This paper aims at bridging a gap between the history of American animal behavior studies and the history of sociobiology. In the post-war period, ecology, comparative psychology and ethology were all investigating animal societies, using different approaches ranging from fieldwork to laboratory studies. We argue that this disunity in “practices of place” explains the attempts of dialogue between those three fields and early calls for unity through “sociobiology” by J. Paul Scott. In turn, tensions between the naturalist tradition and the (...) rising reductionist approach in biology provide an original background for a history of Edward Wilson’s own version of sociobiology, much beyond the William Hamilton’s papers usually considered as its key antecedent. Naturalists were in a defensive position in the geography of the fields studying animal behavior, and in reaction were a driving force behind the various projects of synthesis called “sociobiology”. (shrink)

Conwy Lloyd Morgan (1852–1936) is widely regarded as the father of modern comparative psychology. Yet, Morgan initially had significant doubts about whether a genuine science of comparative psychology was even possible, only later becoming more optimistic about our ability to make reliable inferences about the mental capacities of non-human animals. There has been a fair amount of disagreement amongst scholars of Morgan’s work about the nature, timing, and causes of this shift in Morgan’s thinking. We argue that Morgan underwent two (...) quite different shifts of attitude towards the proper practice of comparative psychology. The first was a qualified acceptance of the Romanesian approach to comparative psychology that he had initially criticized. The second was a shift away from Romanes’ reliance on systematizing anecdotal evidence of animal intelligence towards an experimental approach, focused on studying the development of behaviour. We emphasize the role of Morgan’s evolving epistemological views in bringing about the first shift – in particular, his philosophy of science. We emphasize the role of an intriguing but overlooked figure in the history of comparative psychology in explaining the second shift, T. Mann Jones, whose correspondence with Morgan provided an important catalyst for Morgan’s experimental turn, particularly the special focus on development. We also shed light on the intended function of Morgan’s Canon, the methodological principle for which Morgan is now mostly known. The Canon can only be properly understood by seeing it in the context of Morgan’s own unique experimental vision for comparative psychology. (shrink)

In 1937 Joseph Grinnell founded the University of California's (U.C.) first biological field station, the Hastings Natural History Reservation. Hastings became a center for field biology on the West Coast, and by 1960 it was serving as a model for the creation of additional U.C. reserves. Today, the U.C. Natural Reserve System (NRS) is the largest and most diverse network of university-based biological field stations in the world, with 36 sites covering more than 135,000 acres. This essay examines the founding (...) of the Hastings Reservation, and asks how it managed to grow and develop, in the 1940s and 1950s, during a time of declining support for natural history research. It shows how faculty and staff courted the support of key institutional allies, presented themselves as the guardians of a venerable tradition in nature study, and emphasized the station's capacity to document ecological change and inform environmental policy and management. In the years since, Hastings and other U.C. reserves have played crucial roles in California environmental politics. Biological field stations in the post-war era deserve more attention not only from historians of biology, but also from environmental historians and other scholars interested in the role of science in society. (shrink)

Biological field stations proliferated in the Rocky Mountains region of the western United States during the early decades of the twentieth century. This essay examines these Rocky Mountain field stations as hybrid lab-field sites from the perspective of the field side of the dichotomy: as field sites with raised walls rather than as laboratories whose walls with the natural world have been lowered. Not only were these field stations transformed to be more like laboratories, but they were also embedded within (...) the particular regional environmental and institutional context of the Rocky Mountains. Using the University of Colorado’s Mountain Laboratory at Tolland and other contemporaneous sites as examples, this essay analyzes key features of these sites, including their location within transportation networks, buildings, equipment, personnel, scheduling, recreational and social activities, and other material and social practices on the ground. Considering both the distinctive and shared characteristics of the Rocky Mountain field stations in comparison to other types of field stations provides a more complete picture of the diversity and range of lab-field hybrid sites in the biological sciences in the early twentieth-century United States. (shrink)

Ethology brought some crucial insights and perspectives to the study of behavior, in particular the idea that behavior can be studied within a comparative-evolutionary framework by means of homologizing components of behavioral patterns and by causal analysis of behavior components and their integration. Early ethology is well-known for its extensive use of qualitative observations of animals under their natural conditions. These observations are combined with experiments that try to analyze behavioral patterns and establish specific claims about animal behavior. Nowadays, there (...) is still disagreement about the significance of observation and experiments and their relation. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 1-2, Page 55-86, June 2022.

