developmental history from yourself (which would be everyone else) or subjects such as the value of the scientific method and all it has given us.

Seen in this light, conservative resistance to the above ideas read as atavistic; as an example of people 'stuck' in their dissociations, and mutually enforce their dissociations by confirming for one another their beliefs.

And ultimately, these conservative dissociations have their origins in childhood; in the 'splitting' they undergo, splitting discomfitting experiences of vulnerability and shame associated with femininity (this being the value of the oedipal complex), where the boy affirms activity and agency by identifying with the 'father' (or the significant other who manifests agency and excitement) and separating from the mother. In these types of households, agency becomes identified with the father, and with men more generally (another, basic, object relation), so that a conservative man deemphasizes "feminine" emotions like empathy and hyper-emphasized machismo 'manly' emotions like assertion. Assertion eventually becomes an in-built response pattern dissociated from its origins (the primal 'separation' from the less agentic mother).

a reply to: Astrocyte

Considering that my education and intellectual limitations forced me to reference Webster's Dictionary several times while reading and rereading your post, I must say that I found it to be quite revealing and regret to admit that I consider myself to be a perfect example of the debilitating effects associated with the lack of any interpersonal and emotional nurturing throughout my entire childhood from either my mother or father. Years later my mother said several times, "Charles, you just didn't seem to require much attention".

Well, it shows now.

S&F Good post.

PS: I am a baby boomer 3rd son with 2 younger sisters. My mother was a Methodist minister's daughter and my father was a wounded WW2 veteran of Iwo Jima.

a reply to: Astrocyte

The one thing I don't really agree with is the equivocation of the term evolution, meaning change or improvement over time, with evolution, meaning genetic mutations sorted by natural selection. They are completely different concepts. One is a biological process and is pretty much what everybody in this section refer to as evolution. In reality if you use the other version of the word, it can mean almost anything that changes or improves. That is the layman's definition, not a scientific process. The scientific one is about biological evolution. The mechanisms for each one are completely different when you look at big bang, star and planet formation, abiogenesis, and biological evolution.

One of the big issues we frequently find in this forum is categorization of evolution to incorporate anything that changes over time into the same process. We have a resident troll here that frequently does this and puts people off as a result. You seem to be much more well reasoned and logical than him, however, so I'm not knocking you.

objective reality - if it exists - is not a given.

This is true, but it's the only reality we know, so learning as much as we can about it can only lead to greater understanding in the long run. If it's not real, then no big deal, it didn't matter anyway. If it is real, this thinking could slow down our scientific progression as a society.

Neo-Darwinian evolution can describe some of what we are, but not all of it. The person who we experiences ourselves to be is a real thing, and its thoughts, feelings and 'selfhood', is something that needs to be studied and dealt with in a manner similar to how biologists think about life and physicists think about matter. This notion that the former can swallow up the latter is nothing more than unresolved breakdown of the mind in connecting to the 'real nature' of the phenomena they are encountering.

I'd argue that evolution can describe exactly what we are in our entirety. There are no aspects that can't be attributed to evolution, imo. The brain has evolved as well over time. The brain is very complex, and in all likelihood can account for consciousness, self awareness, emotional responses, morality, man made religions etc etc.

The idea that organisms 'adapt' to survive applies to the mind as much as it does to the body (or genes). But it would be wrong to reduce the one (mind) to the other (genes).

Well, since genes directly affect the mind, it makes sense. There is long term adaptation and short term adaptation. The brain has been slowly increasing in size and complexity over the last few million years. Epigentics may play a minor role creating genetic markers that can be inherited based on short term adaptation, but this is different from the genetic mutations and natural selection, and it doesn't over ride that. Long term adaptation is dependent on the genetic mutations leading to new traits that offer an advantage over the old. Epigenetics is still pretty new in science, and there is very little evidence. Basically it isn't fully understood yet.

We are all a product of our genes and our environment. It defines who we are as a person more than anything else.

I also don't agree that empathy is a feminine emotion in the least. It is a basic concept to ensure people are treated humanely and ethically. Can you evaluate your action based on how it affects others? Can you understand how other people feel when treated unfairly? These are fundamental questions that anybody can understand. Men aren't just macho tough guys, just like woman aren't just soft and emotional.

Interesting thread, no doubt.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Could you explain the propensity for including ideas not associated with evolution into discussions of evolution. Evolution only pertains to the change of species due to genetic mutaton. Not the big bang (that would be the theory of um the big bang), planetary formation, or how first life happened.

Now I understand that last one really screws up people. But one can not change a species, when there is none. Thus evolution will only occur AFTER the first life happened.

Thus how about you remove these things then try again? I speak from a place of education and logic, so I feel you can as well.

a reply to: Noinden

Take the concept of evolution, which means "to evolve". There was a time, long ago, where things were not: the period before the big bang - and then, "bang"! things exist, time begins, and eventually a condition emerges where life can exist.

