Description: Contextual behavioral science seeks to understand the behavior of individuals and groups in the context of their environments. Meanwhile, evolutionary science examines the effects that environmental selection pressures and heritable variation have on all species. In Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science, two renowned experts in these two fields argue why these schools of thought are intrinsically linked, as well as why their reintegration--or, reunification--is essential.
Brief description: Anthony Biglan, PhD, is senior scientist at the Oregon Research Institute (ORI) in Eugene, OR, and director of the Centers for Community Interventions on Children and Prevention of Problems in Early Adolescence, both at ORI.
Review Quotes: "The best ideas seem simple and obvious in retrospect. What, for example, could be simpler or more obvious than the principle of 'selection by consequences?'And yet, when Darwin applied this 'simple and obvious' principle to phenotypic variation, we got natural selection, biology's biggest idea. Then, about one hundred years later, Skinner applied the same principle and gave us behavior analysis; a view of learning (among other things) that still has no serious explanatory rival in psychology. With this volume, David Sloan Wilson and Steven Hayes have assembled chapters by some of the most creative and rigorous minds in their respective disciplines. Their collective efforts offer an updated and elaborated account of these two big ideas, making clear along the way what only now--in retrospect--seems so simple and obvious: that Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science are scientific sprouts off the same conceptual root."
--James Coan, PhD, professor at the University of Virginia--James Coan, PhD