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THE FOUNDING OF ETHOLOGY*
IT IS OUR GOOD FORTUNE that Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr., has fallen in love with the founding of ethology. Since 1981 he has published 14 papers in this area, and here he presents the grand synthesis: a network of interwoven biographies of the scientists who built behavioral biology. This book exemplifies history writing at its best: ferreting out the relevant sources; reviewing the literature; comparing, checking, and weighing the evidence; and presenting all in a format that dovetails contemporary thought.
Burkhardt starts with a brief introduction, "Theory, Practice, and Place in the Study of Animal Behavior," ending his theoretical considerations with a programmatic statement: "The goal of this book is to analyze historically the construction of ethology as a scientific discipline, paying particular attention to the ways in which, in local and broader settings, the founders of ethology generated, developed, contested, and refashioned the concepts and research practices of their newly emerging field" (p. 4). He introduces Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen as the central persons: "It was Lorenz who was primarily responsible for laying the field's early conceptual foundations," while Tinbergen "contributed experimental and analytical talents that beautifully complemented Lorenz's early theory building" (p. 4).
In the first two chapters, "C. O. Whitman, W. Craig, and the Biological Study of Animal Behavior in America" and "British Field Studies of Behavior: Selous, Howard, Kirkman, and Huxley," Burkhardt traces the foundations of ethological thought to precursors in the United States (especially Lorenz's), and in Great Britain (especially Tinbergen's).This selection reveals his obvious bias in favor of Anglo-American authors by not giving the German forefathers (Heinroth, Kühn, Loeb, von Uexküll, etc.) equal distinction; it also reveals a bias in favor of a naturalistic approach, thus making short shrift of the morphological and physiological forefathers, such as Hochstetter, Pavlov, and Sherrington, who were of special significance to Lorenz's conceptual development.
The central chapters, "Konrad Lorenz and the Conceptual Foundations of Ethology" and "Niko Tinbergen and the Lorenzian Program," combine the biographies of Lorenz and Tinbergen with a concise history of their ethological concepts. Starting with Heinroth s precursor of "species-specific actions" (later known as "fixed action patterns") and von UexküU's "schemata" (developed into "innate releasing mechanism"), the development is traced through the 1930s, up...