ABSTRACT

In modern science at any given time, one of the sciences of the organic dominates the field. An umbrella-science can be identified in part by looking at the naming, and the renaming, of university science departments. Biology seems to have triumphed in this way due to the success of cell biology and molecular biology. Zoology, the umbrella-science it replaced, survives as a scientific discipline, but it is no longer the dominant discipline in the area, and it would be possible to show that its questions, procedures, answers, and priorities have all been reoriented by the rise of biology. In a forum on philosophical ethology, it is appropriate to start with ethology. As is well known, the project of ethology originated in the middle decades of the twentieth century, stemming in great part from the work of Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen in studying the behavior of animals.