Читать книгу The Behavior of Animals - Группа авторов - Страница 14

Scientists (and amateurs) have studied animal behavior long before the word “ethology” was introduced. For instance, Aristotle had many interesting observations concerning animal behavior. The study of animal behavior was taken up more systematically, however, mainly by German and British zoologists around the turn of the nineteenth century. The great British naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882), in his classic book on the theory of evolution by natural selection (1859), devoted a whole chapter to what he called “instinct.” As early as 1873, a British amateur investigator, Douglas Spalding, recorded some very interesting observations on the instinctive behavior of young domestic chicks, including a phenomenon that was later called “imprinting” (Chapter 7). At the beginning of the twentieth century, the behavior of animals was also studied in the context of learning by the Russian physiologist Ivan P. Pavlov (1927) and the American psychologist Edward L. Thorndike (1911; Chapter 8).