ABSTRACT
The Darwinian metaphor can be applied in many different ways, but Skinner’s application was rather superficial. Even in the area of human social arrangements, better attempts have been made. D. T. Campbell, for example, in a carefully reasoned account, identified sources of conflict between “selfish” propensities favored by individual genetic selection and “altruistic” propensities favored by cultural evolution within groups driven by competition between them. In recent years, a new field of evolutionary psychology has come into being which seeks to apply the Darwinian metaphor in systematic and testable ways to human behavior. It has so far had limited success, for reasons that Campbell well understood.
The takeaway from the Darwinian metaphor is the vital importance of variation. Selection—reinforcement—is not omnipotent. It can only work with what is offered up by variation, and not all behavior is, in fact, selectable: there is an operant equivalent of genotype. Some behaviors, some stimuli, are more memorable, and hence more selectable, than others.
