Ten continuous dimensions of the  test

Each trait extends in a continuum from -100 to 100. Only several points of this continuous value line are marked here in digits.  The below example (traits 1-7) is taken from a real 2005 test. Trait 8 ( Correct estimation - Critical) : -90 ; Trait 9 (Appreciative- Lack of accord):-90 ; Trait 10: (Communicative -Withdrawn). The tested person here achieved -10 , which is a good result.

Földes Károly ismertetése

Date de parution : 01/2017
Éditeur : Edizioni dell’Orso
Nombre de pages : 64
ISBN : 978-88-6274-727-1

FRANCESCO BENOZZO & MARCEL OTTE

SPEAKING AUSTRALOPITHECUS

A New Theory on The Origins

of Human Language

FRANCESCO BENOZZO & MARCEL OTTE

Conclusions

t is crucial to bear in mind the follow-

ing assertion recently made by two

eminent paleoanthropologists:

The relationship between modern anatomy,

cognition, culture and language is a complex one,

and cannot be captured by a single saltationary

event, let alone by a single ‘gene’ acquired at a

specific moment in our evolutionary history, leav-

ing unambiguous traces in the fossil or archaeo-

logical record. This myth of a ‘modern human

revolution’ is now totally rejected by paleoan-

thropologists and archaeologists, but it is disturb-

ing to see it persisting – explicitly or implicitly –

in discussion of language and cultural evolution

(Dediu & Levinson, 2014, p. 186, our emphasis).

Also Seyfarth & Cheney (2016) insist

on this point, asserting that, “despite

their differences, human language and

the vocal communication of nonhuman

primates share many features”. These

common features suggest that “during

evolution the ancestors of all modern

primates faced similar social problems

and responded with similar systems of

communication and cognition”. In this re-

spect, “when language later evolved from

I

SPEAKING AUSTRALOPITHECUS 49

this common foundation, many of its dis-

tinctive features were already present”.

According to Hillert, 2015, “Australo-

pithecus was already able to use [...] refer-

ential vocalizations (possibly in combina-

tion with facial expressions and gestures)

to display basic emotions and percep-

tions”; and Kimbel & Villmoare, 2016,

state: “A fresh look at brain size, hand

morphology and earliest technology sug-

gests that a number of key Homo attrib-

utes may already be present in generalized

species of Australopithecus, and that

adaptive distinctions in Homo are simply

amplifications or extensions of ancient

hominin trends”. Their conclusion is that

“the expanded brain size, human-likewrist

and hand anatomy, dietary eclecticism

and potential tool-making capabilities of

‘generalized’ australopiths root the Homo

lineage in ancient hominin adaptive

trends, suggesting that the ‘transition’

from Australopithecus to Homo may not

have been that much of a transition at all”.

Bringing together the PCP, Chomsky’s

innatism, and the refusal of a conception

of languages as evolving organisms, more

concrete elements for inferring the exist-

ence of an articulated language in early

humans from the Plio-Pleistocene can be

50 FRANCESCO BENOZZO & MARCEL OTTE

offered by the four elements of deductive

evidence indicated before [1) the lithic-

geolinguistic correlation, 2) the millenni-

al stability of languages, 3) the new dis-

covers about the language of animals, and

4) the process of human world for-

mation], linked to paleontological-

archaeological considerations on Austra-

lopithecus [concerning its 4) anathomy,

5) habitat, 7) tools, and 8) bone remains]

As linguists and prehistorians working

in the epistemological frame offered by

the Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm, we

can positively answer to the question lu-

minously posed 20 years ago by Tobias.

We would then point out the three fol-

lowing conclusions:

(1) Homo was born loquens (2.5 million

years ago);

(2) languages appeared with Homo

himself;

(3) language existed much earlier on

(before 2.5 million years ago), with Aus-

tralopithecus.

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The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

Universal Nature of Expression: Darwin notes the universal nature of expressions in the book, writing: "the young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements." "The force of language is much aided by the expressive movements of the face and body" - hinting at a neurological intimacy of language with psychomotor function (body language) and underscoring the social value of expression. Eric Korn, in the London Review of Books, describes how the book was claimed, and he argues subverted, by Margaret Mead and her "sympathisers", and then presented afresh by Paul Ekman. Ekman had collected pro-Darwin, anti-Mead evidence, Korn wrote, for the universality of human facial expression of emotions. Darwin, suggests Korn, avoided unsettling the Victorian public by arguing that humans had "animal traits", and instead charmed them by telling stories of "human traits in animals", thus avoiding too much explicit talk of natural selection at work. Darwin preferred to leave the evolutionary implications hanging.Darwin's ideas were followed up in William James' What Is An Emotion ? (1884); and, in the James-Lange theory of emotions, James develops Darwin's emphasis on the physical aspects, including the visceral (autonomically mediated) components of emotion

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When Ancient Societies Hit a Million People, Vengeful Gods Appeared

By Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor | March 20, 2019 02:15pm ET

"For we know Him who said, 'And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.'" Ezekiel 25:17.

The God depicted in the Old Testament may sometimes seem wrathful. And in that, he's not alone; supernatural forces that punish evil play a central role in many modern religions.

But which came first: complex societies or the belief in a punishing god?

A new study suggests that the formation of complex societies came first and that the beliefs in such gods helped unite people under a common higher power.

Ancient societies often used supernatural forces to explain natural phenomena, such as lightning. But in the past several millennia, religions also used supernatural forces to enforce moral codes. For example, the Egyptian sun god, Ra, judged the fate of people in the afterlife according to how well they followed the code of "maat," or "what is right." [The World's Top Religions (Infographic)]

Past work suggested that the rise of this idea of cosmic enforcement of morality was associated with social complexity. The concept of supernatural judgment evolved to help strangers in large societies cooperate, researchers hypothesized. Some work, such as analyses of Austronesian religions or of the Viking age in Scandinavia, suggested that moralizing gods preceded complex societies, while other research, such as a study of Eurasian empires, found that moralizing gods followed the rise of complex societies.

But those studies were limited in geographic scope and hampered, at times, because historians lacked detailed information on the complexity of societies at given points in history, said Patrick Savage, an anthropologist at Keio University in Kanagawa, Japan. In the new study, Savage and his colleagues sought to overcome these limitations using the Seshat: Global History Databank, a database of information about global history from the end of the Paleolithic period up to the Industrial Revolution.

The scientists analyzed the relationship between social complexity and moralizing gods in 414 societies spanning the past 10,000 years from 30 regions across the globe. Researchers examined 51 measures of social complexity, such as the size of the largest settlement and the presence of a formal legal code, and four measures of supernatural enforcement of morality, such as the concept of a supernatural force that monitors and punishes selfish actions.

The researchers found that belief in moralizing gods usually followed increases in social complexity, generally appearing after the emergence of civilizations with populations of more than about 1 million people.

"It was particularly striking how consistent it was [that] this phenomenon emerged at the million-person level," Savage said. "First, you get big societies, and these beliefs then come."