In 1973, the discipline of ethology came into its own when three of its most prominent practitioners—Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch—jointly received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Historians have shown how Lorenz and Tinbergen were central to the practical and theoretical innovations that came to define ethology as a distinct form of animal behavior research in the twentieth century. Frisch is rarely mentioned in such histories. In this paper, I ask, What is Frisch’s relationship to (...) the discipline of ethology? To answer that question, I examine Tinbergen’s relationship to Frisch’s grey card experiments between Tinbergen’s time as a student at the University of Leiden in the mid 1920s and his 1951 publication of The Study of Instinct. In doing so, I highlight previously neglected affinities between Frisch’s early career research and the program of classical ethology, and I show how Frisch’s research meant different things at different times to Tinbergen and others working in the ethological tradition. (shrink)

Seeking a scientific basis for understanding and treating mental illness, and inspired by the work of Ivan Pavlov, American physiologists, psychiatrists and psychologists in the 1920s turned to nonhuman animals. This paper examines how new constructs such as “experimental neurosis” emerged as tools to enable psychiatric comparison across species. From 1923 to 1962, the Cornell “Behavior Farm” was a leading interdisciplinary research center pioneering novel techniques to experimentally study nonhuman psychopathology. Led by the psychobiologist Howard Liddell, work at the Behavior (...) Farm formed part of an ambitious program to develop new preventative and therapeutic techniques and bring psychiatry into closer relations with physiology and medicine. At the heart of Liddell’s activities were a range of nonhuman animals, including pigs, sheep, goats and dogs, each serving as a proxy for human patients. We examine how Pavlov’s conceptualization of ‘experimental neurosis’ was used by Liddell to facilitate comparison across species and communication between researchers and clinicians. Our close reading of his experimental system demonstrates how unexpected animal behaviors and emotions were transformed into experimental virtues. However, to successfully translate such behaviors from the animal laboratory into the field of human psychopathology, Liddell increasingly reached beyond, and, in effect, redefined, the Pavlovian method to make it compatible and compliant with an ethological approach to the animal laboratory. We show how the resultant Behavior Farm served as a productive “hybrid” place, containing elements of experiment and observation, laboratory and field. It was through the building of close and more naturalistic relationships with animals over extended periods of time, both normal and pathological, and within and outside of the experimental space, that Liddell could understand, manage, and make useful the myriad behavioral complexities that emerged from the life histories of experimental animals, the researchers who worked with them, and their shared relationships to the wider physical and social environments. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, ornithology underwent significant changes. So far, these changes, basically, have been studied by focussing on the elite of professional biologists working at universities or state museums. However, important developments also occurred in what Lynn Nyhart has called “the civic realm” of science – the sphere given form by private naturalist associations, nature writers, taxidermists and school teachers. This article studies the changing dynamics of civic ornithology, by looking at one particular case: the influential orinthological observatory (...) in Rossitten, East-Prussia. This observatory, the first of its kind, was founded in 1901 and led, for the first three decades of its existence, by the minister Johannes Thienemann. This article analyses the ornithological practices Thienemann developed in Rossitten and the rhetoric he used to defend these practices. In both, so it is argued, one finds a mixture of the traditional, locally anchored naturalist approach with the new ideals of the “modern” and “experimental” university laboratories. The innovations which Thienemann introduced in this hybrid form of ornithology called for specific spatial strategies which made optimal use of the natural chatacteristics of his workplace and which mobilized a large civic network of geograhically scattered amateurs. At the same time, his work also altered the space he shared with the birds – materially, conceptually and culturally. Thus, this article maintains Thienemann's ornithology can only be understood by acknowledging its continuous interaction with the geographical and civic context in which it arose. (shrink)

