The Characters of Living Things

Abstract

The dramatic advance of biological research in the past few decades has been proceeding on two very different fronts. The triumphs of biochemistry, in its detailed study of the nature and regulation of metabolic processes; the startling advances of molecular genetics, in particular DNA ‘code-cracking’; the revelation, through the electron microscope, of a whole new world of complex organization at the minutest level: in short, those fields of research designated by the package title ‘molecular biology’: these form one such ever-widening front of advancing knowledge. A little less conspicuously in the headlines, but as ingenious in its methods and certainly as significant in its philosophical implications, is the almost equally new and equally rapidly growing science of animal behavior, or ethology, which studies, not the minute component parts of animals, but their action patterns, whether as individuals or in groups.