Ethology

12 Key excerpts on "Ethology"

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  Evolution

  The First Four Billion Years

  • Michael Ruse, Joseph Travis, Michael Ruse, Joseph Travis(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  Ethology can be understood by contrast to alternative approaches to the study of behavioral evolution in biology and psychology. Within biology, be-havioral ecology applies population-level models of evolution to the under-standing of animal behavior. Behavioral ecologists freely borrow models from economics and game theory, which represent individual organisms as rational optimizers and allow analysis of interactions between environment and behavior on reproductive fitness and the distribution of behavioral traits. Unlike traditional Ethology, behavioral ecology has been less concerned with immediate causes of the behavior of individual animals or its development. Mechanisms responsible for generating optimal behavior are often simply as-sumed and not explained. Nevertheless, there has been significant crossover between the two subdisciplines, with many of the originators of behavioral ecology having first trained as ethologists. Comparative psychology also takes an explicitly evolutionary approach to animal behavior. However, unlike biologists, who tend to be interested in dif-ferences among individuals and among species, psychologists are trained to look for general patterns of behavior and principles of learning, sometimes referred to as laws of learning. Where comparative psychologists do see dif-ferences between species, they often regard these as revealing steps on an evo-lutionary ladder to full-blown human cognition, and they are often drawn to investigating tasks to mark thresholds of cognitive sophistication. Thus, for example, there has been much interest among comparative psychologists in finding out which species can recognize themselves in mirrors, can pass a false belief attribution task, or can learn a human language. Many ethologists prefer to observe animals in natural or naturalistic habitats.

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  Perspectives on Social Psychology

  • Clyde Hendrick(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Nevertheless, the position of Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire impressed some, and a series of biologists espoused the same arguments well into the early decades of the twentieth century (see the reviews of Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1970; Mortenson, 1975). It was not until the 1930s, however, that Ethology received an impetus that changed it from the concern of a splinter group of biologists to what it is today. That impetus stemmed from the empirical and theoretical work of Lorenz and Tinbergen and their associates. Interestingly, it seems that this circle of modern ethologists were not aware of the origins of the label they had applied to themselves, nor of the earlier debates (Jaynes, 1969). Regardless, it was an appropriate selection as the aim of Ethology today is the same as it was in the past, the understanding of phylogenetically adapted behavior of organisms in their natural habitat.

  In 1951, Tinbergen provided the first systematic and comprehensive exposition of the distinguishing features and principles of Ethology. With few exceptions, these principles remain current with ethologists, although as Hinde (1970, p. vii) points out, the term ethologist is most correctly applied to students of behavior who share certain orienting attitudes, rather than the same problems, methods, or levels of analysis (see also Crook, 1970, for a contemporary overview). The following compendium has been drawn from several ethologically writers (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1967, 1970; Hess, 1970a, 1970b; Hinde, 1970, 1974; Lorenz, 1937, 1950, 1965; Thorpe, 1956; Tinbergen, 1948, 1951, 1963) who appear to be in general agreement on main issues.

  In the broadest sense, ethologists claim to concern themselves equally with evolution, adaptation (survival), ontogeny (development), and immediate causation and organization of behavior. Much interest has centered on the last topic in the list. Ethological theory has provisions to account for the organization of an organism’s behavior through the interaction of inherited internal factors and external environmental factors. In an extreme sense, behavior can be reactive in that it is controlled, within limits, by environmental stimulation. On the other extreme, behavior can be spontaneous in that it is caused by neurophysiological activities or states that are largely independent of external stimulation. Most often, of course, behavior is a product of an interplay between these conceptually distinct causal forces.

