James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934) was one of American psychology's
greatest contributors, both professionally and intellectually.
Professionally, he founded experimental laboratories at the
Universities of Toronto and Princeton, established two important
journals: The Psychological Review and The Psychological Bulletin,
and served as President of the American Psychological Association.
Intellectually, Baldwin was one of the field's most prolific
authors and quite possibly its most sophisticated thinker. Over the
course of his career, he published twenty-two books and
approximately one-hundred-fifty articles. Among his publications
were the field's first well-controlled experimental studies of
infant behavior and a work, Social and Ethical Interpretations in
Mental Development. Between 1901 and 1905 he edited a three volume
Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology that is still one of the
best sources for turn-of-the-century thought in these disciplines.
This led directly to his receiving Oxford University's first
honorary doctorate of science. Baldwin's biosocial approach
introduced a level of complexity in conceptualization of the mind,
its evolutionary origins, ontogenetic development, and
sociocultural formation that went far beyond the prevailing thought
of the period. He addressed topics as varied as the nature of
developmental and evolutionary mechanisms, the relationship between
reason and reality, the genesis of logic, the value of aesthetic
experience, and the nature and development in children of habit,
imitation, creative invention, altruism, egoism, morality, social
suggestibility, social self, self-awareness, theory of mind, and
enculturation. His use and in some cases introduction of concepts
such as multiplicity of self, ideal self, self-esteem,
assimilation, accommodation, primary circular reaction, genetic
logic, genetic epistemology, and social heredity exerted a
formative influence on later scholars such as George Herbert Mead,
Jean Piaget, Lev S. Vygotsky, and Lawrence Kohlberg. In Development
and Evolution, Baldwin had arrived at a clear conception of the
mechanism mediating the influence of individual adaptations on the
course of phylogenetic evolution. As he described it in an
autobiographical chapter written toward the end of his life, the
theory of organic selection involved the claim that: "natural
selection operating on "spontaneous variations" is sufficient alone
to produce determinate evolution (without the inheritance of
acquired adaptations or modifications), since - and this is the new
point - in each generation variations in the direction of, or
"coincident" with, the function to be developed will favor the
organisms possessing them, and their descendants will profit by the
accumulation of such variations. Thus the function will gradually
come to perfection. In other words, the individual organism's
accommodations, made through learning, effort, adaptation, etc.,
while not physically inherited, still act to supplement or screen
the congenital endowment during its incomplete stages, and so give
the species time to build up its variations in determinate lines."
This title is increasingly heavily cited because of the great
interest in how development is represented genetically and how
changes in gene expression during development, especially
regulatory genes, occur through selection on phenotypes
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