Animal Behavior

The Lengthening Shadow of One Man
People always have been fascinated by the behavior of animals. For as long as people have walked the earth, their lives have been touched by, indeed interwoven with, the lives of other animals. People hunted animals, fished them, domesticated them, ate them and were eaten by them, made pets of them, revered them, hated and feared them, immortalized them in art, song, and verse, fought them, and loved them. The very survival of ancient people depended on knowledge of wild animals’ habits and behaviors. As the hunting societies of primitive people gave way to agricultural civilizations, an awareness was retained of the interrelationship with other animals, and the need to understand their behaviors increased. Even today zoos attract more visitors than ever before; wildlife television shows are increasingly popular; game-watching safaris to Africa constitute a thriving enterprise; and millions of pet animals share the cities with us—more than a half million pet dogs live in New York City alone.

Despite our long-standing interest in the behavior of animals, the science of animal behavior is a newcomer to biology. Charles Darwin, with the uncanny insight of genius, prepared for the reception of animal behavior by showing how natural selection would favor specialized behavioral patterns for survival. Darwin’s pioneering book, The Expression of the Emotions of Man and Animals, published in 1872, mapped a strategy for behavioral research still in use today. However science in 1872 was unprepared for Darwin’s central insight that behavioral patterns, no less than bodily structures, are selected and have evolutionary histories. Another 60 years would pass before such concepts would begin to flourish within behavioral science.

It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who said that an institution is the lengthening shadow of one man. For Charles Darwin the shadow is long indeed, for he brought into being entire fields of knowledge, such as evolution, ecology, and finally, after a long gestation, animal behavior. Above all, he altered the way we think about ourselves, the earth we inhabit, and the animals that share it with us.

In 1973, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three pioneering zoologists, Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz, and Niko Tinbergen (Figure 38-1). The citation stated that these three were the principal architects of the new science of ethology, the scientific study of animal behavior, particularly under natural conditions. It was the first time any contributor to the behavioral sciences was so honored, and it meant that the discipline of animal behavior, which really has its roots in the work of Charles Darwin, had arrived.