Word: behaviorists
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...scout bee steps forward during the waggling dance, it points the way to the source. Having written the classic book on the subject, The Dancing Bees, Von Frisch went on to publish Man and the Living World (1936), an ethological survey of the life sciences. It ranges from behaviorist speculations on the cause of man's relatively weak sense of smell (since man stands upright, his nose is too far from the ground to follow spoors any more) to the fact that calluses on the feet are inherited...
...Nowhere in Behaviorist B.F. Skinner's voluminous writings does he give evidence of an inability to effectively discriminate between man and rat. However, Skinner and his distinguished students have amassed data that strongly suggest that many of the same principles that parsimoniously explain and govern the behavior of certain animal species, under carefully specified conditions, are also true of human behavior. And for devoting himself to such demanding, yet valuable objectives, he should be scorned? For shame...
...BEHAVIORIST speaking. In the past four decades the heady belief has grown that people can be molded by simply deciding what they should be and then manipulating their behavior, as though the world were a laboratory and man a rat or a pigeon. No one has done more to advance the notion than B.F. Skinner, Harvard psychology professor and author of the bestselling Beyond Freedom and Dignity (TIME cover, Sept. 20, 1971). Those who claim to leave man "free," Skinner believes, are merely abandoning him to uncontrolled forces in his environment. To Skinner, observable behavior is the only reality...
JUST as the behaviorist establishment in psychology has long centered its attention on environmental influences on man, so too have the leading figures in anthropology. From the days of Franz Boas, most American anthropologists have been cultural relativists, seeing each society as distinctive and trying to show how man's feelings and thoughts were shaped by the way he lived. Anthropologists did not believe in a narrowly fixed, hereditary human nature. Early in her career, Margaret Mead, for example, set out to show how even the notions of maleness and femaleness vary from place to place. As she explained...
...THIS IS NOT the case with Kinkade and her friends. Despite their avowed intention to fashion a utopia according to behaviorist principles, there are only a few examples in the book of attempts at conditioning behavior or even defining problems in Skinnerian terms. And these few are, invariably, embarrassing to the cause...