Afterword: Learning, Adaptation, and the Lessons of O

Abstract

In 1956, the insect ethologist W.H. Thorpe in a book entitled Learning and Instinct in Animals defined learning as “that process which manifests itself by adaptive change in behavior as a result of experience.” The definition was both widely accepted and widely criticized. On one hand, it was embraced by ethologists as prominent as Konrad Lorenz (cf. Lorenz, 1965) and, until the most recent edition, was the definition of choice in Alcock’s deservedly best-selling textbook on animal behavior. On the other hand, the definition was criticized by anthropologists and behavioral biologists alike on the grounds that defining learning as adaptive behavioral change undermined efforts to evaluate the evolution of learning ((Stenhouse, 1973; Hailman, 1985; Goodall, 1986; Papaj and Prokopy, 1989). While it is possible that learned behavior is the result of adaptive evolutionary change, these critics argued, Thorpe’s definition amounted to presuming the hypothesis of learning as adaptation to be true before it was validated.