Biologism has two cardinal manifestations. One is the claim that the mind is the brain, or the activity of the brain, so that one of the most powerful ways to advance our understanding of ourselves is to look at our brains in action, using the latest scanning devices. The other is the claim that Darwinism explains not only how the organism Homo sapiens came into being but also what motivates people and shapes their day-to-day behavior.
These beliefs are closely connected.
If the brain is an evolved organ, shaped by natural selection to ensure evolutionary success, and if the mind is the brain and nothing more, then the mind and all those things we are minded to do can be explained by the evolutionary imperative. The mind is a cluster of apps or modules securing the replication of the genes that are expressed in our bodies.
Many in the humanities have embraced these views with astonishing fervor. New disciplines, prefixed by "neuro" or "evolutionary" or even "neuro-evolutionary," have been invented. "Neuro-aesthetics" explains aesthetic pleasure in terms of activity in certain parts of the brain observed when people are enjoying works of art. A propensity for aesthetic brain-tingles, implanted in us by evolution, causes us to tingle to the right kinds of things, such as pictures of landscapes loaded with food.
"Neuro-economics" can explain why we buy things we don't need or can't afford, by identifying ancestral imbalances between the want-it center in the amygdala, deep in the cerebral hemispheres, and the wait-until-you-can-afford-it center in the prudent frontal lobes. Those toxic subprime mortgages, it appears, were in fact "neurotoxic." Conspicuous consumption and our trillion-dollar debts are due to a desire to advertise our genetic health, analogous to a peacock virtually crippled by its meretricious tail.
A brain in good working order is, of course, a necessary condition of every aspect of human consciousness, from basic perception to the most complex constructed sense of self. It does not follow that this is the whole story of our nature—that we are just brains in some kind of working order. Many aspects of everyday human consciousness elude neural reduction. For we belong to a boundless, infinitely elaborated community of minds that has been forged out of a trillion cognitive handshakes over hundreds of thousands of years. This community is the theater of our daily existence. It separates life in the jungle from life in the office, and because it is a community of minds, it cannot be inspected by looking at the activity of the solitary brain.
Biologism commands acceptance in the humanities because it is promoted or endorsed by scientists whose prowess in their chosen field seems to qualify them to pronounce on what are essentially philosophical questions. Thus it is notable when two books written by neuro-biologists of the greatest distinction are nonetheless critical of the simplifications—both scientific and philosophical—of biologism. Both authors look outside the conceptual frameworks upon which biologism depends.
Terrence W. Deacon: Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter
Michael S. Gazzaniga: Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain
Source: The Wall Street Journal, November 12, 2011
Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, Richard Lannon: A General Theory of Love
Leaders know and science has discovered emotionality's deeper purpose: the timeworn mechanisms of emotion allow two human beings to receive the contents of each other's minds.