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  Cross-Cultural Psychology

  Research and Applications

  • John W. Berry, Ype H. Poortinga, Seger M. Breugelmans, Athanasios Chasiotis, David L. Sam(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The argument raised in this subsection is of relevance for cross-cultural psy-chology for two reasons. First, established evolutionary pathways of development can enhance our understanding of behavior patterns. Second, a too strong pre-sumption of evolutionary adaptation may lead to anthropomorphic language in the interpretation of animal behavior and an underestimation of the importance of culture in shaping the human mind (Bolhuis and Wynne, 2009 ; Penn, Holyak and Povinelli, 2008 ). In the next section, dealing with Ethology, we will elaborate on this. Ethology The study by biologists of animal behavior in natural environments is called Ethology . Characteristic of this branch of the biological sciences are elaborate and detailed field studies of animals in their natural habitat. The resulting descriptive accounts form the basis for theoretical explanations which are further developed along three lines of enquiry: through additional observations, through experi-ments to test specific hypotheses and through the comparison of findings across species. To do that, ethologists look at our phylogenetic relatives from two per-spectives, homology and analogy . Homology integrates us in the array of other primate species, all descending from a creature like a modern ape; understand-ing other primates will help us understand our ancestors with respect to shared phenomena like hunting, tool use and even lethal aggression (Goodall, 1986 ) or maternal investment (Keller and Chasiotis, 2007 ). The problem with ape “models,” however, is that we do not know which one (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas or orangutans) to choose because there is a great variety in behavioral adaptations and social organization. Moreover, all modern apes live in forests, but hominids moved out of the forest and have many features that may not be like those of our common ancestor (Kappeler and Pereira, 2003 ; Kappeler and Van Schaik, 2004 ).

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  The Behavior of Animals

  Mechanisms, Function, and Evolution

  • Johan J. Bolhuis, Luc-Alain Giraldeau, Jerry A. Hogan, Johan J. Bolhuis, Luc-Alain Giraldeau, Jerry A. Hogan(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  The Behavior of Animals: Mechanisms, Function, and Evolution , Second Edition. Edited by Johan J. Bolhuis, Luc-Alain Giraldeau and Jerry A. Hogan. © 2022 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. The scientific study of animal behavior is often called Ethology, a term used first by the nineteenth century French zoologist Isidore Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, but then used with its modern meaning by the American zoolo-gist Wheeler (1902). Ethology is derived from the Greek ethos, meaning “character.” The word “ethics” is also derived from the same Greek word, which makes sense, because ethics is basically about how humans ought to behave. Unfortunately, the word “Ethology” is also often confused with the word “ethnology” (the study of human peoples), with which it has nothing in common. In fact, the very word processor with which we are writing this chapter keeps prompting us to replace “Ethology” by “ethnology”! For whatever the reason, the word “Ethology” is not used as much as it used to be, although there is still an active animal behavior journal bearing this name. Instead of “Ethology,” many authors now use the words “animal behavior” or “behavioral biology” when they refer to the scientific study of animal behavior. I N T R O D U C T I O N 1 the study of animal behavior Johan J. Bolhuis, Luc-Alain Giraldeau, and Jerry A. Hogan A Brief History of Behavioral Biology Early days S cientists (and amateurs) have studied animal behavior long before the word “ethol-ogy” was introduced. For instance, Aristotle had many interesting observations concerning animal behavior. The study of animal behavior was taken up more 2 johan j. bolhuis, luc-alain giraldeau, and jerry a. hogan systematically, however, mainly by German and British zoologists around the turn of the nineteenth century.

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  The Evolution of Culture

  Volume IV

  • Stefan Linquist(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  adaptiveness of behavior. Really to understand a behavior, one has to know its survival value, its function (Lorenz, 1965). The only way to do this is by studying the behavior as a response to naturally occurring stimuli to which the phylum has become adapted over generations, and by observing the effect of the behavior in the animal’s natural environment.

  Another characteristic of Ethology, and one which is linked to naturalism and functionalism, is a concern with species-specific behavior. An ethologist is usually an expert on the behavior of a particular phyletic group, and theoretical work tends to be comparative. When constructing an “ethogram” of his animal, the ethologist tries to describe each behavior as exactly as possible. Such a description includes details of both what the animal does and the exact circumstances in which it does it. Great effort is often devoted to identification and description of the environmental cue that “releases” a given behavior. For example, it was observed that black-headed gulls remove broken eggshells from their nests. Tinbergen et al. (1962) were able to show, by a series of 22 field experiments, precisely what features of the broken eggshells released that behavior.

