History of Ecological Sciences, Part 56: Ethology until 1973

A distinction can be drawn between ecological and psychological studies of animal behavior. The former became ethology and the latter, behaviorism. Robert Boakes, University of Sussex, wrote the history of the latter: From Darwinism to Behaviourism: Psychology and the Minds of Animals ( 1984 ). However, behavioral psychology is relevant to the study of ethology (Kruuk 2003 :3, Burkhardt 2005 :8), despite Konrad Lorenz reading works by “Spencer, Lloyd Morgan, MacDougall, Yerkes and Watson” and concluding that “they simply did not know what they were talking about” (quoted in Nisbett 1976 :37). While Lorenz ’ s wholesale dismissal of other approaches and fi ndings than ethological was unfair, his comments illustrate an attitudinal gulf between two different approaches to the study of animal behavior. Yet, zoologists Peter Klopfer and Jack Hailman blended the two approaches in their text, An Introduction to Animal Behavior: Ethology ’ s First Century ( 1967 ), as did ethologist Robert Hinde in his Animal Behaviour: a Synthesis of Ethology and Comparative Psychology ( 1970 ), Michael Fox in his Readings in Ethology and Comparative Psychology ( 1973 ), and the fi rst two chapters in P. P. G. Bateson and Peter Klopofer ’ s Perspectives in Ethology (volume 1, 1973) are by authors from departments of psychology. American collaborators V(incent) G. Dethier, biologist, and Eliot Stellar, physiological psychologist, coauthored Animal Behavior (1961, edition 3, 1970 ), which has six chapters on nervous systems in different kinds of animals and three chapters on behavior, learning, and intelligence. Michael Bright ’ s Intelligence in Animals ( 1994 ) is a synthesis of these two approaches for a popular audience.