Dilemmas in the Constitution of and Exportation of Ethological Facts
Early ethologists such as Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz faceda problem: What constituted a fact about behaviour? How reliablymust a behaviour be exhibited (and in how many specimens) beforeit could be said to be species-typical? And how similar do thebehaviours of two species need to be before it is reasonable to saythat the behaviour is true of both? They sought to convince others oftheir claims for interspecific behavioural commonalities through anumber of means – writings, diagrams, films – and enjoyed somenotable successes. But establishing facts about behaviour thatwould hold across multiple species was a dispute still largelycontained within the relatively esoteric discipline of ethology. It wasonly a matter of time before the species boundaries being crossedwere more controversial. For if the problem of establishing that a factabout goose-behaviour is also a fact about duck-behaviour was oflimited interest, it was of considerably more significance when one ofthose species was human. With the publication of works such asLonrenz’s On Aggression and E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, what hadbeen a marginal issue for zoology was now of considerable politicalsignificance, and the original claims for inter-specific behaviouralsimilarities fell under renewed and intense scrutiny – leading to thereexamination of the original facts on which ethology waspredicated.[...]
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