Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich - W. Horsley Gantt (essay date 1960)
W. Horsley Gantt (essay date 1960)
SOURCE: "Pavlov and Darwin," in Evolution after Darwin, edited by Sol Tax, University of Chicago Press, 1960, pp. 219-38.
[In the following essay, Gantt equates the importance of the scientific discoveries of Pavlov with those of Charles Darwin and surveys Pavlovian and post-Pavlovian research.]
The lives of Pavlov and Darwin overlapped. When Darwin was producing the great work which we now celebrate, Pavlov was a stripling lad of ten years, romping and scuffling with the urchins on the streets of Ryazan in central Russia. They both lived in the great age of the adolescence of science, in the century when science, like a rambunctious youth, felt the cocksureness of the teen-ager.
Darwin's theory of evolution liberated thinking among the masses. He gave to science a freedom from authority; he justified its right to stand in a new field upon facts. Pavlov was perhaps a more militant and...
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