History of ethology comes of age
نویسندگان
چکیده
The public profile of animal behavior research is out of all proportion to the number of biologists who engage in this kind of work, or the share of funding which they receive. The television genre of the ‘wildlife program’ was substantially shaped by the early contributions of Niko Tinbergen and his students, such as Desmond Morris at Granada Television. High-profile public controversies about the lessons of animal behavior for society were provoked by Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression (1966), by Morris’s The Naked Ape (1967), and more recently by the works of another Tinbergen student, Richard Dawkins. As a result, the popular understanding of Darwinism has been more strongly influenced by ideas from animal behavior research than perhaps any other area of biology. Lorenz’s ‘hydraulic model’ of instinctive behavior was still a hot topic in popular science more than a decade after behavioral biologists abandoned it. Today, the popular understanding of ‘genes’ owes as much to the abstractions of evolutionary game theory as it does to molecular biology. In the light of its extraordinary impact, it is surprising how little attention animal behavior research has received from historians of science. In a essay published in 1981, shortly after he began the research which culminated in this book, Buckhardt suggested that the controversy then raging over E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975) and Dawkins’ Selfish Gene (1976) should motivate historians to explore the origins of this extraordinary scientific (and social) movement (Burkhardt 1981; see also Durant 1980). For the next 20 years, however, Buckhardt was the only major historian of biology to follow up this compelling suggestion. Some promising researchers left the field (Durant 1981, 1986), and others concentrated their attention on early evolutionary theories of mind and behavior, rather than the flowering of these ideas into a mature scientific discipline after 1945 (Richards 1987). Burkhardt’s publications in the
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