ABS History of the Society
A Guide to the Records of the Animal Behavior Society (1965-1994)
by Martin W. Schein
December, 1994
Introduction
In 1985, the Smithsonian Institution Archives agreed to house and maintain the Archives of the Animal Behavior Society as part of its 'Manuscripts Collections' series. Thereafter, some 33 cartons of documents, records, photographs, papers, and even a videotape were sent to the Institution during the 7 year span from 1985 through 1992. These cartons contained materials that had accumulated in the offices of or were generated by various Society officers and Committee Chairpersons since the late 1940s, and they detail the efforts of a great number of people who devoted time and energy to the establishment and sustenance of the Animal Behavior Society as we now know it. My job was to organize the materials into some semblance of order so as to make them more accessible to future historians. At the same time, in the interest of preservation the materials were transferred to 'safer' (acid-free) boxes and folders, and potentially damaging items (paper clips, rubber bands) were removed.
Obviously not every scrap of paper connected with the Society has been rescued from obscurity nor from the trash basket. Many papers from a number of early contributors have been lost forever or have yet to be sent to the Smithsonian Archives. Thus, the collection documented here is far from complete. Still, the materials listed in this Guide should be sufficient to convey to a researcher a sense of the conception, organization, growth and development of a scientific society.
Accumulating the archives of a vibrant and ongoing entity is an open-ended process. Therefore, the establishment of a cut-off point is purely arbitrary and dependent upon the whim of the archivist on the scene at the moment. In 1990, the Animal Behavior Society crossed the quarter-century threshold; it is now solidly established as a major member of the community of scientific societies. Thus, the year 1990 seemed appropriate as the formal cut-off point for this first collection of materials. But while 1990 was indeed a convenient cut-off target, 1993 and then 1994 became more realistic. Thus, while the bulk of the current collection pre-dates 1990, the collection includes materials dated as late as 1994.
The early Giants are going or gone; new Giants are now being established and will lead the field in the quarter-century to follow. Perhaps 25 years from now, some recently retired 1990s activist will endeavor to assemble, organize and list the ABS reports, papers, documents, TV tapes and computer printouts from the 1990s thru 20-something. I wish her/him well.
M. W. ScheinWashington, D.C.
December, 1994
Historical Background
On December 27, 1964, in the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Montreal, Canada, at 4:00 PM, an ad hoc organizational committee was called to order by John Paul Scott (Jackson Memorial Laboratories, Bar Harbor, Maine) and the establishment of a new society, to be known as the Animal Behavior Society (ABS), was formally proposed. James A. Braddock (Michigan State University) recorded the minutes of the meeting. The first order of business was to consider a draft Constitution for the new society, and to move the contents article by article. Each item was discussed in detail, but with the final adoption of the Constitution the Society was formally established; the Animal Behavior Society was born. The following day, 28 December 1964, the new society convened its first official meeting; it drew breath and uttered its first official healthy cries.
As with any organism, the actual birth was the almost inevitable consequence of a sequence of prior events akin to courtship, conception, and gestation. While it may be difficult to pinpoint the actual moment of conception (or indeed, as is so often the case, identify the actual parents), intrauterine development could be clearly detected long before the 1963 AAAS winter meetings in Cleveland, when various committees were established to prepare for the birth of the new organization.
The uterus in this case was commodious: one horn belonged to the Ecological Society of America (ESA) and housed an embryo called the Section on Animal Behavior and Sociobiology (SOABS) which had been conceived in 1956; the other horn belonged to the American Society of Zoologists (ASZ) and housed a twin called the Division of Animal Behavior (DAB), conceived in 1958. The twins shared common head and therefore functioned as one organism.
It was under the auspices of this awkward but unified organism that the gestational pre-ABS committees were established. Among other jobs, their various tasks were to prepare a constitution, see to liaisons with related organizations and prepare for the business affairs of the new organization. But of course it should be recognized that even these gestational committees were themselves natural consequences of many precedent events. Thus, while the present Guide covers the first 25± years of the Animal Behavior Society (1965-1992), materials in the archive collection actually date back to 1948 so as to include the society's immediate ancestors.
The genealogy of the combined ESA Section/ASZ Division can be readily traced back to an informal ad hoc group that J. P. Scott and his colleagues convened at Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1947, following a postwar (1946) Bar Harbor conference on Genetics and Social Behavior (supported by a grant from Rockefeller Foundation). One of the outcomes of the conference was the formation of the Committee for the Study of Animal Societies Under Natural Conditions, (CSASUNC) [24,1] which was a direct precursor of the ABS.
