“For a long time I did not want to face the full truth: Being sent up for life into a thicket of learning opportunities seemed equivalent to inescapable propaganda for the limitless adaptation to a techno-gene world, propaganda for a grotesque and disgusting belief in the plasticity of man.” Ivan Illich

PROLOGUE

It has been to my great pleasure and high honor to engage in desultory dialogue with highly esteemed Adam Blatner, M.D., T.E.P., the world’s leading authority on and foremost proponent of psychodrama therapy, a psychotherapeutic and analytic technique in which individuals are given roles to be extemporaneously played within a dramatic context set up by a therapist.

Adam Blatner took his undergraduate classes at the University of Berkeley in 1955 and graduated from medical school at the University of California San Francisco in 1963. He became interested in psychodrama, widely regarded as a fringe therapy today, during his psychiatric residency at Stanford University Medical Center – now his medical credentials lend some credence to the practice of psychodrama therapy: he is reportedly the only psychiatrist in the United States who is a certified psycho-dramatist. He trained in child and family psychiatry in Los Angeles, and served the United States as a child- and adult-psychiatrist at a military base in England before going into private practice in California, where he and his second wife Allee developed their ‘Art of Play’ techniques, which they elaborated on in 1988 in their delightful book, The Art of Play: Helping adults reclaim imagination and spontaneity.

Dr. Blatner served on the faculty at the University of Louisville’s School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science for seven years, and worked as well in clinics, hospitals, and his private practice. In 2001 he retired to an active life of writing papers and books, editing various journals, and expounding on his special interests in philosophy and history to students in Texas. Among his major life goals, he lists popularizing practical psychology, propagating psychodrama, and integrating spiritual and psychological insights.

In sum, Adam Blatner has led and still leads a long and productive life. I encountered him in virtual reality during my fortuitous study of evolutionary psychology and the concept of adaptation. Of course ‘adaptation’ was my primary search term. Google’s search engine responded in part with a particular conference paper entitled ‘The Theoretical Foundations of Psychodrama’, presented by Adam Blatner, M.D., T.E.P. at the IAGP Conference in London in 1998, presented again in 1999 at the American Society for Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama, and then revised and published on his website in 2006. Dr. Blatner asserts therein that people in general need to acquire “psychological literary,” a set of communication and interpersonal problem-solving skills he feels is “becoming as necessary for adaptation in a rapidly changing world as knowing how to read and write was in the last century.” Furthermore, “We can look at and play our roles, and much of actual adaptation involves the making of appropriate changes.” Wherefore he extols psychodrama at considerable length, as a methodic “training for greater health and adaptation.”

We have all heard of the well-adjusted or well-adapted individual, the person who is not mentally disturbed by the rapid advances civilization is supposedly making. The implication is that we must adapt to the world rather than adapt the world to our own needs, and to do so we are in need of lifelong learning or continuous education happily provided by expert guidance counselors. These teachers stand behind the perpetual learners, ever ready to re-orient them, to help them to help themselves, a process that some critics believe has rendered the humanity increasingly conditioned and dependent over the past centuries, a process that has accelerated in modern times to the virtual destruction of the free, creative, and independent individual in whose name civilization advances to demented conformity. The purportedly liberated person is free to choose for himself, but the alternatives are manufactured for him, in the form of an array of approved products and certified services to be produced and consumed. People are advised to welcome change whether they like it or not; to become sane or at-one with society, they must become welcome mats for other people’s changes, and, if they do not learn how to welcome change, to adapt to it, they will miss the opportunities around every corner, and be left behind in the dust of the free market. Wherefore there is no end to education to keep up with perpetual innovation and change. Education has become a factory, and teachers who decline to adapt to its processes and would expose the system as a fraud on humanity are treated as saboteurs. 

