Abstract The Multiscale Molar View of behavior fits with evolutionary theory and with General Process Theory. These two theories combine to afford a monistic ontological basis for understanding behavior as consisting of extended activities controlled by extended behavior–environment relations. General Process Theory casts the world as process and all existences as processes—no objects, no events, and no substance. Although the theory applies to both animate and inanimate things, behavior analysts focus on animate processes. Evolutionary theory conceives of a species as a process, the function of which is to evolve, and the individual members—the parts—as processes, the function of which is to reproduce. All behavior consists of activities, which are processes that ultimately promote surviving and reproducing. Evolutionary theory, process ontology, and the concept of induction provide a powerful conceptual framework for understanding not only behavioral phenomena in the laboratory and everyday life but also for more flexible approaches to clinical applications.

Only humans live in continuously and cumulatively changing worlds of their own making-cultural worlds. Theories of cumulative cultural evolution are multidisciplinary, depending heavily on the home disciplines of theorists. Virtually all cultural evolutionary theorists view behavior as fundamental to cultural evolution, but most theories focus on changes in social relations, or human cognition, or human brains. Here we attempt a first approximation to a behavior-based theory that explains the origins and evolution of the human-built world. We include topics such as the origin and evolution of cultural organization and resulting cultural systems, which have not often been addressed in this literature.

Darwin explained how seemingly purposeful and foresightful design could be decoupled from natural selection. Skinner followed suit for selection by reinforcement. Together with cultural selection, these three selectionist ideas represent today's prime pillars of evolutionary thinking in biological and behavioral science. Nevertheless, controversy continues because mentalism still creeps into the efforts of psychologists, biologists, and philosophers to meet the interpretive challenges posed by creative behaviors and innovations. A prime problem may be the unfortunate connotations accompanying the term "selection."

This article describes the evolutionary theory of behavior dynamics, which is a complex systems theory. The relatively simple rules of the theory generate detailed emergent outcomes that can be compared to data from live organisms. Extensive qualitative and quantitative empirical evidence has been found to support the theory in every detail. We may therefore conclude that the behavior of organisms can be generated by evolutionary dynamics.

Stagnation in the development of novel strategies for the management of major depression and other neuropsychiatric disorders has left many patients with unmet treatment needs. This state of affairs has encouraged critical appraisal of the very relationship between preclinical findings and their clinical applications in psychiatric practice. One consequence of such reflection has been a growing emphasis on reverse translation in preclinical research. Traditional preclinical approaches with laboratory animals have most often used a forward translational approach designed to identify classes of organized animal behavior that serve to predict outcomes in humans. On the other hand, reverse translational approaches identify patterns of human behavior revealed by task performance to develop assays with maximal formal similarity in laboratory animals. Presumably, such correspondence will evoke functionally similar behavioral outcomes across species, allowing for rigorous assessment of innovative, sometimes invasive, behavioral and pharmacological treatment strategies impossible to examine in human subjects without substantial preclinical evidence of safety and efficacy. Following validation and optimization, a reverse translational framework can be used for coordinated bidirectional pursuits across species to accelerate the drug discovery process. To aid appraisals of emerging reverse translational techniques, the present review outlines five considerations based on their longstanding association with rigorous assessments in behavioral science and informed by behaviorist traditions. Emphases on behavior, pharmacology, environmental determinants, levels of analysis, and cross-species continuity are discussed, with an emphasis on the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework to advance innovative therapeutic strategies for treatment-resistant neuropsychiatric illness.

This article discusses three contributions to the special issue from the Symbolic Processes cluster in the second Theory and Philosophy conference. Each of the articles advances a naturalistic, learning-based account of complex linguistic and social phenomena. The article byBarnes-Holmesand colleagues suggests a refinement of relational frame theory (RFT) informed by findings emerging from research conducted with the IRAP protocol for the past decade. Degli-Espinosa offers a behavioral reinterpretation of the development of theory of mind with implications for understanding its absence in certain populations and the potential for remediation where necessary. Palmer presents a thorough-going behavioral account of word order in novel utterances and, by way of example, offers a blueprint for the analysis of syntactic organization in spoken languages more generally. This paper discusses the articles' conceptual innovations, empirical grounding, and the implications of the analyses for future research. The discussion ends with an appreciation of the shared philosophical and methodological commitments reflected in these articles.

The present article focuses on presentations from the second topical cluster from the 2024 Theory and Philosophy Conference held by the ABAI-Cultural Systems. The cultural systems cluster was comprised of two primary talks-"Unhinging Design from Darwinian and Skinnerian Selection" (Wasserman, 2024), and a second, co-authored by Sigrid Glenn and Maria Malott (and delivered by Sigrid Glenn), entitled "Behavior and Cumulative Cultural Evolution." We will begin by briefly summarizing some of the main points of each talk, and then discussing some of the implications of the arguments developed in each. The approach taken to link these two seemingly different primary talks will be interdisciplinary. I will seek to illustrate how dynamic patterns of systemic interactions within systems of physical energy parallel the dynamic patterns of behavioral systems and enable us to "reconstruct" some of the main principles emphasized in the primary talks, while also seeking to develop an understanding of how various processes of selection by consequences (natural selection, operant selection, and selection of cultures) emerge from systemic interactions.