Behavioral pharmacology

594

ANIMAL

BEHAVIOUR,

acquisition is considered acceptable in these experiments. Shashoua presents a most unusual task for a goldfishto learn to swim upright with a buoyant float attached under its chin. Tritiated erotic acid is administered, and trained fish show a significant increase in labelled RNA in the brain. Puromycin reduces this increase, with a correlated decrement in the performance of the task. This is indeed a drastic treatment to the fish, and certainly involves adjustments in several sensory and motor systems. ‘Memory’ in this instance undoubtedly involves many peripheral as well as central factors. The conclusions of both these papers tend to be somewhat oversirnolified and reductionistic. ‘Memorv’ is confounded with a phenomenon that is far more complex than the word. It is evident that protein synthesis is involved in retention of performance, but it is hard to find any cytoplasmic function in which protein synthesis is not involved. We still seem to be searchine for the enzram. Part IV consists of four chapters on molar aspects of fish behaviour. In a somewhat rambling, instinctivist approach Barlow presents arguments toward a search for behavioural units-fixed action patterns. What makes certain actions unitary and ‘natural’ is not clear. His conclusions show an attempt to reconcile the more rigid aspects of ethology with the discovery that quantitative studies of behaviour reveal extensive variability. Unfortunately, there seems to be no appreciation of the role of development of behaviour, and the discredited dichotomy of nature v. nurture is still central. Some experiments on conditioning of sticklebacks are reported by Sevenster. Essentially, he demonstrates that fish can be conditioned to perform a variety of tasks, some of which seem complex but are actually no more so than many other operants, such as paddle-pushing. In a concise chapter, Hasler summarizes much of the work on homing and sun orientation in fishes. The tinal paper is a summary by Bitterman of the studies coming from his laboratory on reversal and probability conditioning in fishes. Although the qualitative differences in learning between fish and mammals are evident, the evolutionary and developmental factors that underlie these differences need to be explored further. In summary, as is the case with many symposium volumes, there is unevenness in quality and coverage. Much of the material has been published elsewhere. In spite of this, the volume represents a unique compilation of recent advances in the field, especially in the section on vision. It will have a long life as a valuable reference work and source book for any serious student of animal behaviour. WILLIAM

N.

TAVOLGA

Ecological Adaptations to Breeding in Birds. By DAVID LACK. London: Methuen (1969). Price 84s. This is not so much a book as an extended scientific paper. It is also a further round in a polemical duel, mainly between Dr Lack and his supporters and Professor Wynne-Edwards and his supporters, that many people will now feel has been carried about as far as is usefully possible using the present weapons. The weapons may briefly be described as bombardment by enormous mounds of facts. The dispute is about whether, as WynneEdwards claims, animal populations are controlled by self-balancing behavioural devices, or, as Lack reioins. purely by adaptations basically operated by food supply: Wvnne-Edwards would agree that food is the basic controlling factor,. but safs that in many animals the self-balancing devices come into play to forestall the

17,

3

ultimate arbitrament of hunger. Lack, on the other hand, says that this involves group selection, which is impossible, because we know that inheritance is in fact by individuals. However, one cannot help feeling that this is one of the arguments where both sides are right in some degree and wrong in some degree. The solution will probably be found in the direction of further work on the adaptive significance of social and solitary habits; will somebody please look more closely at the relationship between Wynne-Edwards’s supposed group selection (the term is his opponents’ rather than his own) and the entirely respectable (from the point of view of orthodox Darwinians) adaptive value of animals living socially? This extended introduction is necessary to explain why David Lack has found it necessary to read through the enormous amount of literature and review, most valuably, the breeding adaptations of the class Aves as a whole. Though one may feel it is flogging a dead horse to go to all this trouble to establish the adaptive value of all all these aspects of a bird’s breeding cycle, nesting dispersion, the pair bond, clutch size and so forth, the value of the work when done is undoubted. It shows that the amateurs who over the past hundred years have been steadily amassing facts about birds as and when they came across them have not by any means been wasting their time. Indeed, they have not done enough of it, for there are many birds and even whole families for which our information is sketchy in the extreme. David Lack has nroduced an invaluable source-book. in the course of providing himself with a large pile of &nmunition wherewith to bombard the Wynne-Edwards School. R. S. R. FIITER Behavioral

Pharmacology. By T. THOMPSON & C. R. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall Inc., New Jersey. (1968). Price: $10.50. This is an excellent, pragmatic text which brings to the student and research worker a clear statement of the potential and the aims of this relatively new, but very active field of behavioural pharmacology. Such a text was surely needed by teachers and students both in psychology and in pharmacology. The authors are realistic in recognizing that ‘it would be misleading to suggest that a &fled-discipline concerned with the behavioral actions of drugs has already evolved’. They have instead tried to present the important variables inherent in any study of the effects of drugs on animal behaviour. In recognizing the potential complexity of these relationships, one may hope that experimenters will strive to uncover the lawfulness of such relationships and will not be satisfied merely to observe interesting drug effects. The text consists of 297 pages divided into five sections. with a glossary of technic& terms, bibliography and index. Section I consists of a short introduction justifying the existence of behavioural pharmacology as a basic science. Section II presents very briefly, in chapter 2, the pharmacological principles of drug action. Chapter 3 is a short introduction to the classification of the major groups of behaviourally active drugs. The student should be recommended to pharmacological texts for more detailed information. Section III includes chapters on the principles of experimental analysis of behaviour and the classification of behaviour. These chapters reflect the influence of Skinner’s descriptive behaviourism on the authors and serve SCHUSTER.

