Potential cognitive speciation understood otherwise

Cognitive Embodiment of Nature Re-cognized Systemically (Part #7)

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Recapitulation of phylogeny in ontogeny: The processes of biological speciation have long been studied, described and visualized (History of evolutionary thought, Wikipedia; Adam Rothstein, Speciation: a diagram book). This is distinguished from theories of sociocultural evolution. Both are characterized by the creation-evolution controversy with its own history.

Recapitulation theory explores the relationship between embryonic development (ontogeny) and biological evolution (phylogeny), as summarized by Stephen Jay Gould (Ontogeny and Phylogeny, 1977).

Recapitulation of phylogeny in psychogeny: A degree of relationship between psychology and phylogeny is recognized in evolutionary psychology. In framing recapitulation theory, its implications were suggestively extended at the time to a psychological dimension by Ernst Haeckel (The Phylogeny of the Soul. ResearchGate, October 2012). However both psychogeny, and the extent to which it may recapitulate ontogeny or phlyogeny, have attracted little interest (Wayne Viney and William Douglas Woody, Psychogeny: a neglected dimension in teaching the mind-brain problem, Teaching of Psychology, 22, 1995, 3, pp. 173-177; Yvan Lebrun, From Psychogeny to Organicity: is the brain going to outgrow the psyche in the Third Millennium? Brain and Language, 71, 2000, 1, pp. 138-140).

There are two primary theories of psychogeny:

• Identity theory maintains that psyche is instilled into the biology of the organism at one point in time and that the psyche instilled at that point remains identical throughout the lifespan. However, although most contemporary identity theorists accept conception as the time of infusion, the time of the arrival of the psyche is a matter of historical debate.
• Psychogenic emergentism, suggests that the psyche develops as the body or the neurological substrate develops. Psyche can grow and decline with age; emergentists do not agree on a time at which psyche emerges.

"Freedom of movement" -- understood in psychogenetic terms? Without specifically associating psychogeny with the process of identification with species as argued above, there is a sense in which humans are free to engage psychologically in what can be understood as a form of ontogeny or of phylogeny. Expressed succinctly, individuals are potentially free to move up and down the evolutionary tree in psychological terms, identifying with species as may be appropriate.

Such an argument contrast with a static understanding of "humanity" and of the individual. In that sense the individual -- or a group -- embodies the evolutionary process as a whole and is not locked into what is otherwise framed as its current outcome. It is in this sense that an individual may well cultivate a multi-species identity -- shifting dynamically between "species" as appropriate.

Shifting up and down the tree of life may be a more fundamental human right -- and more characteristic of future human beings.

Unrecognized speciation of humanity? It is widely argued that speciation may occur in humans at some stage but that it is not currently evident -- other than in speculative fiction (Bill Christensen, Genetic Upper Class: could the human race split? LiveScience, 27 October 2006; Peter Ward, What May Become of Homo sapiens, Scientific American; James Owen, Future Humans: Four Ways We May, or May Not, Evolve, National Geographic, 24 November 2009). It is readily argued that humans engender the speciation of non-human species (J. W. Bull and M. Maron, How humans drive speciation as well as extinction, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 29 June 2016)

Such conclusions depends entirely on the questionable definition of species as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. It suffices to recognized that through specialization by discipline, and the cultivation of distinctive cultural preferences for communication, the probability of intercourse between two individuals engendering a "fertile offspring" is increasingly problematic -- in the psychological sense emphasized in this argument. Humanity has already speciated to an unrecognized degree which the tendency to define is unable to encompass meaningfully.

The argument here effectively emphasizes the potential of a dynamic psychological identity -- already evident -- rather than the static identity which institutions cultivate and reinforce.

Homo undulans? As noted in the previous part of this document, with any Renaissance of the kind imagined there, it is appropriate to ask whether this will be characterized by the birth of a successor to Homo sapiens. One exploration of this is with respect to the cognitive engagement with otherness (Authentic Grokking: emergence of Homo conjugens, 2003). As Homo undulans, this is the theme of a penultimate chapter of the very detailed study by Daniel Dervin (Creativity and Culture: a psychoanalytic study of the creative process in the arts, sciences, and culture, 1990), as discussed separately (Emergence of Homo undulans -- through a "grokking" dynamic? 2013).

The cognitive dance between the framings variously offered by distinctive species, could then be understood as characteristic of Homo undulans -- with the linking dynamic as suggested in the speculation regarding Homo conjugens.

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