All in all, "our research suggests that religion is playing a functional role throughout world history, helping stabilize societies and people cooperate overall," Savage said. "In really small societies, like very small groups of hunter-gatherers, everyone knows everyone else, and everyone's keeping an eye on everyone else to make sure they're behaving well. Bigger societies are more anonymous, so you might not know who to trust."

At those sizes, you see the rise of beliefs in an all-powerful, supernatural person watching and keeping things under control, Savage added.

"We are not saying anything about the value of religion," Savage added. "We are not saying it is good or bad, but we are saying it has a deep and consistent relationship with societies throughout world history. Religion is deeply intertwined with what it means to be human, for better and for worse."

The scientists detailed their findings online today (March 20) in the journal Nature. Their work was supported in part by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

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Scientists have reproduced in the lab how the ingredients for life could have formed deep in the ocean 4 billion years ago. The results of the new study offer clues to how life started on Earth and where else in the cosmos we might find it.

Astrobiologist Laurie Barge and her team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are working to recognize life on other planets by studying the origins of life here on Earth. Their research focuses on how the building blocks of life form in hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.

To re-create hydrothermal vents in the lab, the team made their own miniature seafloors by filling beakers with mixtures that mimic Earth's primordial ocean. These lab-based oceans act as nurseries for amino acids, organic compounds that are essential for life as we know it. Like Lego blocks, amino acids build on one another to form proteins, which make up all living things.

"Understanding how far you can go with just organics and minerals before you have an actual cell is really important for understanding what types of environments life could emerge from," said Barge, the lead investigator and the first author on the new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Also, investigating how things like the atmosphere, the ocean and the minerals in the vents all impact this can help you understand how likely this is to have occurred on another planet."

Found around cracks in the seafloor, hydrothermal vents are places where natural chimneys form, releasing fluid heated below Earth's crust. When these chimneys interact with the seawater around them, they create an environment that is in constant flux, which is necessary for life to evolve and change. This dark, warm environment fed by chemical energy from Earth may be the key to how life could form on worlds farther out in our solar system, far from the heat of the Sun.

Black smoker at the Mata Ua undersea volcano on Earth. Credit: MARUM, University of Bremen and NOAA-Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory "If we have these hydrothermal vents here on Earth, possibly similar reactions could occur on other planets," said JPL's Erika Flores, co-author of the new study.

Barge and Flores used ingredients commonly found in early Earth's ocean in their experiments. They combined water, minerals and the "precursor" molecules pyruvate and ammonia, which are needed to start the formation of amino acids. They tested their hypothesis by heating the solution to 158 degrees Fahrenheit (70 degrees Celsius)—the same temperature found near a hydrothermal vent—and adjusting the pH to mimic the alkaline environment. They also removed the oxygen from the mixture because, unlike today, early Earth had very little oxygen in its ocean. The team additionally used the mineral iron hydroxide, or "green rust," which was abundant on early Earth.

The green rust reacted with small amounts of oxygen that the team injected into the solution, producing the amino acid alanine and the alpha hydroxy acid lactate. Alpha hydroxy acids are byproducts of amino acid reactions, but some scientists theorize they too could combine to form more complex organic molecules that could lead to life.

"We've shown that in geological conditions similar to early Earth, and maybe to other planets, we can form amino acids and alpha hydroxy acids from a simple reaction under mild conditions that would have existed on the seafloor," said Barge.

Barge's creation of amino acids and alpha hydroxy acids in the lab is the culmination of nine years of research into the origins of life. Past studies looked at whether the right ingredients for life are found in hydrothermal vents, and how much energy those vents can generate (enough to power a light bulb). But this new study is the first time her team has watched an environment very similar to a hydrothermal vent drive an organic reaction. Barge and her team will continue to study these reactions in anticipation of finding more ingredients for life and creating more complex molecules. Step by step, she's slowly inching her way up the chain of life.

Laurie Barge, left, and Erika Flores, right, in JPL's Origins and Habitability Lab in Pasadena, California. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This line of research is important as scientists study worlds in our solar system and beyond that may host habitable environments. Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus, for example, could have hydrothermal vents in oceans beneath their icy crusts. Understanding how life could start in an ocean without sunlight would assist scientists in designing future exploration missions, as well as experiments that could dig under the ice to search for evidence of amino acids or other biological molecules.

Future Mars missions could return samples from the Red Planet's rusty surface, which may reveal evidence of amino acids formed by iron minerals and ancient water. Exoplanets—worlds beyond our reach but still within the realm of our telescopes—may have signatures of life in their atmospheres that could be revealed in the future.

"We don't have concrete evidence of life elsewhere yet," said Barge. "But understanding the conditions that are required for life's origin can help narrow down the places that we think life could exist."

This research was supported by the NASA Astrobiology Institute, JPL Icy Worlds team.

Explore further: Hydrothermal vent experiments bring Enceladus to Earth

More information: Laura M. Barge et al. Redox and pH gradients drive amino acid synthesis in iron oxyhydroxide mineral systems, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2019). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1812098116

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Provided by: NASA

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Psychology as science of reactions and of behavior In proposing to define Man [l’homme] as a living organization serviced by intelligence, Maine de Biran marked in advance—better, apparently, than Gall who thought, according to Lelut, that “man is no longer an intelligence but a will serviced by the organs”9—the terrain on which a new psychology would be constituted in the 19th century. But, at the same time, he assigned it its limits since, in his Anthropology, he situated human life between animal and spiritual life.

The 19th century sees the biology of human behavior emerge (alongside psychology) as a nervous and mental pathology, as the physics of external sense, as the science of internal and intimate sense. The reasons for this emergence seem to be the following. First, scientific reasons to know: the constitution of Biology as a general theory of the relations between organisms and their milieus, which marks the end of belief in the existence of a separate human reign. Then, technical and economic reasons to know: the development of an industrial regime that directs attention to the industrious character of the human species and marks the end of belief in the dignity of speculative thought. And, finally, political reasons that mark the end of belief in values of social privilege and result in the diffusion of egalitarianism: conscription and public education become State affairs, and the demand for equality in military positions and civil functions (to each according to his job, works, or merits) becomes the real, though often overlooked, foundation of a phenomenon proper to modern societies, that is to say, the generalized practice of expertise, in every sense of the word, as the determination of competence and the test for simulation.

At any rate, what characterizes this psychology of behavior, in comparison to other types of psychological investigation, is its constitutional incapacity to grasp and present with clarity its founding project. If among the founding projects of previous types of psychology, there are some that pass for philosophical counter-senses [des contre-sens philosophiques], here, to the contrary—all links to philosophical theory having been refused—the issue is to figure out from where a given psychological investigation gets its sense. In accepting to become, under the sponsorship of biology, an objective science of aptitudes, reactions, and behaviors, psychology and psychologists completely forget to situate their own specific behaviors in the context of their historical circumstances and the social milieus in which they propose their methods or techniques, and in which they make their services accepted.

