William James and Evolutionary Theory

The essential break with the mental philosophical past was achieved by William James, whose Principles of Psychology (James, 1890) represented the first of the modern textbooks (Evans, 1981). James was a transitional figure, with one foot in philosophy and the other in the empiricism of the new science. His text, while still too philosophical for some of his more empirical colleagues (see, e.g., Evans, 1981; Ross,1972), nevertheless effectively cut the discipline’s past ties to theology. James was attracted to the new psychology by the possibility of using science to pursue philosophical issues more deeply (Croce, 1999) and called for psychology to be a natural science (James, 1892a). He recognized that while psychology was not yet an established science, it constituted the hope of a science (James,1892b). His textbooks (James,1890, 1892b) attracted recruits to psychology’s banner to attempt to realize that hope. William James had been appointed an instructor at Harvard in physiology in 1872; like Wundt, James had earned an MD degree and, again like Wundt, had no real interest in practicing medicine. In 1875, he offered a graduate course at Harvard on the Relations between Psychology and Physiology” and, again like Wundt, had rooms assigned to him to use for experimental demonstrations to augment his teaching. James, however, was never very enthusiastic about laboratory work; he once declared the psychophysics could never have arisen in a country in which the natives could be bored (Boring, 1950). As a text for his course in psychology, James adopted Principles of Psychology (1855) by Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). A course featuring discussion of evolutionary theory was a novelty, since the older, pre–Civil War
mental philosophy texts ignored evolutionary theory, while textbooks written after the war wrestled uncomfortably and unsuccessfully with integrating evolutionary theory with theological concerns. The theory of evolution by natural selection proposed by Charles Darwin (1809–1882) had an enormous influence on American psychology. In his book On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin presented evidence to support his theory of evolution and proposed natural selection as the mechanism
responsible. To account for the evolution of intelligent behaviors, Darwin appealed to two mechanisms, sexual selection (the evolution of traits that facilitate mating
success) and, more tentatively, as a second mechanism, the inheritance of acquired characteristics (Darwin, 1871). Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744–1829) had proposed that learned changes in behavior that occur during an animal’s lifetime can be passed down to that individual’s offspring through biological inheritance. This view was shared by Herbert Spencer, who, unlike Darwin, viewed the evolutionary process as a linear progression from “lower” to “higher” forms (Spencer, 1855). Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” to suggest that those individuals who were best
adjusted to their environments would survive. Learned behaviors that facilitated this adjustment to the environment would then be passed to subsequent generations. Adjustment was to the individual’s survival what adaptation was to the survival of the species (Boakes, 1984; Buxton, 1985a;1985b). The absence of evidence for Lamarck’s theory led to its abandonment, and evolutionary theory was left with natural selection as the only mechanism of evolutionary change. Nevertheless, Spencer’s focus on adaptability during an individual’s lifetime (learning) and Darwin’s emphasis on individual development during childhood, differences among
individuals, the relation between structure and function, and the continuity between animals and humans contributed substantially to the expansion of the topics that psychologists pursued in the name of psychological science.