You're thinking is way too 'fixed' upon the term "evolution", so much so that you aren't even acknowledging that evolution has been an ontological process, from form and matter to planetary bodies, stabilizations in galaxies, solar systems, and eventually conditions emerge on planets where individual molecular collections become 'cells', somehow existing separately with its own internal continuity, exchanging and expunging elements with its environment.

And then, over time, gradually, consciousness emerges, with real live 'affects'. Along one line - hominoids - brains begin to grow very large so that the world, instead of being engaged with more directly along in terms of arrangement of the body and its envronment (on all 4s), they are arboreal, moving on the ground, relating with the world as if like a "tool", and so brains grow, abstraction emerges more and more. Ultimately, in human beings, there is a being who is aware of its own being. The only being with a "self" in this of a narrative arc. A being, talking to itself as it lives.

I can see you probably have not spent much time exploring the phenomenological perspective of things, and no doubt you completely glossed over the psychoanalytical (or psychodynamic) portion of this thread which tries to explain how some people - perhaps people like yourself - have difficulty looking at the world in this way, instantly feeling some negative affect, either aggression, or, disinterest. No doubt this is a result of early-life relational affects from which the growing infant brain (100% volume increase in just the first year!) is becoming conditioned.

As you can see - this is science, developmental neurobiology, and it is justified by countless studies on infant-parent attachment observations, and imaginging techniques such as MRI, PET NIRS (near infrared spectroscopy) and EEG.

My point with this thread is simple:

Just as the rules of biology or life mean nothing relative to the conditions of the big bang, yet, paradoxically, life and its unique processes are entirely dependent on the laws of the physical universe. Similarly, human beings and our sense of having a self with a narrative arc, based on a reflexive sense of our own existence, depend upon the conditions of life, as well as the conditions of the physical universe.

What I'm really asking to be acknowledged, or musing about, is how someone can fail to see the ontological shift into another category, from life universe -> life universe -> self conscious universe. A lack of awe? and Wonder? A deep felt need to protect against the experience of emotions - because the body, when it feels, might induce.....anxiety? And someone who has trained his mind to approach subjects in mathematical and dry ways likely has great difficulty experiencing the fear and anxiety that results from his direct reflection upon matters hes been trained never to think about?

Bottom line, you do not need to posit any special God to respect the fact that human beings and their capacity to know their own existence is an amazing fact about the world. It is what it is.

a reply to: Barcs

The one thing I don't really agree with is the equivocation of the term evolution, meaning change or improvement over time, with evolution, meaning genetic mutations sorted by natural selection. They are completely different concepts. One is a biological process and is pretty much what everybody in this section refer to as evolution. In reality if you use the other version of the word, it can mean almost anything that changes or improves. That is the layman's definition, not a scientific process. The scientific one is about biological evolution. The mechanisms for each one are completely different when you look at big bang, star and planet formation, abiogenesis, and biological evolution.

While I can respect the taxonomic needs for casting 'evolution' in strictly biological terms, the fact is, when you don't break things down into artificial (semantic) categories, you can see that the universe is essentially change and process. From the get-go, from the big bang, the universe has been 'evolving'. That is to say, the initial conditions contained the POSSIBILITY for life, just as the conditions of life contained the possibility for consciousness and eventually reflexive consciousness.

You can't just remove life from the background processes that it emerged within and from, such as, for example, the history of the early earth and the early forming solar system: there is a direct, dialogical unfolding within a much larger system. Galaxy on solar system, solar system on planetary bodies. Atmospheric conditions on life processes, and life processes on atmospheric conditions (I.e OXYGEN). It's a non-linear feedback loop, the whole thing, and although we cannot at this moment describe the exact relations between mind, life and matter, they are all bound up in a chain of cause and effects that goes all the way back to the big bang.

This is true, but it's the only reality we know, so learning as much as we can about it can only lead to greater understanding in the long run. If it's not real, then no big deal, it didn't matter anyway. If it is real, this thinking could slow down our scientific progression as a society.

No, no.. Reality is real. What I mean to say is, from a psychoanalytic perspective, people do not know what is 'real' when they do not know how what they feel and how they feel influences how they perceive things. In brain terms, its simple, and its emerging as basic backbone of modern day developmental psychology and neuroscience. Emotions are more 'basic' than cognitions, so cognitions, as a rule, tend to ride the dynamics set in place by emotive responses. In more basic language, meanings are a given when we have inherited specific motivation systems from our ancestors. Their "action tendencies" are "fixed" into our biology, so that when we encounter a specific stimulus, it elicits a predictable reaction.

But human "ethology" is far more complex than animal ethology, because unlike animals, we have symbolic minds. But like animals, we have very strong affects, and feelings. Hence the conundrum: as speakers of languages we get lost in language, so much so that we fail to see how the deep-cortical affects and metabolic logic of the brainstem influence higher cortical functions - necessarily, governing higher cortical functions along the simple evolutionary principle of: adapt to survive.

