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  3. Animal Behavior P1: Throughout much of the 20th century, European and American scientists were sharply divided over how to study

Animal Behavior P1: Throughout much of the 20th century, European and American scientists were sharply divided over how to study

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问题 Animal Behavior
P1: Throughout much of the 20th century, European and American scientists were sharply divided over how to study animal behavior.
To ethologists who mainly based in Europe, the most striking fact about animal behaviors was that they are fixed and seemingly unchangeable. For example, cats have an innate need to climb and seek refuge up high. They typically feel most secure when they can view their world from a point of concealment and gain control over their environment from a single vantage point. Dogs, by contrast, are able to understand and communicate with humans. Ethologists came to believe that ultimately even the most complex animal behaviors could be broken down into a series of immutable stimulus-response reactions. They emphasized the value of comparative studies of specific behavioral patterns, such as mating across species, in order to gain insight into how those behaviors evolved. For well over half a century, their search for the innate mechanism continued.
P2: Meanwhile, to those ethologists who based mainly in North America, the study of animal behavior took a different tack. American comparative behaviorists focused on learning and conditioned responses, which later developed into comparative behaviorism. Of interest to comparative behaviorists was where a particular behavior came from—that is, its evolutionary history, how the nervous system controlled it, and the extent to which it could be modified. In 1894, C. Lloyd Morgan, a pioneer comparative behaviorist, insisted that animal behavior be explained independently without reference to emotions or motivations, since these could not be observed or measured. In Morgan’s research, animals were put in simple situations and presented with an easily described stimulus, accompanied by precise observations and vivid accounts of behavior.
P3: This extension of animal behaviorism— studies of stimulus-response—has evolved to become an important development in comparative behavior. A stimulus is an observable fact and a broad term—so broad, in fact, that it involves any phenomenon that directly influences the activity or growth of a living organism. Not all responses to stimuli are automatic, however: as we have noted, even humans are incapable of some automatic responses. Nor are environmental changes limited to the organism’s external environment. In some cases, its internal environment can act as a stimulus as well. In general, behavior can be categorized as either innate (inborn) or learned, but the distinction is often unclear. Behavior is considered innate when it is presented and completed without any experience whereby it was learned. Higher animals, in contrast to other animals, use both innate and learned behavior. Not surprisingly, comparative behaviorists worked most comfortably from the comfort of a laboratory or psychology department, while their ethologist colleagues tended to stick strictly to studying innate patterns in a natural environment, like the development of behavior throughout animals’ lives. Major disagreements between adherents of the two approaches out inevitably occur, though the distinctions were often unclear.
P4: To early ethologists, the major driving force in behavior was instinct, behaviors that are inherited and unchangeable. Moths move towards light because they inherit the mechanism to respond to light. Although dogs have more options available to them, they bark at strangers for much the same reason. The comparative behaviorists disagreed: learning and rewards are more important factors than instinct in animal behavior. Geese are not born with the ability to retrieve lost eggs when they roll out of the nest—they learn to do so. If their behavior sometimes seems silly to humans because it fails to take new conditions into account, that is because the animals’ ability to learn is limited. There were too many examples of behaviors modified by experience for comparative behaviorists to put their faith in learning and rewards.
P5: The arguments came to a peak in the 1950s and became known as "the nature vs. nurture controversy". Consider how differently an ethologist and a comparative behaviorist would interpret the begging behavior of a hatching bird. The first time a hatching bird is approached by its parents, it begs by pecking at the beaks of their parents in an attempt to stimulate them to regurgitate a meal. Obviously, said the ethologists, they inherited the ability and the tendency to beg. Not so, countered the comparative behaviorists. We also saw that a model bearing what would seem to be the most superficial resemblance to the beak of the parent birds would stimulate begging on the part of the chick. Later experiments showed that when presented with two parental birds from related species, the young initially showed no preference for either of them. Of course, these chicks will only ever be rewarded by their parents. It would appear therefore that their innate behavior is refined with time, or to put it another way—they learn. Eventually, the distinctions between the two fields narrowed.
P6: The current view is that both nature and nurture influence behavior and development.
Increasingly, people are beginning to realize that asking how much heredity or environment influence a particular trait is not the right approach. The reality is that there is not a simple way to disentangle the multitude of forces that exist. These influences include genetic factors that interact with one another, environmental factors that interact such as social experiences and overall culture, as well as how both hereditary and environmental influences intermingle. Instead, many researchers today are interested in seeing how genes modulate environmental influences and vice versa.
P4: ■ To early ethologists, the major driving force in behavior was instinct, behaviors that are inherited and unchangeable. ■ Moths move towards light because they inherit the mechanism to respond to light. Although dogs have more options available to them, they bark at strangers for much the same reason. ■ The comparative behaviorists disagreed: learning and rewards are more important factors than instinct in animal behavior. ■ Geese are not born with the ability to retrieve lost eggs when they roll out of the nest—they learn to do so. If their behavior sometimes seems silly to humans because it fails to take new conditions into account, that is because the animals’ ability to learn is limited. There were too many examples of behaviors modified by experience for comparative behaviorists to put their faith in learning and rewards.
According to paragraph 1, what do ethologists think is the most notable characteristic of animal behavior?
选项 A、Animal responses in most situations are predictable and do not vary.
B、In similar situations, different animal species often behave in similar ways.
C、Even in ordinary situations, animal behavior can be unusually complex.
D、Animal behavior may sometimes include stimulus/response reactions.
答案A
解析 【推断题】第2句说“the most striking fact about animal behaviors was that they are fixed and seemingly unchangeable”，因此答案为A。
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