Who were the people who made up that very informal group, the CSASUNC? They represented diverse disciplines and widely divergent backgrounds, and their names are legend: Frank Beach (University of California, Berkeley) and C. Ray Carpenter (Pennsylvania State University), psychology; John Fuller and J. Paul Scott [43,2; 1,2] (both at Bar Harbor), genetics; Nicholas E. Collias [43,8] (University of California at Los Angeles), John B. Calhoun (National Institutes of Health), and John T. Emlen [43,4; 1,13] (University of Wisconsin), ecology; and Theodore C. Schneirla (American Museum of Natural History, NY), polymath, to mention but a few. And some worked at places other than Chicago or New York. Behind them stood such greats as Tolman, Lillie, Allee [43,1], Dice, Emerson, Noble, and others...a truly distinguished academic ancestry.
As Collias points out, the University of Chicago and the American Museum of Natural History in New York were the major centers of research activity in ethology and sociobiology during the 1930s and 40s. Warder Clyde Allee and Alfred E. Emerson, both social biologists and behavioral ecologists, were in Chicago's Department of Zoology. Other Chicago faculty whose work has had very important implications for animal behavior included Sewall Wright (genetics), Thomas Park (population biology), Carl Moore (endocrinology) and Paul Weiss (neuroembryology). A number of the original founders of the Animal Behavior Society got their doctoral training at the University of Chicago, including J. Paul Scott, A. M. Guhl [43,3; 1,8] (Kansas State University), N. E. Collias (UCLA), E. B. Hale [43,9] (Pennsylvania State University), J. C. Braddock (Michigan State University) and Benson Ginsburg (University of Chicago).
The other major center of animal behavior research was the Department of Animal Behavior in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. This department was founded by G. K. Noble around 1928 as the Department of Experimental Biology. Noble, a naturalist and all around zoologist, had done graduate study at Harvard where he was an assistant to Thomas Barbour; he later earned a Ph.D. at Columbia. His 1931 book, The Biology of Amphibia, was a classic and served as a model for studies in comparative biology, including behavior. After Noble's death in 1940, his successors as curators of the renamed Department of Animal Behavior were F. A. Beach, T. C. Schneirla, and L. R. Aronson [43,5; 1,9]. Beach, who got his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Chicago, had developed a strong interest in behavior as related to hormones and the nervous system as a post-doctoral scholar in Karl Lashley's laboratory at Harvard. Schneirla was trained in psychology at the University of Michigan, where he pioneered in experiments on maze learning in ants and later spent much time in field studies of army ants in the New World tropics. Aronson obtained his Ph.D. on the neurobiology of mating behavior of frogs from New York University under the direction of Noble, an Adjunct Professor there. From its beginning, the Department of Animal Behavior at the American Museum strongly emphasized comparative physiology and the psychology of reproductive behavior.
Thus, the meeting ground for the original CSASUNC members was a common interest in what and why animals do what they do, and an earnest hope that an understanding of non-human social systems could be used to alleviate human social problems. Some of the CSASUNC papers survive, and are included here [24,1; 44,1,2]. As Scott pointed out, he and the others in the original group spent their formative years in the midst of massive social failures: the shadow of the Great Depression, with the Sino-Japanese and Spanish Civil wars in full swing and World War II clearly on the way. Is it any wonder, then, that some scientists hoped that science might be able to contribute meaningfully to the solution of social problems? Shouldn't it be possible to solve social problems by the application of biological techniques and concepts to social behavior and social organization?
Again under the leadership of J. Paul Scott, the CSASUNC organized an important conference in 1948 on Methodology and Techniques in New York under the joint sponsorship of the New York Zoological Society and the New York Academy of Sciences. The published proceedings of the meeting (Annals NY Acad. Sci., 51, 1950) quickly became a significant sourcebook for those working in the field because it emphasized the importance of individual recognition and offered ideas on how this seemingly simple task might be accomplished. The 1948 meeting was also jointly sponsored by the ESA and the ASZ, and thereby constitutes the first official recognition by these organizations of animal behavior as an emerging discipline.
