Maybe I need some chemical adjustment, but I've been very amused, almost to
laughing aloud over the current line on nature vs. nurture.
The best idea seemed to be the one attributed to Bruner, that practices
guided by developmental theories create conditions that seem to naturalize
particular trajectories of development. What biology can tell us is that
development happens; history more or less tells the same story. Change
begets change; when we change the conditions of possibility for activity,
we can get and usually do get different kinds of activity. This process is
cumulative, or irreversible, but it is at every stage _contingent_.
Two kinds of confusion seem to arise. One having to do with the different
timescales of different kinds of change; a point that Mike Cole has made
here often (evolution, history, ontogeny, microgenesis in activity ... but
also many more scales in between these, with the key question being how
they add up and trickle down across scales). The other with the relation
between evolution-like change and development-like change.
In idealized organism-centric biology this is relatively simple, but in the
real world of complex multiscale systems it isn't. Organisms develop;
species evolve. Individuals, on whatever scale, develop; types or classes,
on whatever scale, evolve. Development progresses along trajectories that
are similar within a class; what evolves are the typical trajectories of
the class. Every individual trajectory is partly class-specific and partly
unique; when some of the uniqueness becomes generic to the class, that's
evolution.
The unit of evolution is the developmental trajectory, but not for the
individual; rather it is the frequency distribution of kinds of trajectory
found in the class. (And the class is most generally defined by the
similarity of the trajectories.) The distribution changes because of the
unique differences that occur in individual trajectories, but only if
something makes those differences propagate in the class -- the right
conditions.
What we think of as biological evolution (macro-evolution, vs. the
micro-evolution of short-term changes in gene frequencies) is not strictly
evolution under this definition, it is also partly _development_ of the
biosphere, i.e. of a larger scale organizational level. There are two
analytically distinct hierarchies here: a type-hierarchy
(order-genus-species-individual) and a scale-hierarchy
(biosphere-ecosystem-population-individual ... note that these are not
exactly correct, just illustrative of the point), but they are
interdependent. The conditions that shape an individual developmental
trajectory have one necessary minimum persistence timescale, distinct from,
and usually much shorter than, that for the conditions that shape evolution
(even micro-evolution). The passing of information between processes with
different timescales is what one really needs to understand to see how all
this works. DNA inheritance is only one small part of that story.
Another is the role of the egg cell in establishing the right conditions
for DNA to catalyze reactions; the recipe book is not the only artifact you
need to have in a kitchen. In many organisms there is a house around the
kitchen (an eggshell, a womb in a mother in a family in a village ecology
...), and at each scale there is maintenance and change of conditions
necessary to allow the recapitulation in ontogeny of a very long series of
accidents each preserved because of past conditions on different scales of
space and time, some of which still persist today.
But recapitulation is not the only important thing happening; there is also
individuation of each trajectory. Equifinality is an attribute of a class;
we judge that by some criteria something about the trajectories and where
they get to is 'the same'; but each individual has come by a different
route, if we choose to pay equal attention to differences on many scales.
Those differences, which are not just a matter of DNA mutations by any
means, are the raw 'variation' on which 'selection' acts. Of course there
is no such thing as 'selection' as a material process; it too is an
artifact of our classifying and connecting events on different timescales.
What is really happening is that events on short timescales are 'adding up'
in a certain way because of constant conditions on longer timescales. Lack
of change on a longer timescale, usually typical of a larger system,
defines the direction of change on a shorter timescale, for usually a
smaller system or subsystem. And at each scale there are _real_ material
processes at work, 'developmental' processes that account for the
similarities in evolution, which are just as noticeable and important as
the differences.
In this picture, which is gradually making its way towards paradigm status
in biology, but still has a ways to go against the resistance of the
reductionist worldview, if we add in the activities of humans (and other
species to a lesser degree) that we call cultural (i.e. meaning-based and
typical of groups or categories of individuals), and look across the full
range of relevant scales (planetary, regional, national, local-urban,
ecosystemic, micro-patch, organismic, cellular, molecular in size //
geological, evolutionary, historical, ontogenetic, microgenetic, actional,
operational, physiological, chemical in time ... and all the scales in
between) -- then there is no relevant distinction between nature and
culture. They cannot 'interact' with one another because they are both part
of exactly the same processes and systems in the same hierarchies of
organization and process. They cannot be separated from each other either,
except ideologically and arbitrarily and with disastrous results for
scientific analysis. What can be separated are different material systems
and subsystems, and different timescales of processes. But on each scale of
system and process there are elements and aspects of what some cultural
traditions call 'nature' or 'culture'. Indeed what we call 'culture' tends
to be restricted to certain scales, but that also is very misleading. Any
definition of culture that does not arbitrarily limit it to humans will
find it at all scales where semiosis occurs, and that goes down at least to
one-celled organisms, and probably to intra-cellular processes, and
possibly to macromolecular ones ... and who is to say that some future
physics will not construe it as happening at or below the limits of the
notions of space and time?
Or go upwards (outwards, longtime) in scale. Soil erosion and deforestation
processes. Climate shift processes. Extinction processes. Ecological change
processes. Atmospheric-oceanic-biospheric change processes. All show the
effect of human cultural decisions and meaning-based action patterns; all
also influence the evolution and development of cultures. Not the solar
system? not the galaxy? Not yet, but we have not yet observed on the
relevant very long timescales. Who is to say a million or a billion years
from now? or that what we see today has not been shaped on these scales by
lifeforms and intelligences that came long long before us?
Soma, as Huxley well knew (read _The Doors of Perception_ or _The Perennial
Philosophy_), was not primarily an 'opiate of the masses' or an instrument
of hegemonic cultural control (though that is also a means of preserving
certain conditions over certain timescales and necessary to many features
of culture that we value). It was an affordance of our ecosystem, a
possible interaction of animal and plant chemistry, that could open up
unique trajectories for individuals, and which was also typically
culturally regulated (in Vedic Hindu culture, in Native American peyote
religions, etc.) as part of stable longer term systems.
Prozac is just as natural as peyote, and just as cultural. So is sticking
an electrode in your brain. So is eating chocolate. So is regulating your
breathing patterns. So is becoming sexually aroused by a photograph, or a
body-type. So is getting melanoma from hard solar UV let through an ozone
depleted atmosphere in equilibrium with a certain kind of human
technological civilization -- all indistinguishably both natural and
cultural. So will be new genetically (very slightly!) modified plants and
animals in our already heavily modified human ecosystems.
We will make mistakes, but as we have no right to all the credit for
large-scale longterm systems and processes in which we participate (we
can't control them, whatever we may think), we should not moan with guilt
about changes either. We have already done crimes against 'nature' that a
less sophisticated galactic police would have incinerated us for; we're
really only worried about doing ourselves in at this point. One scale's
mistake is another scale's opportunity. How many mistakes did it take in
evolution to make us possible?
All we have to go by are the interdependent pair of Knowledge and Values.
Discourses and meaning-making practices necessarily both describe and
evaluate, both act and choose, in ways so mutually pervading that even this
distinction may be more misleading than useful. But remembering both
aspects is useful. And remembering that K-V is also developing and
evolving, at scales a bit up the chain from us, and co-evolving with
technologies and large-scale material system changes in our world. We shall
see how long romantic discourses of good-nature and wicked-artifice
survive, and how well their practitioners do, historically, as other more
unitary views of the multiscalar whole emerge.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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