ranch of behavior study commonly called ethology, which can be defined succinctly as the biology of behavior, has a special right to claim Charles Darwin as its patron saint" (p. xi).
Lorenz observes that patterns of behavior characterize individual species and evolve through the process of natural selection in the same ways that are typified by physical characteristics:
The adaptation of the behavior patterns of an organism to its environment is achieved in exactly the same manner as that of its organs, that is to say on the basis of information which the species has gained in the course of its evolution by the age-old method of mutation and selection (p. xiii).
Cognition plays as vital a role in the natural selection process as do genes. As Jerry A. Fodor (1985) observes, "Prejudiced and wishful seeing makes for dead animals" (p. 2); animals that cannot learn to think their way out of a dangerous situation do not live to reproduce new generations. From this perspective, behavior can be studied in precisely the same way as physical attributes.
Biological observation provides science with its first, easiest way of studying the behavior of all kinds of living organisms, from simple viruses to complex human beings. J. E. R. Staddon (1983) writes, "Organisms are machines designed by their evolution to play a certain role" (p. 1). Evolutionary design, especially in more complicated beings, includes a mixture of innate and learned behavior, and "there is no neat dichotomy between 'learned' versus innate' behavior" (p. 2). While science once believed that every aspect of biological development, from hair color to a preference for green vegetables, was a matter of genes, biologists have since proved a more epigenetic view.
Staddon (1983) spells out the concept of epigenesis, "the now well-accepted idea that development is the outcome of continuous interactions between a genetically encoded program and the environ...