Peter Zeller Department of Human Sciences, Landscape, Cultural Heritage, Literary, Civilization and Education Faculty of Sciences of Education

University of Foggia (Italy) p.zeller@unifg.it

The mind after Darwin

1.1 The evolution tree and Romanes diagram The tree as representation form of evolution has been discussed for a long time. It has known great popularity (even if it has not always been shared and accepted) and the most spread and common image of the species progress has passed through it. Darwin, in his On the Origin of Species, writes: The affinities of all beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth1. Nevertheless recent researches seem to show that the tree metaphor was a conceptually problematic simplification even for him, though useful to disclosure2. Being a metaphor which seemed strongly to colour the evolution progress with finalism, it perhaps was inadequate to show all the living process complexity by the enormous amount of its attempts, of its extinctions and its keeping nonfunctional features, other stories remains or aesthetical choices products: a progress without direction or hierarchies but a free expression of meetings between casualness and necessity, seductions and competition, so to explode in a phantasmagoria of forms. In any case, beyond all its faults, the tree survived and was successful. Tree models were proposed by Alfred Russel Wallace, Ernst Haeckel 3 and, in a very particular contest, by George John Romanes (1848-1894). Romanes, after an adhesion complete4 and devoted to Darwin ideas, decided to deal with the natural history of mind. If his master outlined a species transformation and described the possible becoming of organism, it should have been possible as well, in the Figure 1 The diagram Romanes attached to Mental Evolution in Animals (1883). same contest, to build again

See C. Darwin, On the Origin of Species. 1859/2001, p. 129. See H. Bredekamp, Darwins Korallen: Die frhen Evolutionsdiagramme und die Tradition der Naturgeschichte (2005). 3 See E Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866). 4 See E. Romanes, The Life and Letters of George John Romanes (1898). I have recently dedicated to Romanes works and to his relations with Darwin the essay Romanes. Un discepolo di Darwin alla ricerca delle origini del pensiero (2007).
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the psychism genesis, the mental evolution. So he conceived a grandiose project which would have allowed to retrace a road able to join the far life origin and the first unicellular organisms with human culture, language and institutions. He put his project in action into three volumes that, starting from a report of the animal intelligence, analysed the phylogenetic stages that had seen the rising of cognitive and emotional processes and so the language and the thought in our species: Animal Intelligence (1881), Mental Evolution in Animals (1883) and Mental Evolution in Man (1888). However Romanes wanted to synthesize the sense of these researches into a diagram (Fig.1) which would compare the mental process appearance into the animal world with its presenting during different stages of the neonatal life and he precisely used a graphic tree. In this configuration you may identify the idea so popular at the time according to which as Haeckel argued the individual development sums up the phylogenesis stages. The trunk showed a double root (discrimination-conductivity) which was based in the substrate of excitability considered as the most general nervous tissue property: from the common trunk of the volition-reflex action the ramifications of sensation-perception divided up to self thinking and thought on the one hand and those concerning sociality seen as derived from the species preservation. It is important to stress that, anyway, you are for the first time considering psychism as characterised by a temporal dimension. During the age of Darwin and Romanes of course there were complex images of comparison between different species animal organs and sequences readable as proximity or affinity. The taxonomic classifications had reached great complexity levels, as in the anatomy studies of Cuvier and others such as Agassiz and Le Conte had described the embryologic modifications sometimes comparing them. Nevertheless these were settlements which leave the phylogenetic point of view out of consideration but in those scholars as Haeckel or Huxley who shared Darwin point of view. Moreover, though many biologists considered at the same time morphological and functional aspects, these two trends had remained differentiated into distinct subject structures, with proper methods and theoretical principles. In this sense the idea of using the morphological classifications to deduce a sense and a mental dimension development is surely a revolutionary moment in the history of biology and psychology. If you look this image, taken