Animal Behaviour

"Animal Behaviour" by C. Lloyd Morgan is a scientific publication written in the late 19th century. The work explores various aspects of animal behavior, examining organic responses, consciousness, instinctive and intelligent behaviors, and the evolutionary significance of these reactions. It integrates concepts from biology, psychology, and philosophy to provide insights into how animals interact with their environment. The opening of the book introduces the concept of "behaviour" in a broad context, highlighting how it can be applied to a range of phenomena, from human actions to the movements of atoms and plants. Morgan emphasizes the importance of understanding the conditions that elicit behavior, whether in simple organisms like the Paramecium or in more complex animals. He prepares the reader for a discussion on the organic behavior of cells, corporate behavior among them, and how these lead to the behavior seen in higher animals, setting a foundation for deeper explorations into the evolutionary and conscious aspects of animal behavior. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Conwy Lloyd Morgan, FRS was a British ethologist and psychologist. He is remembered for his theory of emergent evolution, and for the experimental approach to animal psychology now known as Morgan's Canon, a principle that played a major role in behaviourism, insisting that higher mental faculties should only be considered as explanations if lower faculties could not explain a behaviour.