UC Davis

The importance to behavior analysis of making contact with evolutionary theory cannot be overstated. Organisms and behavior go hand in hand, because they both enhance the fitness of the genes that promote them. The connection to evolution and natural selection allows a rethinking of the concept of reinforcement. Events impacting fitness, phylogenetically important events (PIEs), induce activities that enhance good (fitness-increasing) PIEs and mitigate bad (fitness-reducing) PIEs, and operant activities that produce or avoid the PIEs are induced along with the unconditionally induced activities. Events correlated with PIEs become proxies for them and induce some activities the PIEs themselves induce. A natural science of behavior may be based on three laws: allocation, induction, and covariance. A molar view of behavior, consistent with these laws, may apply at any time scale, from milliseconds to years. Activities are processes and may be defined at any time scale, according to their function.