Nietzsche, adumbrating the psychology of the 19th century psychologist, writes: “We, psychologists of the future, view the instrument that wishes to know itself almost as a sign of degeneration; we are the instruments of knowledge and we would like to have all the naïveté and precision of an instrument; so we must not analyze ourselves, know ourselves.” 10

9 Qu’est-ce que la phrénologie? Ou Essai sur la signification et la valeur des systèmes de psychologie en général et de celui de Gall, en particulier, (Paris, 1836), 401. 10 Nietzsche, La volonté de puissance, translated by Bianquis, Book 3, §335.

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Astonishing misunderstanding, and how revealing too! The psychologist only wants to be an instrument, without knowing of what or of whom. Nietzsche seemed more inspired when, at the start of The Genealogy of Morality, he applied himself to the enigma represented by English psychologists, that is to say, the utilitarians who were preoccupied with the genesis of moral sentiments. He wondered what had pushed them in the direction of cynicism when explaining human behavior in terms of interest and utility, and in the direction of forgetting these fundamental motivations. It is precisely here that, in the face of the behavior of the psychologists of the 19th century, Nietzsche provisionally renounces all cynicism, which is to say, all lucidity!

The idea of utility, as a principle of psychology, is linked to the philosophical understanding of human nature as a power of artifice [comme puissance d’artifice] (Hume, Burke) or, more prosaically, to the definition of Man as a toolmaker (the French Encyclopédistes, Adam Smith, Franklin). But the principle of a biological psychology of behavior does not seem to have been disengaged, in the same fashion, from an explicitly philosophical conscience, without a doubt because this principle can be activated only on the condition that it remain unformulated. This principle is the definition of Man himself as tool. Utilitarianism (which implicates the idea of utility for man, the idea of Man as judge of utility) was succeeded by instrumentalism (which implicates the idea of the utility of man, the idea of Man as mean to utility). Intelligence is no longer what organizes the organs and avails itself of them, but what services them. And it is not with impunity that the historical origins of the psychology of reaction must be sought in the works produced by the discovery of “the personal equation” of astronomers using the telescope (Maskelyne, 1796). Man was studied first as the instrument of the scientific instrument, before being studied as the instrument of all instruments.

The investigations of the laws of adaptation and learning, of the detection and measurement of aptitudes, and of the conditions of output and productivity (whether concerning individuals or groups)—investigations that are inseparable from their applications to selection or orientation—admit a common implicit postulate: the nature of Man is to be a tool, and his vocation is to be put in his place, to his task.

Nietzsche, of course, is right to say that the psychologists would like to be the “naïve and precise instruments” of this study of man. They have struggled to reach objective knowledge, even if the determinism they seek in behavior is no longer the sort of Newtonian determinism familiar to the first physicists of the 19th century, but rather a statistical determinism, progressively resting on the findings of biometrics. But what is the sense of this instrumentalism to the second power? What is it that pushes or inclines psychologists to appoint themselves, of all men, the instruments of an ambition to treat Man as an instrument? In the other types of psychology, the soul or the subject—as natural form or consciousness of interiority—is the principle used to justify the value a certain idea of Man

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relative to the truth of things. But for a psychology in which the word “soul” causes flight and the word “consciousness” laughter, the truth of Man is captured by the fact that there is no longer any idea of Man as anything other than a tool. We must recognize that to talk about the idea of a tool, it is necessary that not every idea belong to the rank of a tool; and that in order to assign a value to a tool, it is precisely necessary that not every value be that of a tool whose subordinate value consists in procuring some other thing. Now, if the psychologist cannot derive his psychological project from an idea of man, does he think he can justify this project with his behavior of the utilization of man? We say it well, “his behavior of utilization,” in spite of two possible objections. Someone could say that, in a way, this type of psychology does not ignore the distinction between theory and application and, in another way, that this utilization is not ultimately the doing of the psychologist himself but of the person or persons who ask him for reports and diagnostics. We will respond that, unless one is going to confuse the theoretician of psychology with the professor of psychology, one must recognize that the contemporary psychologist is, more often than not, a practicing professional whose “science” is completely motivated by that search for “laws” of adaptation to a socio-technological environment—not to a natural environment—, for that which confers on his operations of “measure” a signification of evaluation and a range of expertise. In this way the behavior of the psychologist of human behavior involves, almost by necessity, a feeling of superiority, a good dirigist conscience, the mentality of a manager of the relations between man and man. That is why we must go back to the cynical question: who designates psychologists as the instruments of instrumentalism? How do we recognize those men who are worthy of assigning to instrument-man [l’homme-instrument] his role and function? Who counsels the counselors?

Needless to say, we do not place ourselves on the terrain of capacities and technique. Whether there are good or bad psychologists—that is to say, technicians skilled due to learning and technicians noxious due to stupidity not forbidden by law—is not the issue. The issue is that a science or a scientific technique do not contain, within themselves, any idea that could confer them their sense. In his Introduction to Psychology, Paul Guillaume described the psychology of a man taking a test. The subject [le testé] defends himself against this investigation, fearing that an action is being exercise over it. Guillaume sees in this state of mind an acknowledgement of the efficacy of the test. But one could also see here the embryo of the psychology of the tester. The defense of the subject being tested is the repugnance of seeing itself treated like an insect by a man who is not recognized as having the authority to tell him what he is or what he must do.

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takes it from Cuvier.11 What if we treated the psychologist like an insect? What if we applied to the dismal and insipid Kinsey, for example, Stendhal’s recommendation?

In other words, in 19th and 20th centuries, the psychology of reaction and behavior thought it made itself independent by separating itself form all philosophy, that is to say, from the kind of speculation that looks for an idea of Man beyond the biological and sociological facts. But this psychology could not prevent the recurrence of its results in the behavior of those who obtain them. And, to the extend that one forbids philosophy from furnishing the answer, the question “What is psychology?” becomes “In doing what they do, what do psychologists hope to accomplish?” “In the name of what are they instituted psychologists?” When Gideon takes command as the head of the Israelites and escorts the Midianites beyond the Jordan (The Bible: Judges, Book VII), he uses a test of two degrees that permits him to keep only ten thousand out of thirty-two thousand men, and then three hundred out of ten thousand. But this test owes to the Eternal the finalization of its use and the process of selection used. To select a selector, it is normally necessary to transcend the blueprint of technical selection procedures. In the immanence of scientific psychology, the question remains: Who has, not the competence, but the mission of being a psychologist? Psychology always relies on an doubling up [dédoublement], but this is no longer the doubling of consciousness (according to the facts and norms entailed by the idea of man); it is the doubling of a mass of “subjects” and of an elite corporation of specialists who invest themselves with their proper mission.