The ad hoc and informal CSASUNC quickly gravitated towards a more formal structure, if only to establish a mechanism for regularly scheduled meetings at which invited and contributed papers could be presented and ideas discussed. At the same time, the Committee strove to broaden its membership base to include all who might share its aims and goals. Since many of its members were also members of the ESA, the ASZ and/or the American Psychological Association (APA), and since these established entities met annually under the umbrella auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), it was natural that the CSASUNC moved towards these societies when it sought a "home" for meetings. Both the ESA and the ASZ were receptive to the idea and thereafter an ESA/ASZ jointly sponsored session on Animal Behavior and Sociobiology became a regular feature at the annual meetings of the parent societies.
The session usually lasted about a half day, at which perhaps 8 or 9 papers were presented. The programs were well attended and discussions lively. The success of these sessions led to the establishment (in 1952) of a standing committee on Animal Behavior and Sociobiology within the ESA, while an informal companion committee operated within the ASZ. The ESA Standing Committee was the next stage in the evolution of the CSASUNC, which thereafter ceased to exist as an entity: it had accomplished its mission and simply faded away. "Faded away" is perhaps not quite the proper terminology; it would be more appropriate to use such words as "transformed" or "evolved".
It didn't take long for things to get complicated. The American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) was created around 1949, and within a year or so organized its own set of "umbrella" meetings to which the various biological societies were invited. The major attraction of the AIBS meetings was twofold: a summer meeting was far more convenient for many people than the usual post-Christmas timing; also, summer meetings could be held on University campuses so that costs to participants would be considerably cheaper than the big city hotel rates suffered by AAAS attendees. In 1951 the ESA chose to meet with the AIBS in the summer, while the ASZ chose to stay with AAAS. The behaviorists were faced with a choice: go with ESA and Summer, stay with ASZ and Winter, or compromise and lean on the APA for meeting space in the Fall. Actually, since most of our participants were not APA members, it boiled down simply to a winter-summer choice...and the members chose both. Now, there were two sets of important behavior meetings per year, and just as well since the number of papers contributed began to rise at a pleasantly alarming rate. Also, members could attend whichever meeting was geographically closest (thereby cutting travel costs) and therefore attend at least one good meeting a year.
It was not long before the half day meeting developed into a full day and then into two day sessions. A summer 1954 full-day symposium on Social Organization of Animals in honor of W.C. Allee, who was at that time in Gainesville, FL, where the meetings were being held, was a standing-room-only smash hit. Both the ESA and the ASZ recognized that with the burgeoning interest in behavior studies it was only a matter of time before there would be a move to splinter off a new society. This was especially true since a number of participants at the summer meetings were not members of the ESA (nor were those at winter meetings members of ASZ); the rumblings were getting louder. However, splintering was distasteful to many: the fragmentation of biology was already a problem, since no one fragment by itself was strong enough to carry political clout. Therefore, the ESA constitution was carefully examined and a mechanism to avoid splintering was discovered. "Sections" could be established within the ESA, and except for collecting dues and handling money, the Sections could operate quite autonomously within the framework of the parent society; a Section could arrange its own program and would be entitled to have its abstracts published in the ESA Bulletin. It seemed like an ideal arrangement for behaviorists: all the rights and privileges of ESA membership and at the same time visibility as an organized entity with a fair degree of independence. Lee R. Dice, of the University of Michigan and past president of the ESA, offered much encouragement and advice on the establishment of the Section. On the basis of historical events, he predicted that eventually the animal behavior group would break off into a separate society, but the prior experience of operating as a Section would prove beneficial to the subsequent Society. Accordingly, with the blessing and encouragement of the ESA Executive Committee, the ESA Committee on Animal Behavior and Sociobiology held an organizational meeting during the 1956 AIBS meeting at the University of Connecticut, Storrs; about a dozen or so persons were in attendance. The first order of business was to elect officers: J. P. Scott was elected Chairman, A. M. Guhl, Vice-Chairman, and, since I was the youngest present and also seemed to be the only one with paper and pencil at hand, I was elected Secretary [1,3; 24,2]. That done, attention was turned next to the adoption of a set of by-laws. This was a fairly simple matter [24,3] since all that had to be done was to modify slightly the existing by-laws of the Western Section. The meeting was then adjourned and Scott reported our actions to the ESA Executive Committee. They in turn formally recognized the Section, welcomed him to the Executive Committee (the Chairperson of a Section automatically became a member of the Executive Committee of the Society), and the Section of Animal Behavior and Sociobiology, ESA, was now formally in existence. Many early papers of the Section are preserved in Boxes 1, 2, 24 and 28 of these archives; especially pertinent are A. M. Guhl's papers [28,1,2,3].