by Romanes from Le Conte Darwin and after Darwin (1892), you can read it under a new light: before being the representation of an encephalon morphogenesis, it is already a representation of the psyche (Fig. 2); an image which in nuce confers it complexity and deepness, providing it of instinct and unconscious, forestalling new Figure 2 - Ideal section through all the above stages models. In the same way, in (After Le Conte) in Romanes Darwin and after Darwin (1892). the illustrations comparing brains of different species (fish, reptiles, birds, mammals) you can read a new intent: that of showing a morphological succession (fig. 3) which is a making of psychism at the same time. One of the tree limits as metaphor of the phylogenesis was probably, as it was said, its suggesting a hierarchic and vertical orientation of evolution as if there was a living scale aimed at the man appearance. And, obviously, the tree drawn by Romanes itself permitted the

same misunderstanding. The appearance of sensations and perceptions, of intelligence and volition, of emotion and sociality, was likely to appear as a temporal series of preparatory acts to the appearance of human mind and, particularly, of the rational civilized man mind who abandoned the imperfections represented by the animal minds, by those of the savages or simply those of the children. On the contrary nowadays the alternative image of a non-linear development and the need to get through the naivety of certain cognitive abilities classifications based on a misunderstood zoological scale stands out: the livings brain is in fact rather a mosaic of primitive abilities and more advanced characteristics. Another limit is linked, for us coming later, to the impossibility of thinking, under Lamarcks perspective (in Darwin and Romanes there was a lot of Lamarckism), that learnt behaviours could be moved as inheritance and that intelligent acts could have become instincts with time. On the other hand you have to admit that, in those times, recognizing a relationship between the different livings species was itself revolutionary. Concerning the accusation of dualism mind-body which according to some authors appears as an evident limit 5, it is surely little founded. There is no doubt that beyond the conceptual aspects linked to the historical time, Romanes wanted to root psychology into the sure basis of physiology in a unitary and nearly monist vision of the relations between psychism and nervous system: The mental processes which we recognize as subjective are the psychical equivalents of neural processes which we recognize as objective. 6 Coming back to Romanes diagram and to his tree, you have to remember how these images wanted to be a synthetic expression of a complex and articulate progress as the one represented by the trilogy. On the other hand the author, who had presented it to the attention of his master in 1879, talked about it as something which would have been substantially unchanged even in front of future developments of science. 7 This peremptory tone, uncommon in a scholar usually very humble in his way of proposing himself and cautious in his exposition, actually takes its strength from the clearness of the intuition inherited by Darwin on the evolution as one Figure 3 - Comparative series of Brains long argument. Such to be included in few graphic (after La Conte). The series reads from signs, in the idea of an offshoot which implies a above downwards, under represents common origin of all the morphological and diagrammatically the brain of a fish, a psychical manifestations of the livings. reptile, a bird, a mammal, and a man. Romanes diagram wanted to be a compendium Darwin and after Darwin (1892). of the history of mind. Or, perhaps, you should say at this point, of minds as human psychism is one of the possible adaptive way born by the interaction between organisms and environmental contests. The animal mental world becomes then the most complex representation, rich of transitions and nuances, of a continuum in which every expression is linked to the others and in which you may find a sort of changing in colour of sensation into perception, of excitability into volition so as in the thought action, of memory into intelligence and consciousness. This
See R. Boakes, From Darwin To Behaviorism. Psychology and the Minds of Animals ( 1984). See G. J. Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals ( 1883) p. 34. 7 Romanes writes: [] and although it is no doubt true that the progress of sciences may affect the diagram to the extent of altering some of its details, I feel confident that the general structure of our knowledge concerning the evolution of mind is now sufficiently coherent to render it highly improbable that this diagrammatic representation of it will, in the future, be altered in any of its main features by any advances that science may be destined to make. Ibidem, pp. 63-64.