In Kant and Maine de Biran, psychology situates itself in an Anthropology, which is to say—despite the ambiguity, much in vogue today, of this term—in a philosophy. In Kant, the general theory of human ability is still connected to a theory of wisdom [sagesse]. Instrumental psychology presents itself as a general theory of ability outside any reference to wisdom. If we cannot define this psychology via an idea of man, that is to say, if we cannot situate psychology within philosophy, we do not have the power to prevent anyone from just considering themselves “psychologists” and calling whatever they do “psychology.” But neither can we prevent philosophy from continuing to interrogate the ill-defined status of psychology, ill-defined from the viewpoint of the sciences as much as from that of techniques. In doing this, philosophy carries itself with a constitutive ingenuity that is so different from gullibility that it does not exclude a provisional cynicism. This ingenuity leads philosophy to return, once again, to the common sector, to the side of non-specialists.

It is rather vulgarly, then, that philosophy poses to psychology the question: tell me what you aim for so that I may find out what you are? But a philosopher can also address

11 “Instead of hating the small bookseller of the neighboring town who sells the Popular Almanac, I used to say to my friend Mr. de Ranville to apply to him the remedy indicated by Cuvier: treat him like an insect. Find out what are his means of sustenance, try to guess his ways of making love” (Stendhal, Mémoires d’un Touriste, Calmann-Lévy (ed.), Book 2, page 23).

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himself to the psychologist in the form of offering orientation advice (one time does not a habit make!), and say to him: when one leaves the Sorbonne by the street Saint-Jacques, one can ascend or descend; if one ascends, one approaches the Pantheon, the conservatory of great men; but if one descends, one heads directly to the Police Department.

Georges Canguilhem Transl

© Georges Canguilhem, Trans. David M. Peña-Guzmán 2016 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No. 21, pp. 200-213, June

Psychology as the Science of Subjectivity The decline of Aristotelian physics in the 17th century marks the end of psychology as para- physics, as science of a natural object, and correlatively the birth of psychology as science of subjectivity.

Those truly responsible for the advent of modern psychology as the science of the thinking subject are the mechanical physicists of the 17th century.3

If the reality of the world is not confused with the content of perception, if reality is obtained and posed vis-à-vis the reduction of illusions of sensible experience, then the qualitative residue of this experience engages, in virtue of being possible as falsification of the real, the responsibility of spirit, which is to say, of the subject of experience insofar as it does not identify itself with mathematical or mechanical reason, instrument of truth and measure of reality.

But this responsibility is, to the eyes of the physicist, culpability. Psychology constitutes itself as the enterprise for the exoneration of spirit. Its project is that of a science that, in the face of physics, explains why spirit is forced by nature, first and foremost, to trick reason with respect to reality. Psychology becomes a physics of external sense in order to account for the counter-senses that mechanical physics imputes to the use of the senses in the function of knowledge.

The Physics of External Sense Psychology, the science of subjectivity, begins as psychophysics for two reasons. First, because it cannot be less than a physics if it is to be taken seriously by physicists. Second, because it must look in a certain nature—i.e., in the structure of the human body—for the reason for the existence of the irreal residues [résidus irréels] of human experience.

But even so, this is not a return to the ancient conception of a science of the soul, a branch of physics. The new physics is a calculus. Psychology tends to imitate it. It will seek to determine the quantitative constants of sensation and the relations between these constants.

Here, Descartes and Malebranche are the leaders. In Rules for the Direction of the Mind (XII), Descartes proposes the reduction of qualitative differences between sense data to a difference between geometric figures. Here, it is a matter of sense data insofar as they are, in the proper sense of the term, information from one body to others. And what is informed by the external senses is an internal sense: “fantasy, which is nothing more than a real and figured body.” In Rule XIV, Descartes expressly deals with what Kant will call the intensive magnitude of sensations (Critique of Pure Reason, transcendental analytic, anticipation of perception): the comparisons between lights, sounds, etc., which cannot be converted into

3 Cf. Aron Gurwitsch, Déveleoppement historique de la Gestalt-Osychologie, in Thalès, 2nd year (1935), 167-175.

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exact reports except by analogy with the extension of the figured body. If we add that Descartes, even if not properly speaking the inventor of the term and concept of the reflex, has nonetheless affirmed the constancy of the link between excitation and reaction, we see that psychology—understood as the mathematical physics of external sense—begins with him and culminates with Fechner, thanks to the help of physiologists such as Hermann Helmholtz, and in spite of and against the Kantian reserves criticized, in turn, by Herbart.

This type of psychology is enlarged to the dimensions of an experimental psychology by Wundt, whose is motivated by the hope of making appear, in the laws of the “facts of consciousness,” the same kind of analytical determinism that mechanics and physics expect from any universally valid science.

Fechner died in 1887, two years before Bergson’s thesis, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889). Wundt died in 1920 having formed a good amount of disciples (some of whom are still alive), and not without having contributed to the first attacks launched by the psychologists of Form against the analytical physics (at once experimental and mathematical) of external sense. This was done in accordance with Ehrenfels’ observations about the qualities of form (On the Qualities of Form, 1890), which themselves resemble Bergson’s analysis of totalities perceived as organic forms that dominate their supposed parts (Time and Free Will, ch. II).

The science of internal sense But the science of subjectivity does not reduce to the elaboration of a physics of external sense. It suggests and presents itself as the science of self-consciousness or the science of internal sense. The term psychology dates to the 18th century, having the sense of the science of the “I” (Wolff). The entire history of this psychology can be written as the history of the counter-senses [des contre-sens] that the Meditations of Descartes initiate without, however, assuming responsibility for doing so.

When Descartes, at the start of Meditation III, considers his “interior” to render himself better known and more familiar to himself, the consideration aims at Thinking. The Cartesian interior, consciousness of the Ego cogito, is the direct knowledge the soul has of itself qua pure understanding. Descartes calls the Meditations “metaphysical” because they claim to arrive directly at the nature and essence of the “I think” in the immediate grasping of its existence. Cartesian meditation is not a personal confessional [une confidence personnelle]. The reflection that gives self-knowledge the rigor and impersonality of mathematics is not the kind of self- observation that the spiritualists will to trace back to Socrates beginning in the 19th century, so that Mr. Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard can give Napoleon I the assurance that the Know Thyself, the Cogito, and Introspection all give the throne and the altar their impregnable foundation.

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The Cartesian interior has nothing in common with the internal sense of the Aristotelians, “who conceive their objects interiorly and inside the head,” 4 and which Descartes considered, as we have seen, as an aspect of the body (Rule XIII). This is why Descartes says that the soul knows itself directly and more easily than the body. We overlook the explicitly polemical intention of this affirmation too often because, according to Aristotelians, the soul does not know itself directly. “Knowledge of the soul is not direct, but only by reflection. This is because the soul is similar to the eye that sees everything but cannot see itself except by reflection as in a mirror [...] and the soul, by parallel, does not see itself and does not know itself except by reflection and recognition of its effects.”5 This thesis rouses the indignation of Descartes when Gassendi reclaims it in his objections to Meditation III, and to which he responds: “It is not the eye that sees itself, or the mirror, but spirit, which alone knows the mirror, the eye, and itself.”

