An Evolutionary Psychology

Darwin treated both behavior and awareness as integral parts of animal life and as subject to the same evolutionary pattern of variation and selection as all other aspects of the living world. He rejected his friend Huxley's theory of animals as automata, and he believed not only that animals had mental states but that these states could be known through a combination of observation, experiment, and ecological analysis. Darwin did not explicitly develop the core ideas of ecological psychology, the concepts of ecological resources for behavior and awareness, but he came surprisingly close to doing so. Many of the ideas discussed in this chapter are, at the very least, implicit throughout his work on behavior and evolution. Moreover, Darwin invented several basic experimental procedures for analyzing how animals regulate their encounters with their surroundings. It is this Darwin, the experimental behaviorist and evolutionist, who is surprisingly still unknown, more than a century after his death. This chapter reviews his studies on earthworm activities and awareness to gain an overview of his efforts at creating an experimental and evolutionary science of behavior.