Ebook: Roots of Behavior: Genetics, Insect, and Socialization in Animal Behavior

Psychiatry is awash with concepts and theories. Unfortunately, many are untestable, and few have been rigorously confirmed.
The overriding importance of early experience is postulated. Dreams are respected as the royal road to the unconscious. The mother-child relationship is extolled, and heredity or a disturbed parental-child matrix is incriminated in schizophrenia. In the welter of confusing opinion, dogmatism and nihilism coexist.
One is tempted to accept the "truth"---for certainty is reassuring---or, despairing, one may reject the entire field as hopelessly befuddled. The notion for this symposium arose from such ruminations. Each year, the Research Committee of the American Psychiatric Association sponsors a symposium on some currently important topic at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The editor was given this responsibility and elected to organize a meeting devoted to animal behavior, not because the ultimate answers to man's behavior were evident in contemporary work in this field, but because the area offered *new techniques* to study the problems of behavior. It can be argued that man is not a fruit fy, a rat, or a monkey, and

who is to deny the obvious? But the genetics of simple behavior can be explored in the fruit fly, and a monkey neonate can be isolated and mothered by a manikin. The sequence of the mother-child relationship can be disturbed in the rabbit, or alcoholic preference can be studied in strains of teetotaling mice. Techniques, though limited and not always applicable to man, are available to investigate a wide variety of behavioral puzzles. At the least, variables can be better controlled; and social, endocrinological, and even surgical modifications can be introduced to gain greater understanding. This is clearly only one of many ways through which man's nature will eventually be revealed, but it appears to be a potentially productive one---and one that should be made better known to many working in related areas. The fact that fighting behavior is best facilitated and perpetuated by combat success in rats may not explain a patient's behavior, but it and other observations may focus the clinician's as well as the investigator's attention on such critical variables.

The book, like the symposium, represents a cross section of activity in the field. It has been organized into four parts. Papers clearly overlap, and the categories, although artificial, may have usefulness since they do correspond to current areas of conceptualization and thinking.

Part I is concerned with the genetics of behavior, an area where systematic inquiry is developing. It is evident that people----being a heterologous population---differ amongst themselves, as do different strains of mice or fruit flies. Some men are tall, others short; some are intelligent, some less well endowed. It would seem that the genetic differences implied by such casual observations must also be true for many parameters of behavior, but the psychiatrist, as yet, can ill define them. He mentions differences in energy levels, ego strengths, or instinctual
urges, but finds it impossible to be more specific or to delineate the contributions of the genes and the environment. There is evidence that schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychosis are gene-linked, but the precise nature of the connection is totally unknown. It is a long way from the deoxyribonucleic acids in the gene to the synthesis of proteins, and then eventually to behavioral tendencies that predispose, under appropriate circumstances, to schizophrenia. But this is the dim sequence that must some day be clarified.

Far from this goal are the studies of the birds, _Drosophila_, insects, and mice, but they suggest the beginning of some understanding. Certainly the biochemist has learned much about human metabolism from microorganisms, and we are vastly indebted to the rat for his contribution to our knowledge of mammalian nutrition. It now appears that our less privileged friends may help us to understand better the contribution of genes to behavior. Already initial steps have been taken to define the role of inheritance in such diverse behavior as alcoholic consumption, sex, exploratory behavior, problem solving, and geotropism, to cite only a few.

Part II is devoted to analysis of drive states and instinctual behavior. The problems of sexuality and aggression are carefully scrutinized, since work in both of these areas has been particularly intensive and rewarding. Certainly, papers on the physiology and psychology of alimentation and water intake would have been appropriate as well as a discussion of such basic drives as exploration. Much work has been done in these fields, and articles and reviews are available. But these deficiencies are compensated, in part, by elegant analyses of maternal and affectional behavior in animals. There is at least the clue that in the monkey physical contact between mother and child is a critical need and that a strange offspring may be reared if this relationship is neglected.

Part III deals with the early socialization of animals, or early experience, and is introduced by a careful analysis of the problem. Attention is directed to the relevance of the sequence or schedule of experience as it intermingles with emerging biological changes. Several studies emphasize the vicissitudes of the initial social bonds, for there seems to be a period of varying length, depending upon the animal, when fear is in abeyance. During this time, the neonate attaches to his mother and, for that matter, to many other substitutes that may be experimentally introduced. one of the intriguing aspects of this period is the time-limited quality that varies from species to species. In man, undoubtedly, the period is much longer; but man, like the chick or puppy, may also have critical periods when he becomes socially imprinted as a _Homo sapiens_. The process of learning who he is and what behavior is appropriate is far more complex in man; but, notwithstanding, the studies of animals imply a specificity in the process that can be studied and understood. Finally, there is even the suggestion that changes in early experience may lead to structural and physiological alterations in the organism.

Part IV is devoted to studies of animals as members of groups and societies. The exploration of individual behavior is perplexing and difficult enough, but the variables are compounded when aggregates are investigated. The several papers in this part illustrate both the naturalistic and more restricted experimental approaches to these problems. The relevance of dominance, territoriality, and family organization is described, amplifying discussions in previous papers. The problem of population and its controls is explored, and factors predisposing to social disintegration are suggested. This is but a limited sample of work in this area, but it does illustrate both the problems and possibilities for imaginative inquiry offered by these techniques.