Human ethology: history of origin and current research problems
Background of human ethology
What is a person? This question has been asked throughout human history by priests, philosophers, artists, scientists. The dilemma «nature or education» (in the domestic version — biological or social) has been discussed by scientists since ancient times. The position on the inheritance of behavioral traits was expressed by Hippocrates and Galen. With the advent of Darwin’s theory, the dispute about the nature of man acquired a new perspective in the scientific world. We are talking about a discussion that has been going on for more than a hundred years between supporters of the concepts of the biological and social essence of man.
Gradually, by the beginning of the 80s, researchers from various fields of knowledge began to understand the need to synthesize natural science and humanitarian knowledge in order to understand the essence of human behavior. In our country, these trends were reflected in the development of concepts of the biosocial nature of man [Efimov, 1981; Zubov, 1983]. In the early 80s, many psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, along with ethologists, turned to the interactionist approach, which considers behavior as the result of the interaction of the individual human constitution and the environment. It was recognized that the behavioral rate of reaction in humans is exceptionally high. Being within the framework of culture, he not only blindly obeys its laws and rules (having learned them in the process of socialization), but also creates this culture himself, actively modifies it. Man is by nature a social (public) being, like his closest relatives — the great apes. It is human biology that serves as the necessary foundation for the development of culture — language, beliefs, customs, morality (Schlefenhovel, 1994). To understand the human essence, one must understand that genes and culture act together in the course of a single process of gene-cultural co-evolution [Wilson, 1998] It is not enough to analyze behavior separately from biological and humanitarian positions, mutual understanding between specialists in these sciences is necessary.
Formation of human ethology as an independent discipline
The ethology of man as a science began to take shape by the beginning of the 70s of our century. What are the real reasons to consider this area of research as an independent scientific discipline?
Charles Darwin, who proposed his evolutionary theory, can rightfully be considered the first scientist who turned to the problems of the biology of human behavior [Eibl-Eibesfeldt., 1997]. K. Lorenz and N. Tinbergen, the founders of ethology, considered testing the suitability of hypotheses obtained as a result of observing animals for the study of human behavior as one of the most important tasks. In Aggression, Lorenz devotes an entire chapter to the question of the role of innate behavior in human life (Lorenz, 1966). In two later works, Beyond the Mirror and The Eight Deadly Sins of a Civilized Man, he develops the idea of cultural evolution and the deterioration of the human gene pool [Lorenz, 1973; 1977]. Around the same time, N. Tinbergen, in his Nobel lecture, expressed the idea of the limited adaptive capabilities of a person in the process of rapidly changing environmental conditions and the importance of ethological approaches in the study of mental disorders in humans (Tinbergen, 1974).
The need to apply ethological approaches to explain human behavior became quite obvious to scientists trying to understand the nature of human behavior already in the 60s. Not only ethologists themselves, but also many psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, and zoologists in the early 70s started talking about the need to develop human ethology. Among them are now famous I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, R. Hynd, W. McGrew, D. Freeman, E. Hess, J. Bowlby, N. Blairton Jones, P. Smith, D. Morris and many others. By the beginning of the 70s, a real, fairly representative scientific community had formed that linked its scientific interests with human ethology.
The peculiar boundary position of the new scientific discipline caused great and heated discussions. Zoologist D. Morris was one of the first to popularize human ethology. He gained considerable fame precisely because of his books and television shows about human behavior. The books The Naked Monkey and The Human Zoo offered a peculiar, zoological view of human behavior and discussed the similarities of nonverbal communication and human social structure with other primates [Moris, 1967; 1971). The books were written popularly, for a wide range of readers, and had a mixed impact on the public. Extreme simplification and extrapolation when comparing man and animals caused well-deserved protests both from the side of the humanities and from biologists. Even after several decades, human ethology continues to be attacked by critics, and for the most part accusations of reductionism are nothing more than echoes of a negative reaction to the books of D. Morris [Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1997]. At the same time, the work of D. Morris would be wrong to regard as a purely negative phenomenon. The very fact that he offered a biological view of the origin of human behavior to the general public, and made people think about their evolutionary past, undoubtedly facilitated the task of subsequent generations of ethologists and caused a significant influx of students into human ethology.
D. Morris stimulated discussions between the humanities and biologists about the phylogenetic roots of human sexuality, parental behavior, cooperation, aggression and the structuring of social Relations. By now, notions of facial homology between humans and chimpanzees are no more shocking. In the course of cultural anthropology, one can hear about the phylogenetic roots of maternal behavior or about cultural traditions in great apes (chimpanzees) [Quiatt, Reynolds, 1993].
The ethology of man as a science took shape largely thanks to the efforts of I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt. In 1967, I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, a student of K. Lorentz, published a chapter on man in the book Ethology-Biology of Behavior (an English translation was published in 1970 and 1975, respectively) [Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1975]. The real formation of a new scientific discipline is also evidenced by the formation in 1970 in Germany of the Institute of Human Ethology within the framework of the Max Planck Scientific Society. The growth of interest in this discipline led in 1978 to the creation of the International Society for Human Ethology. At present, the International Society for Human Ethology unites specialists from 37 countries of the world, including the USA (more than 200 members). The society holds annual conferences and publishes its own newspaper (Human Ethology Bulletin). Ethologists also participate in the work of another international scientific society — the Society for the Study of Evolution and Human Behavior. A significant proportion of the members of the above societies that study human behavior is represented by psychologists, physical anthropologists, primatologists, cultural anthropologists and ecologists (P. Ekman, L. Miley, P. Lafrenière, C. Crawford, C. MacDonald, G. Weisfeld, P. Ekman , E. Keshdan, M. Wilson, M. Dali, R. Boyd, W. Irons, D. Silk, J. Lancaster, B. Fuller, F. de Waal, McGrew, L. Marchant, P. Richardson and others. ).
The results of human ethology research are discussed regularly at the annual congresses of these two societies, as well as in the human ethology section of the World Ethology Congresses. Human ethology is represented by a number of international journals (Human Nature; Ethology and Sociobiology, currently known as Evolution and Human Behavior), articles of this profile are also published in journals on general ethology (Ethology; Aggressive Behavior; Behavior: Journal of Nonverbal Behavior; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; Behavioral and Brain Sciences; Chi1d Development; Current Anthropology).
The course «Human Ethology» is taught in many countries of the world for students of various specialties: biologists, psychologists, doctors, sociologists. anthropologists, economists, political scientists. For example, W. Schiefenhoevel and M. Schleidt have been teaching such a course at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) for nine years, and about 200 students attend it every semester. A similar course is regularly taught at the University of Vienna by K. Grammer and K. Atswanger. Human ethology is taught at the University. Humboldt in Berlin by R. Sigmund and K. Wermke, as well as at the University of Munich, Germany, where this course is taught by W. Schiefenhoevel and K. Kruk. In the United States and Canada, the basics of human ethology are taught at many universities as a separate course, as an integral part of a course in general ethology, and in combination with evolutionary psychology. It is read by such well-known experts as G. Weisfeld, L. Miley, K MacDonald, J. Silk and many others). Human ethology as an academic discipline is also widely taught in Japan (the University of Tokyo, the universities of Yokohama, Osoki, Kyoto, and a number of others). All the above facts clearly show that we are currently dealing with an established discipline that has its own scientific schools, societies, regular scientific meetings, and periodicals.