According to Kauffman, Dennett distinguishes four types of creatures along the evolutionary ladder: 1. Darwinian creatures; using mutation and recombination of genes and subject to natural selection; 2. Pavlovian creatures, capable of stimulus-response learning by conditional reflex; 3. Popperian creatures, which can form mental models and hypotheses like primitive scientists; and 4. Gregorian creatures, humans who make tools, use language, and who initiated cultural and technical evolution, a million times faster than biological evolution.

In terms of the kinds of “minds” that Jantsch recognizes, Darwinian creatures have metabolic, genetic, and epigenetic mind (and maybe hormonal mind); while the higher three add neural mind. And according to Terrence Deacon (“The Symbolic Species”), Pavlovian creatures use iconic and indexic thinking, Gregorian creatures use symbolic thinking, and I am not sure about Popperian creatures. The analogies I am trying to make are a bit uncertain and overlapping.

One could also make analogies with Piaget’s schemas in cognitive development of children, but these might be even hazier. A mid-term fetus is a Darwinian creature, a small child learns by Pavlovian responses to hone its sensorimotor skills, the stage of concrete operation is reached by Popperian thinking, and the stage of formal operations by Gregorian (symbolic) thinking.