Glendon Schubert

The structure of attention: A critical review

This review article is a critique of the theory of attention structure as expounded and propounded by the English primatologist Michael R. A. Chance. The paper reviews the theory of dominance hierarchies in non-human primates; dominance among human children; dominance vs. attention structures; the theory of attention structure; ethological appraisal of the attention structure hypothesis; the structure of attention among political scientists; and social science evaluation of attention structure as theory. The analysis demonstrates that the theory lacks both logical structure and independent empirical support; it is not accepted by leading ethologist commentators; and its appeal among social scientists rests on ideology rather than its use in helping to produce new empirical knowledge. It is concluded that the attention structure hypothesis shows no promise of providing the basis for the construction of viable theories of either the bases for social organization among other primates, or democratic leadership and political structure among humans.

Scientific creation and the evolution of religious behavior

The continuing campaign to substitute the myth of ‘Scientific Creationism’ for the teaching of biology in the public schools ( ‘Creationism’, 1982 ; Hailman, 1982 ; Murphy, 1982 ; Wood, 1982 ; Jukes, 1984 ) has focused public attention anew upon the importance of religion in political behavior—and vice versa. The present paper begins with a consideration of some aspects of the judicial politics of scientific evolutionism, and then examines the scenario of human evolution inferred by modern biological evolutionary theory. Particular attention is given to the beginnings of agriculture and the domestication of animals (including humans of themselves: Schubert, 1985a ) approximately 11,000 years ago, and to the cognitive significance, for humans, of the presence of other animals. Earlier creation myths are examined with special emphasis upon the Sumerian-Hebraic-Christian-Moslem versions featured in Genesis, and upon their relationship to biological evolutionary theory. The third major section of the paper discusses several evolutionary models of religious behavior, including representative ones from the respective perspectives of primatological ethology, cultural anthropological neurobiology, and physical anthropological hominid evolutionary theory.

Rationalism and reality

In their discussion of the relation between biological and cultural evolution, Lumsden & Wilson (I 985; cited below as L&W) restate an argument that they previously published in a pair of books and two articles, as augmented by some five articles (including one in this journal) authored by the nominal senior author of the present iteration. My comment here will focus on four questions. The first of these reflects a relatively novel (for L&W) emphasis in their present paper: this I discuss in the section ‘Reality’ immediately below. The other questions are not novel at all, constituting recurrent issues raised by L&W, but regarding which they have demonstrated thus far no ability to learn from previous critiques: these are discussed in the sections ‘Emotion’, ‘Epigenesis’, and ‘Evidence’.

The creative brain: Toward a behavioral and brain-science theory of invention and innervation

FL but they indulge instead in mentalistic dualism -and apparently unselfconsciously (Libet, 1985; Wood, 1985; Schubert, 1983b) of the implications of their choice of words for their article’s title. Hence I have chosen for these remarks a title that explicitly distinguishes between brain and mind; invention and discovery; and innervation and innovation. “Discovery” implies the characteristic natural-science presumption that there really is some pre-existent phenomenal secret to be found (Schubert, 1983c, p. 106) whereas “invention” implies a novel consequence of animal cognition (Crook, 1980; Davidson and Davidson, 1980); and “innervation” locates “invention” in the functioning of an animal brain (Libet, 1985; Wood, 1985) whereas F&L use “innovation” as an unoperationalized and epiphenomenal byproduct of “culture”.