HOW HUMAN NATURE BECOMES A PERSON

an excusion into evolutionary psychology
............................by Stanley

....The idea that all the great variety of cultures ancient and modern are built up upon a universally shared human nature has been out of fashion for quite a while. Instead we have had what is known as the ‘blank slate’ theory that says there is no such thing as human nature. You are born a blank slate and the habits, language and customs of your culture totally shape you – you live in it, you think with it. Culture is everything. This view is known as ‘post-modernism’. It is so called because it opposes what was a ‘modern’ view, starting with the 18th century Enlightenment, that there is indeed such a thing as objective ‘nature’ – human included. The post-modernists would insist that the whole of human history proves their point. Except that there is a small slice of human history they overlooked. 

......2.5 million years ago our ancestors, hardly recognisable as human, began a long journey through time that ended 12,000 years ago – a period roughly co-incident with the Pleistocene geological era. Someone from the end of that period you would recognise as fully human; and they would be in every sense – biologically and psychologically basically the same as us, with the same potentialities as ourselves. But it took evolution and natural selection over 2 million years to do it. 

.....In that ‘small slice of history’ human nature was formed and it remains basically unchanged in everyone today no matter what their culture. 

......Interesting to us are the more personal aspects of this. Some years ago when I first encountered evolutionary psychology I didn’t like it. I didn’t understand it because I had no knowledge of evolution. It seemed to me to be one of those dead-head scientific theories that would spoil my Jungian view of the world. I thought it could never account for the human imagination. I was wrong.

.....But still, a more pertinent question is this: if our inherited human nature make us all basically the same, the problem for us in person-centred psychology is how and in what way each human person is different; for us this is a crucial question. We are not asking about cultural differences – but the differences between you and me.

.....In our work, the concept of ‘the person’ is most important. Somehow we have to account for it. I believe what we are referring to is a continued development of a long evolutionary trend. What we call ‘the person’ is a refinement of our inherited ability to respond to the specificities of the environment. 

.....The more an animal can respond to the specifics of the environment the greater are its chances of survival. The ability to differentiate changes in the environment and respond appropriately is the key to the success of all the more highly developed mammals. The lower animals cannot do this so well. In  order to lay her eggs the female wasp (Sphex), first digs a hole in the sand, then goes out looking for a caterpillar which she stings and drags into her hole so  that her young can feed upon it. But first she leaves the caterpillar on the edge of the hole while she checks to see if the hole is OK. If you move the caterpillar while she is checking the hole she will go through the whole procedure again. No matter how many times you move the caterpillar while she is in the hole checking it, when she finds the caterpillar again she will go back and check the hole again. She never gets past this repetition if you keep moving the caterpillar.

.....Compare this to the ability of a cat chasing a mouse. The environment and the mouse are constantly changing and the cat responds to each specific change in present time. But far more complex is George at an interview with a board of examiners where he is trying to get a job as an electronics engineer. Not only is George facing a barrage of complicated questions coming from people who also emit shades of subliminal feelings towards him, he is also dealing with all his associated memories: the maths teacher who was sarcastic to him at school, his father’s heavy goals for him, his imagination and fears for the future, as well as his whole training as an engineer. All are present to him; and all are involved in answering the next challenging question from the examining board. No one in the world has ever been in exactly the situation George is in at this moment. And no one in the world will answer the next probing as George will. There are no existing patterns that will help him. His response in present time will come out of the total person George is. George is definitely no mere behavioral, stimulus response organism. He has come a long way from that.

.....Some evolutionary psychologists maintain that our value of the human person is a direct result of evolution and natural selection. I suppose you could say that the intrinsic value we place on the ‘person’ is the secular equivalent of belief in the soul which must have had, because of its ubiquity, some sort of adaptive advantage in evolutionary terms. 

.....All of which would have been laid down in our development during the Pleistocene some 2 million years ago. Evolutionary psychologist Nicolas Humphrey has said that we, and to some extent gorillas and chimps, have evolved to be ‘natural psychologists’. For good reasons we developed the ability to second guess the minds of our fellows, giving us, as a species, a survival advantage. 

.....From this beginning we became ‘a society of selves. The idea that everyone is equally special in this way is extraordinarily potent – psychologically, ethically and politically…  And from the beginning, it will have transformed human relationships, encouraging new levels of mutual respect, and greatly increasing the value each person puts on their own and other’s lives. Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that it marks a watershed in the evolution of our species.’ 

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