Conwy Lloyd Morgan, Methodology, and the Origins of Comparative Psychology.

The British biologist, philosopher, and psychologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan is widely regarded as one of the founders of comparative psychology. He is especially well known for his eponymous canon, which aimed to provide a rule for the interpretation of mind from behavior. Emphasizing the importance of the context in which Morgan was working-one in which casual observations of animal behavior could be found in Nature magazine every week and psychology itself was fighting for scientific legitimacy-I provide an account of Morgan's vision for the comparative psychologist qua professional psychologist. To this end, I explore the important connection between Morgan and the evolutionary theorist, philosopher, and psychologist Herbert Spencer. It is from Spencer, I contend, that Morgan inherited a number of his key epistemological and methodological concerns about the nascent science of comparative psychology. This extends all the way to the canon, which only works as intended when paired with a Spencerian understanding of mental evolution as a progressive linear sequence. Far from being an incidental residue of a pre-Darwinian time, hierarchy was intentionally built into the very core of Morgan's scientific comparative psychology.

William Timberlake: An Ethologist's Psychologist.

William Timberlake was one of several psychologists who, in the wake of traditional learning theory, aimed to develop an improved theoretical basis for the study of learning via greater incorporation of ecology and evolution. In this short biography, I place Timberlake's varied work in historical context. Originally trained as a neoHullian behaviorist, Timberlake sought to integrate the laboratory approach and methodological rigor of behaviorism, with the ethologist's interest in the animal as such. Starting at Indiana University in 1969, he stayed there his entire professional career, where he was one of the founders of the university's internationally recognized Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior. He is best known for his behavior systems theory, which characterizes animal behavior as an evolved complex hierarchically organized system. Timberlake has also made diverse contributions to the study of reinforcement, explanations of superstitious behavior and misbehavior, and the understanding of circadian rhythms and their modification, among other areas.