4 PROBLEM OF ONTOGENESIS OF BEHAVIOR

Congenital and acquired in the individual development of behavior

Mental activity can be known only in the process of its development, and therefore the main attention of the zoopsychologist should be drawn to the individual and historical development of animal behavior. This is precisely how VA Wagner understood the study of the mental activity of animals, emphasizing that this study can be strictly scientific only when using two methods that make up unity: ontogenetic, based on comparing facts from the life of an individual, and phylogenetic, based on comparing facts from life kind of. Together, these two methods constitute a single biogenetic method.

In this part, we consider the issues of individual, ontogenetic behavior development; The following part will be devoted to the historical, phylogenetic aspect.

As it was shown, the analysis of any manifestation of mental activity raises primarily the question of innate and acquired components of behavior. But, as the question itself already shows, solving it by necessity involves studying the ontogeny of behavior, which only allows one to judge what the individual inherits from previous generations in a genetically fixed innate form and what it should independently learn in order to acquire an individual experience. Thus, the fundamental question of zoopsychology about instinct and learning in many respects merges with the problem of behavioral ontogenesis.

Ever since the days of Lamarck and Darwin, it has been clear to scientists that the behavior of an adult animal is formed from innate and acquired elements, but their share, relationships and changes in the course of individual development have been the subject of controversy and heated debate. The American zoopsychologist Cloyd-Morgan, for example, gave in his famous book Habit and Instinct, published at the very end of the 19th century, a deep analysis of the problem of congenital and acquired in animal behavior, built entirely on the ontogenetic approach. He wrote that “an activity that is the result of coordinating selected (as a result of individual experience. - KF) 10% of initially incoherent movements is a new product, and this product is the result of assimilation, acquisition, and not inherited as a definite, coordinated actions. As the sculptor creates a statue from a piece of marble, so learning creates an action from the mass of these random movements. Or as the architect builds a cathedral from an uncertain mass of material, choosing the proper parts, giving them shape, connecting them, so the acquisition creates a familiar look from a given number of uncertain movements, choosing, modifying these movements and bringing them into a known relationship. A specific, coordinated, reactive or reactive action is acquired. But, - continues Morgan, - there are well-known actions that are determined from the very day of birth, which are inherited by ready-made and which, immediately after birth, the combination or coordination of them is already characterized by complete perfection. ^[39] As an example of this kind of action, Morgan refers to swimming a young water hen entering the water for the first time, or building a cocoon with a silkworm "without any prior practice or experience." “Definiteness and coordination of actions,” he writes, “in this case are not individual, but borrowed from ancestors.” ^[40]

In contrast to such a comprehensive approach to the problem of ontogenesis of animal behavior, which takes into account both genetically fixed and individually acquired components of it and emphasizes the importance of activity as a leading factor in the selection and modification of congenital elements of behavior along with the maturation of actions that do not need learning, later especially in the 20s – 30s of our century, attempts were repeatedly made to unilaterally address the issue, reducing the whole process of behavioral development to the action of only one of these ATEGORY factors. Thus, G. E. Koghill and Tsin Yang Kuo in America, V. M. Borovsky in the Soviet Union defended the point of view that everything in behavior was acquired, that an animal should learn everything, and even from the embryonic period. This view, in a modified form, and sometimes still occurring today, was a reaction to the overestimation of genetic factors and the underestimation of environmental factors in the ontogeny of animals. Kuo, to whose works we shall return, considered, for example, possible to write about “psychology without heredity”. Borovsky, in presenting his concept, proceeded from the need to fight against the teleological views on the development of organisms, according to which everything in the future life of the organism is predetermined in advance by the originally working internal factors.

The roots of the mechanistic view, which completely negates the presence and role of internal factors in the development of the organism, go to the philosophy of Descartes, who tried to apply the principle of the machine to the behavior of animals. But in the end, such an explanation differs from the teleological one only in that the initially acting driving forces are removed from the organism without.

The modern understanding of the relationship between the innate and acquired in ontogenesis of animal behavior is based on the recognition not only of the presence but also of the interdependence of these components. In contrast to the vulgar-materialistic interpretation, the process of ontogenesis of behavior is revealed to us in all its complexity and inconsistency as a truly dialectical formation of a qualitatively new as a result of quantitative transformations of the primary functional states of a developing organism. Such a dialectical materialist understanding of ontogenesis is characterized, in particular, by P. Anokhin’s theory of systemogenesis.

