Re: Behaviorism vs. evolutionary psychology

Neil W Rickert <rickert+nn@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote on Wed, 11 Jul 2007:
In short, you asked a naive question. Evolution itself has taken place in
an environment. Environmental and genetic influences are highly entangled,
and you cannot separate them out in the way that your question proposes.

Yes, yes, I know that final behaviors are caused by a combination.
Nevertheless, my question still had a point.

While a newborn deer might be able to walk, due to the greater
simplicity of quadruped walking, walking by an adult deer is
dependent on environmental influences. The newborn deer doesn't
have to support much weight on its legs, but the adult deer does.
And it can only support that weight because the legs are strong
enough due to their development under environmental influences.

Sure, no question.

And I suppose humans would turn out differently if they were raised in an
environment with zero gravity, or teleportation, or submerged in a breathable
but viscous liquid.

So maybe what I want to separate is not nature vs. nurture, but more "behaviors
which are common to all humans" vs. "behaviors which are a function of this
particular individual's unique lifetime history".

So, everybody learns to walk, as a combination of genetics + living on the same
earth with the same gravity, etc.

But only some people drink tequila to excess in college, wake up in vomit, and
for the next few years exhibit revulsion when exposed even to the smell of
tequila.

Let's get back to parents and children for a second. A naive interpretation
of behaviorism is that the parents control the children's environment, so
whatever the behavior of the children, the parents deserve the blame/credit.

The truth is that the span of possible environmental controls a parent could
subject a child to are limited. It would be difficult to "choose" to raise a
child in a zero-gravity environment.

So let's try it this way: which aspects of a child's behavior can reasonably
be ascribed to choices (possibly subconscious) made by the parents, and which
aspects are basically beyond the control of any parent?

Where in behaviorism am I told that little boys are naturally far more
violent than little girls, and that, as a parent, if I can make a little
boy's violent behavior match that of girls, I'm either: (1) extraordinarily
lucky genetically; or (2) must have devoted enormous conscious effort at
behavioral modification towards the little boy, in order to achieve the same
results that the parents of little girls achieved with zero conscious effort
at all.

Experiments with dogs salivating or pigeons pressing levers get at one aspect
of the cause of future behaviors (the part that can be altered by directed
manipulation of the environment), but it seems to miss the other aspect, the
one where little boys break things and little girls cry when their friends
are hurt.

-- Don
_______________________________________________________________________________
Don Geddis http://don.geddis.org/ don@xxxxxxxxxx
Like jewels in a crown, the precious stones glittered in the queen's round
metal hat. -- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
.

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