... as a true science, has inherited such a tradition. For example, Weiss (1925) proposed that all physiological processes could reduce to the same elements that physics dealt with. Civilisation became "the cumulative effect of the individual's behaviour in the group, toward achieving the totality of electron-proton movements outside the locus of movements defined as the individual." Few modern neurophysiologists deny the existence of hopes, beliefs, desires and consciousness as Weiss did, but many still believe that psychology's laws of behaviour can be reduced to the laws of neurophysiology. Is psychology really in danger, as E.O.Wilson put it, of being "cannibalised" by biology? In lower organisms there are many examples of a successful reduction from behaviour to "brain". For example, habituation of the gill-withdrawal reflex in Aplysia calafornica is understood at every level from the behaviour (Pinker et al., 1970), down to the nervous system (Kandel, 1979), the individual neurones (Kupfermann et ...

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