Ricerc@Sapienza

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the discontinuity between
animal and human birth. Starting from theories on animal instinct and those on
animal/human behaviour; from Aristotle to Darwin, and the evolutionary
synthesis of the 1940s, from distorted interpretations of Darwin’s thought to
some aspects of modern ethology and animal psychology, and the human birth
theory, the manuscript tries to respond to the old question: what differences
exist between animal behaviour and human behaviour? Trying to answer these

Understanding individual capability to adjust to protracted confinement and isolation may inform adaptive plasticity and disease vulnerability/resilience, and may have long-term implications for operations requiring prolonged presence in distant and restricted environments. Individual coping depends on many different factors encompassing psychological dispositional traits, endocrine reactivity and their underlying molecular mechanisms (e.g. gene expression).