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C H A P T E R 4 Courtly Behavior The Rituals of British Zoologists To get light on the behavior of man, particularly his innate drives and conflicts, it is often helpful to study the elements of behavior in a simple animal. —Nikolaas Tinbergen, “Curious Behavior of the Stickleback,” 1952 In the United Kingdom, the community of zoologists interested in animal behavior grew quickly in the decades following the Second World War. British zoologists strove to produce a robust view of the role of behavior in the biology of organisms, combining research on systematics, ecology, evolutionary processes, genetics, and physiology. In an era of renewed hope for international scientific cooperation in the name of peace, and as intercontinental travel became cheaper and faster, biologists from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean met to discuss the behavior of animals. Although female choice and sexual selection remained at the fringes of the research program of most British biologists, this interdisciplinary community was crucial in providing biologists interested in courtship behavior with locations and reasons to gather together—from annual meetings, conferences honoring a retiring member of a discipline, and journals in which to publish research to graduate programs where students could earn a degree or simply spend a year learning new research techniques. At these venues, it seemed, two distinct groups of scientists found little common ground on how best to study the behavior of animals. Whereas the mostly American comparative psychologists emphasized using animals as research tools to address general psychological problems, the predominantly European zoologically trained ethologists prioritized the study of naturally occurring behavior patterns characteristic of particular species. British zoologists were diverse in their choice of experimental designs and the animals they studied, but united in their quest to understand the biological basis of Courtly Behavior 81 natural behavior in animals—even if this sometimes meant raising them under arti ficial conditions. In fact, the wide diversity of methodological approaches used in the postwar decades by scientists who thought of themselves as ethologists, and their continuing dialogue with zoologists who did not consider themselves ethologists, makes it difficult to identify a coherent group of scientists who self-identified as ethologists and were accepted as such by their peers. Perhaps what is most amazing about this period is that despite fundamental disagreements, zoologists interested in studying animal behavior maintained extended conversations about how best to study the behavior of animals and how, if at all, this research could be used to understand human behavior. Institutionally, ethology came into its own in the 1950s, after Dutch ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen secured a post at Oxford University and Austrian Konrad Lorenz became director of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology, moving into new facilities at Seewiesen, Austria, in 1958. Tinbergen’s arrival in Oxford may have marked the institutional commencement of the ethological community in England, but the English intellectual soil was already fertile with the behavioral research of Edmund Selous, Henry Eliot Howard, Frederick B. Kirkman, and Julian Huxley in earlier decades. Known to his friends and colleagues as Niko, Tinbergen served as a focal point of the growing community of scientists interested in the scientific study of animal behavior. Tinbergen self-consciously played the role of community builder and teacher, and thanks to his international and interdisciplinary connections, the new center for ethology he established in Oxford was far from isolated or programmatic. As a young man studying animal behavior in his native Holland, Tinbergen had been profoundly influenced by his friendship with ethologist Konrad Lorenz. Tinbergen was also familiar with contemporaneous attempts in the United States to study the natural behavior of organisms—specifically, with the Laboratory of Experimental Biology (later, the Department of Animal Behavior) founded by Gladwyn Kingsley Noble at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City. Tinbergen’s continuing contact with the AMNH after the war proved important in spreading ethological ideas across the Atlantic Ocean. Impressed by the theoretical framework developed by Lorenz in tackling the subject of instinct, Tinbergen brought to Oxford experimental expertise and the sensitivities of a researcher devoted to field studies of animal behavior. Lorenz conceived of instincts as innate behaviors, as behaviors “which animals of a given species ‘have got’ exactly in the same manner as they ‘have got’ claws or teeth of a definite morphological structure.” Such behaviors, he believed, were genetically determined and particulate in nature. Lorenz developed his hydro-mechanical model to explain the...

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