Multi-Scale Selection - Towards a Fully Rounded Evolutionary Approach to Explaining Behavior

How do biology and behavior analysis relate to each other? How can biology benefit from behavior analysis by paralleling the behaviorist’s approach to developing explanations of behavior omitting human agency as a causal factor? How can behavior analysis benefit from Baum’s (1994) introduction of the Multi-Scale View, which paves the road between the two disciplines by arguing for a selection of nested activities through their correlation with phylogenetically important events? By breaking ground for uniting phylogenetic and ontogenetic explanations of behavior, the answers to those questions not only benefit basic knowledge but can also inform effective public policy making. Since biologists no longer limit themselves to studying the evolution of physical bodies but have developed theories of complex human behavior such as altruistic and cooperative actions (cf. group selection theory,) their area of study overlaps considerably with that of behavioral scientists. Behavior analysists study how environmental events during an organism’s ontogeny correlate with changes in that organism’s allocation of time to different activities. Those events cause changes in behavior because of their effect on the individual’s relative fitness. Despite the overlap in topic areas, both biologists and behavioral scientists are largely uninformed about each other’s work. Forelesningen vil avholdes på engelsk.