But this decisive reply does not put an end to this scholastic argument. Maine de Biran uses it once more against Descartes in “On the Decomposition of Thought,” and A. Comte invokes it against the possibility of introspection, that is to say, against the method of self- knowledge that Reid borrows from Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard to turn psychology into the scientific propaedeutic to metaphysics, thus justifying by experimental means the traditional theses of spiritualist substantialism.6 Even Cournot, in all his wisdom, does not hold back from also taking up this argument, this time to support the idea that psychological observation concerns the behavior of others more than the “I” of the observer, that psychology resembles wisdom more than science, and that “it is in the nature of psychological facts to be translated into aphorisms rather than theorems.”7

One has misunderstood the teachings of Descartes if one constitutes, against him, empirical psychology as the natural history of the “I”—from Locke to Ribot, passing through Condillac, the French Ideologues and the English Utilitarians—or if one constitutes, after him, a rational psychology founded on the intuition of a substantial “I.”

To Kant still belongs the glory of having established that even if Wolff was able to baptize his post-Cartesian newborns (Psychologia empirica, 1732; Psychologia rationalis, 1734), he was nonetheless unable to successfully found their pretensions to legitimacy. Kant shows, on the one hand, that phenomenal internal sense is just a form of empirical intuition, which he tends to confuse with time. On the other, he shows that the “I” that is the subject of all judgment of apperception is itself a function of the organization of experience, but one of which there can be no science because it is the transcendental condition for all science. The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) challenges the scientific scope of psychology,

4 Scipion Du Pleix, op. cit., Physique, 439. 5 Ibid., 353. 6 Cours de Philosophie positive, 1re leçon. 7 Cournot, Essai sur le fondements de nos connaissance (1851), §§371-376.

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whether based on the image of mathematics or physics. No mathematical psychology is possible in the same way that there exists a mathematical physics. Even if one, in virtue of anticipating perception relative to intensive magnitudes, applied the mathematics of the continuous to the modifications of internal sense, one would not thereby obtain anything more than a geometry confined to the study of the properties of the straight line. There is also no experimental psychology in the same way that there is a chemistry that constitutes itself by the use of analysis and synthesis. We cannot experiment on others or ourselves. Plus, internal observation affects its object. Wanting to surprise oneself in self-observation would lead to insanity [alienation]. Psychology, then, can only be descriptive. Its true place is in an Anthropology, as a propaedeutic to a theory of skill and prudence, crowned by a theory of wisdom.

The science of intimate sense If we call “classical psychology” what we intent to refute, it must be noted that in psychology there are always classics for someone. The Ideologues, heirs to the sensualists, took as “classical” the Scottish psychology that only advocated, like them, an inductive method so as to better affirm, against them, the substantiality of spirit. And, before being rejected as “classical” by the theoreticians of Gestalt psychology, the atomistic and analytic psychology of the sensualists and the Ideologues was itself already viewed as such by a romantic psychologist like Maine de Biran. Through him, psychology becomes the technique of the Diary and the science of intimate sense. The solitude of Descartes was the asceticism of a mathematician. The solitude of Maine de Biran is the idleness of a school principal. The Cartesian I think founds thought itself. The Biranian I want founds self-consciousness over and against an exteriority. At his isolated desk, Biran discovers that psychological analysis does not consist in simplifying but in complicating; that the primitive psychic fact is not an element but already a relation, and that this relation is lived with effort. He arrives at two conclusions, unexpected for a man whose functions are of authority, which is to say, commandment: consciousness requires the conflict between a power and a resistance; man is not, as de Bonald thought, an intelligence serviced by the organs but a living organization serviced by intelligence. It is necessary for the soul to be incarnated, and so there can be no psychology without biology. Self-observation does not forgo recourse to either the physiology of voluntary movement or the pathology of affectivity. The situation of Maine de Biran is unique, between the two Royer-Collards. He has dialogued with the doctrinarian and been judged by the psychiatrist. We have from Maine de Biran a “Promenade avec M. Royer- Collard dans les jardins du Luxembourg” and we have from Antoine-Athanase Royer- Collard, the former’s younger brother, an “Examen de la Doctrine de Maine de Biran.”8 If

8 Published by his son Hyacinthe Royer-Collard (in Annales Médico-Psychologiques, Book 2 (1843), 1).

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Maine de Biran had not read and discussed Cabanis (On the Relations between the Physical and Moral Aspects in Man, 1798), if he had not read and discussed Bichat (Physiological Researches on Life and Death, 1800), the history of pathological psychology would ignore him, which it cannot do. The second Royer-Collard is, after Pinel and alongside Esquirol, one of the founders of the French school of psychiatry. Pinel had pleaded for the idea that the insane are at once sick patients like the rest, neither possessed nor criminals, and also different from them and should be cared for separately and separated, depending on the case, into specialized hospital services. Pinel founded mental medicine as an independent discipline, starting from the therapeutic isolation of the insane at Bicêtre and Salpêtrière. Royer-Collard imitates Pinel at the Maison Nationale de Charenton, where he becomes head doctor in 1805, the same year Esquirol defends his medical thesis on The Passions Considered as Causes, Symptoms and Means of Cure in Cases of Insanity. Royer-Collard becomes, in 1816, professor of legal medicine at the Faculty of Medicine of Paris and, in 1821, the first holder of the chair of mental medicine. Royer-Collard and Esquirol had as pupils: Calmeil, who studied paralysis in the insane; Bayle, who recognized and isolated general paralysis; Félix Voisin, who created the study of mental retardation in infants. And it is at Salpêtrière that—after Pinel, Esquirol, Lelut, Baillarger, and Falret, among others—Charcot becomes, in 1862, the leader of a service whose works will be followed by Théodule Ribot, Pierre Janet, cardinal Mercier, and Sigmund Freud.

We have seen psycho-pathology positively begin with Galen and culminate in Sigmund Freud, creator of the term “psychoanalysis” in 1896. Psycho-pathology did not develop in isolation from the other psychological disciplines. Because of the investigations of Biran, it compelled philosophy to ask itself, since at least a century before, from which of the two Royer-Collards it should borrow the idea of psychology that we must develop. In this way, psycho-pathology is at once judge and party to that uninterrupted debate in which metaphysics gives direction to psychology without thereby giving up the right to say a word about the relationship between the physical and the psychic. For a long time, this relationship has been formulated as somato-physical before becoming psycho-somatic. This reversal is the same, moreover, as the one carried out on the signification of the unconscious. If one identifies psychism and consciousness—based, rightly or wrongly, on the authority of Descartes—, the unconscious turns out to be of a physical order. If one assumes that the psychic can be unconscious, psychology does not reduce to the science of consciousness. And the psychic is no longer only what is hidden, but also what hides itself, that which one hides; it is not simply the intimate, but also—a term Bossuet takes from the mystics—the abyssal

