CHAPTER 1
Evolution: A Generative Source for Conceptualizing
the Attributes of Personality
THEODORE MILLON
3PERSONOLOGY’S RELATIONSHIP
TO OTHER SCIENCES 3
On the Place of Theory in Personology 4
On the Place of Evolutionary Theory in Personology 5
THREE UNIVERSAL POLARITIES OF EVOLUTION 8
Some Historical Notes 8
Aims of Existence 9
Modes of Adaptation 14
Strategies of Replication 18
THE DISTINCTLY HUMAN POLARITIES
OF EVOLUTION 24
Predilections of Abstraction 24
REFERENCES 28In the last year of the twentieth century, voters elected a
group of Kansas school board members who supported the
removal of the concept of evolution from the state’s science
curriculum, an act that indicated the extent to which evolu-
tionary ideas could incite intense emotional, if not irrational
opposition on the part of unenlightened laymen. Retrospec-
tively appalled by their prior action, in the following year
Kansan voters rescinded their perverse judgment and chose
new board members who intended to restore the concept.
The theory of evolution was reinstated not because the
electors of Kansas, a most conservative and religious state,
suddenly became agnostic, but because they realized that
rejecting the idea would deny their children the necessity of
remaining in touch with one of the fundamentals of modern
science; they realized that this could, in effect, allow their
children to fall behind, to be bereft of a basic science, and to
be both a misinformed and misguided generation. Their chil-
dren could become embarrassingly backward in a time of
rapidly changing technology.
Might not the same ambivalence be true of our own field,
one composed of ostensibly sophisticated and knowledgeable
scientists? Might we not be so deeply mired in our own tradi-
tions (scholarly religions?) that we are unable to free our-
selves from the habit of seeing our subject from no vantage
point other than those to which we have become accustomed?
Are we unable to recognize that behavior, cognition, the un-
conscious, personality—all of our traditional subjects—are
merely diverse manifestations of certain common and deeper
principles of functioning, processes, and mechanisms that
have evolved either randomly or adaptively through history
and time? Do we psychologists have a collective phobia
about laws that may represent the fundamental origins of our
traditional subjects? Does the search for and application of
such laws push our emotional buttons, perhaps run hard
against our habitual blinders, so much so as to prevent us
from recognizing their value as a potential generative source
that may more fully illuminate our science?PERSONOLOGY’S RELATIONSHIP
TO OTHER SCIENCESIt is the intent of this chapter to broaden our vistas, to furnish
both a context and a set of guiding ideas that may enrich our
studies. I believe it may be wise and perhaps even necessary
to go beyond our current conceptual boundaries in psychol-
ogy, more specifically to explore carefully reasoned, as well
as intuitive hypotheses that draw their laws and principles if
not their substance from contextually adjacent sciences such
as evolution. Not only may such steps bear new conceptual
fruits, but they may also provide a foundation that can under-
gird and guide our own discipline’s explorations. Much of
personology, no less psychology as a whole, remains adrift,
divorced from broader spheres of scientific knowledge; it is
isolated from firmly grounded if not universal principles,
leading us to continue building the patchwork quilt of