The German president called for the defense of democracy on the anniversary of several fateful events. This comes as the coalition government seems to be teetering six months after taking power. DW has the latest.

A systematic review of the association between women’s morphological traits and fertility

Archive of Our Own, a digital fanfiction repository, shows what’s possible when we design our infrastructures around the communities that use them, rather than around extractive logics.

They are peaceful, female-led and use sex in everyday interactions. Now a new conservation scheme could offer a lifeline to our critically endangered close relatives living on the Congo river

Height preferences when choosing a partner might reflect adaptive mating strategies, whereby tall men are deemed attractive to potential partners due to links with health and resource acquisition. How...

Photographer Wim van den Heever got the winning shot beside an abandoned diamond mining settlement.

Men-led papers receive more media coverage than women’s, new study finds

This story was originally published by Canada’s National Observer and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Just west of Fort Qu’Appelle in Saskatchewan, the Standing Buffalo Dakota Nation is working across the US border to revive centuries-old trade routes as part of a new Indigenous-governed trade corridor. Trucks from the First Nation could soon be […]

During the postwar period, the concept of instinct came to encapsulate the debate around the importance of nature versus nurture. The fact that animals show highly organized behavior early in development suggested the presence of an underlying fixity where behavior was “inbuilt” into an animal’s biology despite an individual’s experiences. This placed a discrete and exhaustive line between the innate and acquired that became a foundation for the European-dominated field of ethology. Across the Atlantic, a group of comparative psychologists led by the American Museum of Natural History’s T. C. Schneirla contested this approach, proposing that the study of animal behavior should avoid abstract dichotomies with a renewed focus on developmental processes. While Schneirla’s theoretical and empirical work shaped the modern study of animal behavior, his legacy requires revisiting in an era where the nature versus nurture debate is regaining prominence. In this article, I revisit Schneirla’s approach to behavior with a focus on his paper “Interrelationships of the ‘Innate’ and the ‘Acquired’ in Instinctive Behavior” (published in M. Autuori et al. (1956) L’instinct dans le comportement des animaux et de l’homme; Masson, Paris, pp. 387–452) for the journal’s “Classics in Biological Theory” collection; the paper is available as supplementary material in the online version of this article. A companion article (this issue; G. M. Kohn (2024) “A Discussion on Instinct, Paris, 1954”) presents the commentary that was published with it.