24 Evolution: A Generative Source for Conceptualizing the Attributes of Personality
learned to deny the validity of their own wishes and emotions
and instead have adopted as true the values and precepts set
forth by others. The disparity they sense between their own
urges and the behaviors they must display to avoid condem-
nation often leads to omnipresent physical tensions and rigid
psychological controls.
Readers who have reached this final paragraph on the
basic three polarities that undergird all physical forms and or-
ganic species should have a foundation to move onto our next
series of polarities, those which are distinctly human—that
is, these polarities relate to personality attributes found al-
most exclusively in the human species that set us off from all
earlier forms of evolution and that pertain to the higher pow-
ers and adaptive functions ofabstractionand their constit-
uent cognitive modes.
THE DISTINCTLY HUMAN POLARITIES
OF EVOLUTION
This group of personality attributes incorporates the sources
employed to gather knowledge about the experience of life
and the manner in which this information is registered and
transformed. Here, we are looking at styles of cognizing—
differences (first) in what people attend to in order to
learn about life, and (second) how they process information:
what they do to record this knowledge and make it useful to
themselves.
Predilections of Abstraction
The cognitive features of intelligence are judged by me to be
central elements in personological derivations. Comprising
the fourth and most recent stage of evolution, they comprise
the reflective capacity to transcend the immediate and con-
crete, they interrelate and synthesize the diversity of experi-
ence, they represent events and processes symbolically, they
weigh, reason, and anticipate; in essence, they signify a quan-
tum leap in evolution’s potential for change and adaptation.
Cognitive differences among individuals and the manner
in which they are expressed have been much overlooked in
generating and appraising personality attributes. With an oc-
casional notable exception or two, little of the recent so-
called revolution in cognitive science that has profoundly
affected contemporary psychology has impacted the study of
personology. Historically, the realms of intellect, aptitude,
and ability have not been considered to be personality-related
spheres of study.
In my view, personology should be broadened to encom-
pass the whole person,an organically unified and unseg-
mented totality. Consequently, cognitive dimensions and
their various styles not only should be included, but also may
have a significance equal to that of other functions as a source
of personality attributes (Millon, 1990). Unfortunately, the
various features comprising cognitive abstraction have only
rarely been included as components in personality-oriented
concepts and appraisals.
Emancipated from the real and present, unanticipated pos-
sibilities and novel constructions may routinely be created
cognitively. The capacity to sort, to recompose, to coordinate,
and to arrange the symbolic representations of experience
into new configurations is in certain ways analogous to the
random processes of recombinant replication, but processes
enabling manipulation of abstractions are more focused and
intentional. To extend this rhetorical liberty, replication is the
recombinant mechanism underlying the adaptive progression
of phylogeny, whereas abstraction is the recombinant mecha-
nism underlying the adaptive progression of ontogeny. The
powers of replication are limited, constrained by the finite
potentials inherent in parental genes. In contrast, experi-
ences, abstracted and recombined, are infinite.
Over one lifetime, innumerable events of a random, logi-
cal, or irrational character transpire, are construed, and are re-
formulated time and again—some of which prove more and
others less adaptive than their originating circumstances may
have called forth. Whereas the actions of most nonhuman
species derive from successfully evolved genetic programs,
activating behaviors of a relatively fixed nature suitable for a
modest range of environmental settings, the capabilities of
both implicit and intentional abstraction that characterize
humans give rise to adaptive competencies that are suited to
radically divergent ecological circumstances, circumstances
that themselves may be the result of far-reaching acts of sym-
bolic and technological creativity.
Although what underlies our self- versus other-oriented
attributes stems from differential replication strategies, the
conscious state of knowing self as distinct from others is a
product of the power of abstraction, the most recent phase of
evolution’s procession. The reflective process of turning in-
ward and recognizing self as an object—no less to know one-
self, and further, to know that one knows—is a uniqueness
found only among humans. Doubling back on oneself, so to
speak, creates a new level of reality, consciousness that im-
bues self and others with properties far richer and more sub-
tle than those that derive from strategies of reproductive
propagation and nurturance alone.
The abstracting mind may mirror outer realities but recon-
structs them in the process, reflectively transforming them
into subjective modes of phenomenological reality, making
external events into a plastic mold subject to creative designs.
Not only are images of self and others emancipated from