Evolution of emotionality: Lineal heritability or sui generis emergence?

摘要

The Target Article traces the rise of neuromental substrates by which animal experience came to be under increasingly sophisticated means of hermeneutical interpretation. It also traces how this rise was largely in line with mammalian and even earlier animal heuristics. This contribution also would correct the behaviorist paradigm that Wright & Panksepp and others have argued ought to be deposed from its long reign. Their efforts have faced a variety of critical appraisals that are ultimately unpersuasive. They also address a persistent polemic commonly used to misconstrue and attack evolutionary psychology and the related straw-man that science must be synonymous with logical positivism and empirical reductionism. It is true that the ties that the Target Article have to psychoanalysis are more gestural than overt or substantive. But, really, there is no alternative-at least no alternative that is both logical and intuitive-to the naturalistic phylogeny invoked by the authors.