I have often found it difficult to convince non-academic friends that this patently absurd doctrine still dominates academic psychology. As a recent critic wrote:
It is an interesting exercise to sit down and try to be conscious of what it means to say that consciousness does not exist. History has not recorded whether or not this feat was attempted by the early behaviourists. But it has recorded elsewhere and in large the enormous influence which the doctrine that consciousness does not exist has had on psychology in this century. [2]
We are now approaching a vital issue towards which behaviourism and neo-Darwinism show strikingly similar attitudes. It concerns their views of the driving forces behind biological evolution on the one hand, and cultural evolution on the other. Take cultural evolution first. How can scientific discovery and artistic originality be explained in the mindless universe of the behaviourist? Here is Watson's answer -- and let me point out that the quote which follows is the only passage in his book in which creativity is mentioned (Watson's italics):
One natural question often raised is, how do we ever get new verbal creations such as a poem or a brilliant essay? The answer is that we get them by manipulating words, shuffling them about until a new pattern is hit upon . . . How do you suppose Patou builds a new gown? Has he any 'picture in his mind' of what the gown is to look like when it is finished? He has not . . . He calls his model in, picks up a new piece of silk, throws it around her, he pulls it in here, he pulls it out there . . . He manipulates the material until it takes on the semblance of a dress . . . Not until the new creation aroused admiration and commendation, both his own and others, would manipulation be complete -- the equivalent of the rat's finding food . . . The painter plies his trade in the same way, nor can the poet boast of any other method. [3]
The two points to retain here are (a) that the solution is 'hit upon' by chance after many random attempts, and (b) that it is retained because it has been rewarded by approval.
Thirty years after Watson's book was published, Skinner drew the same conclusions about the way scientific discoveries are made -- though by that time behaviourism had developed its own esoteric jargon:
The result of solving a problem is the appearance of a solution in the form of a response . . . The appearance of the response in his [the human individual's] behaviour is no more surprising than the appearance of any response in the behaviour of any organism. [4]
The 'organisms' to which he refers here are the experimental rats in the so-called Skinner box which behaviourists regard as the most effective means for the study of psychology.* The box is equipped with a food tray and a bar which can be pushed down like the lever of a slot machine, whereupon a food pellet drops into a tray. When a rat is placed into the box it will sooner or later 'hit upon' the lever with its paw by pure chance, and be automatically rewarded by a pellet; and it will sooner or later learn that to obtain a pellet it must press the bar. This experimental procedure is called 'operant conditioning'; pressing the bar is called 'emitting an operant response'; the food pellet is called a 'reinforcer'; withholding the pellet is a 'negative reinforcer'; the number of times the rat presses the bar in a given period of time is the 'rate of response', which is automatically recorded and plotted on charts. The purpose of these experiments is to enable the behaviourist to realize his stated purpose: 'to measure, predict and control behaviour' -- including human behaviour.
* Nothing in the ambitious titles of Skinner's The Behaviour of Organisms and Science and Human Behaviour indicates that the data in them are almost exclusively derived from conditioning experiments on rats and pigeons.
The details of behaviourist rat-lore do not concern us here*; the relevant point is again that the animal's discovery of the secret of the lever was due to pure chance, and that lever-pressing was added to its repertory of skills because it was 'reinforced' by rewards.
* See The Ghost in the Machine, Ch. I-III and Appendix II.
If we now turn to the Darwinian's answer to the question how man evolved out of a primordial blob of slime, we find that it is much the same as Watson's answer to the question how Patou transforms a piece of material into an elegant dress: 'He pulls it in here, he pulls it out there . . . he manipulates the material until it takes on the semblance of a dress.' Darwinian evolution is supposed to operate on the same principle, that is, by manipulating at random the organic raw material -- putting a tail here, putting a pair of wings there -- until a suitable pattern is hit upon, and retained owing to its fitness to survive.
In other words, behaviourism and neo-Darwinism, which both occupy key positions in the contemporary sciences of life, base their explanations of biological and cultural evolution on essentially the same model operating in two stages: the first step ruled by blind chance, the second by selective rewards. Thus biological evolution is the outcome of nothing but (a) random mutations (the monkey at the typewriter) (b) preserved by natural selection (which rewards fitness); and cultural progress is the result of nothing but (a) random tries preserved by (b) reinforcements (the stick and the carrot).
=========================================== Biological Evolution Cultural Evolution (a) Chance mutations Random tries (b) Natural selection Reinforcements ===========================================
It is strange that no attention has been paid to this parallel. Perhaps the reason is that psychologists are not interested in evolution, and evolutionists are not interested in psychology.
