Zing-Yang Kuo:from The Standard-Bearer Of Anti-Instinct Movement To Founder Of Behavior Epigenesis

Zing-Yang Kuo(1898?1970),Chinese well-known radical behavioral,comparative and animal psychologist.Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology which break the rule on only publish scientific experiment to offer some pages to introduce the lifetime of Kuo and gave a high appraisal,"During his turbulent career he stood at the center of several important metatheoretioal controversies and made unique investigative contributions to the study of behavior and the nervous system,particularly from the standpoint of developmental analysis." His researches are huge treasure of resources which can be developed and used in later researches.The author divides the processes of Kuo's studies into 3 stages:theoretical assumption,animal experimental and theory formation stage.In the first phase,Kuo got involved in anti-heredity movement.At that time,most psychologists believed that human were born with instinct behavior.But Kuo took a dim view of this kind of opinion.He wrote a paper Giving up instincts in psychology as plancier piece to debate with celebrated psychologist such as William Mcdougall,John Broadus Watson who are supporters of instinct.On the one hand,he insisted firmly that some ambiguous concepts such as instinct,heredity,intention,learning should be excluded out of psychology science.On the other hand,he put forward a new behavioral concept"units of reaction" representing the elementary acts that human infant born with to replace the concept of instincts.In a word,he hoped psychology become a branch of science that can demonstrated by experiments",I believe the main motivation of denial is to save psychology from armchair speculation." In the second step,Kuo made great efforts to carry on a large amount of experiments about animal behavior response such as animal fighting,ontogeny of embryonic behavior in aves and behavior of the cat toward the rat.All these experiments point out a result:Nutritional,developmental and environmental,and hormonal factors all play an important role in the formation of behavior.In other words,Kuo believed that congenital and postnatal factor both play an important role in the formation of behavior.In the third step,Kuo constructed a theory called behavior epigenesis.The theory consists of five determining components of behavior including morphological,biophysical and biochemical,development history,stimulus or stimulating object and environmental context that combined nature with nurture.And his theory supported that every behavior is a functional product of these five factors.