This article elaborates a local history of zoo feeding practices in order to shed light on the construction of knowledge at the zoo, its intersection with laboratory developments in life sciences, and the nature of zoo sciences. It relies on the case studies of two of the oldest zoological gardens in the world-the Jardin des Plantes Ménagerie in Paris (1793) and the London Zoological Gardens (1828)-both of which formed parts of major scientific institutions, thereby facilitating research on the dialogue between (...) zoo knowledge and life sciences. The article argues that zoos developed around an experimental paradigm that consisted of testing on animals the (nutritional) variables of their survival within a highly constrained institutional framework. From the interwar period, the empirical nature of the zoo feeding economy was marked by slow and uneven changes, associated with the development of nutritional sciences as well as internal hygiene, pathology, and veterinary programmes. Despite transfers and networks of people, methods, experiments, concepts, and animals between zoos and life sciences laboratories, the former remained too impure as a research site to act as an extension of the latter. Zoos, however, needed external laboratories to support themselves with the scientific legitimacy that their “biopolitical modernisation” (Chrulew) required. In addressing programmatic changes as well as their impact upon the animals, this paper argues that trial-and-error experiments are constitutive of the zoo, contributing towards the definition of the nature of both zoo management and zoo sciences. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 1-2, Page 87-111, June 2022.

Since wild badgers were first connected with outbreaks of bovine TB in UK cattle herds in the early 1970s, the question of whether to cull them to control infections in cattle has been the subject of a protracted public and policy controversy. Following the recommendation of Prof. John Krebs that a “scientifically based experimental trial” be carried out to test the effectiveness of badger culling, the Randomised Badger Culling Trial was commissioned by Government in 1998. One of the largest field (...) experiments ever conducted in the UK, the RBCT sought to recreate the conditions of a randomised controlled trial across approximately 3000 km2 of the South West of England. Despite widespread expectations that the RBCT would provide the necessary evidence to resolve the controversy, its findings have instead been widely contested and reinterpreted, while arguments over badger culling have become increasingly polarised. This paper will investigate the complexities of field experimental knowledge by following the story of the RBCT from this initial proposal, through processes of research design, implementation, analysis, interpretation and reinterpretation of the findings by multiple actors. It asks what kind of experiment the RBCT actually was, and examines how it has contributed to the protracted controversy over whether to cull badgers in order to control bTB in cattle. Finally, it will explore the wider implications of this case for contemporary debates over the contribution that RCTs can make to formulating public policy. (shrink)

In 1937 Joseph Grinnell founded the University of California’s first biological field station, the Hastings Natural History Reservation. Hastings became a center for field biology on the West Coast, and by 1960 it was serving as a model for the creation of additional U.C. reserves. Today, the U.C. Natural Reserve System is the largest and most diverse network of university-based biological field stations in the world, with 36 sites covering more than 135,000 acres. This essay examines the founding of the (...) Hastings Reservation, and asks how it managed to grow and develop, in the 1940s and 1950s, during a time of declining support for natural history research. It shows how faculty and staff courted the support of key institutional allies, presented themselves as the guardians of a venerable tradition in nature study, and emphasized the station’s capacity to document ecological change and inform environmental policy and management. In the years since, Hastings and other U.C. reserves have played crucial roles in California environmental politics. Biological field stations in the post-war era deserve more attention not only from historians of biology, but also from environmental historians and other scholars interested in the role of science in society. (shrink)

Place, practice and status have played significant and interacting roles in the complex history of primatology during the early to mid-twentieth century. This paper demonstrates that, within the emerging discipline of primatology, the field was understood as an essential supplement to laboratory work. Founders argued that only in the field could primates be studied in interaction with their natural social group and environment. Such field studies of primate behavior required the development of existing and new field techniques. The practices and (...) sites developed by American primatologist Clarence Ray Carpenter were used to demonstrate that scientific standards could be successfully applied to the study of primates in the field. In an environment in which many field biologists fought for higher scientific status, Carpenter gradually adopted increasingly interventionist techniques. These techniques raised epistemological problems for studies whose value rested on the naturalness of the behaviors observed. Thus, issues of status shaped field practices and subsequently altered Carpenter's criteria for what constituted natural primate behavior. (shrink)

