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At the end of the century, Ramon y Cajal revolutionized research on the nervous
system with his neuronal theory and the law of the depolarization, which made
him the father of a new field of science: neuroscience. In the 20th century, the
idea that problem solving by humans (cognitive behavior) is caused by a prop-
erty called intelligence is consolidated in the scientific community due to Alfred
Binet's works about its measurement and further research by Charles Spearman
and Thurstone Louis. Regarding animal behavior, Edward Thorndike, through
his research, enunciated the law of effect in 1911. Thorndike's work was the
basis for the later formulation and development of operant conditioning by Bur-
rhus Frederic Skinner. In 1926, Walter Cannon took up the concept of Claude
Bernard's internal environment and proposed a property of the systems that
regulates its internal environment, homeostasis. Other important contributions
during the 20th century were the works of Konrad Lorenz and Tinbergen Niko-
laas explaining instinctive behaviors through what is now known as fixed action
patterns. In 1943, a new approach to try to explain the generation of behaviors is
made in the article by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts. In the article, they
argued that the activities of neurons and the relationship between them could be
studied mathematically. On the other hand, in 1948 Edward Chace Tolman pro-
posed cognitive maps. Tolman's ideas allow the explanation of complex behavior
as observed by Wolfgang Kohler in chimpanzees that was not explainable by the
law of effect, and paves the way for the cognitive revolution that would happen
in the 50's. A year later Donald Hebb formulated his theory of cell assembly
combining psychology and physiology.
The mentioned investigations caused that, during the second half of the 20th
century, science established that from a functional point of view the behavior
of living things is divided into seven groups: homeostatic behaviors, biological
rhythms, reflexes, fixed action patterns, classically conditioned reflexes, oper-
antly conditioned reflexes, and cognitive behaviors.
Homeostasis has been the framework to explain cellular behavior. Biological
rhythms have been studied over the past centuries, but only with the recent
development of molecular biology, it began to provide answers to their issues.
Concerning the following four groups of behavior, neuroscience has achieved to
explain several of them at the neural level; but it is still working on others, espe-
cially in cognitive behaviors. Therefore, the property of intelligence remains as a
concept used in explaining cognitive behaviors. But even when neuroscience will
achieve to explain cognitive behaviors, the issue will not be closed. In the last
decade there have been numerous discoveries that have completely changed the
outlook on behaviors. One of the most important discoveries has been the behav-
ior of bacteria that can not be explained with the framework of homeostasis[1][2],
and is even referred to as prokaryotic intelligence[3]. In addition, random behav-
iors which allow greater survival than sensing behaviors have been discovered[4]
[5]. And it has also been discovered that some cyclic behaviors fit better than
sensing behaviors in some environments[6][7].
Another issue that science has dealt with behavior has been the realiza-
tion of these by non-biological systems. The advent of computers in the 20th
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