In connection with my Podcast series, “Healing Psychology,” I edited and improved the Introductory chapter of my upcoming book, Re-Imagining Psychology. Here’s the new version. Please feel free to comment.
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. [1]
– Theodosius Dobzhansky
THIS IS A BOOK with a single goal: to extend the idea of natural selection from biology into its daughter science, psychology. It’s something that should have happened all by itself. And it should have happened a long, long time ago.
The sciences are all related. Chemistry uses concepts from physics. And biology uses principles from chemistry. But what about psychology? From which science does it inherit principles?
Clearly, its parent science is biology. Curiously, though, for over a century psychology has declined to use most of the foundational concepts of biology. Behavioral scientists seem to assume that these principles just aren’t relevant to the study of behavior and mental life. This mistake has crippled scientific psychology.
Let’s contrast psychology with biology. Most of us consider biology to be a mature science. That’s because it has progressed to the point it does a pretty good job explaining its subject—life. Certainly, biologists still have lots to learn. But they know enough that they aren’t confused. Psychologists, by contrast, are still struggling to explain the subjects at the center of their interest—behavior and mental life.
Biologists aren’t confused. But just imagine how confused they would be if they tried to understand living things without knowing anything at all about disease. The concept of disease is of overwhelming importance in accounting for the features of living things. Without understanding disease, biologists would tie themselves in knots trying to explain why animals harbor worms in their intestines. They wouldn’t be able to say why animals let bacteria and viruses proliferate in their bodies, when those lifeforms shorten their lives. And they would wonder why they permit some of their own cells to form destructive masses within them, tumors that ultimately kill them.
Without the concept of parasitic disease, biologists wouldn’t understand that organisms don’t suffer these insults gladly. They suffer them because parasites disable their hosts’ immune functions, the defenses the animal would use to fight them off. Parasite and host struggle for control, locked in an unending arms race. Without knowing about disease, and not understanding how living things fight disease, there is simply no way to grasp the nature or the impact of that struggle. If they were ignorant of disease, life scientists would drive themselves to distraction trying to sort it all out. And modern medicine would simply not exist.
Psychology’s dilemma
Today’s psychology is in exactly this kind of fix. It’s trying to explain diseased behaviors without understanding that behavior can be diseased. Oblivious to this kind of disease, psychology has overlooked something of supreme importance, something that simply must be included in a mature behavioral science.
Because it has been blind to diseased behavior, psychology has also overlooked the fact that evolution has provided us with a form of immunity—behavioral immunity—that protects us from our own out-of-control behavior. Behavioral immunity is rooted in our evolved power of attention. It’s the faculty we call attention that empowers us to bring the consequences of our own acts into our awareness, and so to regulate our behavior.
Without knowing that our own habits can begin to relate to us as parasite to host, psychology can’t account for the destructive things we do when our habits escape their controls, and begin to harm us and those we care about. And without understanding the real reason for the dysfunction, psychology can’t help us deal with it.
Parasitic habits? Behavioral immunity? If such things were real, we tell ourselves, surely our psychology would know about them, and would bring them to our attention. It would. Wouldn’t it?
That’s exactly the right question to ask. Unfortunately, the answer is no. Though an understanding of parasites does enlighten biological science, that light is entirely missing from behavioral science. Behavior can indeed become diseased, in the true sense of parasitic disease. And this kind of disease is indeed the source of much human folly and suffering. But for over a century, our psychology has remained completely in the dark. Why? How could a science whose entire purpose is to explain behavior stay so clueless for so long? In order to answer that question, we need to broaden our psychology to account for both the negative influence of out-of-control, parasitic habits upon human awareness, and the means by which we resist that influence. We need, in other words, to acknowledge both behavioral disease and behavioral immunity.
A good science explains its subject matter, and so helps us deal with things. It’s reasonable to expect psychology, the science of behavior and mental life, to help us understand and correct our acts when they become irrational or destructive. But too often it doesn’t help at all.
These letdowns have consequences. We depend upon the insights flowing from psychology to help us live satisfying lives. But over and over, behavioral science disappoints just when we need help the most—when we struggle with an addiction or some other destructive, irrational, out-of-control behavior. Neither is it much help in correcting obviously pathological trends in our social, political, and business systems. You’d think the public would get frustrated when they don’t get the help they need. Mysteriously, though, few seem to notice psychology’s failures.
That lack of awareness is at the heart of the problem. Psychology still can’t see that it’s a part of biology. Because it doesn’t use the most important of biology’s principles, our psychology can’t explain even the normal learning of habits. And it falls far short of explaining how a habit can turn into a diseased, dysfunctional pattern like alcoholism. Biology’s powerful concepts do provide the answers we need. So… why doesn’t psychology make use of them? The answer is so weird that it almost defies belief. And that’s what this book is about.
