Biogenetic Structuralism

Structuralism is a movement within the sciences of man holding that the order which we are able to observe in the world is isomorphic with the order that obtains in the observing mind. The correspondences that exist between world and mind are not generally apparent from inspection, but require scrutiny into the "deep structure" that underlies phenomena, a concept first propounded by Ferdinand De Saussure in his analysis of language. Social organizations, like myths and languages, are based on transformations, evident at the surface, of structures of which the bearers are unconscious. The native speaker, accordingly, knows his language fully in his functional competence, but may have no idea whatever of the rules, lexical, syntactic, phonemic, which hold sway and which permit the infinite variety of manifestations of speech. The authors of this compact, persuasive, and yet also highly speculative study of biogenetic structuralism propose that structure resides primarily in the brain, not in a platonically conceived realm of "mind," and that in fact no psychic reality needs to be inserted between the central nervous system and the environment. The principles of organization of societies for which Levi-Strauss, for example, must postulate mental universals are themselves the necessary derivatives of cerebral structures attained through evolutionary processes. The evidence for biogenetic structuralism leans on evolutionary theory, which in turn helps to explain, as "orthodox" struc-turalism does not, the variety of structures that exist and their modification over periods of time. The evolution of hominid cognition depends on the development of ever greater complexity of dendritic-synaptic configurations and neural tracts, to a point of qualitative change at the human level, in the associative capabilities of the brain. From the findings of modern neurophysiology, Professors Laughlin and D'Aquili point to various systems (including the visual-limbic, the visual-somaesthetic-motor, the frontal-thalamic) and areas such as the parietal-occipital, which support the cere-bral adaptive mechanisms peculiar to man. So, the system of connections between the visual association areas and the limbic system probably provides "the mechanism by which sustained affect of any sort is invested in objects as they are presented to the visual cortex." The significance of such findings not only for imprinting in birds, but for human attachments is evident. Some of the neural associative structures are genetically programmed, such as those underlying the universal stages in the acquisition of language. Probably most are laid down early in the life of the individual, with physical …