Word: behaviorist
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DIED. DONALD GRIFFIN, 88, animal behaviorist who was considered the father of animal-consciousness research; in Lexington, Mass. His 1976 book, The Question of Animal Awareness, revolutionized the study of animal behavior by arguing that animals have the capacity for thought and reason, a notion that was previously taboo...
...disabled and the Jews. Tainted by this association, the idea of innate behavior was in full retreat for most of the middle years of the century. In 1958, however, two men began the counterattack on behalf of nature. Noam Chomsky, in his review of a book by the behaviorist B.F. Skinner, argued that it was impossible to learn human language by trial and error alone; human beings must come already equipped with an innate grammatical skill. Harry Harlow did a simple experiment that showed that a baby monkey prefers a soft, cloth model of a mother to a hard, wire...
Another professor who challenged our ideas was B. F. Skinner, the noted behaviorist. In those days it was fervently believed that babies were born without any imprint whatsoever. They were a “tabula rasa” and the parents had two years in which to form the personality. Professor Skinner was such a fervent believer in this notion that he invented a box (with holes in the bottom and screening on all sides) in which to place a baby so as to have total control over the baby’s stimuli...
...what you can turn into sense. During the early years of the Writing Center, we had faculty give lectures on writing. B.F. Skinner came and gave an extraordinary talk called “How to Discover What You Have To Say” in which he said in funny behaviorist language—I’ll say it in English—“You don’t think in order to write, you write in order to think.” That’s probably what’s central...
Goodall, the neophyte animal behaviorist whom famed anthropologist Louis Leakey dared to send into the jungle, would become the reigning expert on chimpanzee behavior. Her discoveries about man's close cousins, showing that chimps made and used tools (most famously, adapting sticks to hunt for termites), electrified the academic world. But now, many books and National Geographic specials later, she is more than a famous naturalist. She has become a scientific saint and the recipient of many honors, including the Gandhi-King Award for Nonviolence, just given to her by the Millennium World Peace Summit...