Leaving (a) -- the role of chance -- to be discussed later, it has been shown a long time ago that both (b) concepts -- 'reinforcement' and 'natural selection' -- are devoid of any explanatory value. Take 'reinforcement' first, and listen once more to Professor Skinner:
The verbal stimulus 'come to dinner' is an occasion upon which going to a table and sitting down is usually reinforced by food. The stimulus comes to be effective in increasing the probability of that behaviour and is produced by the speaker because it does so. [5]
In case the reader should be in doubt, this is not a parody but a quote from Skinner's book Verbal Behaviour, published in 1957. He also informs his readers that 'a man talks to himself . . . because of the reinforcement he receives' [6]; that thinking is in fact 'behaving which automatically affects the behaviour and is reinforcing because it does so' [7]; that 'just as the musician plays and composes what he is reinforced by hearing, or as the artist paints what reinforces him visually, so the speaker engaged in verbal fantasy says what he is reinforced by hearing or writes what he is reinforced by reading' [8], and that the creative artist is 'controlled entirely by the contingencies of reinforcement'. [9]
In training the rat to press a lever in the box or to find its way through a maze, the term 'reinforcement' had a concrete meaning: by giving or witholding rewards the rat's behaviour could be effectively conditioned by the experimenter. But the behaviourists' heroic attempt to extrapolate from the Skinner box to the painter's studio, with 'reinforcement' as a deus ex machina, leads him, as we have seen, into hair-raising absurdities. Yet his philosophy compels him to try his best to show that human behaviour is nothing but a more sophisticated form of rat-behaviour. A last quotation from Skiniier will drive the point home. The writer's 'verbal behaviour', he tells us, 'may reach over centuries or to thousands of listeners or readers at the same time. The writer may not be reinforced often or immediately, but his net reinforcement may be great.' [10]
What this means is, if anything, that every writer would like to write an immortal masterpiece. He persists in his efforts because of the reinforcement he receives, and reinforcement means whatever it is that makes him persist in his efforts. [11] As Chomsky [12] and others have pointed out, the concept of reinforcement is based on a tautology, and its explanatory value has been reduced to nil.
2
A similar fate is overtaking the Darwinian household concept of natural selection or the survival of the fittest -- which, as we have seen, is the evolutionist's equivalent of the behaviourist's 'reinforcement'.
So far as we know, not only is Natural Selection inevitable, not only is it an effective agency of evolution, but it is the only effective agency of evolution. [Huxley's italics.] [14]
Compare this ex cathedra pronouncement to the devastating comment by the late Professor Waddington (who was himself an eminent member of the neo-Darwinian establishment, but given to critical doubt):
Survival does not, of course, mean the bodily endurance of a single individual, outliving Methuselah. It implies, in its present-day interpretation, perpetuation as a source for future generations. That individual 'survives' best which leaves most offspring. Again, to speak of an animal as 'fittest' does not necessarily imply that it is strongest or most healthy or would win a beauty competition. Essentially it denotes nothing more than leaving most offspring. The general principle of natural selection, in fact, merely amounts to the statement that the individuals which leave most offspring are those which leave most offspring. It is a tautology. [15]
Von Bertalanffy put it even more pointedly. Commenting on the orthodox theory, he remarked, 'It is hard to see why evolution has ever progressed beyond the rabbit, the herring, or even the bacterium which are unsurpassed in their reproductive capacities.' [16]
To avoid misunderstandings: no critic would of course deny that biological misfits, incapable of coping with life's demands, would be eliminated in the course of evolution. But the elimination of deformity does not explain the evolution of higher forms. The action of a weedkiller is beneficial, but it does not explain the emergence of new plant species. It is a common fallacy among evolutionists to confuse the process of elimination of the unfit with the process of evolution towards some undefinable ideal of 'fitness'. The defenders of the synthetic theory could easily put an end to this confusion by replacing the discredited term 'natural selection' by 'selective elimination'. However, they only went as far as replacing the slogan 'survival of the fittest' by the less offensive 'differential reproduction' -- but that, as we have just seen, provided no escape from the labyrinth of tautologies.
