Theory of Evolution By Natural Selection and The Beginnings of Ethology
Because ethology is considered a topic of biology, ethologists have been concerned particularly with the evolution of behaviour and the understanding of behaviour in terms of the theory of natural selection. In one sense, the first modern ethologist was Charles Darwin, whose book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, influenced many ethologists. He pursued his interest in behaviour by encouraging his protégé George Romanes, who investigated animal learning and intelligence using an anthropomorphic method, anecdotal cognitivism, that did not gain scientific support.
Other early ethologists, such as Oskar Heinroth and Julian Huxley, instead concentrated on behaviours that can be called instinctive, or natural, in that they occur in all members of a species under specified circumstances. Their beginning for studying the behaviour of a new species was to construct an ethogram (a description of the main types of natural behaviour with their frequencies of occurrence). This provided an objective, cumulative base of data about behaviour, which subsequent researchers could check and supplement.
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