  The ethologist tries also to specify in detail what the animal does when confronted with the particular environmental cue. The gull, for instance, flies or walks away from the nest, carrying the broken eggshell in its bill, and drops it. Finally, as a sort of final confirmation that he has indeed described a natural behavioral unit, the ethologist tries to demonstrate the survival value, or function, of the behavior. In the example, it was shown that predators do indeed use broken eggshells as a beacon for homing in on unhatched eggs and newly hatched gull chicks.

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  Evolutionary Thought in Psychology

  A Brief History

  • Henry Plotkin(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  As noted at the start of this chapter, classical Ethology seemed for a time to be eclipsed by the rise of sociobiology in the 104 EVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT IN PSYCHOLOGY mid-1970s. Ethology, however, lives on, largely in the form of animal behavioral ecology. The study of animal behavior in the wild has increased considerably. And rising numbers of people, espe-cially those working on physiological mechanisms of drives and emotions, are happy to use the word as a label identifying the science that they do – a kind of generalized evolutionary-physio-logical approach, a neuro-Ethology, aimed at understanding the multiple causes of behavior. In that sense it is Lorenz’s old friend, Tinbergen, who in the end wielded the greatest influence. Sociobiology There is a view that sociobiology is merely a continuation of Ethology using a different theoretical framework. It is certainly the case that Ethology, as the increasingly catholic discipline of the study of animal behavior, with its tentative forays into human behavior, was not in any strong sense shown to be wrong and as a result of such error sociobiology then took its place. The simple truth is that Ethology never did deliver as a science of comparative behavior, there being relatively few sys-tematic studies using homology apart from Lorenz’s work on ducks and Tinbergen’s and his students’ on gulls. Even in his Nobel acceptance speech Lorenz chose, oddly, to discuss analogy as a source of knowledge, not homology. More importantly, comparative studies had a very old-fashioned ring about them in the 1960s and 1970s. By contrast, sociobiology presented a set of ideas seemingly so compelling and arresting that most just lost interest in the kinds of studies mandated by Ethology. In short, Ethology looked like old science; sociobiology in 1975 was new, and it was new because it was directly related to what many thought the most significant advance in evolutionary theory since the modern synthesis of 50 years before.

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  Interacting with Animals

  Understanding their Behaviour and Welfare

  • Pierre Le Neindre, Bertrand Deputte, David Lindsay(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • CAB International

    (Publisher)

  Behaviour is central to the study of how animals relate to one another. It can only be approached by careful observation of what animals do when faced with different environmental challenges and the scientific data that they generate. Sometimes these data are confronting and sometimes they are poorly presented in the literature so that, sadly, the work of researchers, ethologists or comparative psychologists, is too often ignored, decried or even rejected. For example, Scott and Fuller (1965), authors of many original papers on dogs and a critical review of their genetics and social behaviour, reported that it was difficult to do research on dogs because everyone ‘knows’ all about them. Nothing has changed. In fact, difficulty has probably increased, despite a recent wave of scientific work, maybe too much, on the behaviour of dogs. Much of this work followed a naturalistic approach and has led to high-quality empirical knowledge. Perhaps a scientific approach might have led to challengeable knowledge and the use of statistics to account for individual variability and other valuable information. As Firestein (2012, p. 10) points out, ‘scientific knowledge generates a cultured ignorance of superior quality’.

  In short, we can conclude that at this stage in its development, Ethology, or the biology of behaviour, analyses the interaction between individuals and the environment in which they find themselves. This environment can be the natural one in which they evolved without human interference. It can also be a captive environment for individuals of a wild species, or it can be anthropized in the case of domestic species.

  1.3 Ethologists – Researchers Who Work With the Subjects They Study

  Ethologists gather information on the species they study by observing the way they live. In doing so they are following the counsel of Tinbergen (1953, p. 139), ‘I must emphasize that thorough reading, while necessary, will never replace “first-hand” knowledge based on personal observations. The animals themselves are always more important than the books that have been written about them.’ He claimed that Ethology had become a quantitative discipline and its place as a behavioural biology was fully justified. In other words, ethologists don’t just observe behaviour; they do it according to the concepts of scientific discipline. Observation is only the stage when data are collected. These data must then be analysed as part of the scientific method to generate a hypothesis. An integral part of this process is to choose carefully and define precisely the behavioural variables that are collected from individuals so that they can be quantified. In this form they make it possible to accept or reject hypotheses put forward at the outset. As a simple example, let us suppose the question asked concerns the study of the relationship between speed of movement of a horse and its age. It would be preferable to define behavioural units such as ‘walking’, ‘cantering’, ‘trotting’, ‘galloping’ or ‘jumping’, and not use a more general unit such as ‘moving’ which would include all of these.