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last one shows itself as a phenomenon with out-of-focus contours whose origins are lost in the darkness of the matter from which it has hardly come out as in awakening from anaesthesia. This epistemological turning point and this new placement gave back to psychology a possible image of comprehensible and decoding mind linked to the outside world, to matter and its laws and provided of a previously inexistent deepness.8 In spite of being a strong and convincing image (or perhaps for this reason) it has been subjected to innumerable assaults and it produced resistances: the recognition of a substratum common for men and animals and of a consequent chance of mental representations of these last ones has been thwarted in many ways. Not only in the archaic and Cartesian form of a distinction between thought provided-men and machine-animals but often, in more recent times, in that of a rigid demarcation between cultural and instinctual, or in that of an emphasis set on the human learning or particularly on language as necessary condition of conscious experiences, or on the pre-constituted denial of these last ones. Particularly in the most recent history of psychology you have assisted to a change from the behaviourist indifference toward mental contents up to a cognitivist revolution which however excludes once again the animal minds. Griffin cognitive ethology is certainly a relevant exception in this contest.9 Even psychoanalysis, which has appeared profoundly rooted in Darwins discourse, has often produced the sensation, in the next theoretical elaboration, of distancing itself from Freud as psyche biologist. Nevertheless the backwards travel, the psychism archaeology started by Darwin and Romanes, has a indisputable force. The origins discovery has soon been found in a new nature. If the subject is not where it is thought to be, it is not as well what it is believed. 1.2 The place of subject after Darwin Three new and decisive features concern from that moment a new image of the psyche: A) reflecting (active); B) historicity; C) structural affinities man-animals. (A) Reflecting
A. Tartabini writes: Romanes fu un grande precursore non solo della psicologia animale in generale ma anche della teoria della mente e in un certo senso delletologia cognitiva. And also: lidea costante di vedere la mente sottoposta alle stesse leggi dellevoluzione che valgono per le altre parti del corpo delluomo o dellanimale, fu unidea fissa di Romanes () un soggetto, quando percepisce che le sue attivit sono simili a quelle degli altri,pu capire anche le conseguenze di queste azioni sullindividuo e dedurre che siano giustamente le stesse. Questo ci induce a ritenere che gli altri non solo abbiano una mente, ma che essa sia simile alla nostra. Cos pensa luomo, cos pensa lanimale, senza tante differenze. Lidea di vedere la mente come progressione ordinata che parte da animali semplici fino ad arrivare alluomo () originale, perch in questa scala evolutiva darwinista, Romanes non pone la struttura, la specie o il genere a cui appartiene lanimale o luomo, ma le attivit mentali. (Romanes was a great forerunner not only of animal psychology in general but also of the theory of mind and in a certain sense of the cognitive ethology. And also: it was an obsession of Romanes the constant idea of seeing mind subjected to the same evolutionary laws valid for the other parts of human or animal body (). When a subject perceives his/her activities are similar to the others ones, he/she can also understand the consequencies of these actions on the individual and deduce they are correctly the same. This lead us to think that the others not only have a mind but that this one is similar to ours. Man thinks as animal does without so many differences. The idea of seeing mind as tidy progression starting from simple animals up to man () is original, because in this Darwinist evolutionary scale, Romanes does not put the structure, the species or the kind to which the man or the animal belong to, but the mental activities.) See A. Tartabini, Psicologia evoluzionistica (2003), pp. 9-10. 9 Griffin, whose main argument is that the conscious thinking could be from an evolutionary point of view more coherent and economical than a purely instinctive and unconscious complex mechanism, writes: one reason to suspect that nonhuman animals do experience conscious thoughts is that the basic structure and functioning of neurons and synapses are quite similar, as far as we know, in all animals with organized central nervous systems. There is no convincing evidence that specific features of gross neuroanatomy are essential for conscious thinking. See D.R. Griffin, Animal Minds ( 1992), p.4.
