Reply to Raya Jones

In her remarks, Dr. Raya Jones undertakes to enlarge on the issue of innatism raised in my exchange with Dr. Alan Maloney, which appeared recently in this journal. In so doing she traverses a considerable territory, ranging from comments on Jung's use of animal examples to the philosophers of science, Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos, and on to a critique of other Jungians such as David Rosen and his colleagues and thence to the whole question of human symbolization. While there is much here to admire - and much that I quite frankly agree with - I nevertheless find myself in the odd position of feeling that I am being admonished for failing to bring enough heavy artillery to bear on Dr. Maloney and the other advocates of innate structure. In order to get a handle on Dr. Jones's comments, therefore, I think it is first necessary to briefly review the original argument with Dr. Maloney.

It is important to keep in mind that my exchange with Dr. Maloney began with a paper on a heretofore uncommented on influence on Jung, namely the work of James Mark Baldwin and Conway Lloyd Morgan (Hogenson 2001). These late 19 th and early 20 th Century psychologists had independently reacted to the then dominant Lamarckian interpretation of Darwin's theory of evolution by proposing that the behavioural plasticity of an organism might allow for survival over sufficient time, under novel environmental conditions, to bring the genome into convergence with those conditions. Thus, as I outlined in my paper, by learning to modify the lactose levels in milk, adult populations in some parts of the world were able to continue to consume milk, which was important for calcium retention, as those populations moved further north. At the same time, this process would alter the genetic selection gradient in such a way that the actual genetic basis for lactose tolerance would move from less than one per cent in some sub-Saharan populations to more than 95 per cent in populations in Scandinavia. This proc