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  Evolutionary Psychology

  An Introduction

  • Lance Workman, Will Reader(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  This represented a step change in the social sciences that is still of great importance today. No longer do we assume that, for instance, working-class people speak differently from middle- and upper-class people because they are biologically inferior; we know now that it is an effect of culture. From these honourable beginnings cultural relativism dominated thinking to the extent that many social scientists developed an almost pathological fear of biological explanations of hu- man behaviour, a disposition that sociologist Lee Ellis (1996) termed biophobia. There are various reasons for this. One is that once a scientific discipline is established it is difficult for researchers to consider alternative explanations that lie outside the discipline. Another is that the atrocities of the Second World War made it difficult to explore biological explanations of human nature without being seen as advocating genetic determinism and eugenics (see next section and Box 1.3). Putting things in boxes can be as dangerous as it is useful. Below we have tried to describe each of the four main disciplines that apply evolutionary thinking to behaviour. The danger is that although there are differences in approach, subject matter and method there is a great deal of overlap too. The descriptions below should therefore be seen as a rough guide rather than the final word on the matter. Ethology Description. The term Ethology is derived from the Greek ethos meaning character or habit. Although many people see Ethology as the invention of Lorenz, Tinbergen and von Frisch, dur- ing the 1930s, the term has been around for at least 300 years. What Lorenz, Tinbergen and von Frisch did was to take a largely descriptive discipline and add academic rigour to it via systematic observation and recording of behaviour followed by analysis. Approach. Observation of animal behaviour in its natural setting, i.e. observe the behaviour in the environment in which it evolved.

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  Animal Cognition in Nature

  The Convergence of Psychology and Biology in Laboratory and Field

  • Russell P. Balda, Irene M. Pepperberg, A. C. Kamil(Authors)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  3. The American behaviorist tradition, with its emphasis on learning and reinforcement. 4. The Schnierla-Lehrman approach, emphasizing epigenesis and experience in the broad sense. There was considerable disagreement and confusion about how to reconcile these approaches. Especially problematic was the question of the relationship between evolutionary and mechanistic levels of analysis. A major event in the resolution of these problems was the publication of Tinbergen's (1963) famous paper 'On aims and methods of Ethology'. In that paper, and throughout his work and career, Tinbergen emphasized the necessity of understanding behavior at different levels, in terms of phylogeny (historical), adaptation (function), mechanism (neuroscience) and develop-ment (ontogeny). One way to express Tinbergen's position is that it called for the integrated study of these four levels of analysis. Anothe r way to On the Proper Definition of Cognitive Ethology 7 express it is that it encouraged the study of ontogeny and mechanism within a Darwinian perspective, including considerations of phylogeny and adapta-tion. Howeve r it is phrased, it is clear that the integrative, multileve l approach called for by Tinbergen (and others) has been successful. Today, the study of animal behavior, encompassing Ethology, behavioral ecology and compara-tive psychology , is a much more integrated and cohesive field. This has taken place because students of animal behavior now largely agree on a scientific research program sensu Lakatos. The central core of this program is the assumption that every behavior has an evolutionary history, a biological function, an underlying neural mechanism and a developmental history, and that these interact in many ways. This central core has produced a field of study that is a vibrant field, much different than the field of animal behavior of the 1950s and 1960s. Many of the old disciplinary distinctions have largely fallen away.