Resolving the dilemma
How can we make things right? Let’s begin by repeating that psychology is a branch of biology, the larger science that explains the adaptation of living things to their environments. Psychology is an offshoot, a child of that mother science. Behavioral science is about adaptation, just as surely as biology is about adaptation. But psychology addresses a specific type of adaptation—the kind reflected in animals’ perception, cognition, and behavior.
Psychology can, and should, make use of biology’s foundational ideas to explain behavior—both the normal kind of behavior, and the abnormal kind. Today’s theorists can create a stronger, more valuable behavioral science by making full use of those ideas—most especially the concept of natural selection, biology’s guiding light.
Using the idea of natural selection to make sense of behavior leads us down a path to mind-blowingly beautiful insights. It’s a path that incorporates the ideas of theorist Carl G. Jung, makes use of the concept of parasitic disease, and ends in a reconciliation of psychology with biology. You are invited to travel this path now. The first step is understanding how natural selection relates to individual learning.
The light of evolution
It was more than a century ago that the idea of natural selection transformed biology. Researchers had already uncovered many truths about living things. Then a breakthrough insight brought their separate discoveries together under a single umbrella. The concept of natural selection empowered biologists to grasp the larger picture behind all those separate details about living things—how they arise, and how they adapt to their environments so effectively. Hundreds of puzzle pieces quickly fell into place, one after another.
Darwin and Wallace [1] framed natural selection as “survival of the fittest.” The animals that were best adapted to their ecological niches lived longer to pass their positive characteristics on to their offspring. Those helpful features gradually accumulated to shape their species. Natural selection explained how the remarkably intelligent designs of living things come into being.
Consider the struggle between the African wildebeest and its predator the lion. In Darwin’s eyes, the strongest, wariest, fastest wildebeest were the ones that escaped the fangs and claws of the lion. So those individuals survived to pass their helpful characteristics on to the next generation. By the same token, the fiercest, strongest, most relentless lions ate better than their peers. So, they likewise passed their characteristics on to their offspring. In this way, over the generations, both prey and predator refined their ability to do what they needed to do to survive.
Biology’s mistake
The contest between the lion and the wildebeest does illustrate the way natural selection works. Yet the authors of evolutionary theory unwittingly left something quite important out of the picture. In describing the struggle for survival, they had failed to consider the influence of the animals’ parasites—the smaller lifeforms that live in and on them, exploiting their resources. And this omission had consequences far, far greater than they might have imagined.
As originally conceived, “survival of the fittest” seemed to imply that fierce apex predators such as lions (on the land) and sharks (in the ocean) dominate the action. In recent years, though, life scientists have discovered that, in almost every ecosystem they have studied, the parasites are the ones actually running the show. [2]
Parasites controlling ecosystems? How could that be? Most parasites aren’t nearly as impressive as lions or sharks. They are most often small compared to their hosts. The majority are even microscopic—bacteria, yeasts, and viruses. It’s easy to see how Darwin and Wallace could have overlooked the influence of something so diminutive and seemingly insignificant. And yet, the evidence says parasites really do have that kind of power.
What kind of power do parasites have? There’s a term, maybe an overly dramatic term, that biologists frequently use to describe it. It’s called “parasitic zombification.” [3]When the lion catches the wildebeest, it’s often because a tiny internal parasite has changed the wildebeest’s perception and behavior, making it do things it would not ordinarily do, things that aren’t good for it. For example, the parasite influences the animal to lose its caution, and stray carelessly from its herd. Being isolated makes it easier for the lion to chase it down and devour it.
But wait! That sounds suicidal—for both the parasite and its host. Where’s the logic in a parasite’s arranging for its own host to get eaten by a predator? Wouldn’t the parasite die with it? And how in the world could a tiny parasite have such dramatic influence on its host?
Answers to such questions come easier when we think in terms of natural selection. To complete its life cycle, that particular species of parasite needs to move from inside the prey—the wildebeest—to inside the predator—the lion. Because the parasite will sexually reproduce inside the predator lion. [4] And over millions of generations, the parasite has evolved the means to alter the wildebeest’s behavior to make it more likely to be eaten. Causing the wildebeest to yield to the lion helps the parasite jump from its first host to its second.
This so-called zombification is kind of creepy. So we might hope that it happens only rarely. But it’s far from rare. In fact, zombification is universal. It’s inevitable, part of each and every parasite/host relationship. Why? Because of the way natural selection works.
The fittest individuals of any species are the ones that survive to pass their characteristics to the next generation. We must ask ourselves this: when it comes to parasites, which individuals are the fittest, most likely to survive? It’s the ones able to influence their host’s behavior in ways that favor the parasite. It makes sense, then, that through natural selection every parasite will, to the extent possible, evolve ways to exert control over both the body and the activity of its host.
