Janus (25 page)

,
the hopeful student of psychology is told from the very outset that
'mind', 'ideas', etc., are non-existent entities, 'invented to provide
spurious explanations. . . . Since mental or psychic events are asserted
to lack the dimensions of physical science, we have an additional reason
for rejecting them." (By the same logic, we may reject the reality of
radio waves, because they consist of vibrations in a vacuum devoid of
any physical properties.)

 

 

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'.

 

 

Once upon a time, it all looked so simple. Nature rewarded the fit
with the carrot of survival and punished the unfit with the stick
of extinction. The trouble only started when it came to defining
'fitness'. Are pygmies fitter than giants, brunettes fitter than blondes,
left-handers fitter than right-handers? What exactly are the criteria
of 'fitness'? The first answer that comes to mind is: the fittest
are obviously those who survive longest. But when we talk about the
evolution of
species
, the lifespan of individuals is irrelevant (it
may be a day for some insects, a century for tortoises); what matters
is
how many offspring
they produce in their life-time. Thus natural
selection looks after the survival and reproduction of the fittest,
and the fittest are those which have the highest rate of reproduction
-- we are caught in a circular argument which completely begs the
question of what makes evolution evolve. This lethal flaw in the theory
was recognized by leading evolutionists (Mayr, Simpson, Waddington,
Haldane, etc.) several decades ago [13]; it was and is, as I said, an
open secret. However, since no satisfactory alternative was in sight,
the crumbling edifice had to be defended. Thus Sir Julian Huxley in 1953:

 

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