BOOK

REVIEWS

as a very useful rCsumC of the achievements of these methods of behavioural analysis. There can be no doubt that the authors feel that the methods of descriotive behaviourism provide the most satisfactory and sensitive baseline for drug studies and an increasing number of research workers will agree with them. Starting with this assumption in Section IV they consider--with a well-chosen sample of exoeriments. how the’methods lend themselves to an analysis of drug action both in animals and man. Chapter 7 which discusses drug environment interactions is most useful. It is becoming increasingly clear that the effect of a given drun on an oruanism is not a static and oredictable response. The r&ponse can be influenced by variables inside the organism and also by environmental variables, which may in themselves control the ongoing behaviour. It is one thing to recognize this fact and another to have sufficient co&o1 over-the behaviour to be able to isolate and assessthe contribution of these variables to the total drug-behaviour relationship. It may be that this task can only be undertaken with the behavioural methods nioneered bv B. F. Skinner. The authors make a con-;--:----~ vmcmg case,*for this point of view and illustrate it with detailed descriptions of some of the most elegant experiments in the &Id. Section V of the book contains appendices on pharmacology and behaviour in which the hardware of the subject is briefly described and illustrated. This is essentially a methodological text and the bibliography is accordingly limited. However the experiments cited to illustrate methodological points have been chosen with care and also serve to acquaint the reader with some of the achievements of behavioural pharmacology. The text is technically well presented with many clear drawings well correlated with the text. In conmatulatine the authors on this excellent book I can do no better than repeat part of Dr Brady’s foreword : ‘This book is a concrete example of how rapidly behavioral pharmacology is progressing beyond the uncriticial acceptance of interesting demonstrations involving “drug effects upon behaviour”. The systematic ordering of data, involving parametric analysis of functional relationshrps, is now a recognized requirement for the practice of tha new science. The present volume clearly bears the hallmark of a growing sophistication. Indeed the dilettantes of the early psychopharmacological research are giving way to a hard core of interdisciplinary scientists preparing for the difficult but rewarding task of systematically investigating the many complicated interrelationships that characterize the drug behaviour S. D. IVERSEN Ethology of Mammals. By R. F. EWER. London: Logos Press Ltd (1968). Price 130s. Dr Ewer sets out to review the behaviour of mammals, and on the basis of what is known to reappraise ‘the validity of ethological concepts as applied to this group’. The preface and the first chapter are taken up with an introduction to the author’s aims and some discussion of ethological concepts. The following ten chapters are concerned with one of each of the major aspects of behaviour such as expression and communication, fighting, courtship and mating, etc. The final two chapters return to a discussion of ethological theories and mammalian behaviour in more general terms. There is a useful glossary of common names, and both an author and a subiect index. There are a few excellent photographs and a small number of line drawings,

595

It is clear from the outset that Dr Ewer is first and foremost concerned with the adaptiveness of behaviour and with its evolution, and hand-in-hand with this approach goes discussion of the manner in which the individuals of a species come by their behaviour patterns. This leads to the familiar division of behaviour into innate and learned. The author is using this dichotomy in the sense that Lorenz does, namely of ‘sources of information’ for adaptedness. ‘Innate’ behaviour thus means that which has been acquired by the species in evolution and which depends on a neural mechanism elaborated during natural selection (which may or may not be acted on by environmental influences during the ontogeny) and ‘learnt’ behaviour that which has been acquired as a result of specific experience by the individual. Having explained her distinction between these two the author-then lets the reader lose sight, for the most part, of the role of the environment in interacting with the genetically coded patterns to produce ‘innate’ behaviour. As discussion of the relative roles of ‘innate and ‘learnt’ behaviour are encountered throughout the book one can easily slip into thinking of a ‘genetic’ v. ‘learnt’ dichotomy which is not intended or desirable. There is a further point which may lead to confusion. The first chapter introduces the term Fixed Action Pattern as denoting the ‘built-in’ patterns common to all members of the species on which individuals base their behaviour. However the term is perhaps more familiar as a category in the classification of patterns of muscle contraction according to the type of control system (i.e. central v. peripheral) used during the actual performance of the behaviour and this seems to be the definition implied in chapter 12. The bulk of the book, namely chapters 2 to 11 inclusive, is largely descriptive and covers a great deal of ground, both in terms of behaviour and of species. Of course, no one aspect of behaviour can be covered really comprehensively in a single chapter, but it seems a pity that the author has omitted, albeit apologetically, any detailed consideration of the primates. While she does provide reference in the preface to some of the recent books in this group, her policy seems to knock in a little further the wedge which is, unfortunately, being driven between this order and the rest of the class. Nevertheless, Dr Ewer brings together a wealth of information, and has included a good deal of personal observation on the behaviour of animals that she has kept. The German literature is widely referred to. Students of animal behaviour may be disappointed to find rather little discussion of many of the basic principles of this science, and little reference to work which has examined and reviwed these critically. Nonspecialist readers will be left in ignorance of many of the problems which are involved and of the differing schools of thought they have aroused. Furthermore, comparisons with other classes are rarely made, and for instance, the discussion of the complexity of motivation to which mammals are subject may mislead the reader into supposing that these are the only class in which such complexities are manifest. However, Dr Eewer unifies the whole text with her main theme of the adaptedness and evolution of mammalian behaviour and indeed, this is what the book is really about. The author’s views are obviously strongly held and sometimes vehemently expressed, but her writing is extremely readable throughout. This expensive but well produced book demonstrates the variety and complexity of mammalian behaviour most successfully, It will be a source of fascination for