There are some wonderful advantages to being a parasite. It’s easier to ride in a boat than it is to row it. Through natural selection, parasites arrange for their hosts to do a good bit of the rowing for them. They stow away aboard their host organisms, treating themselves to an easy trip down the river of life. Parasitism is an immensely popular lifestyle. It’s so popular, in fact, that the vast majority of all species are parasites, from viruses to bacteria to much more complex lifeforms. They’re literally everywhere. Science writer Carl Zimmer put it this way: “The study of life is, for the most part, parasitology.” [5]
To be clear, when we speak of zombified host animals we are not talking about the scary, mythical “walking dead” of motion pictures. The zombified hosts are not mythical. And they’re certainly not dead. They are very real, and very much alive. It’s just that the host’s parasites have co-opted their perception and their behavior, changing it in ways that benefit the parasite. Whether those changes are harmful depends on what the parasite needs to survive and reproduce. Some zombification actually benefits their hosts—if helping the host benefits the parasite. Logically enough, a parasite changes its host’s behavior in ways that help the parasite complete its own life cycle, whatever that may be.
Psychology’s copycat error
Overlooking parasitic zombification was a huge mistake for biology. It introduced a flaw in theorists’ reasoning that slowed progress for decades. Only recently has biology begun its recovery from this misstep. But here we’re concerned with psychology. So why are we talking about parasites? Does parasitism have something to do with psychology?
Yes, it does. We humans are host animals too. So, when we harbor any kind of parasite it will inevitably change our behavior and our perception. Opening our eyes to this reality can demystify some of our self-destructive activities. Unfortunately, though, psychology has followed in biology’s footsteps, duplicating its error of omission rather precisely. It has overlooked the influence of parasitic forms upon normal and abnormal behavior. And unlike biology, it has not yet realized its mistake. So it hasn’t taken a single step to correct it.
In the pages to follow, we’ll examine the unforeseen consequences of psychology’s copycat blunder, and outline a way to make things right. Fixing this mistake will extend the light of evolution from biology to behavior, illuminating the way to a more useful psychology. This re-imagining hinges on our using a handful of well-validated biological principles to deepen our understanding of normal and abnormal habits. Among these useful concepts are parasitism, immunity, and parasitic zombification.
As we apply these ideas, it will become apparent that addictions and similarly destructive, out-of-control behaviors are best understood as symptoms of parasitic zombification. Already we know that biological parasites can and do change human behavior. Parasites can, in other words, make us act in ways that are good for the parasites, but not so good for us. And this way of thinking shows us that zombification happens even when the parasite in question is purely behavioral, and not biological.
Jumping the fence
The insight that biological parasites can and do influence our behavior is a step toward greater understanding. But as long as we restrict our attention to the influence of biological parasites only, we’re still sitting on the fence between biology and psychology.
We can amplify that insight a hundredfold by jumping completely over the fence, right into the domain of cognition and behavior—psychology proper. Within this realm, the zombifying parasitic forms of greatest concern aren’t biological organisms. Rather, the major concern is abnormally persistent patterns in an animal’s behavior, patterns of activity that maintain themselves at the animal’s expense—in other words, “behavioral parasites.”
What’s a behavioral parasite? It’s a habit that has escaped its normal controls to become self-replicating. If this idea sounds strange, it is only because of that copycat error. Psychology’s decision to ignore the influence of parasitic forms makes the idea of diseased behavior sound kind of weird. But despite its unfamiliarity, the idea of diseased habits isn’t any stranger than the idea of diseased bodies. When we open our eyes to what’s really going on as we acquire habits, we will see that the learning process itself regularly and unavoidably creates parasitic habits.
Self-repeating, malignant habits are an inevitable byproduct of the learning process. To attain, refine, or revise a habit, it’s necessary that there be variation in the way it is expressed. That normal variation occasionally creates self-reproducing forms that can spin out of control unless actively suppressed. Addictions and other stereotypical, destructive, persistent behaviors arise when routine suppression fails. If we apply the principle of natural selection to psychological phenomena, as we should, this conclusion is simply unavoidable.
Natural selection
The idea of natural selection is as important for psychology as it is for biology. To see why, we have to understand what it is—and what it is not. It is certainly not something invented by Darwin and Wallace. Those thinkers were simply the first to write clearly about it.
Natural selection is the process that has been guiding the development of life for billions of years. What Darwin and Wallace did invent was a way to understand that process. First, they discovered how living things adapt to their environments. Then they wrote about their discovery clearly enough that the world could understand.
Natural selection is the mechanism behind evolutionary change. The way it works isn’t all that hard to grasp, but people tend to get confused anyway. Perhaps we can sidestep some of that confusion by introducing it with a parable, one I call “The Sculptor’s Stupid Secret.”
