The Sciences March/April 1997 [antikvár]

Peer Review LETTERS FROM READERS MORE "GREATEST HITS" I enjoyed the special pullout section, "A Billion Seconds of The Saences" [November/December]. But I would like to have seen included some of the many important achievements of behavioral science, particularly behavior analysis. For example, there was no mention of B. F. Skin-ner, the psychologist who, perhaps more than any other, elevated the study of behavior to a true experimental science. Hence, I would like to offer the follow-ing as a sample of the general achievements in the science of behavior in roughly the past thirty-five years. • The experimental analysis of opérant and Pavlovian learning has documented the important role of environmental déterminants of non-species-specific behavior. • Behavioral pharmacology has led to the experimental analysis of the behavioral effects of drugs, as well as to the application of those principies to increasingly effective treatments of drug abuse. • Beginning with the discovery in 1954 of reinforcement systems in the brain, and continuing, most recendy, with the démonstration of opérant conditioning in individual neurons, behavioral investigators have gained an increasingly detailed under-standing of the cellular basis of reinforcement. Those findings have begun to reveal the possible neurophysiological mecha-nisms underlying behavioral plasticity. • The experimental analysis of behaviors such as choice, commitment, self-control and decision-making has demonstrated the importance of the selective action of the environment on complex human behaviors. • The development of behavior therapy and behavior modification has revolu-tionized the treatment of a variety of behavior problems, including autism and other developmental disabilities, schizo-phrenia and dépression, anxiety disorders and a host of learning disabilities. • The principies oflearning have been sys-tematically applied to the problems of éducation. In the next thirty-five years I would hope to see more advances toward a sci-entific understanding of how environmental variables determine behavioral sim-ilarities and différences in humans and nonhumans alike, as well as of how neurophysiological variables mediate such processes. Such an understanding will lead to a much more effective application of technologies to many of the behavior problems that beset society. Henry D. Schlinger Jr. Western New England College Springfield, Massachusetts Fanny Brennan, Mont St. Michel, 1977 received my very first issue of The Sciences, and what do I find but Clifford Geertz chosen to speak as a représentative anthropologist. Unfortunately, he probably is ail too représentative of perhaps a majority of anthropologists who blithely write in ternis such as "de-posi-tivization" (meaning "negativization"?). What he is saying, of course, is that anthropology (for he seems to speak for ail anthropologists) has decided that being "scientific" just isn't any fun any-more and that instead anthropology will find its inspirations in the "humanistic disciplines: history, philosophy and liter-ature." Throw in more than a dash of "cognitivism" and you can trash science altogether as a model for understanding humanity. In the past twenty-plus yeârs anthropology has lost ground, lost face and lost whatever respect it might have been gain-ing after the Second World War, when the discipline (some of it) was finally able to face natural selection, ecology and the realities of a world that was rapidly being overwhelmed by Homo sapiens. Geertz himself started off by asking serious questions about the impact of colonialization on indigenous populations, but that apparently grew tiresome and probably depressing. The resuit is a discipline in which bet-ter than half its members are engaged in "postmodernism" and its various ofîshoots. Why try to understand population explosions, ethnie compétitions (involving the killing of hundreds of thousands of peo-ple) and the functioning or inability to function on the part of contemporary state governments? Boring? What about the human behavioral elements of both old and new épidémies? Boring? Anthropology has lost its sense of responsibility and has turned instead to the modem équivalent of counting angels on pin-heads. Michael Scullin Garden City, Minnesota ^|Why was agriculture, including the "Green Revolution" and the recipient of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for that rev-olutionary development—the agronomist Norman Borlaug, of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico City—ignored by those who compiled "A Billion Seconds of The Sciences"? Could it be that scientists recognize that the Green Revolution has already turned brown; that erop failures, and thus starva-tion, cause more deaths than does aids? Leland B. Taylor Albuquerque, New Mexico THE DOCTOR WAS A CHEMIST Because I have a professional interest in infectious disease as well as in the history of medicine, I avidly devoured Cynthia Mills's beautifully written article, "The Deadliest Virus" [January/February]. But Ms. Mills refers to Louis Pasteur as a "French physician." In fact, Pasteur nev-er matriculated in nor graduated from a fac-ulty of medicine and never was a physician; he was trained instead as a chemist.