The Lengthening Shadow of One Person

Ralph Waldo Emerson said that an institution is the lengthening shadow of one person. For Charles Darwin the shadow is long indeed, for he brought into being entire fields of knowledge, such as evolution, ecology, and finally, after a long gestation, animal behavior. Above all, he altered the way we think about ourselves, the earth we inhabit, and the animals that share it with us.

Charles Darwin, with the uncanny insight of genius, showed how natural selection would favor specialized behavioral patterns for survival. Darwin's pioneering book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, mapped a strategy for behavioral research still in use today. However, science in 1872 was unprepared for Darwin's central insight that behavioral patterns, no less than bodily structures, are selected and have evolutionary histories. Another 60 years would pass before such concepts would flourish within behavioral science.

In 1973, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three pioneering zoologists, Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz, and Niko Tinbergen (Figure 36-1). The citation stated that these three were the principal architects of the new science of ethology, the scientific study of animal behavior, particularly under natural conditions. It was the first time any contributor to the behavioral sciences was so honored, and it meant that the discipline of animal behavior had arrived.