Douglas Alexander Spalding
Douglas Alexander Spalding (* around 1840 in London , † 1877 ) initially worked in London as a simple worker and later moved to Scotland near Aberdeen . There the philosopher Alexander Bain persuaded the University of Aberdeen to allow Spalding to attend the lectures free of charge. Spalding studied philosophy and literature, but went back to London after a year. Soon he fell ill with tuberculosis and was traveling halfway across Europe in the hope of finding a cure somewhere. In Avignon he met John Stuart Mill and through him Viscount Amberley, the son of the former British Prime Minister Lord John Russell , who hired him in England as a tutor for his son - the young Bertrand Russell .
Spalding carried out some remarkable experiments in the field of animal behavior and described, among other things, a phenomenon ( stamping in , "stamping", "imprinting"), which Oskar Heinroth later (around 1900) called imprinting ; In the German-speaking area, this designation was then made known mainly by Konrad Lorenz and came to the English-speaking area as "imprinting". So Spalding already recognized the importance of the interplay between innate and acquired behavior as well as the benefits of experiments in behavioral research - and in this respect was far ahead of his time.
Today, his work is virtually unknown, even in specialist circles, although the biologist John Burdon Sanderson Haldane made some of his findings available again in the 1950s - apparently to prove that Konrad Lorenz was by no means the sole founder of ethology . William Thorpe wrote in 1979 in The Origins and Rise of Ethology that Spalding had been given the honor of going down in history as the founder of behavioral biology solely because of his untimely death.
literature
- JBS Haldane : Introducing Douglas Spalding. In: British Journal of Animal Behavior. Vol. 2, 1954, pp. 1-11.
- Philip Howard Gray: Spalding and his influence on research in developmental behavior. In: Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. Volume 3, No. 2, 1967, ISSN 0022-5061 , pp. 168-179, doi : 10.1002 / 1520-6696 (196704) 3: 2 <168 :: AID-JHBS2300030205> 3.0.CO; 2-Y .
- Philip Howard Gray: Prerequisite to an analysis of behaviorism: The conscious automaton theory from Spalding to William James. In: Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. Volume 4, No. 4, 1968, pp. 365-376, doi : 10.1002 / 1520-6696 (196810) 4: 4 <365 :: AID-JHBS2300040406> 3.0.CO; 2-O .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Douglas Alexander Spalding: Instinct, with original observations on young animals. In: Macmillan's Magazine. Volume 27, 1873, ZDB -ID 339417-7 , pp. 282-293.
- ↑ Douglas Alexander Spalding: On instinct. In: Nature . Volume 6, No. 154, 1872, pp. 485-486, doi: 10.1038 / 006485a0 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Spalding, Douglas Alexander |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British behaviorist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | around 1840 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | London |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1877 |