Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

238 Jean Piaget
According to his view, only the germen seemed important from the point of
view of variation and evolution, while the phenotype constituted only a kind of
perishable individual excrescence with no evolutive influence, and evolution
was to be accounted for by mutations and by their selection conceived as a
process of sorting out. Behaviour appeared all the more negligible, with in-
stinct, learning and the intelligence itself being of only slightly additional use
to the survival of organisms in their struggle for life in the selection process.
We now know, however, that the genome is a controlling system made up
of interdependent elements, that genetic combinations play a more important
part than mutations and are themselves subject to laws of equilibration within
the genetic pool of the population. Above all, weknow that the phenotype should
be regarded as a response by the genome to environmental tensions and that
selection does not directly involve the genes, but the phenotypes as more or
less adapted responses. Behaviour, for its part, then no longer has anything
secondary or negligible about it, since it represents the essential activity of the
phenotype. Further, because of behaviour, the relations between the organism
and the environment become circular: the organism chooses its environment and
modifies it just as much as it is dependent on it, and behaviour thus becomes an
important factor in evolution itself.
We should therefore not be surprised to see one of the great founders of
contemporary ethology, K. Lorenz, who is a zoologist and not a psychologist,
write recently: ‘As naturalists knowing the real facts of evolution, we are bound
to consider the achievements of man’s intellectual apparatus just like any other
organic functions - as something formed phylogenetically that owes its specific
characteristics to the confrontation between the organism and the environ-
ment... And even if we are not interested in the actual processes of knowledge,
but solely in its ‘objective’ and extra-subjective bearings, we are bound to study
the theory of cognition, as a particular instance of the science of biological
systems’.’z Lorenz himself interprets human knowledge as being essentially due
to a priori forms, in the sense that they exist prior to experience, though they
are not necessary and are considered as hereditary hypotheses on the mode of
instincts.
These possible links between biological structure and the structure of knowl-
edge, especially between organic control mechanisms and cognitive control
systems with their gradual equlibrations, provide no justification whatsoever
for a reductionist approach, and for an obvious reason from the point of view
of the psychology of development. This is that the intelligence is not created
fully equipped, as if already contained in the organism, nor does it develop in
a straight line starting from elementary mechanisms already formed in the ner-
vous and genetic systems, but is gradually built up, stage by stage, each one
beginning with the reconstruction of what had already been acquired at the
previous level. We cannot, for instance, consider logic as innate and already there
in the brain due merely to the fact that W. McCulloch and W . Pitts discovered
that the various changes occurring in the synaptic junctions corresponded in
structure to the functors of the logic of propositions. Such nervous structures
must &st of all be expressed in sensori-motor structures, and these are not simply