Yes, we have heard the refrain ‘Welcome Change’ many times, most recently during the stellar ascent of Al Gore’s astounding invention, the Internet, a device that promises to bring democracy and communality to the human herd by distracting every individual from the anxiety of alienated existence. Indeed, if we are to survive, we must welcome rapid changes instead of resisting them. That is, we had better behave appropriately. Apparently we can do so in part by adhering to the principles adumbrated in Dr. Blatner’s authoritative paper, the foremost advantages of which are set forth in a bulleted list of the “advantages of applied role theory.”

Although Dr. Blatner has devoted much of his professional life advocating and practicing psycho-dramatic psychotherapy, he claims that he is an eclectic – someone devoted to no school in particular but rather to sound notions and effective practices wherever they might be found. Therefore he would have us know that he does not offer psychodrama as a panacea for humankind’s salvation; it is simply a tool in his psychotherapeutic kit and caboodle; obviously, given the hundreds of thousands of words he has devoted to it, the device is the most important one as far as he is concerned.  

In any case, we are to adapt if we would succeed, and of course we want the optimum result. The etymology of the English word ‘adaptation’ certainly fits psychodrama’s prescription, for the term derives from the Latin terms ad, or “toward”, and optus, “fit to play some role.” According to The Oxford English Dictionary, adaptation is “to fit (a person or thing to another, to or for a purpose), to suit, or make suitable, to alter or modify so as to fit for a new use. ,to undergo modification so as to fit for a new use.”  The Dictionary of Psychology by Raymond J. Corsini (2002) defines adaptation as: “Modification of either a bodily structure or function to adjust to and survive environmental changes; changes of attitudes toward external situations resulting in better adjustment to those situations; In receptors, modification to sensitivity, to permit optional functioning, such as a person recently blinded depending more on hearing; in Darwinian theory, survival of the species through natural selection by changing to fit in better with the environment.”

The notion of adaptation has been put forward, of course, as the most important key to the theory of biological evolution and its mental analogue, psychological evolution. Universal Darwinism is the application of the theory of evolution to instances outside of the originally biological scope of the hypothesis: abstract evolution is a process independent of the structures in which it is instantiated, basically in genes; adaptation is a learning process: adaptations are knowledge. Sociobiology is based on the premise that social behavior and its mechanisms evolve fundamentally by virtue of natural selection; that is, by adaptation. Evolutionary psychology addresses the influence of evolution on mental behavior, and explains mental traits as adaptations; that is, the functions and results of natural selection. The value of consciousness is downplayed or eliminated by the fundamentalist Darwinists in the field.

The mechanics of the evolutionary mechanism can be explained as a sorting function: a range of variations is generated and tested against the environment; specific varieties or variants are “selected” or retained and then regenerated as the set of variants or originators of the next phase. In other words, variants are thrown into the environment; whatever survives is replicated in another round, so on and so forth.

It is unsurprising that the human being may find its dignity insulted by the deterministic evolutionary hypothesis or “theory of evolution,” especially when it is told to adapt to selection devices such as the blind “merit” selection of the best competitors in the production-consumption rat race. But such adaptation to zombie-like existence is inculcated at an early age, and the surviving rebels are few in number, for the absolute power to resist is dead. The will to somehow endure forever without impediment has been assassinated – the anointed one lives in everyone, but everyone does not know it, hence it is the resurrection of the supreme being waited on by recalcitrant fundamentalists rather than resurrection of the christened. But never mind the one-god religion, for its God works in mysterious ways.

Somehow species evolve by virtue of the mysterious natural selection process that “acts by life and death, by the survival of the fittest, and by the destruction of the less well-fitted individuals,” observed Charles Darwin. Man has conscious power over the selection of variations, as can be seen from his breeding of animals. “We can not suppose that all the breeds were suddenly produced as perfect and as useful as we now see them; indeed, in many cases, we know that this has not been their history. The key is man’s power of accumulative selection. The great power of this principle of selection is not hypothetical.” The agriculturalist has a magic wand, so to speak, “by means of which he may summon into life whatever form he can mold as he pleases.”