Within a few months, the Section boasted a membership of over 200 which grew steadily to over 300 before the year was out [44,3]. Since membership in the ESA was a prerequisite to Section membership, potential members who were not ESA members were asked to first join the ESA, at least in the "Associate" category; Associate membership in the ESA cost only $2/year, and while it did not entitle the member to receive the ESA journal, Ecology, it did entitle them to receive Newsletters, the ESA Bulletin (in which animal behavior abstracts were printed), and to participate in meetings and present papers. It was a bargain and attracted into the ESA another 100 or so individuals interested in the Section.
A major task facing the Section was to find a real publication outlet for behavioral papers. It was true that as a recognized Section we were entitled to name a member to the Editorial Board of Ecology, but that journal simply couldn't handle the volume of behavior papers that were forthcoming. A Publication Committee was appointed, under the Chairmanship of L. R. Aronson, and it explored two ideas: the first was to create a new American journal devoted exclusively to papers in animal behavior; the second was to consider the possibility of linking with the existing journal, the British Journal of Animal Behaviour, which was the publication outlet of the British Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Since the cost of creating a new journal was found to be prohibitive, we redoubled our efforts to join forces with our British cousins to support their journal [1,1,5]. The net result was the new journal, Animal Behaviour, [43,97] which began publication in 1958 under the joint auspices of the British Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour and our Section; D. E. Davis [43,43] (Pennsylvania State University) was named American Associate Editor. Thus, the publication-outlet problem was solved, which to many was a major accomplishment.
Nineteen-fifty-eight was a landmark year for still another interesting development: the formal establishment of a Division of Animal Behavior within the ASZ [2,1]. As was the case two years earlier with the ESA Executive Committee, the ASZ Executive Committee also worried about splintering and could foresee a number of small (and therefore politically weak) zoological societies. To forestall and perhaps even preempt the splintering, ASZ leaders such as C. Ladd Prosser, H. Burr Steinbach, P. Sears Crowell and others engineered changes in the ASZ Constitution that permitted the creation of ASZ Divisions much like ESA Sections. Thus, the ASZ Division of Animal Behavior was established at the Xmas meetings in 1958. Box 2 in this archive collection contains many papers relating to the establishment of the ASZ Division of Animal Behaviour.
The bylaws of the ASZ Division [2,2; 24,3] were exactly the same as those of the ESA Section and so were the officers, so that Section/Division officers were at once on the Executive Committees of both parent societies. Niceties aside, though, abstracts could now be published also in American Zoologist and behavioral representation on the Editorial Board of the new ASZ publication was forthcoming. This paid off, of course, and resulted in the publication of some of the meeting symposia. The Evolution of External Constructions by Animals (Amer. Zool., 1964) serves as a case in point; the 1963 symposium, dedicated to A. E. Emerson, included papers on the evolution of spider webs (B. J. Kaston), caddis worm cases and nests (H. H. Ross), termite nests (R. S. Schmidt, who was a doctoral student of Emerson's), nests of bees (C. D. Michener) and bird nests (N. E. Collias). Prior to that, during the December 1959 AAAS meeting in Chicago, The Section/Division joined forces with the American Psychiatric Association to arrange and sponsor a several-day-long symposium entitled "Roots of Behavior." The 23 papers presented were grouped into categories that included Behavior Genetics, Instinct, Early Experience and Social Behavior. They were published in 1962 as the very successful and influential volume Roots of Behavior, edited by Eugene Bliss, with contributions from Section/Division members Jerry Hirsch [43,19], Vincent Dethier, J. Paul Scott, Stuart Altmann [43,21], Daniel Lehrman, Jan C. Bruell, C. Ray Carpenter, John Fuller, Harry F. Harlow, William C. Dilger [43,7], David E. Davis and others. That volume sold out and was reprinted at least once, about 1969.
The combined Section/Division was a viable and strong organization. At the 1962 summer meeting at Oregon State University, the secretary reported a membership of nearly 1000 [3,10; 44,8]; Collias was elected Chairman, E. B. Hale, Vice-Chairman, and John A. King [43,14] (Michigan State University), Secretary. Terms of the officers were to run until the end (instead of mid-summer) of 1964 because of the August 1963 meeting of the International Congress of Zoology in Washington, D.C. But this was the same period of time in which the initial plans were laid for the establishment of a new and independent group, the Animal Behavior Society [24,11].
