John Crook (zoologist)
John Hurrell Crook (born November 27, 1930 in Southampton ; † July 16, 2011 in Somerset , England ) was a British behavioral scientist and a pioneer of sociobiology in the early 1970s . In addition to his zoological studies, he worked as a teacher of Chan or Zen Buddhism.
Career
After studying zoology at the University of Southampton , John Crook worked for his doctoral thesis from 1955 to 1958 at the University of Cambridge under Robert Hinde and William Thorpe on weaver birds . For this purpose, he carried out extensive field observations in India and the Seychelles and came to the conclusion that the behavior of the animals is shaped to a large extent by the environment and - unlike at the time mainly represented by Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen - less by innate trigger mechanisms ; that made him a trailblazerBehavioral ecology . He later studied various species of African monkeys, and from the early 1960s Crook taught behavioral science at the Faculty of Psychology in Bristol .
In 1970 John Crook wrote a pioneering publication in which he contrasted traditional comparative behavioral research with a new kind of “behavioral research on social systems”, which had to focus less on the behavior of individuals and instead on social groups and the behavior of their members to one another. Five years before Edward O. Wilson's book Sociobiology , he pointed the way to the new field of research sociobiology .
After his retirement he concentrated more on his interests in Zen Buddhism and led expeditions to the Himalayas and Ladakh , among other things . Together with Stamati Crook he analyzed, among other things, the polyandry of the Tibetans from an ecological point of view.
Fonts
- Social Behavior in Birds and Mammals. Essays on the Social Ethology of Animals and Man. Academic Press, London 1970.
- The Evolution of Human Consciousness. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1980.
- World Crisis and Buddhist Humanism: End Games - Collapse or Renewal of Civilization. New Age Books, 2009, ISBN 978-81-7822-325-4
Web links
- John Hurrell Crook, 1930-2011. Obituary on bris.ac.uk from July 20, 2011
Individual evidence
- ↑ John Crook obituary. Scientist who studied animal behavior and Buddhist humanism. Obituary on: guardian.co.uk , 23 August 2011.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Crook, John |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Crook, John Hurrell (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British behavioral scientist, teacher of Chan and Zen Buddhism |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 27, 1930 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Southampton |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 16, 2011 |
| Place of death | Somerset |