Word: ethologists
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Everyone knows parrots can talk, but for the past 15 years, ethologist Irene Pepperberg has been working with Alex, exploring the degree to which the birds understand what they are saying. Pepperberg picks up an object from a crowded tray and inquires, "What toy?" Alex promptly answers, "Block." He then responds to questions about the plaything, describing its color, shape, what it is made of ("wood") and whether it is bigger or smaller than other objects on the tray...
...psychologist and ethologist, and a leader in the growing pack of natural scientists who have lately given wolves a good name. He has been raising wolves and studying them for years. In earlier books like Behavior of Wolves, Dogs and Related Canids, Fox presented the facts. The Soul of the Wolf is something else, an illustrated valentine to Fox's four-footed friends, and a moral message for another endangered species, man. The valentine is marvelous, the exhortation overblown. By learning about wolves, Fox insists, man can learn about the mysterious intricacies of nature, and thus be encouraged...
...September 1973 George Schaller and Peter Matthiessen began a 500 mile trek from the Himalayan town of Pokhara to the unspoiled Crystal Mountains and back. Schaller, an ethologist, went to research mating behavior among a wild herd of bharal, the blue sheep of the Himalayas. He wanted to confirm his speculations that the bharal are a living, missing link between the true goats and the true sheep. He also wanted to see the snow leopard, the most elusive, and one of the rarest, cats in the world, which preys on the bharal. He accomplished both...
...human genes for such behavior as conformism, homosexuality and spite. Carried to an extreme, sociobiology holds that all forms of life exist solely to serve the purposes of DNA, the coded master molecule that determines the nature of all organisms and is the stuff of genes. As British Ethologist Richard Dawkins describes the role and drive of the genes, they "swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale...
Many recent theorists?such as Nobel-prizewinning Ethologist Konrad Lorenz and Scots Biologist V.C. Wynne-Edwards?have focused on the group or species as the primary unit of selection. Darwin wrote that it was the individual organism. But Sociobiologists believe it is the genes themselves that conduct the life-or-death evolutionary struggle. This gene-based view of life is compatible with a finding made independently by researchers in a widely divergent branch of science. Rutgers Biochemist George Pieczenik has discovered patterns in DNA coding that he sees as evidence of selection occurring at the molecular level (TIME, April...