The Behavior of Animals. Группа авторов

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foreword

      ROBERT A. HINDE

      Writing a foreword for such a stimulating series of chapters, which represent the state of animal behavior studies at this time, is a considerable responsibility. Perhaps I can do best by looking not forward, as might seem appropriate, but backward, and thus attempt to provide a context for the chapters that follow. Of course it cannot be a fully objective backward view, because I am looking from where I am now, and what I see is biased by my own experience. It is bound also to involve simplification. But I hope that it will provide a useful perspective.

      In the early decades of the twentieth century, most studies of animal behavior fell into two groups. In one were the naturalists, mostly amateurs, without scientific pretensions but with a long tradition stretching back beyond the nineteenth century. In the other were the psychologists, producing an increasing body of data and theory mostly concerned with learning processes. Of course this dichotomy is already unjust and simplistic. Darwin himself could be called a naturalist; and an originator of learning theory (J.B. Watson) started from naturalistic observation. However, the work of the learning theorists, impressive in its own right, was not to have much impact on the traditions that led to the chapters in this book until much later.

Those traditions can be said to stem from the emergence of ethology in the 1930s. This was due to Lorenz, an Austrian MD with a PhD in comparative anatomy, and Tinbergen, a Dutch zoologist who moved to England a few years after the end of World War 2. Both men had a passionate interest in animals, but this was expressed in very different ways. Lorenz kept a menagerie of diverse animals in his home, though also studying the local jackdaws and the semi-tame geese that he reared. Tinbergen, by contrast, was a dedicated field naturalist. Although he later worked with captive animals, it was always with problems that he had brought in from the field, and he liked best to be in the field himself. Tinbergen’s first pupil, Baerends, suggested that the contrast lay in their attitudes to their subjects: Tinbergen saw himself as a nonparticipant hidden observer of animals, Lorenz as an adopted alien member and protector. Lorenz was a thinker who tried to relate or contrast his observations with current biological and philosophical views, while Tinbergen was much more empirical, an experimenter as well as an observer.

      But both rejected the vitalist view that the phenomena of “instinct” СКАЧАТЬ