Theodore Holmes Bullock

Who was Theodore Holmes Bullock?

Theodore Holmes “Ted” Bullock is one of the founding fathers of neuroethology. During a career spanning nearly seven decades, this American academic was esteemed both as a pioneering and influential neuroscientist, examining the physiology and evolution of the nervous system across organizational levels, and as a champion of the comparative approach, studying species from nearly all major animal groups—coelenterates, annelids, arthropods, echinoderms, molluscs, and chordates.

Bullock discovered the pit organ in pit vipers and electroreceptors in weakly electric fish, as well as other electrosensory animals. His work on the jamming avoidance response in electric fish is an excellent example of how motor programs are integrated with incoming sensory information when generating a behavior pattern in response to a stimulus.

Bullock appealed to the scientific community to look beyond established paradigms in neuroscience, as well as to consider the ecology of an animal when endeavoring to understand its nervous system. As he once wrote, “Neuroscience is part of biology, more specifically of zoology, and it suffers tunnel vision unless continuous with ethology, ecology, and evolution”.