James Mark Baldwin (Columbia, South Carolina, 1861–1934) was an American philosopher and psychologist, educated at Princeton, under the supervision of Scottish philosopher James McCosh, and several German universities.

He was professor of philosophy at Lake Forest College near Chicago (1887), but soon found a better position as professor of metaphysics and logic at the University of Toronto (1889). In 1893 he was called back to his alma mater, Princeton University, as professor of psychology. In 1903, partly as a result of a dispute with Princeton president Woodrow Wilson, partly due to an offer involving more pay and less teaching, he moved to a professorship of philosophy and psychology at Johns Hopkins University. Baldwin founded the first experimental psychology laboratory in the British Empire at Toronto, the first experimental psychology laboratory at Princeton, and re-opened the experimental laboratory at Johns Hopkins that had been founded by Granville Stanley Hall in 1884 (but had closed with Hall's departure to take of the presidency of Clark University in 1888).

He was prominent among early experimental psychologists (voted by his peers the fifth most important psychologist in America in a 1902 survey conducted by James McKeen Cattell), but it was his contributions to developmental psychology that his contributions were greatest. Baldwin's stage-wise theory of intellectual development was a critical influence on the thought of Jean Piaget, who is widely regarded as the most important developmentalist of the 20th century.

His contributions to the young discipline's early journals were highly significant as well. Baldwin was a co-founder (with James McKeen Cattell) of Psychological Review (which was founded explicitly to compete with Hall's American Journal of Psychology), Psychological Monographs and Psychological Index, and he was the founding editor of Psychological Bulletin.

In 1892 he was vice-president of the international Congress of Psychology held in London, and in 1897–1898 president of the American Psychological Association; he received a gold medal from the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences of Denmark (1897), was honorary president of the International Congress of Criminal Anthropology held in Geneva in 1896, and was made an honorary D.Sc. of Oxford University.

Baldwin's academic career was cut short when an arrest at a Baltimore brothel in late 1908 became a public scandal in early 1909 and he was forced to resign his position. He lived out the rest of his life in Mexico, where he held a position at the National Univeristy, and France, where he died in 1934.

Baldwin effect

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Baldwin's most important theoretical legacy is the concept of the Baldwin effect or "Baldwinian evolution". Baldwin proposed, against Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, that there is a mechanism whereby epigenetic factors come to shape the genome as much as — or more than — natural selection pressures. In particular, human behavioural decisions made and sustained across generations as a set of cultural practices ought to be considered among the factors shaping the human genome.

For example, the incest taboo, if powerfully enforced, removes the natural selection pressure against the possession of incest-favoring genes. After a few generations without this natural selection pressure, unless such genetic material were profoundly fixed in the genome, it would tend to diversify and lose its function. Humans would no longer be innately averse to incest, but would rely on their capacity to internalize such rules from cultural practices.

The opposite case can also be true: cultural practice might selectively breed humans to meet the fitness conditions of new environments, cultural and physical, which earlier hominids could not have survived. Baldwinian evolution might strengthen or weaken a genetic trait.

Although relatively obscure in his time, Baldwin's contribution to this field places him at the heart of contemporary controversies in the fields of Evolutionary psychology and wider Sociobiology. In his book Integral Psychology, Ken Wilber refers to Baldwin as a forerunner of Wilber's theory of integral psychology.

Written work

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Apart from articles in the Psychological Review, he has written:

• Handbook of Psychology (1890), translation of Ribot’s, German Psychology of To-day (1886);
• Elements of Psychology (1893);
• Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development (1898);
• Story of the Mind (1898);
• Mental Development in the Child and the Race (1896);
• Thought and Things (London and New York, 1906).

He also largely contributed to the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1901—1905), of which he was editor in-chief.

1861 births | 1934 deaths | Incest | Johns Hopkins University faculty

James Mark Baldwin | James Baldwin (psychologue) | James Mark Baldwin | James Mark Baldwin | James Mark Baldwin