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First of all mind is taken away from an ideal abstractness and given back to a concrete sense and to a functionality which is its being an instrument of survival and of adaptation to the outside world. It is here greatly stressed that precisely as born inside the natural world as answer to physical laws it represents a reflecting form of it. What in Kant was ordering and legislator reason, place of prior intuitions and categories, ends progressively revealing itself as a sensory organ which recreates inside (in its own way) the outside (whatever it is). In the post-Darwinian thinking there will be more and more mind models, even different, which will consider its being born inside a natural process and as an adaptive answer. In Konrad Lorenz, for instance, the idea of a mental apparatus as reflecting is greatly stressed as the middle of his hypothetic realism. According to him, mind can only be thought as a sensation-perception development and so finally as a complex answer to the environmental spurs, a castof the outside world. It follows, in this, a destiny not different from the body structures in which it was born and lived. So according to him the organization of the sensory organs and of the nerves by which the livings orient themselves in the world, comes, by the phylogenesis, from a contraposition and a later adaptation to elements of the outside reality which through it appears as a phenomenal space. In many places and by different points of view Lorenz comes back to this main topic of his hypothetical realism, stressing how the birds plumes and the way itself in which the fish move reproduce the air physical properties and the water hydrodynamic ones or how the eye is a copy of the sun and of the physical characteristics of the light and concluding that, in the same way, also the man and animal behaviour, just because they have adapted to the surrounding environment, is an image of it. It is the theme of the mirror: the reflected image has a real reverse which puts it in the same ontological category of the things the image reflects. The reflecting activity is a contraposition between real and real: the subject sets itself in the world, rooting in the reality clefts.10 It has finally become more and more evident that it does not make sense to talk about an environment if you do not consider that a co-evolution has happened, a mutual interaction of the living systems. Ultimately the living are in a world they have born within adopting form and structure in a sort of never ending role playing. Their structures are as the results of a coevolution as their cognitive systems. These last ones, which already in Lorenz were not simple information receivers, have become then more and more thinkable as creative users of perturbations, stories builders. Ultimately the reflecting can never be considered as a simple image but rather as a complex interaction product. Our sensorial and perceptive system can only be tared on a precise dimensional scale (it does not fit for the macrocosm or the microcosm) and it elaborates concepts useful for biological needs or their derivates. It is a limited construction which suffers from the chances and limits of its own matter: the senses are limited not only because they have borders but because they act by cells, defined chemical or electrical mediators. The reflecting image lead us finally to another important theme represented by the '90s discovery of the mirror neurons. It has been observed (in Macacus rhesus) that some neuronal groups became active both when the animals behaved in specific ways and when they observed them in other subjects. This kind of neurons, also present in man, could explain an original communication way, a resonance, valid both for the comprehension of actions similar to ones own and for the perception of emotions, which would end turning into a deep empathy and into the skill of having a relation.
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See K. Lorenz, Die Rckseite des Spiegels Versuch einer Naturgeschichte mensliche Erkennens (1973).

The dimension of the mirror neurons widen the sense of the outside world reflection which happens into the organisms, suggesting that the functioning of mind is essentially linked to the body experience and reorganizing the cognitivist models which looks at the computer functional methods.11 (B) Historicity Becoming in such a way heir of the complex ways of the natural history, the human mind acquires, after Darwin -as we were saying- a historical dimension: a deepness. In the psychism model drawn by Freud what strikes our attention is its being almost punctually consequential accomplishment and psychological translation of the same heart of Darwinism, the re-proposal of a subject no longer inserted into the world from the outside, (embodied and lost in it) but inside project of the natural development which meant obviously - discovering once again a historical depth, a diachronia translated into an almost stratigraphic structurality. It is the crucial idea of the past including the present comprehension, the archaeological idea that will be applied both to the history of the single being and to the hard task of affirming the origins of life (and with it the laws of physics, chemistry and so on) with the modern man psychism. Particularly in Freud, the Id concept seems more definitely to introduce biology into the representation of mind as Id is open at its end from the somatic side and it fills itself with the energy coming from urges. Moreover while in the first topic the unconscious took origin by the removal, with the appearance of Id we assist to the recovery of a phylogenetic historicity which links again the single mind to its biological destiny.12 There is an insistence of Freud on the continuity in the genesis which leads from the biological need up to the Id and from this one both to the Ego and the Super-ego.13 Lucille Ritvo who documented in a very important study the continuity between Evolutionism and Psychoanalysis, observes that Freud never outlined a clear boundary between Id and Ego or between Ego and Super-ego but that he derived one from the other. He considered Ego as developed from Id under the push of vital exigencies and the Super-ego as a development of Ego. She concludes that Freud has always maintained the existence of a continuum which extends back through the individual development and the human race development up to the inorganic life development itself.14 It is so indubitable that in this contest he worked out a concept of animality as hidden substratum of the cultural and the social but also of the conscience and of its precarious emerging. In Eine Schwierigkeit der Psychoanalyse he says that after Darwin it has been evident that man is nothing more or better than animal, coming himself from the animal series and being related more to some species and less to others. In the same article he talks about an equality given both to the body structure and to the psychic attitude.15 Frank Sulloway legitimately stressed this aspect particularly in his Freud biologist of the mind together with some limits related to the fact that Freud, as Darwin, was profoundly convinced of the chance that adult acquisitions of the species could be Lamarckianly handed down to the descendants.16 Besides being a very rich and suggestive image, Haeckel expression according to which ontogenesis sums up phylogenesis was considered as a sort of dogma by the first postDarwinian generation.
