Susan Oyama

Evolution’s Eye: A Systems View of the Biology-Culture Divide

In recent decades, Susan Oyama and her colleagues in the burgeoning field of developmental systems theory have rejected the determinism inherent in the nature/nurture debate, arguing that behavior cannot be reduced to distinct biological or environmental causes. In Evolution’s Eye Oyama elaborates on her pioneering work on developmental systems by spelling out that work’s implications for the fields of evolutionary theory, developmental and social psychology, feminism, and epistemology. Her approach profoundly alters our understanding of the biological processes of development and evolution and the interrelationships between them. While acknowledging that, in an uncertain world, it is easy to “blame it on the genes,” Oyama claims that the renewed trend toward genetic determinism colors the way we think about everything from human evolution to sexual orientation and personal responsibility. She presents instead a view that focuses on how a wide variety of developmental factors interact in the multileveled developmental systems that give rise to organisms. Shifting attention away from genes and the environment as causes for behavior, she convincingly shows the benefits that come from thinking about life processes in terms of developmental systems that produce, sustain, and change living beings over both developmental and evolutionary time. Providing a genuine alternative to genetic and environmental determinism, as well as to unsuccessful compromises with which others have tried to replace them, Evolution’s Eye will fascinate students and scholars who work in the fields of evolution, psychology, human biology, and philosophy of science. Feminists and others who seek a more complex view of human nature will find her work especially congenial.

A Reformulation of the Idea of Maturation

Though the principle of interaction in development has gained considerable popularity among psychologists, the control of ontogeny still tends to be attributed to genetic and environmental determinants in complementary relation, rather than to the coaction of genes and environment. Thus maturation continues to be viewed as development “encoded in the genes” and so not dependent on experience, as physical rather than psychological, and as developmentally fixed. None of these ideas, either alone or in combination, can provide an adequate definition of maturational processes. Research based on such conceptions therefore lacks a coherent theoretical framework, and this defect is evident both in the programs of investigation themselves and in the way empirical findings are interpreted.

WHAT DOES THE PHENOCOPY COPY

The concept of the phenocopy is examined from the point of view of psychology. Two main uses are described: to refer to artificially induced versions of phenotypes usually associated with mutant genes and to designate naturally occurring alternate phenotypes which appear in different environments. It is argued that the traditional definition, an environmentally produced copy of a genetic character, perpetuates the misleading and invalid assumption that some phenotypic characters are programmed and formed by the genes, while others are formed by the environment. An alternate view rejects this developmental dichotomy (which is to be distinguished from the legitimate description of specific sources of variation under restricted experimental conditions), instead taking the notion of multiple developmental pathways as central. The value of this latter idea extends far beyond the phenocopy itself, emphasizing as it does the coaction, not just interaction as it is conventionally construed, of genome and environment in ontogenesis. In the light of this coaction the concept of genetic potential is scrutinized and found inadequate to the often unpredictable multiplicity of development.

Constraints and development

The notion of constraints is discussed, and a comparison made between the ideas of genetic constraints on learning and developmental constraints on natural selection. Both depend on a contrast between conservative internal forces and external contingency. An alternative developmental systems perspective is introduced, in which constraint and formation are not separate phenomena but two aspects of complex interactive systems. The implications of these conceptual changes for some definitions of innateness and of sensitive periods are shown, and the relationship between development and evolution is reformulated.

How Shall I Name Thee? The Construction of Natural Selves

The relation between Cartesian dualism and the developmental dualism of the nature-nurture dichotomy is discussed, with special attention to the treatment of subjectivity and agency. I argue that causal explanation need not drive out active subjects, as it so often seems to, and that it is especially questionable to attempt to solve questions of moral responsibility by weighing biological against environmental causes, or causes in general against reasons. A developmental systems perspective provides a way of seeing subjectivity as both constructed and natural. Aspects of persons cannot then be attributed to biology or culture, and responsibility is a matter not of independence from causal influence, but of action and accountability in a social world.

Ontogeny and Phylogeny; a Case of Metarecapitulation?

For some time I have been occupied with the nature-nurture opposition (genes-environment, innate-acquired, etc.)1 Over this period I have become sensitised, not only to the various guises in which this dichotomy appears, but also to structurally similar ones in other fields. (Fig. 1) In epistemology, one of the sources of the nature-nurture dichotomy in science, the classical question has concerned the origin of knowledge. The disputes between rationalists, who insisted upon innate knowledge, and empiricists, who credited the senses, did much to set the framework for more recent disputes. Similar oppositions are found in other fields.

Evolutionary and Developmental Formation: Politics of the Boundary

Much of my work has been concerned with what we could call the politics of the boundary. The meaning of “politics” here is very broad, having to do with all sorts of influence and power, but especially the power to define and privilege, include and exclude, render central or peripheral. Though this may involve matters “outside” science (a fraught frontier if ever there was one) it need not. Some of my reasons for working on the nature-nurture problem stem from concerns about publicly contested issues of, say, intelligence, race or sex, but most have to do with the kinds of distinctions that are made in the scientific work that draws on and feeds these larger disputes. Any theory carves the world in particular ways and so legitimates some entities and distinctions while leaving others beyond the pale--secondary, invisible or unintelligible.

The Ins and Outs of Nature and Mind

* Department of Psychology, John Jay College, and Sub-Program in Developmental Psychology, Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York, New York, New York; E-mail: scojj@cunyvm.cuny.edu Peter Coodfrcy-Smith, i11 his book C:cnrrylo.vi~y ~rrn t/¡e oi’ .Bfilld ill ~B’n~nrr, says that nly work challenges the very possibility of &dquo;apportioning rrspollsibility between internal and external&dquo; (p. 5a). In this review, I will respond briefly to this characterization and then make some remarks on (;OLifrcB’-Siiiltli’,., analyses of externahsm. intcrnaIi&dquo;m..1I1d comtructiB’ism (following hi&dquo; tc’riiiiiioliigm’ throughout), and on the book as a whote.

On the Concept of the Anatomically Modern Human: A Discussion on Tim Ingold's 'People Like Us' (1995): Human History, History, or history?

Cultural Dynamics, As Tim Ingold announces in his abstract, he means to question several grand and well-entrenched oppositions in anthropology. The alternative he offers to these polarities, and to the presumption of timeless essence that underwrites them, is a perspective based on embodied action, organism-environment mutuality, and developmental change. This ’developmental systems’ approach accounts for the ontogenetic and evolutionary arising of living beings without positing essences or traditional dualities. Ingold is an anthropologist; though I have touched on anthropological topics from time to time (Klama, 1988; Oyama, 1994), my audience has more often been biologists, psychologists, and philosophers of biology. As a commentator on this essay, then, I am in a peculiar position. A relative

IS PHYLOGENY RECAPITULATING ONTOGENY

There are three things I would like to accomplish in these comments. First, I would like to mention some of the larger issues addressed by Stuart Kauffnan’s work. They are related to important questions in other fields; pointing out the relationships could be useful for finding the kinds of interdisciplinary connections to which this conference is devoted. Second, I will describe my own perspective on Kauffman’s work; my interests are basically conceptual, not technical. Finally, I want to draw some parallels between arguments about phylogenetic and ontogenetic origins; these parallels cast additional light of Kauffman’s endeavors.