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A THEORY OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR BASED ON STUDIES OF NON-HUMAN PRIMATES COLTER RULE, M.D.* Throughout the Middle Ages, man, under the guidance oftheological leaders, was preoccupied with his immortal soul, with life hereafter, and with the types ofethical behaviors that would win a favored position in the next world. The Age ofReason, the industrial and scientific revolutions , and materialist philosophies offset all this and replaced it with the conviction that, since man could triumph over nature and toil, he could, in effect, have his heaven here on earth. This belief, too, is running its course, and enthusiasm over technological advances has begun to fade. Man the toolmaker excites us less and less. (A telecast ofa recent Gemini mission in space shared the screen with a college football game!) Philosophers decry sterile mechanistic advances by stating that they have failed mankind. This disenchantment stimulates us to reappraise man's relatedness to nature and the animal world. Such an endeavor is made feasible by an ever increasing flood ofdata arriving anywhere from A to Z, anthropology to zoology, and much of this data bears directly on behavior. Less than two decades ago, a leading psychologist discussing research in behavior could define psychology as "the study oflearning in white rats and college sophomores" [i]. Today, the "information explosion " has destroyed the boundaries ofthe academic disciplines; the multidisciplinary study is the rule rather than the exception. Many fields and many studies contribute to knowledge of behavior whether at a cellular, physiological, psychological, or social level. Archeological discoveries have illuminated crucial areas in the origins ofearly man.1 The controversy between the ethologists on the one hand and the classical learning theorists * 122 East 76th Street, New York, New York 10021. 1 Primarily, that he was truly bipedal and a tool user with a brain volume not greatlyexceeding that ofpresent day apes [2-5]. I53 (and Pavlovians) on the other has given rise to the somewhat contentious but productive science of animal behavior that exists today [6-10]. But there are many other contributors. Behavioral genetics, neurophysiology, neuroendocrinology, enzyme chemistry, brain and computer circuitry, communications and information theory, all have been deeply involved [11, 12]. Additional crucial and fruitful areas are the studies on circadian rhythms, sensory deprivation, physiology of dreaming, psychopharmacology , the behavioral basis ofperception, figure-ground phenomena, etc. One ofthe newest additions to the family ofmultidisciplinary specialties is primatology, barely a decade old. Ten years ago there existed only two centers for the study of primate behavior. Now there are many in both universities and government institutions; the number offield investigators has quadrupled and continues to increase, and the volume of literature is already unwieldy. Two surveys in book form, one mainly offield studies, the other reporting onlaboratory research, werepublishedin 1965 [13, 14]. One section ofthe annual convention ofthe American Association for the Advancement of Science two years ago was devoted entirely to primate behavior. In spite of accelerated effort, most primate studies raise more questions than they answer. Of the approximately 240 living species of non-human primates, reliable field studies are available for less than two dozen. Much work lies ahead. The absence of a solid foundation of reliable data has led a professional primatologist to remark that the amount ofinterest in primatology shown by scientists in general is out ofall proportion to the amount ofinformation available [15]. A possible explanation for this unusual degree of interest may be a rising ground swell of suspicion that in primatology the beginnings of human behaviors may be revealed. While the behaviors observed in non-human primates may be little more than seedlings when contrasted with the fully evolved behaviors as revealed in man, they seem, nevertheless, to be identifiable and to demonstrate crucial bridges between biological, psychological, and social man. For clinical psychiatrists, enough data has accumulated about primate social behaviors, about the ways their small societies (usually between fourteen and thirty individuals) are organized, and about dyadic behaviors (behaviors between any two individuals) to speculate about human behavior. Admittedly, the medical profession has never let the paucity ofdata interfere with its determination to build theories, however fanciful. Perhaps this privilege is justified by the ancient and awful re154 Colter Rule...

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