You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The research unit on “Evolution and Complexity” has started with an interest in complex dynamic systems, and is focusing
mainly on the relation between selection and self-organization and their respective roles in a theory of evolution. Whether one maintains that the emergence of order and adaptation at all biological levels can be sufficiently explained on the basis of variation and selection, or whether natural selection and self-organization have to be considered as complementary principles, the respective utility of which has to be articulated in specific situations, it became clear that the respective explanatory roles of natural selection and self-organizational principles in biological evolution needed reconsideration. Our research unit has carried out these researches, which continue, in close collaboration with biologists and mathematicians, within the framework of the Research Community on “Evolution and Complexity” of the Fund for Scientific Research, Flanders. After having explored these issues with regard to biological systems, we have continued and extended this study, focusing on psychological systems. Are psychological systems simply and exclusively subject to natural selection? If not, what are the (self)-organizing principles at work in them? What are the various organizational levels that can be usefully distinguished in them? It is here that we encounter the mind-body or mind-brain debate, as well as the discussions about consciousness and the role of emotion in cognitive systems. It is here that we acknowledge the usefulness of psychoanalytic theories, early Freudian (“The Project”) and Lacanian (the Real-Symbolic-Imaginary) theories, which are according to us close to a dynamic, organizational, and hierarchic viewpoint on mind and body. So, we think that it is useful to study, empirically and theoretically, the mind–body debate from a combined biological, evolutionary (selectionist), developmental (self-organizational), and psychological (psy