Not Monkeying Around

Monkey Farm: A History of the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology, Orange Park, Florida 1930–1965
By Donald A. Dewsbury. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006. 347 pp. Cloth, $55.00.

Sometimes it's the littlest events and coincidences that determine the course of history. The study of primate biology and, more specifically, primate behavior followed such a historical course. It is common knowledge that Robert Yerkes established the Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology, later renamed the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology (YLPB) in his honor. It is also very well known that the years between its founding in 1930 and the mid-1960s—the period Donald A. Dewsbury writes about in Monkey Farm: A History of the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology, Orange Park, Florida 1930–1965—were the years in which American psychology was dominated by the reductionist approach of behaviorism. During the years of Robert Yerkes's directorship of the research center, the first 11 years of its operation, Yerkes managed the research on primate behavior not under the banner of behaviorism but rather of its virtual antithesis, "a psychology of conscious experience and mental processes" (p. 292). Yerkes's science was integrative rather than reductionistic. He did not accept the mindlessness of behaviorism's stimulus–response view; he saw the primate brain as having the capacity for substantive cognitive processes, such as concept formation, insight learning, reasoning, ideation, and even "intimations of conscience" (p. 110).