John Crook (ethologist)

John Hurrell Crook ( born November 27, 1930 in Southampton; ; † July 16, 2011 in Somerset, England ) was a British ethologist and early 1970s, a pioneer of sociobiology. In addition to his zoological studies, he worked as a teacher of Chan or Zen Buddhism.

Career

After studying zoology at the University of Southampton John Crook worked for his PhD thesis from 1955 to 1958 at the University of Cambridge under Robert Hinde and William Thorpe weaver birds. To this end, he conducted extensive field observations in India and Seychelles through and came to the conclusion that the behavior of the animals is shaped to a large extent by the environment and - unlike his time mainly represented by Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen - less by innate releasing mechanisms; that made him a pioneer of behavioral ecology. Later he studied various African monkey species, and since the early 1960s taught Crook Tray behavior research at the Faculty of Psychology in Bristol.

In 1970, John Crook wrote a pioneering publication in which he, a novel " ethology of social systems " faced the traditional comparative behavioral research, which have to turn our gaze less on the behavior of individuals and instead to each other on social groups and on the behavior of its members. Five years before Edward O. Wilson's book Sociobiology thus he pointed the way toward the new research direction of sociobiology.

After his retirement, he focused more on his interest in Zen Buddhism and the conductor for expeditions to the Himalayas and to Ladakh. Together with Stamati Crook he analyzed include the polyandry of the Tibetans under behavioral ecological aspects.

Works

  • John H. Crook: Social Behaviour in Birds and Mammals. Essays on the Social Ethology of Animals and Man. London: Academic Press 1970.
  • John H. Crook: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1980.
  • John H. Crook: World Crisis and Buddhist Humanism: End Games - Collapse or Renewal of Civilisation. New Age Books, 2009, ISBN 978-81-7822-325-4
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