Nor did it help to resort to yet another synonym for fitness, namely, 'adaptability'. To cut a long story short, here is von Bertalanffy again:
... In my opinion, there is no scintilla of scientific proof that evolution in the sense of progression from less to more complicated organisms had anything to do with better adaptation . . . or production of larger offspring. Adaptation is possible at any level . . . An amoeba, a worm, an insect or non-placental mammal are as well adapted as placentals; if they were not, they would have become extinct long ago. [17]
In other words, nobody questions the truism that a species can only survive if it is able to adapt to the environment, but there are countless ways of adapting to one and the same environment, and some of these ways are so incredibly tortuous and complicated that the term 'adaptation' becomes empty of meaning. Consider this example from Sir Alister Hardy's The Living Stream:
There are some kinds of orchids with flowers which mimic, in colour, shape and smell, the female form of certain insects and so offer sexual attraction to the males of these insect species; the excited spouses who come for the creative act, unwittingly, by carrying pollen, complete, instead, the sexual process for the flower! [18]
Or, to quote von Bertalanffy yet again:
I for one . . . am still at a loss to understand why it is of selective advantage for the eels of Comacchio to travel perilously to the Sargasso sea, or why Ascaris has to migrate all around the host's body instead of comfortably settling in the intestine where it belongs; or what was the survival value of a multiple stomach for a cow when a horse, also vegetarian and of comparable size, does very well with a single stomach. [19]
And how does 'adaptation' explain the fantastic transformations of the caterpillar into a chrysalis -- spinning itself into a cocoon, where it undergoes a complete transformation which involves the dissolution of the larval organs and tissues and their complete re-moulding into a winged adult? Books on natural history have innumerable examples of such far-fetched ways of 'making a living' as a species, but they are rarely mentioned in theoretical works on evolution, because they reveal too glaringly that the theory begs the vital questions. Thus 'adaptation', as a deus ex machina of 'natural selection', shares the fate of its precursors, 'survival of the fittest' and 'differential reproduction.
3
According to the neo-Darwinian doctrine, the raw material on which the magic of natural selection operates is provided by random mutations, i.e., chemical changes in the genes, the carriers of heredity. These changes are triggered by radiations, noxious chemicals or excessive heat, and are 'random' in the sense of being completely unrelated to the animal's needs or welfare, or its natural environment: they are in the nature of accidents which interfere with the normal functioning of the delicately balanced organism. Accordingly, the vast majority of mutations have either damaging or trivial effects; but from time to time, so the theory goes, there is a lucky hit, which will be preserved by natural selection, because it happens to confer some small advantage on the bearer of the mutated gene; and given sufficient time, 'anything at all will turn up', as Sir Julian Huxley wrote. 'The hoary objection of the improbability of an eye or a hand or a brain being evolved by "blind chance" has lost its force' -- because 'natural selection operating over stretches of geological time' [20] explains everything.
Compare this statement with the following by Waddington:
To suppose that the evolution of the wonderfully adapted biological mechanisms has depended only on a selection out of a haphazard set of variations, each produced by blind chance, is like suggesting that if we went on throwing bricks together into heaps, we should eventually be able to choose ourselves the most desirable house. [21]
Nevertheless, Jacques Monod (Nobel Prize, 1965) calls evolution a 'gigantic lottery' [22] or 'nature's roulette' [23] and concludes:
Chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition -- or the hope -- that on this score our position is likely ever to be revised . . . [24] The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game. [25]
But the roulette analogy hides rather than indicates the fantastic improbability of any major evolutionary advance produced by chance mutations. For such an event to occur, it is not enough that a certain required number, say the 17, should come up on the roulette table -- but that it should come up simultaneously on a dozen or so tables in the same establishment, followed by the 18, 19 and 20 simultaneously on all tables.
Let me ill
ustrate this by a few examples. The first is very simple and trivial, involving only four roulette wheels. The giant panda has on its front limbs an added, sixth finger. This could be a typical case of a deformation caused by a deleterious chance mutation; it happens to be quite useful to the panda in manipulating bamboo shoots, but it would of course be a useless hindrance if it were not equipped with the requisite muscles, nerves and blood-supply. The chances that among all possible genetic mutations just those which produced the added bones, nerves, muscles and arteries occurred simultaneously and independently from each other are infinitesimally small. And yet in this case we have only four main factors -- four roulette wheels at work. When it comes to such composite marvels as the vertebrate eye -- that classic stumbling block of the Darwinian theory -- with its retina, rods and cones, lens, iris, pupil and what have you, the odds against the harmonious evolution of its components by independent random mutations, i.e., by 'blind chance', becomes, pace Huxley, absurd. Darwin himself clearly realized this when, in 1860, he wrote to Asa Gray: 'I remember well the time when the thought of the eye made me cold all over.' [26] It still has that effect on the upholders of the doctrine, so they avoid discussing it, or resort to elaborate evasions.*
Janus: A Summing Up Page 19