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© Georges Canguilhem, Trans. David M. Peña-Guzmán 2016 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No. 21, pp. 200-213, June 201

TRANSLATION

What is Psychology?* Georges Canguilhem

The psychologist seems to be more embarrassed by the question “What is psychology?” than the philosopher by the question “What is philosophy?” The reason is that philosophy is constituted by the question of its sense and essence much more than it is defined by any answer to it. The fact that this question is reborn incessantly without ever admitting a satisfying response is, for those who would like to call themselves “philosophers,” a reason for humility and not a cause for humiliation. But, for psychology, the question of its essence, or more modestly of its concept, also brings into question the very existence of the psychologist since, lacking the ability to explain what he is, he has difficulty explaining what

* Georges Canguilhem’s “Qu’est-ce que la psychologie?” was first delivered at the Collège Philosophique on December 18, 1956. It was then published in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale in 1958. Eight years later, in 1966, it appeared in the second volume of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, which bore its title. This volume included a “Foreword” by Jean-Claude Milner, a “Supplement” (“Les graphes de Jacques Lacan, commentés par Jacques- Alain Miller”), and contributions by Robert Pagès, Alain Grosrichard, Chevalier de Merian, Serge Leclaire, and Thomas Herbert. Translation source: Georges Canguilhem, “Qu’est-ce que la psychologie?” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, Vol. 63, No. 1 (January-March, 1958), 12-25. Translator’s note: Translation work is labor-intensive and tiring, on a good day. Here, I have tried to stay as close as possible to the letter of Canguilhem’s text. For example, unlike other translations (in both English and Spanish), this one reproduces all the section- and paragraph-breaks of the original 1958 article. And while works mentioned in the body of the essay are presented here under the title of their English translations (when available), all references have been preserved in their original French (mainly to protect the accuracy of page references). In spite of my largely literalist approach to translation, however, there were moments I was forced to abandon this path. For the sake of readability, for instance, I made some stylistic calls. I changed a few commas to semi-colons and, once or twice, introduced a period. I added quotation marks in places where the mention/use distinction was helpful and appropriate. I relied on dashes and parentheses to break up some the longer and more cumbersome sentences in the original text. I also translated idiomatic expressions in French into idiomatic expressions in English given that a strict attachment to the literal meaning would have resulted in a bizarre, and bizarrely fractured, style entirely foreign to Canguilhem himself. Finally, where translation proved particularly onerous, I opted for presenting the original French alongside the English translation in bracketed form. Special thanks to Rabih Hage, Simon Truwant, and Ellie Anderson for aiding and abetting in this translation. 200

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he does. He can justify his importance as a specialist only by pointing to an always-debatable “efficiency” [efficacité]. And some would not care one bit if this “efficiency” engendered, in the philosopher, an inferiority complex.

In saying of the psychologist’s efficiency that it is debatable, we do not mean that it is illusory; we simply want to note that it will remain, without doubt, ill-founded as long as it has not been shown to be really due to the application of a science, which is to say, as long as the status of psychology is not fixed in such a way that one would be forced to take it for something more and better than a composite empiricism that has been codified, literally, for the sake of teaching. In fact, from a good number of works in psychology one gets the impression that they add up to a philosophy without rigor, an ethics without exigency, and a medicine without control. Philosophy without rigor because it is eclectic under the pretense of objectivity; ethics without exigency because it teams up with ethological experiences that are themselves without critique, e.g. those of the confessor, of the educator, of the leader, of the judge, etc.; and medicine without control because of the three kinds of illnesses most unintelligible and least curable—i.e., illnesses of the skin, illness of the nerves, and mental illnesses—the study and treatment of the last two have always furnished to psychology its observations and hypotheses.

Therefore, it seems that in asking “What is psychology?” one poses a question that is neither impertinent nor futile.

For a long time we have looked for the unity characteristic of the concept of a science in the direction of its object. The object would dictate the method used for the study of its properties. But this was, at bottom, to limit science to the investigation of a fact [un donné], to the exploration of a domain. When it became clear that every science more or less gives itself its fact and appropriates for itself, in this way, what one calls its “domain,” the concept of a science became progressively more focused on its method than on its object. Or more exactly, the expression “object of science” acquired a new sense. The object of science is no longer only the specific domain of problems and obstacles to resolve, it is also the intention and target of the subject of science, it is the specific project that constitutes a theoretical conscience as such. One could respond to the question “What is psychology?” by making appear the unity of its domain in spite of the multiplicity of methodological projects. To this type of response belongs that brilliantly given by Professor Daniel Lagache, in 1947, to a question posed, in 1936, by Édouard Clasparède. 1 The unity of psychology is here sought in its possible definition as general theory of behavior—a synthesis of experimental psychology, clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, social psychology, and ethnology.

1 Édouard Clasparède, L’unite de la pscyhologie (Paris: PUF, 1949).

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On a closer look, however, we notice that perhaps this unity looks like a pact of peaceful coexistence signed by professionals more than a logical essence obtained by the revelation of constancy across a variety of cases. Of the two tendencies between which Professor Lagache want to find a solid accord—i.e. the naturalist one (experimental psychology) and the humanist (clinical psychology)—, one gets the impression that the second carries, for him, more weight. Without a doubt, this is what explains the absence of animal psychology from this review of disputing parties. True, we see very clearly that it is contained by experimental psychology—which is in large part a psychology of animals—, but it is contained there only as material to which the method is applied. In reality, a psychology can be considered “experimental” only on account of its method, and not on account of its object. Meanwhile, and despite appearances, it is on account of its object more than its method that a psychology is said to be “clinical,” “psychoanalytic,” “social,” “ethnological.” All these adjectives are indicative of one and the same object of study: man, loquacious or taciturn, sociable or unsociable. In light of this, can one rigorously speak about a general theory of behavior as long as the question of whether there is continuity or rupture between human language and animal language, between human and animal society, remains unsolved? It is certainly possible that, on this point, it may not be philosophy that gets to decide, but science, in fact many sciences, psychology included. But in order to define itself, psychology cannot prejudge what it is called upon to judge. Otherwise, it is inevitable that in presenting itself as the general theory of behavior, psychology will incorporate some idea of Man. Hence, it is necessary that we allow philosophy to question psychology about where this idea comes from, and whether it may not be, ultimately, from some philosophy.

Because we are not psychologists, we would like to broach the fundamental question posed here via a different route. That is to say, we propose to explore whether or not the unity of a project can confer to the different types of disciplines called “psychological” their eventual unity. But our method of investigation demands a step back [un recul]. Exploring how various domains overlap can be done by their separate investigation and by comparing them with one another in the present (about a decade in the case of Professor Lagache). Exploring whether certain projects coincide demands that we extract the sense of each of them, not at the moment it gets lost in the automatism of application but at the moment it emerges from the situation that provokes it. Searching for an answer to the question “What is psychology?” becomes, for us, the obligation of sketching a history of psychology, one considered of course solely in relation to its orientations and in connection with the history of philosophy and the history of the sciences; a history necessarily teleological since it is destined to convey to the posed question the assumed original sense of the diverse disciplines, methods, or enterprises whose current disparity legitimizes this same question.