11 See G. Rizzolatti C. Sinigaglia, So quel che fai ( 2006). M.A. Arbib, "The Mirror System, Imitation and the Evolution of Language" , Imitation in Animals and Artefacts ed. C. Nehaniv and K. Dautenhahn, (2002) pp. 229-280. G. Rizzolati - L. Fogassi V. Gallese, Neurophysiological Mechanisms Underlying the Understanding and Imitation of Actions", in Nature Reviews Neurosciences, 2001, 2, pp. 661-670. 12 See S.Freud, Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einfhrung in die Psychoanalyse.(1932) 13 See J. Laplanche, J.B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, p. 149. 14 See L.B. Ritvo, Darwin's Influence on Freud: A Tale of Two Sciences ( 1990). 15 See S. Freud , Eine Schwierigkeit der Psychoanalyse in Imago (1917). 16 See F. J. Sulloway, Freud Biologist of the Mind : Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (1979).

Also into Romanes diagram (Freud had a Mental evolution in Man copy underlined by himself in his library inWien) the link between the appearance of emotional and intellective phenomena in the newborn and their appearance in the species history has certainly been influenced by this conception. If it is no longer possible to fully submit the continuity imagined by Haeckel and think a sort of memory of the events relevant to the species history, nevertheless it is true that our mind has developed starting from archaic structures and partly its functions still reveal it. The physical basis of perception, behaviour and in such a way thinking appear similar in the different organisms: the neuronal structures are similar and by analogy the psychic expressions should be similar (Griffin, 1992). In spite of how many differences exist among the different species (but even inside our own among different conditions) the historical dimension of mind and its representations re-appearance in more or less distant organisms remain, starting from those discoveries, a hardly controvertible matter of fact. If the livings organisms have no memory of the historical events happened in millions of years, however they are memory of them (C) Man-animal structural affinities. The chances and limits of mind are, after Darwin, set in an absolutely new contest. Also the classic Kant idea, aimed at drawing the transcendental modalities of perception and intellect functioning and the image of a reality knowable only by the forms and categories of a clearly defined mental apparatus, finds here a decisive overcoming. At least because the mind-operating conditions and chances find a solid ground in being species features born by a process of adaptation and by biological needs. So you can see as the human mind, positioned in the intersection among biological need, environmental reflecting and phylogenetic inheritance, becomes to be thought between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century in a less abstract and more historical dimension thanks to the natural sciences development. The idea of a subject born inside the natural world becomes so possible as alternative to a long tradition structured on the concept of a psyche coming from the outside and whose origins are nebulous and un-investigable. The acceptance of the linked mental chances in animals (or at least in part of them) has had a well different fortune. An impressive amount of words has been spent to argue against these last ones, very often linking the existence of any form of consciousness to language and to its presence/absence. Other times the language argument has been useful not to deny but to sign a very deep caesura between ways of thinking. In few authors only, as in Griffin, the original Darwinian coherence maintained by Romanes - who wanted for analogous neuronal structures similar mental contents- nowadays translates itself into the proposal, for the animals, of a psychic world in which consciousness plays a decisive part. Also Searle, in his recent The mind argues that the physical structure beneath, which let the coming stimulus cause experience, is essentially similar in both the human being and the superior animals and that, for this reason, we are completely sure that both dogs and chimpanzees have in many ways conscious states similar to ours.17 1.3 The mind in animals There is no doubt that following these lines of thought lead finally to refuse the idea of a thought necessarily linked to language and to re-evaluate the thinking through images of which already Freud wrote that can be a very incomplete way of becoming conscious adding that such a thinking is moreover in such a way nearer to the unconscious processes than the thinking in words can be and it certainly dates back, both according to the
