Word: behavior
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Because of the common occurrence of skiing injuries, The Ski Supplement attempts to explore how such injuries come about and to suggest standards of behavior and physical fitness that will minimize your chances of being hurt...
Loeb first attracted public attention by showing that tropisms govern some kinds of animal behavior as strictly as they had been shown to govern plant behavior by his teachers. (A tropism is an automatic, mechanical orientation of an organism in response to some controlling factor in its environment. A moth which can fly only toward a light and a plant which can grow only in the direction of light both show positive phototropisms...
...simple chemical alterations of the water in which marine organisms lived, Loeb caused tropisms in animals which, under normal circumstances, appeared to be acting "spontaneously." He concluded that all animal behavior was tropistic, or would be if we only knew the controlling physico-chemical forces...
Having "proved" behavior deterministic, Loeb moved on to fertilization, for he found that vitalists (who opposed mechanists) were always using the mystery of the process of fertilization to slip a soul into animals. In 1899, by chemical alterations in water containing sea urchin eggs, he was able to fertilize the eggs and cause them to develop into larvae without any male sperm at all. For this work he gained world renown. Professor Fleming's introduction recounts that maiden ladies stopped bathing at the sea shore for fear of what the water might do to them; barren couples earnestly entreated Loeb...
...minor addendum. On page 73, Loeb says that worms do not posses associative memory, that is, the capacity for learning. This was consistent with what was known when Loeb wrote the chapter in 1899. Months after he revised it in 1912, Robert Yerkes reported in the Journal of Animal Behavior an experiment that became famous: Yerkes trained a single earthworm over a period of months to learn a simple maze. Fleming's note at the end of the chapter mentions neither this nor more recent experiments in training planarians...