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Psychology as natural science Although etymologically “psychology” means science of the soul, it is remarkable that an independent psychology is missing, in both idea and fact, from the philosophical systems of antiquity, where the psyche, or soul, is taken to be a natural being. There, investigations of the soul find themselves split between metaphysics, logic, and physics. The Aristotelian treatise On the Soul is in reality a treatise of general biology, one of his writings consecrated to physics. After Aristotle, and according to the tradition of the School, the “Courses of Philosophy” at the beginning of the 17th century still discuss the soul in the chapter on physics.2 The object of physics is the natural and organized body that has life as a potentiality [ayant la vie en puissance]. Thus, physics treats the soul as the form of the living body and not as a substance separate from matter. From this point of view, a study of the organs of knowledge—that is to say, of the external senses (the five usual senses) and the internal senses (common sense, fantasy, memory)—does not differ in any regard from a study of the organs of respiration or digestion. The soul is a natural object of study, a form in the hierarchy of forms, even if its essential function is the knowledge of forms. The science of the soul is a province of physiology, in its original and universal sense as a theory of nature.

It is to this ancient conception that an aspect of modern psychology returns without interruption: psycho-physiology (for a long time exclusively considered as psycho-neurology but today, also, as psycho-endocrinology) and psycho-pathology (as medical discipline). In this respect, it does not seem superfluous to recall that well before the two revolutions that permitted the development of modern physiology, those of Harvey and Lavoisier, a revolution no less important than those produced by the theory of circulation and respiration was set in motion by Galen when he established, clinically and experimentally—after the doctors of the School of Alexandria (Herophilus and Erasistratus), against Aristotelian doctrine, and in accordance with the anticipations of Alcmaeon, Hippocrates, and Plato—that it is the brain and not the heart that is the organ of sensation and movement, and the seat of the soul. Galen truly founds an uninterrupted filiation of research, an empirical pneumatology for centuries, in which the fundamental piece is the theory of animal spirits, and which was dethroned and superseded at the end of the 18th century by electro-neurology. While decidedly pluralist in his conception of the relationship between the psychic functions and the encephalic organs, Gall proceeds directly from Galen and dominates, in spite of his extravagances, all investigations of cerebral localizations during the first sixty years of the 19th century, until Broca.

In sum, the psychology of today, as psycho-physiology and psycho-pathology, always returns to the 2nd century.

2 Cf. Scipion De Pleix, Corps de Philosophie contenant la Logique, la Physique, la Métaphysique et l’Ethique (Genève, 1636 [1st ed., Paris, 1607]).

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rty to that uninterrupted debate in which metaphysics gives direction to psychology without thereby giving up the right to say a word about the relationship between the physical and the psychic. For a long time, this relationship has been formulated as somato-physical before becoming psycho-somatic. This reversal is the same, moreover, as the one carried out on the signification of the unconscious. If one identifies psychism and consciousness—based, rightly or wrongly, on the authority of Descartes—, the unconscious turns out to be of a physical order. If one assumes that the psychic can be unconscious, psychology does not reduce to the science of consciousness. And the psychic is no longer only what is hidden, but also what hides itself, that which one hides; it is not simply the intimate, but also—a term Bossuet takes from the mystics—the abyssal. Psychology is no longer just the science of intimacy, but the science of the profundities of the soul.

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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4071959/?fbclid=IwAR2xtUPKnqazgKP0vavon2wq8_0Pup64aKCkRMtpIYFQ7LNyUrS9LaMNe0k 

