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C H A P T E R 3 Branching Out, Scaling Up American Experiments on Behavior The strange ways of courtship and mating among fishes, frogs, lizards, snakes, birds, to say nothing of rats, guinea-pigs and monkeys, used to be recorded separately by ichthyologists, herpetologists , ornithologists, mammalogists, primatologists and comparative psychologists all writing in as many different technical journals, which in turn were rarely seen by anyone outside their respective specialties. More than any other man [Gladwyn Kingsley] Noble was rapidly integrating these fragments into a continuous and understandable picture . . . His ideal [was] the discovery of the basic principles that have governed the evolution and behavior of vertebrate animals from fish to man. —William K. Gregory, Address at Noble’s memorial, 1940 The study of animal behavior in the United States expanded considerably between the two world wars, in terms of the number of biologists interested in the subject and the scope of their research. Biologists working on animal behavior employed techniques from both naturalist and experimentalist traditions. For example, Warder Clyde Allee, at the University of Chicago, incorporated animal behavior into an ecological context. Allee stressed the importance of an organism’s interactions with the community in which it lived and with the surrounding environmental conditions in producing its behavior. Approaching behavior on a different tack, psychologist William C. Young, one of the founders of behavioral endocrinology, studied the role of sex hormones in producing mating behavior. Both of these trends in behavioral research of the interwar period built on strong disciplinary traditions in the study of behavior established at the turn of the century. Additionally, by the mid-1930s, comparative psychology began to attract more students. Comparative psychologists were interested primarily in the ability of animals to learn, although Branching Out, Scaling Up 55 some also explored the role of behavior in the natural lives of organisms and the evolution of behavior more generally. Despite their methodological diversity, these biologists were united in their belief that the study of animal behavior should be professionalized and rid of its amateurish , anthropomorphic roots. Each group brought valuable contributions to the table: experimentalists found that the controlled environment of the laboratory provided an ideal location for modifying and observing behavior in developing organisms , while naturalists used observation and modification of an organism’s natural habitat to establish the normal behavioral characteristics of the species. Without the behavioral data gathered in the natural environment, it was impossible to know whether or not behaviors observed in laboratory spaces were simply artifacts of the artificial, laboratory conditions. As a result, the activities of naturalists and experimentalists overlapped and complemented each other within the professional study of animal behavior. Biologists’ understanding of evolutionary theory changed dramatically in this period. In the early twentieth century, practicing zoologists had adopted an evolutionary model in which many different fauna and flora adapted simultaneously and independently to their surroundings. The process of evolution, then, drove a single species in a particular direction (for example, toward more refined adaptation to its environment or toward greater sociability). By the 1950s, American studies of animal behavior looked remarkably different. Zoologists portrayed evolution as fundamentally concerned with the process of speciation, in which subpopulations of a single species broke off and assumed a distinct evolutionary future of their own. Whereas in a linear model of evolution it was easy for biologists and nonscientists alike to see human cultures as the pinnacle of social evolution and animal behavior as a primitive form of human behavior, in a branching model, the comparison between animals and humans was much less clear. Given these dramatic changes in the communities of scientists interested in animal behavior and evolutionary theory during the first half of the twentieth century, it is hardly surprising that biologists also altered their conceptions of female mate choice in animals. Biologists in the 1930s conceived of female choice as a cognitive comparison, one female from a particular species choosing from among multiple male suitors of the same species, and they supported or dismissed the evolutionary mechanism accordingly. By the 1950s, biologists instead couched female choice as the process by which females in a population determined the species identity of their potential suitors and were stimulated to mate by any male exhibiting the appropriate species-specific courtship behaviors.This transition, from female choice as individual comparison to female choice as response to the courtship characteristics [3.145.152.98] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 23:10 GMT...

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