Operant Reinforcement and Natural Selection: The Useless Analogy

Current theoretical discussions of behavior analysis often mention "selection by consequences" as a specific causal mode and as an unifying framework that would relate the field to evolutionary biology. Using the term, "selection," in the context of operant reinforcement, however, amounts to relying on analogical or metaphorical discourse. This theoretical note has three principal aims: first, to clarify the conditions under which an analogy of this type may be accepted; second, to summarize and simplify the arguments that Tonneau and Sokolowski (2000, 2001 ) marshaled against the analogy between operant reinforcement and natural selection; and finally, to examine whether recent developments in the field refute these authors’ negative conclusions.