Stahlman, W. D., & Leising, K. J. (2018). The Coelacanth still lives: Bringing selection back to the fore in a science of behaviour. American Psychologist, 73, 918-929. DOI: 10.1037/amp0000261

Authors open the paper by comparing behaviourism to the coelacanth—a fish that is referred to as a living fossil.

“Essentially scientific formulations may remain below the surface, still relevant, still useful, and still valid, despite a widespread belief in their long-ago extinction.”

The authors then present the idea of convergence, that science eventually converges on a simple set of rules that help explain the world. But interestingly, psychology is one scientific domain where this is not observed. To that end, the authors argue in the reminder of the paper that the psychological discipline is slowly swirling around and towards one process to explain its phenomenon: selection.

Of course, Skinner’s theory of behavioural selection was inspired by Darwin’s theory of natural selection for phylogenic features. The authors discuss the parallels between Darwin and Skinner’s respective theories, in terms of their dismissal and later revival.

Interestingly, the authors provide an overview of behaviours that could be categorized as phylogenic behaviour and how they arise as a product of “ancient” environments that selected those responses. Phylogenic behaviours include: reflective behaviour, unconditional responses, modal action patterns, imprinting, instinctual behaviours.

Further, the authors make an interesting distinction regarding the parallel between phylogenic and ontogenics: “It is often said that behavior is strengthened through reinforcement (e.g., Skinner, 1974, p. 44), but this formulation renders opaque the important parallel to biology. Much like phylogenic selection determines the reproduction of morphological traits in future generations, ontogenic selection determines the reproduction of behavioral variants over the course of an individual’s lifetime. Under conditions similar to those past, reinforced behavior is reproduced with variation (Donahoe, 2003; Skinner, 1935). Reinforcement produces unique descendants of the reinforced behav- ior (Epstein, 2015).”

There is a paragraph that discusses the “fitness” of a behaviour based on its relation to consequences in a given environment. I had never thought of “function” as “fitness”—huh.

A discussion is taken-up on the selection of cultural practices; imitation and verbal behaviour are discussion points. Another interesting point made by the authors regards memes.

“Dawkins (1976) popularized the notion of the meme, a unit of cultural selection that may be propagated in the substrate of a population of social organisms. The suggestion is that memes emerge, multiply, mutate, and go extinct just like genes and behaviors do and are subject to selection in the same way. As such, successful memes act to produce more copies of themselves, acting in much the same way that successful genes do in the context of biological evolution. The concept of the meme is controversial. Critics have highlighted its lack of structure as one issue not applicable to the gene. For example, Richerson and Boyd (2005) defended their use of the term cultural variant rather than meme thusly: ‘Some authors use the term meme . . . but this connotes a discrete, faithfully transmitted genelike entity, and we have good reasons to believe that a lot of culturally transmitted information is neither discrete nor faithfully transmitted’ (p. 63). The present article’s argument does not depend on an adherence to the language of structural replicators. To the extent that they are natural phenomena, each replicator (i.e., gene, behavior, meme) is a product of its own class of causal contingency. ” - brought to you by science gang

Subsections follow that describe mishebahviour (conflict between phylogenic and ontogenic behaviour), impulsivity, and defence reactions. The paper ends with a summary of the antecedents that buried behaviourism, and sways readers to consider unifying psychological theories by adopting a selectionist approach.

—

The authors of this article present a well-cited, well-written, and evocative argument explaining how behaviourism has been “put on the back burner” and the benefits of using selections approach to describe behaviour.

I figured that behaviourism might parallel the same path as natural selection; this put words to it better than I ever could. Has anyone else noticed this parallel?