ArgumentThe nineteenth century witnessed the advent of the modern zoo. Nearly everyone who came to watch the exotic animals was a “lay person” in the sense that virtually none had formal training in zoology. This paper provides a typology of these observers: the zoo directors, assistants, keepers, animal painters, and the “common” visitor. What did they observe and what were their motivations? Did they pursue a certain agenda? What kind of knowledge, if any, did they produce? Soon the issue of (...) the reliability of these observations emerged. Lay observers insisted on the veracity of their intimate and personal knowledge of animals while academics complained that their claims could not be generalized and were tainted by anthropomorphism. Hence the focus on the observations of these laymen will reveal contemporary assumptions on what may count as “scientific.” This is closely linked to the question of how far the zoo may qualify as a site of scientific investigation in the first place. The constraints on doing research on animals in a public space such as the zoo were numerous. Yet despite these obstacles the zoological garden contributed to the rise of ecological thinking as well as to the formation of ethology as a scientific discipline. (shrink)

Since Krebs and Davies’s (1978) landmark publication, it is acknowledged that behavioural ecology owes much to the ethological tradition in the study of animal behaviour. Although this assumption seems to be right—many of the first behavioural ecologists were trained in departments where ethology developed and matured—it still to be properly assessed. In this paper, I undertake to identify the approaches used by ethologists that contributed to behavioural ecology’s constitution as a field of inquiry. It is my contention that the current (...) practices in behavioural biology owe ethology something much subtler than the simple transposition of Tinbergen’s Four Problems for heuristic purposes. Demonstrating what ethology inherited from the long naturalist tradition shows the tensions that strained the field and that later led to the loss of both its unity and its specificity. It also allows for a precise delineating of what behavioural ecology picked up from the ethological practice, and it helps to cast some light on the introduction of economical thinking in behavioural sciences. (shrink)

Peculiar to Konrad Lorenz’s view of instinctive behavior is his strong innate-learned dichotomy. He claimed that there are neither ontogenetic nor phylogenetic transitions between instinctive and experience-based behavior components, thus contradicting all former accounts of instinct. The present study discusses how Lorenz came to hold this controversial position by examining the history of Lorenz’s early theoretical development in the crucial period from 1931 to 1937, taking relevant influences into account. Lorenz’s intellectual development is viewed as being guided by four theoretical (...) and practical commitments as to how to study and explain behavior. These four factors, which were part of the general approach of Lorenz but not of other animal psychologists, were crucial in bringing about his specific position on instinctive behavior. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 1-2, Page 189-199, June 2022.

ArgumentTemporal issues appear to be crucial to the relationship between life scientists and their field sites and to the making of science in the field. We elaborate on the notion of practices of time to describe the ways life scientists cope with multiple and potentially conflicting temporal aspects that influence how they become engaged and remain engaged in a field-site, such as pleasure, long-term security, scientific productivity, and timeliness. With this notion, we seek to bring enhanced visibility and coherence to (...) the extensive but rather scattered and limited treatments of temporal practices in field sciences that already exist. (shrink)

Large, black, flightless birds with unpredictable tempers and colourful heads and necks, cassowaries have enthralled European audiences for centuries, but perhaps no one more so than private collector and zoologist Lionel Walter Rothschild (1868-1937). Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Rothschild acquired hundreds of living cassowaries which were kept in his private zoological collection. This paper explores the nature of Rothschild's private zoo and how the collection of living cassowaries was used to support his zoological activities. Spread across (...) three sites-the family estate at Tring Park, the zoological gardens in Regent's Park, and the business premises of Cambridge-based taxidermist Frederick Doggett-it will examine how Rothschild used the living birds kept in his private zoo to devise and inform a process for the preparation and display of cassowary specimens in museum galleries. It will show how he recruited specialist artists and taxidermists to perfect the art, and the significant financial investment this entailed. This is followed by exploration of how Rothschild's access to and observations of living birds informed his taxonomic work and, in particular, the identification of species and subspecies. The argument is made that Rothschild's private zoo and access to living cassowaries enabled his dedication to the study of the genus and ultimately underpinned his reputation as a world authority on cassowaries in the early 20th century. (shrink)