L3 Biological Influences Flashcards
What was Phrenology?
Bumps on the head give insights into cognition/personality.
Franz Joseph Gall - hypothesised about this but never opened anyone’s skull or sold anything.
Business - it was later turned into a business where people could have potential employees/wives tested.
Discredited - Napoleon commissioned Flourens to investigate it. He does this using abalations and finds it is nonsense.
Contributions of Charles Darwin.
Comparative psychology - species have similar psychology due to shared ancestry
Developmental psychology - documented his own child’s ontogeny to study human cognitive development.
Adaptation/individual differences - you had features that others didn’t and that’s why you survived and bred.
Emotion - looking for universals in emotional facial expressions.
Contributions of George John Romanes.
Darwin - recipient of a lot of Darwin’s literature when he died.
Instinct vs habit - interested in whether actions are instinctive or reflexive. Protecting children is an instinct.
Heritability - animals seem to exhibit and share some instincts. These instincts are heritable and subject to natural selection.
Ontogeny = phylogeny - believed that ontogeny (individual development) recapitulates phylogeny (evolutionary history of the species).
Contributions of Conwy Lloyd Morgan?
Morgan’s Canon: In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of the higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.
i.e. the principle of parsimony.
Does dog have empathy when you’re sad or does he know he’ll get pats?
What were the three important elements in the early North American tradition?
Religion - when they migrated to the US, the settlers were puritanicals.
Business - supreme value was placed on useful knowledge because it made money. Anti-intellectualism i.e. no point to theoretical only.
Blank slate - Americans also tended to be radical environmentalists. This appeals to them having left Europe and the power of the monarchy.
What is Transcendentalism?
Post-Kantian idealism - noumena were knowable. They believed in an order of truths that transcended the senses.
Individualism - still focused on the individual and individual experience, you going off on a hike, you doing this alone. Self-reliance is key, and rejection to elitism.
Romanticism - prizing individual feeling and communion with nature. Passion is what makes you closer to god.
What was an example of the influence of Transcendentalism on popular culture?
The reframing of Phrenology
Though originally framed scientifically (by Gall), it was reframed by the Fowlers who minimised the scientific content and maximised the practical applications.
This was due to the rejection of eliticism and emphasis on the individual. We are not interested in science, we are interested in how we can assess and better ourselves as individuals.
What are some antecedents to Darwin’s evolution?
Lamarck - law of use and disuse, law of inheritance and acquired characteristics
Time scale - time since creation seemed too short for evolution. We’ve only been on the earth for 6000 years, how could this be?
Charles Lyell - layers of rocks demonstrate that the earth is a lot older than we think. The principle of uniformatism cf the other chaotic theory.
