James Mark Baldwin

James Mark Baldwin

By, Hannah Grigorian and Christopher Sanchez

James Mark Baldwin was born on January 12, 1861 to an abolitionist father and mother. During the Civil War, his father moved to the North but Baldwin himself stayed with his family within Southern Carolina until he went to New Jersey to attend Princeton University. While beginning in theology he switched to philosophy quickly and used the Green Fellowship of Mental Science as a result to study at Leipzig with Wilhelm Wundt. In 1887 he married Helen Hayes Green who was the daughter of the president of the seminary he had begun to teach at but shortly after that in 1889, Baldwin moved to Toronto to attend school as the chair of logic as well as metaphysics. Here, his focus shifted to the study of infants and published the book, Mental Development in the Child and the Race. Methods and Processes in 1894. A man who was famous for scandal, Baldwin taught at Princeton for a short time before leaving as a result of a disagreement with the president as well as being a professor at John Hopkins before he was caught in the raid of a brothel. After the last scandal at John Hopkins, Baldwin was forced to leave an American career in psychology and live out the rest of his days in countries such as Mexico and France.

Even with the associated scandal, Baldwin had gained respect as an experimental psychologist. His two most prominent ideas fall under the construct of developmental psychology: Organic selection and the Baldwin Effect. Organic selection, later renamed as functional selection, is the idea that infants select the most useful movements from an excess of movements created by way of imitation. He extended this to later stages of development as well in an attempt to explain the learning process when it comes to things like drawing or writing. This is generally referred to as “niche building” within humans.  

The Baldwin Effect is another idea pertaining directly to developmental psychology for which Baldwin was so renowned for. The Baldwin Effect, also referred to as Baldwinian Evolution, deals with the effects of human behavior on the human genome. Baldwin believed that the behavioral decisions humans make are shaped into culture and sustained over generations have the ability to affect the human genome. For instance, the taboo on incest, which is a culturally enforced taboo, allows for the diversification of genes and increases the overall success of the species. Baldwin proposed that a similar idea could be extended to include many culturally enforced behaviors and that, in fact, breed the human species selectively in order to overcome cultural or physical obstacles that would be insurmountable to previous generations of humans.

Below you will find a Picture of James Mark Baldwin the ingenious and scandalous focus of this blog post.

Also, while studying the dead schools and behaviorism these last few days we have also been carving out time to spend exploring London! Click the Link below to check out some facts about the London Eye which we took advantage of this past weekend.

http://primaryfacts.com/665/10-london-eye-facts/