The interpenetration and various combinations of unconditioned and conditioned-reflex elements in ontogonese behavior prompted L. V. Krushinsky to put forward the thesis of "unitary reactions", by which he means acts of behavior that have a similar external expression in various ways of their formation. According to Krushinsky, unitary reactions are “single, holistic acts of behavior, in which conditional and unconditioned reflexes are combined, integrated,” ^[41] they are directed “to perform a certain act of behavior that has different paths of implementation and at the same time a definite pattern of execution. " ^[42] The ratio of conditioned and unconditioned reflexes in a unitary reaction is not strictly fixed, but it itself is aimed at performing a single adaptive action. During ontogenesis, unitary reactions are integrated, according to Krushinsky, in the form of "multi-act behavior" associated with providing the basic biological needs of the organism. These forms of behavior are not, however, a simple sum of unitary reactions, but have a flexible structure that allows the animal to adapt in the course of its development to the most varied conditions of life.

Biological causation of ontogenesis of animal behavior

The processes occurring during ontogenesis, in many respects, reveal the same regularities as the processes of phylogenesis. To understand the essence of the formation of individual behavior, it is of paramount importance that morphofunctional transformations that characterize the evolution of the animal world play an equally important role in ontogenesis. Thus, the well-known Soviet zoologist B. S. Matveyev showed that at different stages of the ontogeny of vertebrates there are phenomena of changing functions, which will be discussed later. He also deeply analyzed the relationship of the developing organism with the environment and identified important patterns arising from this interaction. Having studied the transformation of the organization of animals at different stages of individual development, Matveyev came to the conclusion that the relations of the organism to environmental conditions undergo significant changes in the course of ontogenesis and at different stages of development organisms adapt to the environment in different ways. Especially in the early stages of ontogeny, far-reaching adaptive restructuring in the morphofunctional sphere is possible. According to Matveyev, the leading ones are functional changes of exosomatic, that is, external, “working” organs, which lead to correlation shifts throughout the body as a single integral system.

These conclusions are of particular importance for the knowledge of the development of mental activity, if we recall that innate motor coordination, instinctive movements are a function of exosomatic organs and are caused by morphological signs.

An important point in determining the course of ontogenesis is the degree of maturity of the animals. The ability to perform life functions independently is to a very different degree expressed in different newborns, which is due to differences in the phylogenetic level and lifestyle. This results in significant differences in the ontogeny of behavior.

The diversity of ontogenesis in different groups of animals is determined even more by the presence or absence of larval forms, which sometimes lead to a completely different way of life, than the mature forms (imago). For the formation of mental reflection in this regard, it is essential that the larval and imaginal forms often move in different ways and generally possess radically different motor abilities. It suffices to recall the corresponding differences between the frog and the tadpole. In the process of metamorphosis, which turns the larva into a mature individual, the most complex transformations of behavior occur. The differences in ontogeny between vertebrates and invertebrates are extremely large. In the latter, the larval stages are common and in most cases the behavior of the larva and the imago has little or even nothing.

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The complexity and diversity of manifestations of the ontogeny of animal behavior makes it extremely difficult to periodize this process. The periodization schemes proposed by different authors are too fractional and are therefore applicable only for certain groups of animals (it is not possible, for example, to observe the stages of the ontogenesis of behavior in animals “in general” by observing the development of a rabbit or a dog).

For this reason, we will refrain from further detailing the periodization of the development of mental activity. We consider the selection of only three major periods: prenatal, early postnatal, and juvenile (game) to be the most appropriate and reflecting decisive milestones in the ontogeny of behavior.

The last period preceding puberty is not found in all animals, but only in those that are characterized by play activity. As will be shown later, this activity plays an exceptionally large role in the ontogenesis of higher animals. As for the game as a criterion of mental development, let us refer to the outstanding researcher of insect behavior, Nobel Prize winner, Austrian scientist K. Frish, who emphasizes that the absence of insect play and its presence in higher vertebrates indicate a significant difference between these groups of animals and evidence of the superiority of inherited forms of behavior in the first and individual experience in the second.

Similarly, obviously, the game acts as a milestone in the ontogenesis of behavior, a more thorough acquaintance with which we, however, begin with the initial, embryonic period.