BIOLOGY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 



ability of responses even in the lowest organisms; Watson 

 developed the technique of record and analysis; Holmes 

 gave the mental behavior its proper place in the zoological 

 setting; Yerkes gave the subject the most comprehensive 

 interpretation; the Gestaltists, notably Kohler, demon- 

 strated the overlapping stages of human and animal per- 

 formance. None the less, as Yerkes emphasizes, the 

 naturalistic interpretation that studies animals in their native 

 habitat and records their native solutions of problems, free 

 from human guidance, furnishes a major clue. Experiment 

 may be too refined and too artificial; a broad behaviorism 

 includes both. 



The ancient problems thus appear in transformed aspect. 

 The distinction between instinct and reason loses its 

 rigidity; in all cases we deal with behavior patterns. 

 Animal learning proceeds by trial and error; the unlearned 

 factors in response are instinctive. Instinctive trends 

 are modified by experience, both spontaneously and in 

 response to human training. Behavior, with insight into 

 the relation between means and ends, coming not like 

 "trial and error" with slow improvement and correction 

 but with the sudden abandonment of an old method and 

 an adoption (after reflection) of a new one, appears clearly 

 in the more intelligent specimens of the anthropoid apes — 

 perhaps not elsewhere. The interplay of heredity and 

 environment appears more clearly. There is in most animal, 

 as well as human, behavior "conditioning" in the more 

 liberal sense and equally "dispositioning." Their varia- 

 tions make way for the problem of individual differences 

 which, in the human setting, becomes paramount. 



Child psychology has a different set of antecedents. It 

 goes back to Pestalozzi and Froebel and the "kindergarten" 

 movement — all with a strong interest in directing the 

 earliest educational procedures. Infant life provides the 

 closest approximation to objective conditions and supplies 



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