of pregnancy and infant care, would be more monogamous. Concluding that sexual selection is strictly genetic is impossible. Again, genes determine structure and structure influences behavior, which results in the genes of the subsequent generation. Mate choice is strongly influenced by behavior and the cultural consequences. In addition, choice of mates is part of the third condition of the previously discussed Hardy-Weinberg Law, in that, it violates the process of random reproduction. Without random reproduction, change in the population will occur and evolution accumulates through sexual selection.
Mate choice can also become out-of-phase with the environment, leading to conflict with natural selection. The Irish Elk (Megaloceros) is an example. Mate choice led to larger and larger male antlers, which had to be shed and regrown each year. The required energy expenditure produced extinction. Natural selection is the instrument of evolution.
Sexual selection, like any structural or behavioral feature, can be adaptive or not. Thus, sexual selection is not separate from evolution. Not only courtship patterns, but all behavior evolved. The process and phenomena of the evolution of behavior are the subjects for the remaining chapters.
The Non-conflict with Religion
One of the major reasons for difficulties in the trend away from the egocentric position noted early in this chapter is the supposed conflict with religion. If religion is ultimately the belief in God, rather than in human doctrine, there can be no conflict with science. Science can neither confirm nor disprove the existence of God. God is either believed in or not.
Difficulty stems from those who profess to believe, but whose personal faith requires proof, often from physical sources. The support for such fragile faith frequently comes under the scrutiny of science and the frail faith becomes threatened. The true believer knows that science, whose purview is phenomena, and religion, which deals with faith, do not even overlap and, therefore, cannot possibly conflict.
Clergy, however, repeatedly make ridiculous spectacles of faith by pronouncements about science. In 1650, Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh, Ireland, calculated from the ages of biblical figures that the world was created on Sunday, October 21, 4004 BCE, at 9:00 AM. Early in the 20th century, when several groups were struggling to develop “heavier-than-air” flying craft, clergy announced that such endeavors were folly because, if God meant people to fly, we would have had wings. The Wright Brothers on December 17, 1903, were the first to prove that we could make our own wings. Repeated interference in science by uninformed clergy have created an image of religion as anti-science. Instead, the misunderstanding is produced by the weak faith of the particular clerics. No one with strong faith is disturbed by evidence that the Earth is not the center of the universe, that humans evolved, or any other phenomena of the natural world.
If someone could be sent back a few centuries in time with the task of telling people of that time about nuclear energy, and saying that those people should write down what is explained to them, what would they write without any knowledge of what they are being told? Thus, anyone, thousands of years ago, being told how the universe was created would have no understanding of what to transcribe. Having no numbers like seven billion, they might write seven days and compose a description like Genesis. Therefore, the Bible describes what happened and science is trying to explain how.
References
Arms, K. and Camp, P. S. (1979). Biology, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, N. Y.
Daly, M. and Wilson, M. (1983). Sex, Evolution, and Behavior, PWS Publishers, Boston.
Darwin, C. (1887 edition). The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, D. Appleton and Co., N. Y.
Fisher, R. A. (1930). The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, Claredon Press, Oxford.
Gold, T. (Ed.) (1967). The Nature of Time, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N. Y.
Hanson, E. D. (1964). Animal Diversity, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N. J.
Morton, A. G. (1951). Soviet Genetics, Lawrence & Wishart, London.
Notterman, J. M. and Mintz, D. E. (1965). Dynamics of Response, John Wiley & Sons, N. Y.
Pauling, L. (1968). “Orthomolecular Psychiatry”, Science, 160, 265–271.
Trivers, R. L. (1972). “Parental investment and sexual selection”, In B. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man 1871–1971, Aldine, Chicago.
Trotter, J. R. (1956). “The physical properties of bar pressing behavior and the problem of reactive inhibition”, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 8, 97–106.
CHAPTER 2
Nature as the Subject
The Study of Nature
The study of nature is undertaken for many reasons. Humans have always had an interest in nature as the cave paintings by early people illustrate. People often identify with animals particularly in England, and with Disney encouragement, in the United States. Animal and human qualities are often intermixed as in mythology, astrology, and augury. People are also interested in learning how to use animals for food, clothing, and other products or as pets. However, the scientific study of nature is concerned with gaining knowledge as an aid to understanding organisms in their own right. Comparative study of many species, can lead to the discovery of general principles explaining the nature of all life. Practical considerations, like the application of bat sonar techniques to electronic guidance and detection systems, are the consequences, not the goals, of the basic study of nature and are possible only because of fundamental understanding.
Scientific understanding of nature comes from the use of the inductive and deductive methods in the pursuit of knowledge of nature. However, as in any human endeavor, scientists themselves often become embroiled in specific issues that retard progress. For nearly five decades, from about 1920 to 1960, a specific school of psychological thought called “learning theory” or behaviorism dominated the American psychological journals, excluding other work on animal behavior and wrongly emphasizing a strictly deductive approach employing laboratory studies and group statistics necessitated by the use of a single species, typically rats, but also pigeons and college students. When attempting to extract information in a study employing one species, statistics are required in order to discriminate between intra-species variation in the subjects and the effects of the conditions of the experiment.
The behaviorist position was incorporated into a narrow perspective of experimental techniques, even to the point of insisting upon two variables in defining an experiment (Underwood, 1966). Many areas such as comparative and physiological psychology avoided that error and continued to use all methods of science. Thus, Schneirla (Schneirla and Piel, 1948) investigated ants inductively in the jungles and deductively in the laboratory and co-authored a major comparative text (Maier and Schneirla, 1935) mainly covering research literature excluded from the psychological journals and without restrictive emphasis on any particular techniques. Wever (1949) used inductive and deductive techniques in the comparative study of hearing. Even among the behaviorists there were scientists like Skinner (1956) insisting on the importance of induction. The value of induction is clear from Darwin’s ideas on evolution and Einstein’s formulation of relativity both concepts produced inductively and not deduced from experiments, except in imagination.
In the 1930’s a mostly European school of biology, ethology, began to react against the narrow behaviorists’ view. The ethologists insisted on exclusive use of inductive techniques such as field observations of individual organisms, rarely rats, in their natural habitat. Later ethological field procedures were called ethograms. Laboratory techniques were scorned as artificial abstractions
