PSYC 3420 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: E. O. Wilson, Konrad Lorenz, Songbird
16 Apr 2020
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Principle of psychic determinism: everything that we do is caused by a mental event (psychological) that comes beforehand. Freud = possible causes are unconscious events. Whenever you draw a time frame around an event of observation, you"re including some possible causes but also excluding others. Darwin"s theory is not a theory about the origin of life forms, but rather about the process of change over time (evolution) Ontogeny: psychologists look for ontogenetic causes (focus on development of the individual) how? . Phylogeny: ultimate causation (address adaptive significance of a trait or behaviour over evolutionary time) why? (psychologists ignore this) Lamarck"s idea was towards progress, the idea that each species has the tendency to go towards becoming better (change occurs in the context of individual organisms) . Theory of progress: organisms always adapted to their env, env change over time, laws of use and disuse, structural changes passed to the next generation. Scientific observations pre-darwin: biodiversity, the earth is old.
