Karl Lashley and Clark Hull had a long and unresolved controversy about the structure and function of the brain, its relationship to the mind, and the use of machine metaphors to explain intelligence. Though on the surface their debate was not about the relative importance of heredity or environment in determining intelligence and behavior, this is the subtext that ran through their exchanges. A determined hereditarian, Lashley was committed, both intellectually and institutionally, to the integration of biology and psychology. But Hull believed that environmentally‐shaped reflex connections underlay behavior and that this law made psychology the most basic of the social sciences.
The history of psychology is one of those unusual academic fields pursued by two different groups of scholars in two different institutional locations: psychologist-historians and historians of science. In this concluding reflection on the special issue, I argue for a new kind of relationship between these two professional groups. Neither their consolidation nor their mutual isolation is the best way forward for our small and neglected field. Instead, I imagine a future in which the difference between our professional locations narrows but does not disappear, in which communication and mutual understanding broaden and intensify, but in which the two groups maintain their distinct identities. Because mutual isolation does not serve anyone's interests well, I discuss two ways in which further integration of the two groups might take shape. (PsycINFO Database Record
Constructing Scientific Psychology, published in 1999, was the first full-scale interpretation of the life and work of the major American neuropsychologist Karl Lashley. It sets Lashley's research at the heart of two controversies that polarized the American life and human sciences in the first half of the twentieth century. These concerned the relationship between 'mind' and 'brain' and the relative roles of 'nature' and 'nurture' in shaping behaviour and intelligence. The book explodes the myth of Lashley's neuropsychology as a fact-driven, 'pure' science by arguing that a belief in the power of heredity and a nativist and deeply conservative racial ideology informed every aspect of his theory and practice.
This essay examines Robert Ardrey (1908-1980)-American playwright, screenwriter, and prolific author-as a case study in the popularization of science. Bringing together evidence from both paleoanthropology and ethology, Ardrey became in the 1960s a vocal proponent of the theory that human beings are innately violent. The essay shows that Ardrey used his popular scientific books not only to consolidate a new science of human nature but also to question the popularizer's standard role, to reverse conventional hierarchies of scientific expertise, and to test the boundaries of professional scientific authority. Understanding how he did this can help us reassess the meanings and uses of popular science as critique in Cold War America. The essay also shows that E. O. Wilson's sociobiology was in part a reaction to the subversive political message of Ardrey's science.
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