Introduction to behavior. The history of sciences that drives animals and how to understand them correctly

Throughout his history, a person learned to understand other living beings. And since they cannot tell about themselves in the language available to us, one landmark remains - their behavior. The book of scientific journalist Boris Zhukov is a kind of map of roads that humanity tried to come to understanding this phenomenon. Following the historical canvas, the author considers various theoretical approaches to the study of behavior, complex relationships of various scientific directions with each other and related disciplines (physiology, psychology, theory of evolution, etc), the connection of ideas about behavior with general scientific and global outlooks of one or another era. The development of science is not represented as a simple accumulation of knowledge, but as a “drama of ideas”, a complex and often paradoxical process, where the final conclusions sometimes contradict the original postulates, and wonderful discoveries become the ground for new errors