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  Perspectives on Animal Behavior

  • Judith Goodenough, Betty McGuire, Elizabeth Jakob(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  J. Bolhuis and L.-A. Giraldeau, Table 15.1, p. 364. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Summary 25 Study of the history of animal behavior will show us that whether our primary interest is the mechanism or the function of behavior, our efforts will be most fruit- ful if we keep a clear focus on behavior as the driving interest of research. SUMMARY Perhaps the most important concept in the study of ani- mal behavior is Darwin’s idea of evolution through nat- ural selection, which provides the evolutionary framework necessary for the development of animal behavior. In the early 1900s, the two dominant approaches to the study of animal behavior were Ethology, centered in Europe, and comparative psychology, headquartered in the United States. Ethologists focused primarily on the function and evolution of behavior. Because the context in which a behavior is displayed is sometimes a clue to its function, ethologists often studied behavior under field conditions. It followed from their interest in evo- lution that ethologists used a comparative approach and studied primarily innate behaviors. Early ethologists were interested in stereotyped pat- terns of behavior, considering them to be just as reliable as morphological characters in defining a particular group. These stereotyped behaviors were called fixed action patterns (FAPs). An FAP is triggered by a very specific stimulus. That portion of the total stimulus that releases the FAP is called the sign stimulus or releaser. Because most behaviors are not so stereotyped as implied by the notion of FAP, they have more recently been described as modal action patterns (MAPs). In contrast to the early ethologists, comparative psy- chologists emphasized laboratory studies of observable, quantifiable patterns of behavior. In general, they asked questions that concerned the development or causation of behavior. Learning and the physiological bases of behavior were the focus of much of their research.

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  Developmental Plasticity

  Behavioral and Biological Aspects of Variations in Development

  • Eugene Gollin(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  They argue that ethologists have overplayed the role of the innate determinants of behavioral development, whereas psychologists have displayed a complementary bias in underesti-mating the role of genetic factors in human behavioral development. They recommend a new synthesis of animal and human research. 6 9 This page intentionally left blank 3 Learning Theory, Ethological Theory, and Developmental Plasticity DAVID CHISZAR Introduction This chapter consists of two arguments. The similarities and differences be-tween ethological theory and learning theory are discussed in the first four sections of this chapter, with the conclusion that the similarities far outweigh the differences (at least from a metatheoretical perspective), and modern ideas regarding the evolution of developmental plasticity are discussed in the remaining sections. In this connection, the interface among sociobiology, Ethology, psychology, and several other disciplines is explored to show that a confluence of all of these fields is required to understand behavioral phenom-ena theoretically as well as empirically. A preview of this argument is af-forded by the recognition that there are four kinds of questions to be asked about any example of adaptive behavior: 1. How is it organized and/or released? (i.e., the question of behavioral physiology) 2. How does it develop? (the ontogenetic question) 3. What function does it serve? (the ecological question) 4 . How did it evolve? (the phylogenetic question) It should not be assumed that the four questions (and the disciplines they represent) are independent, and that research in one area can proceed intel-ligibly without interdisciplinary communication and consequent cross-validation. This is perhaps the greatest error that is made by contemporary behavioral scientists.

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  Biology and Politics. Recent Explorations

  Papers presented at the Conference held in Paris, January 6–8, 1975

  • Albert Somit(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  ROGER D. MASTERS The Impaft of Ethology on Political Science A MONG THE AREAS of contemporary biology relevant to the social sciences, «ZJL Ethology (the comparative Study of animal behavior) has lately received considerable attention. In addition to suggesting that biology, rather than physics, is the epiStemological norm for the social sciences, Ethology promises to make substan-tive theoretical and empirical contributions to political science. Konrad Loren^'s theories, as modified by subsequent research, suggest an O-S-R model of behavior that is both more general and more fruitful than the conventional S-R approach. From an ethological perspective, politics can be defined as behavior which simulta-neously partakes of the attributes of dominance and submission (which the human primate shares with many other mammals) and those of legal or customary regulation of social l i f e (characteristic of human groups endowed with language). Such a definition suggests new empirical propositions, based on concepts and phenomena Studied in animal populations, which can be applied to politics without denying that humans d i f f e r from other species. Especially notable are the relation of attention Structure to political power, the role of non-verbal communication (kinesics) in leadership behavior, and the spread of moods through human societies. Preliminary empirical data from a Study of the 19J2 American Presidential campaign illustrate the fruitfulness of several of the seventeen researchable hypotheses proposed. Customarily, modern political scientists have not viewed biology as espe-cially germane to their discipline. Recently, however, it has been argued that biological variables and theories are highly relevant to political science. 1 The term biopolitics has gained increasing currency, and a number of panel discussions and conferences have been devoted to the subjeft.

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