The ArgumentThe study of pain in a historical context requires a consideration of the cultural context in which pain is sensed and expressed. This paper examines attitudes toward physical pain in the later Middle Ages in Europe from several standpoints: theology, law, and medicine. During the later Middle Ages attitudes toward pain shifted from rejection and a demand for impassivity as a mark of status to a conscious attempt to sense, express, and inflict as much pain as possible. Pain became (...) a positive force, a useful tool for reaching a variety of truths. While this attitude stemmed from the religious wish to identify with Christ's passion, it permeated and affected all spheres of cultural expression and investigation. Late permeated and affected all spheres of cultural expression and investigation. Late medieval medicine accepted pain, trying to relieve it only when it became dangerous to the patient. Given the existence of analgesic medicines at the time, this attitude is comprehensible only within the cultural context of the period. (shrink)

Tinbergen’s classic “On Aims and Methods of Ethology” (_Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 20_, 1963) proposed four levels of explanation of behavior, which he thought would soon apply to humans. This paper discusses the need for multilevel explanation; Huxley and Mayr’s prior models, and others that followed; Tinbergen’s differences with Lorenz on “the innate”; and Mayr’s ultimate/proximate distinction. It synthesizes these approaches with nine levels of explanation in three categories: phylogeny, natural selection, and genomics (ultimate causes); maturation, sensitive period effects, and routine (...) environmental effects (intermediate causes); and hormonal/metabolic processes, neural circuitry, and eliciting stimuli (proximate causes), as a respectful extension of Tinbergen’s levels. The proposed classification supports and builds on Tinbergen’s multilevel model and Mayr’s ultimate/proximate continuum, adding intermediate causes in accord with Tinbergen’s emphasis on ontogeny. It requires no modification of Standard Evolutionary Theory or The Modern Synthesis, but shows that much that critics claim was missing was in fact part of Neo-Darwinian theory (so named by J. Mark Baldwin in _The American Naturalist_ in 1896) all along, notably reciprocal causation in ontogeny, niche construction, cultural evolution, and multilevel selection. Updates of classical examples in ethology are offered at each of the nine levels, including the neuroethological and genomic findings Tinbergen foresaw. Finally, human examples are supplied at each level, fulfilling his hope of human applications as part of the biology of behavior. This broad ethological framework empowers us to explain human behavior—eventually completely—and vindicates the idea of human nature, and of humans as a part of nature. (shrink)