ABSTRACT
It is generally acknowledged that the environment is complex, subject to change, and that animal life must interface with it behaviorally if it is to survive. Some environmental challenges are so specific and stable across time that they can be met optimally through the commitment of certain well-programmed behaviors to the genome, as exemplified by the studies of the ethologists (Tinbergen, 1951). Other environmental challenges are not sufficiently stable so as to allow for behavioral adaptation to be achieved through specific encoding in the genome. Such challenges are met through the appearance of basic learning processes which enable the organism to form the associations between relatively specific responses and relatively specific stimuli through the relatively well-known procedures of classical and instrumental conditioning. It is clear that genomes might differentially facilitate and/or constrain the tendency to acquire some responses and not others; in the conditioning of these responses, the genome is not dictating the specific sequence or pattern of responding as it is in the case of species-specific behavior of interest to the ethologist. The patterns of responding are, rather, reflections of the contingencies of the conditioning events.