Psychoanalysis is essentially a human ethology. It sees into the mind because that is the terrain of human behavior. We know, for example, how people tend to respond; what a mean face looks like and how it elicits a sort of reaction; a shrill voice or the sound of anxiety: we all respond the same. In short, our bodies/brains have a 'mind of its own', and we merely enact, or carry out, the necessary consequences of one meaning clashing against another, for example, the oedipal complex.

Modern day psychology is moving back to affect, and thus, back to psychoanalysis. But it is a "neuropsychonalysis" informed by systems dynamic theory. Non-linear processes such as positive and negative feedback, attractors, etc, govern its logic, and not the weirdness of some Freudian ideas.

Ultimately, to understand the world properly, you would like to know "what you are doing" i.e. how your feelings change what you're perceiving, and what the other person is doing. That, is probably the closest we can get to knowing the 'world objectively. And notice, that you are neither thinking about yourself or about others, and not even about the world. Rather, you are locating the world between yourself and others. Which is to say, our ability to reflect at all is a function of our relations with one another. Humans have such large frontal lobes as a result of intersubjective awareness of other selves (Sarah Blaffer Hrdy). Eventually, mans lower tendencies "highjacked" these functions of mind, and thus, from a Freudian perspective, was born the "oedipal complex", where reflection upon the mind-states of others was more a function of manipulation than empathic attunement. This is also where evolutionary thought seems to be heading.

I'd argue that evolution can describe exactly what we are in our entirety. There are no aspects that can't be attributed to evolution, imo. The brain has evolved as well over time. The brain is very complex, and in all likelihood can account for consciousness, self awareness, emotional responses, morality, man made religions etc etc.

What I mean to say is, is not that the mind is "free from the brain", but rather, that the mind is "open-ended". That is, we can exercise choice, of either yes or no. And phenomenologically speaking, no other creature in existence, really nothing in existence, is able to inhibit the automatic process of evolution, where input always leads to output, where environmental elicits a "genetic" reactions from the organism.

When you think of the mind and in terms of the mind, the fact that I can choose at any moment, where to place my attention, shows that this 'reflective function', although dependent upon a specific neuroanatomical platform, is nevertheless conceptually open, and thus, entirely able to review and transform its own self experience.

One problem the philosopher Evan Thompson rightly emphasizes is the "closed-mindedness" of so many scientists towards matters of the mind: and why is this, other than a rather poor sense of "interoception" (awareness of internal affect) and the phenomenological insights that result from deepening your sense of being.

Also, of course, what we believe, or take on faith, has enormous effects on our physiology (neurological as well as immunological)

a reply to: Astrocyte

I am very sorry but you do not get to define the meaning of scientific terms. The term Evolution refers only to the differentiation of life through genetic mutations. Now you can apply the word to other areas, but when doing so you may not have that encompass the first. Its simple logic. Why do you find this such a baffling concept?

I am also pretty sure you are making some huge assumptions over my expereinces, both inside the sciences (viz, you do not need to define MRI, NIRS etc, I'm a Pharmaceutical chemist ) . SImilarly I'm a Neopagan, and I am aware of the awe and wonder of nature. None the less, one doe not need to bastardize a well researched, well established idea (Evolution), to fit ones own predilections.

So stop this new age claptrap neighbor. Its not particularly attractive.

a reply to: Noinden

ah, ok.

So what term would you like me to use to describe the 3 stages I'm describing:

Birth of physical matter, upon which supervenes

Life, upon which supervenes

Reflective self consciousness?

Clearly, this matter is an issue of how each of us feel about the world. For you, my use of the word 'evolution' in reference to the causal relations between the big bang, life, and reflexive consciousness, doesn't make sense to you, which in turn doesn't make a shred of sense to me.

So, lets not aggravate one another any further, and agree, as the proverbial saying goes, to disagree.

a reply to: Astrocyte

You are under the impression there is an all encompassing single term for these unrelated subjects. Further, its not an issue on how we feel about the world. Evolution is a scientific theory, which has a great deal of evidence supporting it. The funny thing about scientific theories, is that they do not change based on how one feels.

The "big bang" (and you really need to specify which hypothesis that falls under that topic you are following, because there are many) has no influence on evolution of life. One is a cosmological event, the other is a biological. I have no idea what your level of experience with the sciences are, but I am going to assume, that at least some high school. Its very important that you don't mix cosmological (lets call it physics) with biological, as there is just too large a gap. You can not describe life in a simple formulae with units being part of the answer. I'm someone who is in the grey area between the two, as a chemist, and Bioinfomatics guy, I see both sides. We can not overlap the two.

So sure we can agree to disagree, you however would be wrong to assume that you are not munting (sorry Kiwi term) things by continuing down this road.