Excerpts from “Epigenetics meets endocrinology” by Xiang Zhang and Shuk-Mei Ho

...1.We propose a three-dimensional model (genetics, environment, and developmental stage) to explain the phenomena related to progressive changes in endocrine functions with age, the early origin of endocrine disorders, phenotype discordance between monozygotic twins, rapid shifts in disease patterns among populations experiencing major lifestyle changes such as immigration, and the many endocrine disruptions in contemporary life.
...
2.The inherited variability is static and does not change in response to the environment. The acquired variability can be caused by an environmental factor such as u.v. radiation from the sun (exogenous) or reactive oxygen species generated during metabolism (endogenous). But once acquired these effects are permanent and irreversible. Thus, inherited and acquired variability, either alone or in concert, cannot fully explain the high degree of variability and the reversibility of the endocrine system in response to the environment.
...
3. Most cells or organs have various degrees of phenotypic plasticity, whereby the phenotype expressed by a genotype is dependent on environmental influences
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Collectively, these findings indicate that nongenetic factors, including the environment, are important determinants of variability in endocrine function and risk of disorders. Endocrine glands and their target organs, because they function to maintain homeostasis in the body, must be highly responsive to environmental changes.
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4. A high degree of mismatch between the adaptive trait and the future environment, which includes aging, changes in lifestyle, or the introduction of new chemicals, pathogens, and pollutants, may increase the risk of developing disease. Prime examples are the strong correlations observed between hyponutrition and/or low birth weight with many endocrine disorders related to thyroid function, calcium balance, utilization of glucose, insulin sensitivity, and adrenal gland function (Vaag & Poulsen 2007, Hyman et al. 2009, Latini et al. 2009).
...
5. The mechanisms underlying the interactions of genetics and the environment, which produce an adaptive phenotype in an endocrine axis, remain elusive. However, a growing body of literature suggests that the missing connection resides in epigenetics, a pivotal mechanism of interactions between genes and the environment (Jaenisch & Bird 2003, Cook et al. 2005, Jirtle & Skinner 2007, Tang & Ho 2007, Vaag & Poulsen 2007, Ling & Groop 2009; Fig. 1).
...
6. Epigenetics links genetics with the environment in endocrine function. Hormone levels vary in response to internal and external environmental changes. Epigenetics, in response to exogenous and endogenous environmental cues, defines active and repressed domains of the genome. These responses explain the high phenotypic plasticity observed in the endocrine system, in which different genetic programs are executed from the same genome based on changes in the environment.
...
7. Epigenetic modifications defined as heritable changes in gene function that occur without a change in the nucleotide sequence (Bird 2007, Goldberg et al. 2007, Berger et al. 2009). They are mitotically and transgenerationally inheritable (Rakyan et al. 2002, 2003, Hitchins et al. 2007) and potentially reversible (Bannister & Kouzarides 2005, Weaver et al. 2005). The most studied mechanisms known to affect the epigenome are DNA methylation, histone modification, and aberrant expression of microRNAs (miRNAs; Esteller 2005). These processes along with other epigenetic events determine when and whether various sets of genes are expressed in a tissue or cell.
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8. Histones are special proteins that facilitate the packaging of the DNA into nucleosomes, the basic building block of the chromatin. Posttranslational modifications such as acetylation, methylation, phosphorylation, sumoylation, and ubiquitination occur at specific residues in histones N-terminal tails (Cosgrove et al. 2004). These modifications determine whether the DNA wrapped around histones is accessible to the transcriptional machinery... In most instances, histone modifications work hand-in-hand with DNA methylation to achieve short- and long-term changes in transcriptional programs through transient or permanent reorganization of the chromatin architecture (Kondo 2009; Fig. 2).
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9. DNA methylation and histone modification are two major epigenetic mechanisms that corroborate in regulating endocrine-related gene expression. Packaging genes into active or inactive chromatin determines whether they are transcriptionally accessible or not. The N-termini of histones have specific amino acids that are sensitive to posttranslational modifications, which contribute to chromatin status.
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10. Epigenetics also plays important roles in regulating thyroid hormone and retinoic acid metabolism. For example, the expression of the sodium iodide symporter (SLC5A5), which is responsible for the uptake of iodine in the thyroid, was shown to be regulated by cytosine methylation of its promoter (Venkataraman et al. 1999, Smith et al. 2007).
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11. As a general observation, epigenetic dysregulation of the expression of type I receptor genes is closely linked to endocrine-related disorders including cancers of the breast, prostate, testis, and endometrium. DNA methylation dysregulates androgen receptor expression in prostate and endometrial cancer (Kinoshita et al. 2000, Sasaki et al. 2000), estrogen receptor-α in breast cancer (Yoshida et al. 2000, Archey et al. 2002, Adams et al. 2007, Champagne & Curley 2008), estrogen receptor-β in ovarian, prostate, and breast cancer (Zhao et al. 2003, Zhu et al. 2004, Zhang et al. 2007, Zama & Uzumcu 2009), and progesterone receptor in endometrial cancer (Sasaki et al. 2003).
...
12. Peptide hormones are another major class of hormones, which have a broad spectrum of action, including regulation of energy metabolism (e.g. insulin), adiposity (e.g. leptin), growth (e.g. GH), and differentiation (e.g. FSH).
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Disruption of the synthesis of peptide hormones or their cognate receptors by epigenetic events often leads to metabolic changes (e.g. obesity and metabolic syndrome; Plagemann et al. 2009) and abnormalities in neuropsychological behavior (e.g. autism and alcohol dependence; Gregory et al. 2009, Hillemacher et al. 2009), as opposed to cancer, the predominant disorder for epigenetic dysregulation of steroid hormones and their receptors (Widschwendter et al. 2004).
...
...Notably, epigenetic regulation of genes encoding peptide hormones or their receptors is largely related to developmental stage- and tissue-specific function or the development of a metabolic or neural disorder. For example, in cultures of mouse embryonic stem cells, the hypermethylated promoter of the insulin gene undergoes demethylation as these cells differentiate into hormone-producing cells; and in both the mouse and human insulin gene promoters, the CpG sites are demethylated in insulin-producing pancreatic β-cells but not in other tissues without insulin expression (Kuroda et al. 2009).
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13. In a recent study of autism-spectrum disorders, hypermethylation of the gene promoter encoding the oxytocin receptor was found to be associated with a reduced level of mRNA expression and was significantly associated with autism (Gregory et al. 2009). In another report, significant alterations of the mRNA expression and promoter-related DNA methylation of vasopressin were reported in patients with alcohol dependence (Hillemacher et al. 2009).
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At the organismal level, the functioning of an endocrine axis involves multiple endocrine organs: for example, the hypothalamo–pituitary-gonadal axis comprising at least three hormone-producing tissues and many target tissues. The coordination of the entire axis, representing the first dimension of regulation controlled by genetic programs, is complex and meticulously well controlled. The interaction of these programs with the environment produces variable epigenomes, greatly amplifying the complexity of interaction and outcomes. These interactions can be viewed as the second dimension of influence...Finally, we will emphasize the effects of lifespan events that have strong modifying influences on epigenetics and pay special attention to windows of susceptibility during human development from conception to death.
...
14. Genetics, environment, and stages of lifespan development interact in a three-dimensional space to create discordant endocrine phenotypes (epigenomes) from an identical genetic background (a single genome).
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A widely studied area of epigenetics–environment– lifespan interactions is the relationship between birth weight and disease in later life. Animal studies have demonstrated that retardation of intrauterine growth results in progressive loss of β-cell function and the eventual development of type 2 diabetes in the adult. This association directly links chromatin remodeling with suppression of gene transcription (Simmons 2009).
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15. A review of human studies also indicated an inverse relationship between birth weight and susceptibility to endocrine metabolic disorders such as insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, hyperlipidemia, and obesity (Godfrey 2006).
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Insulin resistance is another example of epigenetic dysregulation resulting in the loss of function in an endocrine axis over time when it is constantly challenged by environmental changes such as specific dietary deficits. It is the condition in which normal amounts of insulin are insufficient to produce a normal insulin response from insulin-sensitive organs/tissues such as the liver, muscle, and adipose tissue, which all play an important role in the etiology and clinical course of patients with type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, or coronary heart disease (Reaven 1993).
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16. Summary and perspectives
It has become apparent that genetics alone is insufficient to explain the dynamic and complex interdependent relationships between the endocrine system and endogenous and exogenous environmental changes. Genetics alone also fails to address issues related to the progressive changes in endocrine functions over an individual's lifespan, the early origin of endocrine disorders, phenotype discordance between MZ twins, and rapid shifts in disease patterns among populations experiencing major changes in lifestyle, such as immigration. Mounting evidence now suggests that epigenetics is the missing link between genetics, the environment, and endocrine function. In this regard, genetics provides a basis for epigenetic modifications and a blueprint for hormone action. However, the great variability in endocrine function and susceptibility to endocrine-related diseases among individuals or populations is clearly determined by epigenetics. Epigenetics serves as a mechanism mediating the continuous `editing' of the genome or epigenetic marks laid down in early life by exposures and experiences during later life. This paradigm has expanded the static and gene-centric view of phenotypic attributes to a more plastic and adaptive view molded by epigenetics. To fully understand the impacts of epigenetics on endocrine function and vice versa, we need a genome-wide search for plasticity genes or loci directly responsive to a specific environmental stimulus. To achieve this goal, current research is applying high-throughput investigative technologies to uncover global changes in the methylome(s), miRNA signatures, and the histone codes defining the interplay and advanced informatics to produce biologically meaningful data and conclusions. To advance these investigations, our focus should be placed on two commonly raised questions: 1) whether epigenetic changes induced by environmental exposures or lifestyle choices in one generation can be passed to the next and 2) whether these `inherited' changes can be reversed upon removal of the exposures or through lifestyle modifications. Answers to the first question are of paramount importance to the primary prevention of endocrine disorders such as obesity, and answers to the second would open doors to the use of epigenetic drugs or interventions for the reversal of endocrine disorders with a strong epigenetic etiology. The opportunities of applying epigenetics to the prevention and treatment of endocrine disorders are limitless and certainly will emerge rapidly in the near future.