John Bowlby, British psychiatrist and a great pioneer of attachment research, wrote that “the behavioral equipment of a species may be beautifully suited to life within one environment and lead only to sterility and death in another.” Each species has what Bowlby called its “environment of adaptedness,” the circumstances to which its anatomy, physiology, and psychological capacities are best suited. In any other environment the organism or species cannot be expected to do so well, and may even exhibit behavior “that is at best unusual and at worst positively unfavorable to survival.”
