William H. Thorpe. The origins and rise of ethology: The science of the natural behaviour of animals. London and New York: Praeger, 1979. xi + 174 pp. $21.95 (Reviewed by John C. Fentress)
- Book ID
- 101357618
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1983
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 233 KB
- Volume
- 19
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In these two attractive volumes we have unusually vivid reconstructions of humanity's protracted efforts to understand the diverse adaptive relations between organisms and their environments. The hero of Howard E. Gruber's careful psychological analysis is Charles Darwin (1809Darwin ( -1882)), the father of the theory of evolution through natural selection. By focusing upon a remarkably fertile two-year period of Darwin's intellectual struggles, Gruber provides material relevant not only to an appreciation of this naturalist's range of talents and sense of purpose but also to an understanding of creative processes in science more generally. William H. Thorpe casts his historical net more widely. In doing so he shows how the roots of modern ethology-"the science of the natural behaviour of animals"-are deeply embedded in human history. Further, Thorpe takes us on a personal excursion among some of the most interesting personalities of the current state of the art. Both authors stress the multiple and often feeble beginnings of insight, where incomplete kernels of important ideas surface, submerge, and gradually reappear in improved packaging.
Although 1 found reading the two volumes together instructive (evolutionary biology and ethology, after all, have been reaching towards each other for some time), it would be forcing the issue to stress their similarities at the expense of their more specialized missions. Gruber's volume is a second edition of his previously acclaimed study with Paul Barrett (1974). The aim remains "to describe the growth of thought in a real, thinking, feeling, dreaming person" (p. 4). And "real" is precisely the sense that one gets. Thus Gruber starts the preface of his second edition by focusing on Darwin's obvious enjoyment of his work (and of life more generally), his caution, and even courage (evolutionary and materialistic ideas have not always been popular). The documentation for these and related perspectives is unfolded skillfully in subsequent parts of the book through Gruber's analyses of Darwin's four notebooks on the transmutation of species (1837-1839), two notebooks on man, mind, and materialism (l838-1839), and miscellaneous "old and useless notes" (1 837-1840), and, in this new edition, through an appendix containing a detailed comparison of two versions of Darwin's journal of his epochal voyage on the Beagle (published in 1839 and 1845). A key to all of this is the "worship of change" in which Darwin was encouraged by his family from a very early age.
I t is to Gruber's credit that Darwin is not treated as an intellectual island, but as a compassionate man who was obviously sensitive to his surroundings. A question of major interest that Gruber addresses is why the publication of Darwin's well-formulated thoughts on natural selection and man was so long delayed; here they stand in bold relief in the 1837-I839 notebooks. Yet, the Origin of Species was not published until 1859 (with minimal comments about man or behavior), The Descent of Man was delayed until 1871, and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Darwin's most clearly ethological work) surfaced only in 1872. Gruber's detective work on the balance between (paper).