Now it is safe to assume that Dr. Blatner, in his capacity as a psychodrama psychotherapist who cites adaptation as a main aim of his profession, would naturally employ an adaptive model to teach, educate, condition, manipulate, or process his actors, that they might perform or behave better once they are warmed up to acting out their conflicts and improvising various alternative roles to play, discuss, and to select from for further repetition into good habits. Needless to say, ideal roles have already been fashioned for them to don if they can fit into them.

If adaptation is “to fit a person or thing to another, to or for a purpose, to suit, or make suitable, to alter or modify so as to fit for a new use, to undergo modification so as to fit for a new use,” anyone interested in adapting would rightfully want to know to what Dr. Blatner would have him or her adapt, how that would be accomplished, and, most importantly, for exactly what purpose.

A psychotherapy shopper in her right mind might want to see his magic wand before buying it. She would want to know if he has an overarching theory for his practice, or if he operates by the set of his pants on the fly. She might want to know if he has his patients adapt to the status quo, the social milieu that might very well be the foundation of their discontent.

Fortunately, not only religious dogma but evolutionary theory casts humans as rebels against their conditioning, or, as creatures whose defining, inherited adaptation – the power to deliberate – allows them to adapt their environment means to order. That is, the environment can be modified to fit the needs of the race, rather than the race modified to fit the environment, if only man wills it instead of becoming stupefied by conformity. Ultimately, however, the species must adapt to the higher power it sins against or perish from the face of the Earth. Perhaps Dr. Blatner’s theory of adaptation calls for radical reform or social and political revolution in order to survive. Since anarchy can not stand for long, the revolutionary patient would want to know what Dr. Blatner’s principles of change are in order to divine what might emerge from chaos. It is with that in mind that I decided to kick him in the shins a few times.

INTERVIEW

WALTERS: Dr. Blatner, I have perused your paper, published on the Internet, 'Theoretical Foundations of Psychodrama', with keen interest. I noted well your statements to the effect that "adaptation" is a primary goal of Psychodrama. Wherefore I am moved to ask, adaptation to precisely what?

BLATNER: Adaptation, just as a starter, is a way of coping, of responding creatively and effectively to the circumstances of a changing world. Many people, faced with challenge, respond habitually, according to what they feel worked – and often without much intelligent assessment of how the present may not be the same as the past.

WALTERS: I understand. I have fit into a lot of things and I discovered that fitting in by adapting to circumstances is not always for me. Consider the fellow who is sick and tired of adapting. When he is told he should welcome change, he says he will not be a welcome mat for other people's changes. I would like to know what you would adapt to and if you have formed some habit of adaptation. Perhaps you have a paper on your adaptation policy, or do you just go with the flow in an unprincipled manner?

BLATNER: You know, David, I really don't know what you're trying to get at with this talk about adaptation. It's a fuzzy word, and for some, it seems to mean "adjustment," or go with the desires of the majority. That is a narrow interpretation, of course. What really is your question? These words should not be taken out of context, and I certainly have no formula for all contexts. So, for starters, reach down and search yourself a bit. And perhaps – or maybe not – the reason you're even reading about psychodrama is a clue? What possessed you to pick up my work?

WALTERS: I want to know what you would adapt to, what is your habit of adaptation, and I hoped you would consider the reverse role, that of the fellow who doesn’t want to welcome change, to be a welcome mat for other people’s change.

BLATNER: I certainly don't mean by adapting merely adjusting to the norms and attitudes of the environment. I play many roles, being able to be pretty straight, and received and treated like a professional, high status, respected, et cetera. I don't fully achieve "gravitas," because I slip into playfulness a fair amount. In other roles, I'm more playful, at times a bit wacky, as you'll gather from looking at my bio, especially the comments and links to cartoons, et cetera At the bottom of my listing of papers are again more playful spiritual and myth-making papers. I adapt to the challenges of living in a postmodern world, one that asks from me for a creative response so that the less conventional roles may find optimal expression. I take care of business and then I have fun. There is no single out-there-reality, but a goodly number, many of which will play back – I have been given the great gift of finding a soul-mate who joins me in adapting in many different roles. My wife can be as playful as I am.  Am I getting closer to what will meet your request? Am I adapting to your still somewhat idiosyncratic mode of communication?  How about laying more of your cards on the table?

