50 Years Ago

When spiders are given lysergic acid they construct webs of more than usual regularity; they become, like man in a similar situation, withdrawn from external stimuli so that their perceptive awareness is reduced, and they cease to adjust their webs to the irregularities of the surroundings. This example is used ... to illustrate the importance of perception in ritualized behaviour. Psychedelic substances, as well as schizophrenia, distort perception to the extent that contact with external objects is prevented. Ritualization can be described broadly as the adaptive formalization of behaviour through the influence of natural selection. It seems to have occurred in animals as a means of improving signalling to other individuals; to serve as a more efficient stimulator of more efficient patterns of action in others; to reduce intra-specific damage, and to serve as sexual or social bonding mechanisms ... During the evolution of vertebrates, ritualization has tended more towards the maintenance of efficient bonding and ceremonies have become more elaborate ... Particularly in the primates, ritualized behaviour resembles to some extent that of humans.

From Nature 21 January 1967

100 Years Ago

In the thirtieth annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Mr. M. C. Stevenson publishes an elaborate article on the ethnobotany of the Zuni Indians. This tribe had discovered the medicinal value of a large number of plants, one of the most important of which is the Jamestown weed (Datura meteloides), and the writer observes that from the symptoms caused by this drug, its homoeopathic adaptability to hydrophobia will be at once evident.

From Nature 18 January 1917 Footnote 1