Once there was a sculptor who became famous for his magnificent marble horses. His works were so very lifelike—stallions and mares, fully grown animals and foals, some carved as if at rest and others as if in motion. His horses evoked such feeling in the beholder that he was the envy of all the other sculptors in the land. Was it indeed artistry, they wondered, or had this savant somehow acquired a gift from the gods? One of his rivals begged him to reveal his secret. “There’s really not much to it,” the sculptor modestly replied. “I buy a big block of marble. Then I take up my tools, and I chip away everything that isn’t a horse.”
The sculptor’s secret sounds kind of stupid. Oddly, though, he has voiced the most profound principle of evolution. Natural selection does in fact create “what is” by chipping away “what isn’t.”
Here’s how it works. Suppose there’s a large group of mice living in a field. There are minor differences among the mice. For example, some individuals can run faster than others. Hungry hawks fly above the field looking for a meal. Naturally, the hawks eat the mice that are easiest to catch—the slower ones.
With those sluggish mice removed from the breeding population, only the faster ones remain. These mate to begin the next generation. Their genes are mixed, and that mixing creates more variation among them. Then the cycle starts again. Some individuals of the new generation are faster than the others. Once again, the slower mice are more likely to get caught and eaten. And in this way, the faster ones are “naturally selected” to begin each succeeding generation.
This cycle repeats indefinitely. With the features of the slower mice gradually “chipped away” over the generations, the population becomes faster and faster on average, harder for the hawks to catch. Chipping away “what isn’t” creates “what is.” This is how natural selection shapes animal species.
Universal Darwinism
Natural selection shapes lots of other things, too. Once the concept was clear enough, people started seeing see it working everywhere. They came to recognize it in all kinds of systems—many of which have nothing to do with living things. Inventive people even started dreaming up ways of using natural selection to grow solutions to difficult problems. Applying the principle to solve other kinds of problems is called Universal Darwinism.
For example, stock market analysts now harness it to develop effective trading strategies. How? They create a bunch of strategies at random. Then they use real market data to try the strategies out, to see which of them yield the best profits. They remove the worst-performing strategies from the pool. Those that remain are the “naturally selected” winners. The analysts add some variation to these, and they become the starting point for the next generation.
The market analysts repeat this cycle of variation and selection hundreds of times. Profits get better and better. The end result is a viable trading strategy. The strategy seems for all the world like an intelligent design. But God didn’t create the solution—it created itself. It’s a mindless product of evolution by natural selection.
In much the same way, aircraft engineers apply natural selection to develop innovative designs for planes. And AI developers tap the process to evolve better voice recognition systems. Given the wide applicability of this venerable “chip away the losers” principle, it shouldn’t surprise us to learn that nature has been using it all along to shape our habits.
Learning
As the coming chapters emphasize, variation and selection is the very backbone of individual learning. As with animal species, aircraft, trading strategies, and AI systems, individual habits become more efficient as less satisfactory variants of the habit are “chipped away.” Recognizing this process in individual learning yields huge practical benefits.
Of course, the way variation and selection shapes individual habits is not quite the same as the way it shapes biological forms. To begin with, there is a vast difference in the timescale needed for the evolution of a species and the evolution of an individual habit. Animal bodies evolve over a period of time spanning multiple generations. That could be hundreds, or thousands, or millions of years. Habits evolve within a much shorter time span—the lifetime of a single animal. That could be months, days, or even minutes.
Most behavior theorists seem blind to the variation and selection in habit formation. But it’s there, unrecognized. We can acknowledge that truth now, or we can continue to ignore it. But it is better to see it for what it is, because understanding learning as variation and selection helps us explain psychology’s most perplexing failures.
What have behavior theorists missed by neglecting the principle of variation and selection? A lot. Because they don’t really understand how normal habits develop, they can’t understand abnormal habits either. They fail to recognize that many of our own maladaptive behaviors are actually parasitic habits. Parasitic forms and parasitic zombification are everywhere in biology. These things are everywhere in the realm of behavior too, a realm where bad habits sometimes seem to take on a life of their own.
Threatening a disease
There’s a general principle about pathogens that applies as certainly to behavioral disorders as it does to biological disorders. We can state the principle this way: “When we threaten a disease, it invariably evolves resistance.” In applying this principle, we must bear in mind that resistance builds automatically, without intent. The disease does not have any awareness that it is changing in response to a threat.
Antibiotics have no awareness, and we presume germs don’t either. So of course, antibiotics do not threaten germs as a human might threaten—by shaking their fists at the bacterial pathogens and yelling that they’re going to kill them. And the bacteria don’t get scared and put up their dukes in self-defense. Neither does attention to consequences threaten an alcoholic’s drinking pattern by whispering in its ear, “filthy habit, your days are numbered.” So as used here, the word “threaten” has a special meaning, an objective meaning—one having absolutely nothing to do with awareness. This sense of the word “threaten” means that natural selection invariably eliminates the more susceptible varieties of an illness, leaving the resistant versions to proliferate.