WALTERS: I can see that you know very well what I am referring to, and in retrospect I can also see that I asked a fair question in the context of your published paper, 'Theoretical Foundations of Psychodrama,' - in sum: What would you have your public adapt to? For example, would you have them simply go with the flow in an unprincipled manner, or do you have certain principles in mind for their own good as you define it?

BLATNER: You interpret my responses, but cannot read my mind. Actually, I'm a little bewildered, a little wondering if you're playing with me with conscious or unconscious competitiveness, but I’m not sure which, or something else.

WALTERS: You must know very well that you are avoiding the question, which was well put:

BLATNER: Not well put in my perception, and no avoidance in my consciousness

WALTERS: You have been beating around the bush. Precisely what do you mean by adaptation, that is to say, adaptation to what?

BLATNER: Precisely – adaptation to what context, what role demand? Your desire to obtain precision is precisely what thousands of books and articles about philosophy, anthropology, psychology, postmodernism, et cetera, have been about. It is recognized that in a world where, as Nietzsche pointed out, all knowledge is perspective, and since there are many perspectives, getting the context agreed on is part of the process.

WALTERS: You seem to be trapped in some sort of anti-ideological ideology and nonjudgmental judgmentalism. I am still certain, despite your assurances, that you know what I mean, in the sense that you have felt it, and I hoped that you yourself would look within, to the phenomenon of your resistance to definition, which I believe is similar to mine, and clarify your good intentions, or at least shine up your armor a bit. This is, after all, a market, and I see some chinks that need caulking.

BLATNER: I don’t know what you mean by market. What is it that you are driving at?

WALTERS:  I asked if you just go with the flow, for instance, without principles in mind, that is to say in an unprincipled manner, or do you have some ideal or goal in mind and a way to get there, one that you wish all those interested to adapt to.

BLATER: In some circumstances, I have more of an idea of a goal than others; it's rather varied, with a range of strength of responses. Some principles are kept in reserve – more like driving, where the need to turn the wheel more than a little may not be necessary except on occasion, on a freeway, or more active in city driving. A fair amount of time I have few principles in mind, but they exist in the background. I may take a walk around the neighborhood, chatting with my wife, letting it flow, but there is a principle of not peeing on my neighbor's lawn operating, should the urge arise. Your either/or presentation is questionable: Why are these the only alternatives? As for wanting others to adapt to a goal; that, too varies with the urgency, time constraints, et cetera. In many contexts, I'm quite open to play and surprise...

WALTERS:  Language of course is inherently ambiguous, especially when words for general concepts are taken out of concrete contexts. In the interest of the "psychological literacy" and "competence" in  communication skills you deem "necessary for adaptation," the "fuzzy" term, if used for other than bullshit marketing, wants more clarity, or at least wants clarification, and I have asked for your quotable definition for your own good, and mine too if the suit fits me.

BLATNER: What is your argument for that assertion: that the term "wants" more clarity? As for a quotable definition…whoa. I've had too many journalists and interviewers misquote so painfully and foolishly that I have little reason to trust this... And why or how is doing this for my own good?  That sounds ominous or intimidating. Did you mean it to be that?

EPILOGUE

I have quoted Dr. Blatner verbatim. I become more satisfied with his responses each time I reflect on them, for his views do have a liberal underpinning, and his indefinite or evasive definition of ‘adaptation’ leaves one free to develop one’s own relative perspective. I like that and am drawn to side with him. But as the devil’s advocate I still am wont to maintain my own hard-line, results-oriented perspective, and assert that his psychiatry and psycho-dramatic therapeutics is not scientific in terms of getting definite, predictable results. His “adaptation” is not only “fuzzy,” as he puts it, but is essentially meaningless, and a critical analysis of his rhetoric gives us reason to believe that we are dealing with what some disappointed clients might call a fraud or scam or New Age pseudo-religion.

