Assumptions and Basic Connections

"... I can scarcely avoid some discussion of the all but universal belief that a science of behavior must be neurological in nature."  Skinner wrote this i 1938, more than 70 years ago.
But most people still assume one must look into persons to find out why they behave - especially
when they behave badly. Well-behaved persons seem not to interest anyone, not even researchers.
Normalcy is taken for granted.

Yet were scientists to identify variables that keep subjects healthy and normally mobile in the lab, they would know - by analogy - what harms and drives persons mad beyond the experimental settings.
As physicians connect good health and normal organic functioning, so might applied behavior analysts connect good social behavior with normal external surroundings.
Scientific psychology - behavior analysis - would then contribute knowledge as to normal rates and response frequency under certain conditions.
Sources of abnormal behavior are already diagnosed as due to dysfunctional social relationships:
too much of one thing and not enough of another ... and so forth ...

Make no mistake! Healthy persons can't help but to see and to hear.
Seeing and hearing are reflexive, though of course persons, like other creatures, are susceptible
to reflex conditioning.
We know food in the mouth makes us salivate but salivating to something we see or hear outside
is - so to speak - a different kettle of fish. We learn to perceive stimuli, routine sights and sounds,
and what they imply for our welfare.

From the beginning ... starting with Pavlov's Conditioned Reflexes ... scientists consistently
demonstrate how individuals AND physiology are naturally affected by their environments.
Pavlov measured saliva, he connected visible and audible stimuli with edible reinforcement.
Skinner measured voluntary action as a function of stimuli with reinforcing consequences.
Neither process could have occurred without affecting the brain cells and neuromuscular systems.

Behavior analysis has revealed the principles of conditioning as 'Laws of Nature':
organisms depend on environmental qualities for their life and social relationships.
And, of course, this has to include human mortals, flesh-and-blood human beings.

" Neurology cannot prove these laws wrong if they are valid at the level of behavior.
Not only are laws of behavior independent of neurological support, they actually impose
certain limiting conditions upon any science which undertakes to study the internal economy of the organism." Thus Skinner, in chapter 12 of his book, The Behavior of Organisms.

This is as exciting today, as on first reading.  B.F. Skinner and Charles Darwin fit together.
Were conditioning taken into account, the evolution of species might be better understood:
Prior suppositions would change as more and more basic connections become clarified.     
June 27, 2012