Evolving resistance
Biologists know that because of natural selection, anything we do to eliminate a parasitic disease fosters resistance. For instance, disease-causing bacteria always develop resistance to the antibiotics used to kill them. We fully expect resistance to develop, simply because we understand natural selection. The antibiotic wipes out the susceptible variants of the disease organisms, sparing only those having some natural resistance to it. The resistant bacteria survive to reproduce, becoming the next generation. The cycle of variation and selection continues over many generations. And in this way, the bacterial strain becomes ever more resistant.
Eventually, the antibiotic no longer harms the bacteria at all. “What is,” in this case a population of resistant bacteria, has been created by gradually chipping away “what isn’t,” the bacteria that can’t resist. The evolution of resistance is mindless, purposeless, and automatic.
The same thing happens when pathogens respond to bodily immune defenses. Whenever any form of life struggles with a pathogen, natural selection progressively shapes the pathogen to become more resistant to the host’s control. Harmful bacteria and viruses inevitably become resistant to immunity’s efforts to eliminate them. Just as with the hawks and the slower mice, an animal’s immune system decimates the susceptible varieties of the pathogen, sparing only those with some natural resistance to immunity.
As the cycle is repeated over generations, the pathogens evolve to better combat the immune defenses. Immunity itself must adapt in order to meet the challenge. The result is a never-ending arms race between host immunity and the parasitic bacteria.
If a disease organism comes to live only in one particular species of animal, then its success in overcoming the immune system of that species is what shapes its ever-growing resistance. So, the pathogen becomes a specialized parasite of that animal, making it the preferred host. The parasite’s exclusive focus on one host means that over time it will perfect its form and function—sometimes to the degree that it completely stymies host immunity. It gradually becomes endemic. Natural selection guarantees that the parasite will continue to refine its capacity to zombify that specific host.
Resistance in malignant habits
Now for an important question: Is there any reason to assume that the automatic growth of resistance would apply only to biological pathogens? No. It isn’t hard to see that selection would also foster resistance in pathological habits. We can predict that unless controlled, any behavioral pattern that’s beginning to turn malignant would gradually evolve to become even more resistant, ultimately gaining “parasitic” features.
Having introduced the idea of evolving resistance, we can dive more deeply into our example—the notoriously resistant, out-of-control behavior of alcoholism. Professionals who deal with alcoholism are aware of its patently disease-like features. Does it make sense to view this disorder as a habit turned parasitic? Yes, it does.
Let’s see how alcoholism’s most puzzling features—the mind-boggling denial and incredible persistence of this supremely malignant habit—make sense in terms of parasitic zombification. These troublesome characteristics arise predictably during the development of a drinking problem, simply because natural selection promotes resistance within the emerging habit.
Here’s the argument. Nature blesses drinkers, like the rest of us, with natural, powerful means of controlling bad habits. That power lies in their awareness of the consequences of their actions. [6] We can think of our awareness-based controls as immune defenses, because they eliminate pathological trends in our behavior as they crop up.
Clinicians describe flowering addictions as “progressive.” That term means that over time they become more and more destructive, even as they become more resistant to control. The conventional wisdom concerning addictions doesn’t really account for their progressive nature. But it makes perfect sense when we interpret it as the automatic and mindless evolution of resistance. Part of clinicians’ confusion arises simply because they have not been able to think in evolutionary terms.
But evolutionary thinking is required in order to make sense of addiction. There is variability in the expression of any habit, including a drinking habit. A drinker doesn’t do exactly the same thing each time he indulges. Some variants of his habit are more likely to come to his focal awareness than are others. And because he is more aware of problems created by those variants, he is more likely to eliminate them, to “chip them away,” from the evolving habit.
To illustrate, a man may enter an episode of heavy drinking on a weeknight, so his hangover messes up his job performance the next day. That jarring consequence may bring the problem to his awareness, so that he cuts heavy weekday drinking out of his pattern. But other drinking episodes might take place on a Friday or Saturday evening. Then the hangover will be less problematic, and so less likely to jolt his awareness. On those days, the threat is more likely to slip by under the radar. As a result, he may continue to indulge heavily, but only on the weekends. That’s variation and selection in action.
And suppose that on some occasions he rationalizes his excessive drinking by telling himself he’s had a rough week, and deserves a break. On other occasions, his drinking sparks memories of family members whose alcoholism ruined their lives. Then he fears he may be repeating a family pattern. Again, that’s the variation part.
Now for the selection part. On those occasions when he feels guilty and fearful, he doesn’t drink as much. He doesn’t repeat those “I feel guilty” or the “I feel scared” varieties, because they fall under his control. This variety of his habit is like the slow mice the hawks can easily dispatch. But he does repeat the “I deserve a break” varieties—the faster mice of this metaphor. So, as he continues to drink, his concern gradually loses ground to his rationalizations. He’s slowly being zombified by his drinking habit. Over time, he loses his ability to entertain any concern about his habit. It gets harder and harder for him to entertain the idea that his indulgence in alcohol is causing problems.
