They Huey P. Newton Reader

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The consensus of Western science is, of course, that the mind the
brain. Variations on this theme represent various competing schools
of psychology and psychobiology. All of this, however, dialectical materialism
subsumes and then sets itself against. The dialectical approach
tries to distinguish at once bctv/ccn the brain and the "mind," to take
the quotation marks, provisionally, off of the construct "mind."
The argument concerning inherent versus environmental phenomena
in the mind-brain is at least as old as Socrates. Dialectics, of course,
considers this but one more tautology or false argument.
There is an article by the great biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky,
in the 1960 volume Hundert Jahre Evolutionsforschung, to the effect
that the theory of preformation in evolution-which amounts to
denying evolution in favor of a purely endogenous unfolding, predetermined
once and for all-is "irrefutable" in principle and that all
one can do with it is show where it is useless. But if one attaches any
importance at all to the influence of environment, even by means of
some purely structural selection, it becomes very hard to view as
deducible the sort of evolutionary history that then emerges. Of
course, he makes it clear that environmental influence is exerted by
means of selection, although this selection never becomes operational
except at some precise moment and "has no foreknowledge of the
future." But the genes, according to him, act rather like the members
of an orchestra, not like soloists, so that, as he has emphasized
elsewhere (American Naturalist, November-December 1956), selection
operates not upon separate characteristics but upon overall reactions,
both of the polygenic kind (concurrent action of the genes)
and the pleiotropic kind (modification of a single gene with repercussions
on two or more characteristics). What decides success or failure
is, moreover, not only the final phenotypic state reached, but all
the stages along the line. On the other hand, variability is due not
simply to mutations but, above all, to genetic recombinations; it will
be remembered that Dobzhansky originated the "hypothesis of balance"
(1955), according to which the adaptive norm is an arrangement
of a number of genotypes, multiple heterozygotcs
predominating. The vital factor is then seen to be the internal equilibrium
of the genetic pool with what Lerner has called the "genetic
homeostasia." The important part played by equilibrium is stressed