The problems created by an identical ESA Section/ASZ Division were minimal at the outset and could be easily glossed over. Actually, most Section/Division members were members of and active in both parent organizations anyway, but there was concern about what would happen if a chairperson was elected who was not a member of one or the other parent organization (since by the By-laws this individual had to sit on the governing councils of the parent organizations). The problem was resolved, most informally, by agreeing that if in the future the chairperson were not a member of a parent society, he or she could delegate another member of the Executive Committee to represent the Section/Division on the governing council. This arrangement worked fairly well at the outset but proved more and more difficult to manage with each passing year.
By the early 60s, the problems inherent in a dual Section/Division arrangement could no longer be casually ignored. Operating funds, which came from both the ESA and the ASZ, were generally adequate, but there was still a large cadre of behaviorists "out there" who did not find themselves comfortable being forced into the ecologist or zoologist mold. They were psychologists, anthropologists, entomologists, poultry scientists, and a host of "ists" other than pure zoologists or ecologists. Some, like L. R. Aronson, identified themselves as "animal behaviorists", a label that previously had rarely if ever been used to describe a primary area of interest. By 1963, it was apparent that the Section/Division structure was too restricting, too cumbersome, and it was time to consider the establishment of a new and completely independent Society [28,4,5].
Responding to rumblings from the membership, especially those with little if any primary interests in the ESA or the ASZ, Chairman Collias and Vice-Chairman Hale contacted all present and previous and officers of the Section-Division to ascertain their feelings regarding the establishment of a new and completely independent society. Finding them unanimously in favor of the idea, Collias [28,4] appointed them all to an ad hoc committee to consider the pros and cons of such a move. A public announcement of the proposal was published in the Section/Division Newsletter [44,9], inviting public discussion at the forthcoming winter (1963) meeting in Cleveland. As Collias reports, the discussion and business meeting at Cleveland was one of the best attended in the Society's history, and the mere size of the audience (which filled a large dining room) demonstrated the general interest in a potential new society. Many of the leading students of animal behavior in America were present and for an hour all listened carefully to the various opinions expressed, both for and against the idea of a new animal behavior society. The outcome was encouragement to continue exploring the desirability of a new society and a mandate to canvass the entire membership by mail. This was done, and the results of the survey were published in a later Newsletter [44,10]; they showed a strong majority in favor of an independent society, so the stage was set to initiate the creative process at the summer (1964) AIBS meeting of the Section-Division at the University of Colorado, Boulder [4,12] and to formally establish a new society at the winter (1964) AAAS meeting in Montreal, Canada [4,14]. And so the final steps in the creative process were generated.
While the organizational body underwent a number of transformations throughout the past 35 or so years, the original objectives as spelled out in the various by-laws and in the present Constitution [20,3] survived the several incarnations. They are as fresh and as pertinent today as they were when first formulated in the late '40s: "to promote and encourage the biological study of animal behavior in the broadest sense, using both descriptive and experimental methods under natural and controlled conditions." The people who contributed much time and effort to the workings of the society from 1956 through 1990 are listed in spreadsheets [24,4; 25,2] and database compilations [24,5; 26,3].
As the saying goes, "the rest is history"...and that history is contained in many of our own memories and perhaps more succinctly in the 65 boxes of this initial archive collection. The Secretarial papers (boxes 1 through 23) start the collection since, by nature of their jobs Secretaries are the most voluble and voluminous. These papers are followed by those of the three successive Historians (boxes 24 through 27) and then a woefully incomplete collection of President's papers (boxes 28 through 34) followed by an even less complete collection of Committee documents (boxes 35 through 42). The Historian's photographic collection (Box 43) was initially intended to be a collection of President's photos but wisely was later expanded to include photos of as many officers, committee personnel and members as could be gathered. Later still, photos taken at various meetings were included in the collection and this feature is sure to be expanded as the archives grow.
The real history of the society is encapsulated in the Newsletter collection (boxes 44 through 46). The Program Officer's papers (boxes 47 through 55) are sparse at the outset but the initial paucity is more than made up for as the years progress. Herein rests a compilation of all the events that transpired to make the Society a viable entity, while the growth, development and strength of the society can be gauged from a perusal of the Treasurer's documents (boxes 56 through 74). The final section, Late Papers (boxes 75 through 81), contains those documents that arrived at the Smithsonian after the initial compilation was completed but before this Finding Aid could be formally published.