Evidently journalists have caused Dr. Blatner some pain and have portrayed him as a fool; but that was not my intention. It is not my purpose to slander the good doctor or his calling, but to state my personal opinions forthrightly and as truthfully as I can.

Dr. Blatner is not merely interested in the mental health of particular individuals but in the salvation of the “people in general” whose linguistic competence is “necessary for adaptation in a rapidly changing world” I wanted him to clarify the marketing term ‘adaptation’ for everyone’s good. His discourse on adaptation sounds good, but his answer is evasive, leaving us with the impression that he is skating around the subject after erecting it as a banner, or that he is prevaricating, or that he simply does not know what he is doing in respect to the application of a concept purportedly crucial to the progress of everyone concerned – Charles Darwin initially refrained from using the term ‘evolution’ and employed the phrase “descent with modification” because, in the common parlance of his day, ‘evolution’ was synonymous with ‘progress’ or improvement.  

Consumers want to know the purpose of a mechanism or technique and the theory behind it; they want to believe that it will work for them because it has worked for others like them. Perchance Dr. Blatner is an evolutionist in the sense that he works in the same manner that evolution is said to work; that is, blindly, without foresight into distance needs, without purpose or design. That is to say that he has no theory or technique in particular. Maybe he just opens his Pandora-box of postmodern alternatives, and whatever seems to do the trick for his multicultural patients in terms of their mental health as he relatively defines it will do nicely, thank you very much. We have no beef with that, providing that we can see the sacred cow beforehand. And when he would put diverse people into the same ark of salvation, we naturally want to know where it is heading and how it is going to get there.

Seldom do we hear glowing testimonials to the efficacy of psychiatry-at-large except for its efficiency in multiplying the number of mental illnesses and prescribing psychotropic drugs for same, and in cooperating with business and its political cabinet in making sure that consumers are “productive members of society” – a definition of mental health lately promulgated by a Surgeon General. At least classic psychoanalysis provided its analysands with enhanced status and a scandalous theory to chat about, and they could converse at considerable length since their evolution on the couch is Darwinian in its gradualness.

Many psychiatrists disavow uniform theories today, preferring to resort to a case-by-case or pragmatic approach to the presumably unique psychological-sociological situations of particular patients; the virtually priestly proceedings and results are confidential. Such an approach is hardly scientific. It often accomplishes little more than pragmatic politics’ efforts at machine-tweaking reform when radical reform is needed: it results in that stagnant stalemate known as the status quo.

One wonders what possible good the early psychoanalysts who immigrated to America could really have done, given their ignorance of its culture, unless they were in possession of an overarching theory of the workings of the machine generating evolution, the sex machine, and a radical way of setting it on a more sublime track.

Practitioners of psychodrama psychotherapy, uneasy about psychodrama’s reputation for being an unscientific, “fringe” therapy, have tried to cull statistic evidence for the effectiveness of their more or less uniform therapeutic ritual. Thus far the studies are fatally flawed. Positive results have in fact been reported – mostly in journals devoted to the propagation of psychodrama therapy – from a few painstaking statistical studies involving a small number of subjects, conducted by enthusiastic psycho-dramatists. Objective studies of large numbers of subjects belie the encouraging anecdotal reports. Any scientific disproof is deprecated as prejudicial, reductional, materialistic “scientism” entirely contrary to the favored, fundamentally incoherent mode of musing, with its irresponsible claim to absolutely responsible multicultural integration; namely, postmodernism.

Since so-called postmodernism is the symptom if not the cause of the maladjustment malady, how can it be the cure? Does homeopathic therapy really work? Postmodernism is really nothing new in its irrational revolt against the rationalization of mores, in its attempt to peel the onion, to reduce the civilized man to a primitive, childlike state that he might be reborn and spontaneously recreate himself in partnership with god or god’s representative.

