Reflections o n Adaptive Behavior 3 Variation and Selection in Response Structures

Earlier, when I was student in a learning course at Wofford College, my pro-fessor required us to select a "hero. " Every week we were to present to the class at least one article written by our hero, and I had the luck to begin with Staddon and Simmelhag 1971. It required more than a week, but what a vision of behavioral research it provided! Behavior analysis was combined seamlessly with evolutionary processes, producing a fundamen-tal reorganization of our understanding of traditional reinforcement theory! I took an independent research course with Staddon during summer school at Duke just before my senior year (to "prove myself " to him), and he asked me to write a paper on "Reinforcement as a Feedback Mechanism. " This combination of engineering, evolutionary biology, and mathematics cen-tered on the fundamental questions in behavior analysis made me passion-ate about working with Staddon. Staddon's lab meetings were unlike any others I have experienced. His view of the experimental analysis of behavior was clear: The aim of behav