Summary
- Nature-nuture debate is a remnant of behavioural psychology. This discipline focused exclusively on learning in response to stimulus (I assume we’re talking Skinner and the like).
- It was not evolutionary psychology.
- It did not factor in ecological factors,
- evolved behavioural capabilities,
- or how such evolved capabilities structure the learning of an organism.
- They were generally sceptical of ethologist’s claims of innateness (ie ‘nature’ crudely I guess? though memory doesn’t quite fit into that ofc), though they did eventually allow ‘memory’ for retention of learned associations.
- Because they actively resisted evolutionary and cognitive revolutions behavioural science died out as a discipline, however unhelpful remnants remain:
- Organisms being passive reactors to stimuli to which they reactively respond
- Not innate or learned, but the degree by which it is controlled by the individual
Another unhelpful remnant of behaviorism is the nature-nurture debate. If we are concerned with the psychological mechanisms by which organisms generate their actions, this is the wrong debate. The issue is not whether something is innate or learned, but rather the degree to which it is controlled by the individual.
- Artificiality of stimulus-response model
The nature-nurture debate is rendered further moot when we recognise the artificiality of behaviourists’ focus on a molecular level of punctate stimuli and responses. The behaviors of most organisms are enacted psychologically on multiple hierarchical levels simultaneously — a foraging trip is simultaneously seeking to satisfy hunger, searching for prey, traveling to a specific location, and moving limbs in certain ways — and some of these levels are more under the individual agent’s control than others. A key way that the behaviour of a species evolves is by the evolutionary emergence of new goal states that are more or less hardwired by Nature (e.g., an evolved preference for a new food), but with the behavioral means of achieving those goal states left up to the individual to figure out on its own (given its existing cognitive and behavioral capacities). This way of thinking about things recognizes — even in one and the same activity — the important role of both species-level genetic structuring and individual psychological agency.
Background Detail
Michael Tomasello’s contention in The Evolution of Agency is that the nature-nurture debate is an unhelpful remnant of behaviourist psychology.
Nurture implies inherited characteristics that are in some way outside of our individual control, nature implies characteristics learned as living, learning organisms from the point of our emergence into the world (I guess) or our local environment. The latter are seen to contribute to our more or less unique composition as thinking individuals with will, or agency.
First, he points out that the question of intelligence, something we use to define organisms on a hierarchy, is not to do with complexity – anthills and beehives are complex – but with control, ie agency.
The behaviour of ants and spiders does not seem to be under the individual’s control. Their evolved biology is in control1
Whereas even with regards to simple activity primates and mammals appear to be doing something that is under their control - they are operating with “a psychology of individual agency”.
Individual agency does not mean total freedom from biology; it is always exercised in the context of an organism’s evolved capacities
Example of the squirrel caching nuts, which is biologically determined, but the squirrel must still evaluate its environment successfully, which will determine how it carries out that determined behaviour.
For many organisms, degrees of freedom in making such decisions are quite limited
Darwin: organisms do different things to get food and evolve accordingly (beak shape, behaviours etc) but there was no organised scientific paradigm for the study of animal behaviour to allow for the exploration of this at the time
Early 20th C: such paradigms emerge and the notion of an environmental or ecological niche shapes organism behaviour as well as physiology (Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, Karl von Frisch), in a discipline known as ethology.
1975, EO Wilson extends this concept to social behaviour in his book Sociobiology (did not include much psychology as it was the ‘biology of behaviour’ and no agency)
Ethology (the above studies) became behavioural biology and behavioural ecology
The first psychologists with a systematic program of empirical research in animal behavior were the behaviorists, who actually began in the first half of the twentieth century, before the ethologists (by modifying earlier philosophical approaches to animal psychology)
Subsequent cognitive revolution (including cognitive-developmental psychology) applied theories of human cognition to animals in the ’70s and early ’80s
The concept of agency thus, in a sense, represents the dividing line between biological and psychological approaches to behavior; it is the distinction between complex behaviors designed and controlled by Nature, as it were, versus those designed and controlled, at least to some degree, by the individual psychological agent.