EVOLUTION AND BEHAVIOR

In his classical discourse on aims and methods in ethology, Niko Tinbergen (Tinbergen, 1963) first posed a single, central (and what Tinbergen referred to as “admittedly vague”) question: Why do animals behave the way that they do? (p. 411). He suggested four aims, questions, approaches, or levels of analysis that can be used to address this question: causation, survival value, ontogeny, and evolution. We are here to celebrate the anniversary of that paper that was of such important heuristic value for our field. My purpose is to consider aspects of the evolution of behavior.

In this paper, Tinbergen stresses more than once that the large question in ethology, mentioned above, is a question of the biology of behavior, and he gives praise to Konrad Lorenz's insistence in stressing this notion. It is in this context that he argues for an integrative analysis of behavior that addresses several important aspects of its biology: the physiological mechanisms regulating the behavior, the current adaptive significance of the behavior, the acquisition of the behavior by the individual, and the past evolutionary history of the behavior.

The virtues of integration

There is no doubt that Tinbergen appreciated that an integrative approach to animal behavior would result in a more complete understanding of the main question that motives us – why do animals behave as they do?