INTERNAL STATES: NECESSARY BUT NOT SUFFICIENT

Staddon's article is timely, refreshing, and provocative; timely because it invites us to rethink our basic assumptions, always a healthy activity in periods of crisis; refreshing because it suggests new avenues for behavior analysis, such as the history-based concept of internal state; and provocative because it questions a cherished discrimination made by many behavior analysts, that between organismand environment-based accounts of behavior. That much is positive. However, as I show below, Staddon misinterpreted Darwin, misconstrued organism-based accounts, and did not identify the major source of the current problems in behavior analysis. On Darwin and Darwinism. Coming from an author who has written extensively on the relations between evolutionary biology and psychology (e.g., Staddon & Simmelhag, 1971), it is surprising to read that "Darwin dealt primarily with environmental determinants only because behavior was not his primary object of study.... When Darwin did deal with behavior, his theorizing was more 'organism based' than might be suspected" (p. 439). The statement is inaccurate on two grounds. First, no reader of the Origin can fail to recognize in Darwin's account of the origin of species and their various adaptations, how delicate, rich, complex, and fundamental was the role of the environment. As a distinguished historian of biology put it, "Almost his greatest service to biology was that he made biologists realize as they never did before the vast importance of the environment" (Russell, 1917/ 1982, pp. 232-233). Parenthetically, if we replace "biology" with "psychology," exactly the same can be said about B. F. Skinner. Second, Darwin suggested one and the same