Dr. Blatner may impugn postmodernism but he is a confessed postmodernist. Postmodern psychotherapists espouse a sort of anti-theoretical theory-building that plays games with hypotheses but never arrives at a theory. As we can easily observe for ourselves, non-linear, chaotic, fractal behavior is in vogue for the postmodern homunculus. Notwithstanding the dynamic aversion to static logic, which implies that, either something works or it does not work, now there is an attempt by psycho-dramatists to hide psychodrama within a broader therapeutic, or eclectic context, embracing, most importantly, cognitive behavior therapy, a therapy that is uniformly applied, studied, altered to achieve optimum results, and which enjoys broad statistical verification of its utility.

Alternatively, if the statistics are against your approach to helping people, the theory for your practice might conveniently eschew statistics: “What is needed is a shift from the statistical type of research (i.e. ‘nomothetic’) to a more case-study approach (i.e. ‘ideographic’),” Dr. Blatner professed in his seminal conference address.

He has apparently not yet arrived at the synthesis that disposed of the nomothetic/idiographic dichotomy; to wit: Understanding (see Sombart & Weber). Natural science is nomothetic or “law giving.” Nomothetic: If a past set of facts are known, then a future set of facts can be predicted pursuant to a theory applied to the past set of facts.

Many theists also believe in cause and effect; they maintain that divine providence are the facts provided or caused by God the First Cause, and flow from his Wisdom; the precise relation between cause and effect, the abstract deity and the concrete facts, is inexplicable, is God’s mystery. Idiographic: History, on the other hand, was considered to be idiographic, related to events, each one unique in its particularity – the events or facts might be laid out on a graph. The early school of Historicism held that generalizations or theories about those facts must all be false, that Scientism was a fraud – historicists however did not object to the notion that some general form of spirit holds sway over history: Understanding.

The synthesis called Understanding asserts that man is most familiar with man and can therefore understand and predict his conduct by utilizing rational, systematic methods; thus is common sense retained, superstition denied and natural science disposed of. Yet man remains the most unpredictable animal, and economists who claim to understand their ideographs and are notorious for failing to predict the course of the economy. Their idiographic models may be ideographs of facts that will never definitely recur in accordance with any law capable of being understood. Only the laws of probability governing big numbers may be relied upon in general, but the house always wins in the end. A plea of ignorance would be more truthful than being shifty, but it would not raise many investors in our good works.

Furthermore, Dr. Blatner admitted that the definition of “role” in his “applied role theory” was “elusive.” Yet “actual adaptation” requires us to observe the “roles” we play in order to make the changes he deems “appropriate.” However, “Just because a term is hard to define doesn’t mean that it can’t be useful in many contexts.”  

The same might be said of many generalities, whether glittering or not. Many of them work simply because we have blind faith in them, and believe (be-love) in the messenger no matter how much he contradicts himself – language shall always be blessed or cursed by some degree ambiguity. Martin Luther insisted in his commentary on Galatians that nothing really works to set a man right but faith, therefore nothing should be done. “Why do we then nothing? Do we work nothing for the obtaining of this righteousness? I answer: Nothing at all. For the nature of this righteousness is to do nothing.” In that righteousness “no sin is perceived, no terror or remorse or conscience is felt…. For there is no law, and where no law is, there can be no transgression.” Every act is bound by law. Wherefore the saving faith is not in the natural law, or in the law of evolution, or in the law of man, but is in the grace of the highest power of all, as exercised by the Christ, who, “according to his true definition, is no lawgiver, but a forgiver of sins and a savior.” The grandeur of this concept renders all our key terms pathetic.

Perhaps all the key terms of psychodrama advertised by Dr. Blatner in his texts, such as ‘adaptation,’ ‘heuristic’, ‘role’, ‘creativity’, ‘spontaneity’, ‘postmodern’, ‘flexibility’, ‘playful’, ‘drama’, ‘self-expression’, ‘concretization’, ‘sublimation’, ‘encounter’, ‘pluralistic’, and so on denote elusive or indefinite notions designed to allure patients into submitting to his unwritten agenda behind the scenes. If he has such an agenda, let the buyer be aware of it in advance. He ostensibly processes or changes people so they might become more flexible in order to better adapt to or fit the rapidly changing world – psychotherapy should “promote the patient’s capacity to be flexible and adaptive,” he stated. But to what end?