Looking through the lens of variation and selection, we can see that the progression of the disease—the emergence of denial, and the illogic that clinicians associate with alcoholism—can be interpreted as the evolution of resistance within the drinker’s habitual behavior. They are all part of alcoholic zombification, the predictable result of natural selection at work within the parasitic habit.
Let’s summarize. Automatically and inevitably, all pathogens adapt to threats by evolving resistance. When an antibiotic threatens bacteria, they mindlessly increase their resistance to that antibiotic. When the immune system threatens pathogens, the pathogens develop resistance to host immunity. And when insight threatens an alcoholic pattern, the pattern automatically and mindlessly develops resistance to insight.
A needlessly lost romance
The example of alcoholism shows that variation and selection shapes our habits. Both changes in species and changes in behavior reflect animals’ adaptation to their environments. Given that both biologists and psychologists wish to explain adaptation, it would have been natural for psychology to share biology’s enduring romance with natural selection. We might have expected psychology to use—or at least try to use—the idea of variation and selection to help explain the behavior and misbehavior of individuals. But that hasn’t happened.
It hasn’t happened? Some readers might disagree, saying, “Psychologists carefully study animal learning. Their animal research is a meaningful connection to biology. Further, there is Evolutionary Psychology, a discipline laser-focused on the connection.” [7]
There’s a fatal flaw in this argument. To their credit, psychologists do use natural selection among our ancestors to account for species-wide biases in our behavior. But they don’t apply the same principle to individual learning. They fail to recognize learning for what it is: a form of natural selection that operates within the individual animal. And they seem blind to the fact that parasitism and parasitic zombification can explain the aberrations of our behavior that so regularly plague us. The idea of parasitism—so central to the mother science of biology—is simply nowhere to be found in psychology.
Normal vs parasitic habits
Although the reasoning presented here isn’t complicated, many find it confusing. It’s quite different from the conventional wisdom, the “official” explanation for addiction. Our current psychology provides no way to distinguish between normal habits and those that have become parasitic. The concepts required for this discrimination, though readily available within the mother science of biology, are curiously missing from psychology itself.
The vast majority of habits are “normal” habits. Normal habits are those that remain under our control. Only a minority escape our control to become parasitic. There is an easily understandable reason for this. In the pages to come we will thoroughly explore the distinction between normal and parasitic habits, a topic of tremendous scientific and clinical importance.
Social blindness
It is unsettling to think that pathological patterns of behavior can degrade our logic, our ability to comprehend what’s happening to us. People steeped in the psychology of our time see this as an idea so bizarre that we simply dismiss it. But consider this: We regularly witness, in addiction, exactly this degradation of insight. It happens right before our very eyes. So, the truly bizarre thing is this: even when we directly observe such changes to our perception and behavior, we still somehow cling to the belief that it just isn’t possible.
The idea of parasitic distortion of our logic is frightening and distasteful. We resist this scary idea. And yet, we can see that addictions of any sort do distort the addict’s logic. When a loss of insight becomes apparent, we should remember that it isn’t that someone is deliberately tricking or misleading us. Disabling threatening ideas requires no more conscious intent than bacteria’s growing resistance to antibiotics. It’s no more than natural selection in action.
Knowing that distorted logic appears in individuals invites some important questions. Could this kind of unrealistic distortion come about in groups of people? Could the resistance fostered by pathological patterns likewise disable insight throughout an entire social system?
Logically, there’s no reason to believe it couldn’t happen with groups. It could even deplete the pool of ideas available to our scientific psychology. In this book we will evaluate evidence that parasitic patterns in our cultural milieu have indeed fostered resistance to a more effective psychology. Over time, parasitic patterns have evolved the ability to undermine the very ideas that most threaten them.
A disabled science
It’s a rare theorist who sees the need to explain psychology’s many failures. In fact, most respond with blank looks to any mention of failures. They don’t notice anything wrong with psychology, because the ideas that might open their eyes have all gone missing. Natural selection has chipped away at the pool of useful ideas in behavioral science, leaving a toothless collection that poses no threat to the malignancies running rampant through our individual and collective behavior.
Remember that all of the sciences relate to each other—except for psychology. Over a hundred years ago, psychology set itself apart as an area of study. The idea was that behavioral science was equal in stature to the other sciences, but unique, sufficient in itself. In truth, though, it’s neither unique nor self-sufficient. It couldn’t be more obvious that psychology is one of the life sciences, a subset of biology. Accordingly, it should be using biology’s concepts—just as chemistry uses the ideas of physics, and biology uses the ideas of chemistry.
Were we thinking straight, we would certainly find it odd that psychology has so profoundly neglected basic biological concepts, ideas such as natural selection, parasitism, and immunity. Our lack of insight is so odd, in fact, that it stretches credibility to believe it accidental. But if it’s not an accident, what’s the explanation?
