[8.1.4]

The Universal Basis of Behavior. In The Origin of Species (1964 printing), one of the most influential books in modern times, Charles Darwin, its timid author who took twenty years to decide to publish it, correctly saw the importance and significance of the phenomenon of variability in behavior. Unlike behaviorism today, Darwin's behaviorism was basic, universal, truly general: he treated data on plants and animals with equal facility. The level of his theorizing was general enough that the principles he evolved were applicable to behavior of organisms at any phylogenetic level. The result was quite productive, as history recognizes, though they were also fragmentary inasmuch as the notions constituting the theory of evolution and natural selection have coalesced and formed a number of varying disciplines --microbiology, genetics, immunology, among others at one end of the scale of magnitude, and at the other end, ethology, zoosemiotics, sociobiology, and psychology, among others.

The success in Darwin's methodological approach to theorizing can be traced to the relationship he saw between structure and function. Darwin intuitively understood this relationship in the zone of behavior. He did not have the benefit of mathematics; otherwise, it seems to us, he would have used his intuitions about [structure/ function] to include all behavior, including the behavior of physical bodies. Newton, the mathematician, evolved the principles of the behavior of bodies a hundred and fifty years earlier; by that time the fragmentation of the physical sciences was sufficiently evolved that biologists like Darwin were permanently separated from the universal unity of behavior. Thus, it did not occur to him to look for the mind parameters of cultural evolution, of which Newton and Darwin were both products: the cleavage between the behavior of bodies and the behavior of organisms was total and their relationship inaccessible. Yet it is clear that the behavior of bodies and the behavior of organisms have a genetic relationship we use the same descriptive titles to describe our experience of moving bodies as we do moving animals and plants.

We say, for example, that the two cars collided head on; that one animal weighs more than another; that he got stabbed by a pencil; that the plant is thirsty; that the rock shines with radiance; that the jewel impresses its presence on the onlooker; that the two trees curve around to avoid the roof and the electric wires; that the moon circles the earth; that the hammer broke his toe; that electrons repel each other; that the catalyst speeds up the events; and so on.

Note that we naturally use verbs of behavior to describe the relationship objects to each other. Behavior, in its most basic, universal, and objective sense, is a referential system for designating the apparent or observed relationship between two or more objects. We submit that the minimal as well as sufficient characterization of the relationship of objects is given by The Hexagram of Behavior as follows:

[FORM/STRUCTURE/FUNCTION // MEDIUM/FRAME/APPEARANCE] Newton correctly understood the lower trigram but failed to exploit the upper trigram (on the right of the double line). Darwin, on the other hand, correctly understood the upper trigram but related it restrictively to the section of the lower trigram that dealt with biological systems only. We may represent this distinction as follows:

It can be seen that the fragmentation of the notion of behavior leads physicists and engineers to overlook the biographical or personal features of individual variation (bodies and organisms), while biologists and psychologists are led to overlook the non-physiological parameters of personal variability. To unify the notion of behavior, we propose to use the naturally occurring nomenclature as we ordinarily use it on the daily round.

Let us consider the conditional appropriateness of behavior terms as applied to bodies, plants, animals, and organisms or simulations thereof. In the first place, one needs to dispel the prejudice that scientific terms are more exact than everyday terms. This is simply not true as can be ascertained by taking samples of naturally occurring discourse among various groups in the community: scientists, lawyers, psychologists, doctors, insurance salesmen, teachers, etc. The interested person may obtain this information directly by contacting people from various stations in life and noting their discourse in terms of exactness, precision, argument logic, etc. Having done this ourselves over the years, and occasionally in personal life today and in the mass media, we have become aware of the fact that discourse is a function of the setting more than a function of the person or the person's intelligence, personality, etc. In order to document this position, we need to show the specific ways in which natural, spontaneously occurring discourse is a socio-cultural phenomenon, subject to the biological laws of evolution, which themselves are dependent on the physical laws of motion and relatedness. In this discussion, we need to deal with the notion of variability, i.e., what constitutes variation along the dimensions of behavior, and what is responsible for such variation as can be observed at the personal or communal life levels (see CHART T/2 in Chapter 10).

The organization of community begins with the minimal figure of three. At the dyadic level there can M relationship and dependence, but not group life, intergroup organization, politics, organizational structure, rumor, reputation, identity, and so on. In all of these, the minimal structural component necessitates two dyads, and three persons constitute three dyads (A-B; A-C; and B-C). Note that while A and B establish a special relationship, unique in that no other pair has the identical biographical history, C is left out; similarly, A and C leave B out, and B and C leave A out. Thus, with every dyadic episode, there evolves a unique dyadic history. Cumulatively, dyadic histories produce community life: what B imagines is going on with A and C; what C tells A about-his relationship with B; how A tries to give one impression to B and another to C; how C's rights and privileges are affected by his image. These form the coalitions, collusions, and conspiracies, in short, community existence.

Among non-human societies,' community life is similarly limited to the minimum element of three. For instance, communities or colonies of microorganisms establish themselves as viable when a third element, the offspring, is successfully added to the first two, i.e. an invading virus and its host or victim. The host (or medium), the invading organism, and its first offspring, form the triad necessary for community life: propagation at a certain rate; survival from autogenic antibodies; weakening of the host's resistance; etc. (see Index). In non-animal communities, the first body serves as the reference point, the second body establishes relationship or structure, and the third allows for function. For instance, the notion of a stellar or planetary system always comprises minimally a star, a planet, and a satellite. Such terms as quantity, group, class, subtraction, division, etc., designate operations of objects in the order of magnitude of three minimally. Such group notions attributed to objects as playing cards and other sets form the basis of modern mathematics (Carnap, 1959; Kasner and Newman, 1940).