17

See J.R. Searle, The Mind. A Brief Introduction (2004)

ontogenetic and phylogenetic aspect, to an age older than this last one.18 Also recent experiences on the cognitive abilities of animals suggest that there are no proofs according to which the verbal language is essential to complete, e.g., the geometrical and non-geometrical information and that on the contrary basic geometrical intuitions are possible even without a formal instruction, without an experience with graphic symbols or maps or without a language rich of geometrical words.19 The discourse on mind is open nowadays more than ever, leant out toward a future in which more advanced techniques and methods could bring new light on the neuronal processes and on the qualia they carry. Even if recently many behaviours which some time ago would have been seen as a product of conscious activity, are now explained by ethological or computer models, nothing prevents the chance of descriptions in terms of subject experience nor that mental experiences could be actually experienced by animals .20 Definitely it seems that leaving the genetic point of view out of consideration in the comprehension of thought cannot lead to nothing concrete. In the more recent debate, the image of a psychism phylogenetic spreading comes back, a ghost of consciousness as result of the never ending re-modulations of the same phenomenon. In a recent essay Rodrick and Robert Wallace maintained that "Evolution is littered with paraphyletic convergences: many roads lead to functional Romes (). The discovery implies various animal taxa exhibiting behaviors we broadly recognize as conscious are, in fact, simply expressing different forms of the same underlying phenomenon.(). The variety of possibilities, a veritable rainbow suggests minds today be only a small surviving fraction of ancient evolutionary radiations, so concluding: The road to a paleontology of consciousness is wide and open.21 If you abandon yourself to the safe soil of the organisms co-evolution and of the sensorial and representative apparatus, and you give up a reading which passes also through the analysis of analogies between human and not-human minds, you do not have anything more than poorly reductionist visions or metaphysical conjectures, respectable but not involved into the scientific statute. In this sense, Romanes, even compared to those (Lloyd Morgan, Loeb, Thorndike, Watson, Skinner) who will deal with the animal behaviour after him, remains the forerunner of a thought line particularly mindful of the non-human psychism complexity and certainly anti-reductionist which nowadays appears more and more in tune with the almost daily discovery of an astonishing behavioural richness in the animal world.22

See S. Freud, Das Ich und das E s (1923). See V. A. Sovrano, La geometria nel cervello in Le scienze n. 482 (Oct. 2008), pp. 68-74. 20 See G. M. Burghardt, Animal Awareness Current Perception and Historical Perspective in American Psychologist 40 (1985). 21 See R. Wallace and R. G. Wallace, Darwins Rainbow: Evolutionary radiation and the spectrum of consciousness (2006). 22 P. Jouventin has recently taken stock of the situation maintaining that beyond the debates about the symbolism of bees language or parrots imitation ability, nowadays it is allowed to talk correctly of dialects and learning with regard to sparrows and whales, and of knowledge transmission in the big apes. Considering how it is now sure that the inability of animals of articulating a language has its origins in their own anatomy (as their speech organs do not permit it), he finds on the other hand, that their cognitive abilities (particularly in understanding the human languages as the deafanddumb one) reveal themselves so marked that sociologists or psychoanalysts question deeper and deeper on what really constitutes the human specificity and conclude that perhaps it is necessary to come back to the starting point, that is to say to Darwin, who maintained that between man and animal there is no difference of nature, but only of degree. See P. Jouventin, La communication animale aux carrefours de la connaissance in Pour la Science, N spcial La communication animale 34: 2-4. (2002).
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