Are biology’s concepts too complicated for psychology? No. Are they inappropriate for psychology? No. Are they useless to psychology? No. Using them to make sense of alcoholic denial, as we just did, demonstrates the reason to include evolutionary reasoning in our understanding of behavior. So why is that blank spot there? The answer that best fits the facts is disturbing.
In this book we’ll review evidence that the science of psychology is hobbled by disease, the same kind of disease we most fervently wish it to explain. That evidence supports the conclusion that the blank spot in our concepts is a symptom of parasitic zombification. Perhaps the clearest way to explain this is through an analogy, one for which we have already laid the groundwork.
Is psychology itself like an alcoholic?
We can compare psychology to a highly intelligent alcoholic, a man whose life isn’t working the way he wants. Because he’s very smart, we expect him to recognize the source of his problems—especially since that source is obvious to everyone around him. After all, the truth isn’t very complicated. His life is a mess because his drinking is screwing everything up.
But the alcoholic doesn’t see this. Sadly for him, one of the defining characteristics of alcoholism is a disturbance of awareness, a quirky phenomenon that we call denial. The drinker is in denial. So he’s not thinking straight about his condition.
In denial, our very intelligent alcoholic finds it almost impossible to maintain a realistic awareness of the connection between his drinking habit and his misery. His search for answers is sincere, yet he seems blind to the obvious truth. The alcoholic’s dilemma has a paradoxical, “Catch-22” flavor. If he weren’t wrapped up in his alcoholism, he would certainly see it for what it is. But if he could see it, he wouldn’t be wrapped up in it. The only way out of this conundrum is to metaphorically “pull himself up by his own bootstraps.”
It’s not that the alcoholic’s eyes are defective, or that there’s a problem with his brain. No, this is a purely psychological phenomenon. He suffers from a form of blindness caused by defocused attention. His disorder is actively interfering with his ability to bring it to his awareness. An induced perceptual disability has impoverished his view of his life.
Denial, the alcoholic’s continuing failure to grasp the reality of his condition, is what psychologists know as inattentional blindness. His expanding cluelessness is one element of his zombification, a typical symptom of addiction that’s so downright strange that we wish it could not happen.
The alcoholic’s inability to recognize his all-too-obvious problem is one of the primary reasons he can’t stop. This barrier to insight allows him to keep drinking despite the chaos booze creates in his life. If he could drop the denial, he might end the chaos. But as treatment professionals know, the disease of alcoholism actively maintains this uncanny void in his insight.
Comparing the entire science of psychology to an alcoholic will undoubtedly irritate some, and strike others as ridiculous. But as with the alcoholic, psychology’s logic has in fact been compromised. And as with the alcoholic, it has been compromised by the very disorder it is struggling to understand.
Behavioral science can’t think straight about its own limitations. Worse, it isn’t even aware of its limitations. The average psychologist, unfamiliar with the nature and impact of parasitic disease, would likely argue that this alcoholism analogy makes no sense. But denial of the facts, as with alcoholism, simply makes it impossible to deal with those facts.
An evolved inattentional blindness is crippling our psychology. Mysteriously inept at wielding the most elementary and most important of biology’s conceptual tools, theorists have remained oblivious to the parasitic nature of many of our most destructive behavioral infirmities. Lacking the insight the missing concepts would bring, today’s psychology has little power to stop us from doing foolish, absurdly unproductive things over and over and over.
A conceptual disability
To be clear, psychologists aren’t foolish people. Nor are they negligent, lazy, misguided, or incompetent. Over the years they’ve done their best to explain behavioral dysfunction. But they’re up against a most outlandish barrier. The closer they get to understanding, the more resistance they encounter. The necessary insight remains just out of reach. They’re stymied by a subtle distortion, one created by parasitic disease.
Over the past century that logic-thwarting distortion has intensified, to the point that scientific psychology has lost some of the insights it had possessed in the mid 19th century. Psychology is a critically important science. But to become truly useful, it must overcome this bizarre impediment, and regain its power to explain.
How can we accomplish this? By reclaiming the missing biological concepts. It is concepts that give shape, structure, and focus to our awareness. The way we perceive and think about events depends on the specific concepts available for our use in interpretation.
I began this introduction by stressing something important: as the concept of natural selection spread through the scientific community, it restructured biologists’ awareness of life in a sweeping and very constructive way. We are well aware that such new concepts can in fact engender new insights. But it takes courage to accept that things can also go the other way—backwards. It’s frightening to think that useful concepts can be removed, corrupted, or discounted, in this way disabling our ability to comprehend.
And yet, the example of alcoholism clearly demonstrates that such things do happen. A malignant pattern in our behavior can indeed degrade our ability to assess what is happening to us. An insight that would have been easy before becomes almost impossible to achieve. The threat of insight fosters the rise of awareness-resistant forms of a destructive habit. As the malignant habit flourishes, it renders us clueless. In a perceptual and conceptual fog, we no longer have the power to interrupt the malignancy that catapulted us into darkness.
