Psychology in India, Volume 1

1

Biological and Ecological Bases of Behaviour

Raghubir Singh Pirta

INTRODUCTION

Comprehensive attempts to grasp the reality of the world that take both generalities and specificities successfully into account are extremely rare. One of the most outstanding examples of such a feat is perhaps the radical departure from existing thought in cultures all over the world that took place in the middle of the 19th century in the mind of a biologist about the origin of the human species (Darwin, 1859/1958). Within this image of our origins, however, many subtler shades remained hidden (Dawkins, 1996), the most conspicuous and yet the most difficult to prove being the evolution of altruism and cooperation. It has taken more than a century for the accumulation ...