Psychotherapists would either wittingly or unwittingly make the flexible and adaptive world over to their own wanted moral order; if the world were already in good order, it would have no use for them nor would they feel a need to change it. Charles Darwin, incidentally, thought the natural world was perfectly beautiful the way it was:

“How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organization to another part, and to the conditions of life and of one organic being to another being, been perfected? We see these beautiful co-adaptations most plainly in the woodpecker and the mistletoe; and only a little less plainly in the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or feathers of a bird; in the structure of the beetle which dives through the water; in the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze; in short, we see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in every part of the organic world.”

As for the ‘adaptation’ of Dr. Blatner, which he declared to be a “fuzzy word,” it might serve his purpose to delete it from his advertisements if he would not clarify it to suit his practice. Geneticists have taken the speed out of the concept: adaptation is “any relative change in gene frequency.” Still, biologists ordinarily use the term to refer to a state or a certain characteristic of an organism at any given time and acquired over a certain history. Natural historians believe that change takes place gradually over long periods of time, a concept that casts doubt on the efficacy of brief therapy if psychology belongs to biology, as if it were a dog on a rope behind the wagon:

“Why,” asked Darwin, “in the theory of Creation, should there be so much variety and so little real novelty? Why should all the parts and organs of many independent beings, each supposed to have been separately created for its own proper place in nature, be so commonly linked together by graduated steps? Why should not Nature take a sudden leap from structure to structure? On the theory of natural selection, we can clearly understand why she should not; for natural selection acts only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; and can never take a great and sudden leap, but must advance by the short and sure, though slow steps.”

But adaptation in the popular sense refers to the immediate adjustments a person makes to circumstances. Those adjustments might be unintentionally or unwillingly made; but we like to believe that we are making history, and not the other way around; at the same time, we want management to make sure our history is ready-made, or ready-to-wear, that it might suit us on the spot, that we might be immediately gratified. The possible pace of adaptation has sped up to the point that a so-called adaptation may be nothing more than a response to a stimulus, an effect of a cause, a knee-jerk reaction. The extended definition of a long, drawn-out natural history of small evolutionary steps has been collapsed into a few moments, or even into the much heralded gestalt of the Now, that the biological process might be immediately observed, or that one’s awareness of the Now might transcendentally enlighten him.

All biologists are not averse to the notion of the crucial importance of current change. Biologists following in the footsteps of the late Stephan Jay Gould could care less about speculating on adaptation or how undersigned structures happen to appear to be designed. Gould thought the adaptationist or selectionist hypothesis was a waste of time, a sign of “overzealousness” for untested interpretations, for “just-so-stories.” Explanations of traits in terms of immediate developmental or physiological causes – proximate explanations –are more useful than evolutionary explanations based on adaptive values. Knowledge of the immediate process eliminates the need to speculate on the remote history of adaptations, the evolving results of processes. “Speculation about the adaptive significance is a favorite, and surely entertaining, ploy among evolutionary biologists. But the question, ‘What is it for?’ often diverts attention from the more mundane but often more enlightening issue, ‘How is it built?’”

Indeed, a great deal of criticism has been leveled at the concept of adaptation and natural selection as those virtually synonymous concepts of classic evolution have been applied to human behavior. Again, people want to be free from determination by natural history, or to at least bend the processes to their own ends.

Again, I think Dr. Blatner uses what he calls a “fuzzy word” as a buzzword; a buzzword that lends some credence to fuzzy hypotheses because the term is associated with evolutionary science. As we have seen, the concept of adaptation can be simply defined, as variation-selection-inheritance, and the mechanical model for long-term modifications can be currently applied, in order to immediately alter behavior. The logic of evolutionary adaptation is rather simple, so simple in fact that many people are still offended by it. Since Dr. Blatner uses the term, I believe my question was well put, and that it would behoove him to rid his text of his adaptation of the word adaptation, or to clarify it, in which case we might better know if he knows what he is doing, and if that might do us any good.

-XYX-