William Homan Thorpe

Professor of Animal Ethology, Cambridge

Animal Nature and Human Nature

In his series of lectures, Thorpe considers the question of what makes humanity different from other animals, given our current understanding of science. He gives beautiful accounts of animal behaviour, new inferences, and reasons to reject older theories. As animals use tools and language, and the songs of birds are genuinely aesthetic, he says that higher animals have consciousness, but not self-consciousness, and that this self-consciousness may be defined as ‘religion’.

Biography

William Homan Thorpe was born on 1 April 1902 in Hastings, England. He is known for advancing the study of animal behaviour in their natural habitats in the British academy. During the Second World War, Thorpe registered as a conscientious objector on religious grounds. Graduating from Jesus College, Cambridge with degrees in agriculture and entomology in 1929, he then worked on parasites at a laboratory in Surrey for a few years. He returned to Cambridge, where he remained for the rest of his career, and founded a sub-department of animal behaviour and an ornithological field station.

Fellow of the Royal Society, he was also President of the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour and the British Entomological Society in 1951. He held a Rockefeller Fellowship at the University of California in 1927 and a Leverhulme fellowship in 1939. Selected works include Learning and Instinct in Animals (1956), Bird Song: the Biology of Vocal Communication and Expression in Birds (1961), Science, Man and Morals (1965), Purpose in a World of Chance (1978), and The Origins and Rise of Ethology (1979).

Published/Archival Resources

Published as Animal Nature and Human Nature.