The plan
Goals of this introduction were to highlight the mysterious void in our current psychology, and introduce a way to explain it. The coming chapters fill in the picture by exploring examples of dysfunctional behavior, irrational and maladaptive patterns that our current psychology does not adequately explain. Among the examples I have chosen are alcoholism, the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, and the morass of corporate malfeasance we affectionately call “Big Tobacco.” Closely examining these patterns of dysfunction should make it clear that we have the power to create a more informed psychology—a psychology with the power to help us meet the individual and societal challenges of our time.
Chapter summaries
Here are titles and concise summaries of each chapter in Re-Imagining Psychology:
Chapter Content
- Sick Habits – Clarifies why it’s worthwhile to avoid moral judgments when trying to account for destructive human behaviors.
- Alcoholism – Interprets alcoholism, the best known of all substance addictions, as an out-of-control, parasitic habit.
- Anorexia Nervosa – Recasts the eating disorder anorexia nervosa as a parasitic habit.
- Understanding Viruses – Presents a point-by-point comparison of biological viruses with virus-like behavioral patterns.
- Viral Origins – Addresses this surprisingly relevant question: where do viruses come from?
- The Drive/Habit System – Explains the birth of rogue habits in terms of a quirk in the evolutionarily designed system governing all learning.
- A Crippling Error – Assesses the impact of scientific psychology’s disastrous decision, a century ago, to exclude subjective experience from an accounting of behavior.
- Runaway Habits – Documents the conditions under which habits are most likely to escape their normal controls.
- The Self and its Defense – Explains why living things must have a self, and explains immunity as the regulatory system of the self.
- The Great Escape – Compares rogue habits’ escape from control to cancerous cells’ escape from immunity.
- Incubation– Discusses the refinement of parasitic habits through the process of incubation, a form of evolution by natural selection.
- Iteration and Resonance – A theoretical interpretation of speciation as “behavioral resonance,” extending the idea to rogue habits.
- Attention as Immunity – Dwells upon the striking parallel between biological immune functions and the way we normally control our habits.
- The Attentional Fog – Calls attention to a problematic feature of all behavioral parasites—the means by which they incapacitate our behavioral immunity.
- Sociocultural Malignancies – Describes a kind of behavioral parasite that operates not within one individual, but within entire social systems.
- Resisting Behavioral Disease – Suggests practical ways of dealing with virally induced behavior.
- Meme versus Virus – Distinguishes the viewpoint detailed in this book from “meme theory.”
- The Zeitgeist – Investigates an alarming reality: the viral removal of important concepts from the cultural zeitgeist.
- Oedipal Oppression – Details an example illustrating the way a sociocultural parasite cripples awareness on a large scale.
- A Psychology Without Awareness – Explains the bizarre intrusion of behaviorism into psychology over a century ago.
- A World of Icons – Details the important difference between the world we perceive and objective reality.
- Reconciliation – Summarizes the main points of the book, draws conclusions, and makes recommendations.
I hope you find Reimagining Psychology a worthwhile investment of your time and attention.
– Tom Whitehead
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[1] Dobzhansky T. Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution. American Biology Teacher, 1973, 35, 3, 125–129. Theodosius Dobzhansky was perhaps the most influential biologist of this century. One of his beliefs was that “in mankind, biological evolution has transcended itself into the realm of self-awareness and culture.” [quotation is from an article in encyclopedia.com]
[2] In the early part of the 19th century, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently formulated the same idea at about the same time.
[3] Seilacher A, Reif W, and Wenk P. The parasite connection in ecosystems and macroevolution. Naturwissenschaften, 2007, 94, 155-169. Abstract online at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17111182/
[4] The term “zombification,” arguably more colorful than it needs to be, is used by some reputable scientists to describe parasites’ influencing the behavior of their hosts in ways that help the parasite move through its life cycle. See for example https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/animals/2018/10/meet-5-zombie-parasites-mind-control-their-hosts
[5] Heteroxenous parasites move between two or more hosts as part of their lifecycle. A fairly well-known example is toxoplasma gondii, which commonly infects humans. See [Flegr J. Influence of latent Toxoplasma infection on human personality, physiology and morphology: Pros and cons of the toxoplasma-human model in studying the manipulation hypothesis. The Journal of Experimental Biology, 2013, 216, 127-133.]
[6] Zimmer C. Parasite Rex: Inside the bizarre world of nature’s most dangerous creatures. Touchstone Books, 2000. Page xxi.
[7] This awareness is focused by a “drive,” a feature of living things that we will shortly explore in detail.
[8] Whitehead T. Behavioral Viruses: A novel way of understanding repetitive, maladaptive behavioral patterns. 2016(a), A Kindle Book. Available from Amazon.