Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction to animal contests
- 2 Dyadic contests: modelling fights between two individuals
- 3 Models of group or multi-party contests
- 4 Analysis of animal contest data
- 5 Contests in crustaceans: assessments, decisions and their underlying mechanisms
- 6 Aggression in spiders
- 7 Contest behaviour in butterflies: fighting without weapons
- 8 Hymenopteran contests and agonistic behaviour
- 9 Horns and the role of development in the evolution of beetle contests
- 10 Contest behaviour in fishes
- 11 Contests in amphibians
- 12 Lizards and other reptiles as model systems for the study of contest behaviour
- 13 Bird contests: from hatching to fertilisation
- 14 Contest behaviour in ungulates
- 15 Human contests: evolutionary theory and the analysis of interstate war
- 16 Prospects for animal contests
- Index
- References
Foreword
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction to animal contests
- 2 Dyadic contests: modelling fights between two individuals
- 3 Models of group or multi-party contests
- 4 Analysis of animal contest data
- 5 Contests in crustaceans: assessments, decisions and their underlying mechanisms
- 6 Aggression in spiders
- 7 Contest behaviour in butterflies: fighting without weapons
- 8 Hymenopteran contests and agonistic behaviour
- 9 Horns and the role of development in the evolution of beetle contests
- 10 Contest behaviour in fishes
- 11 Contests in amphibians
- 12 Lizards and other reptiles as model systems for the study of contest behaviour
- 13 Bird contests: from hatching to fertilisation
- 14 Contest behaviour in ungulates
- 15 Human contests: evolutionary theory and the analysis of interstate war
- 16 Prospects for animal contests
- Index
- References
Summary
his book on Animal Contests represents a landmark in evolutionary biology that is greater than its immediate title suggests. The adaptive interpretation of fighting behaviour in animals has been a catalyst in the study of evolutionary adaptation: first, it was influential in changing concepts about the mechanism of selection (from implicit group selection to individual selection), and second, it was the focus for shaping our understanding of frequency-dependent optimisation in biology through the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) approach. I regard it a great privilege and honour to have been invited by the Editors to write a Foreword, and I would like to use this opportunity to recount some of the history of these roles of contest theory in evolutionary biology, including my personal recollections of the events during that very exciting decade, the 1970s.
Before 1970
The way we now think of animal fighting behaviour owes most to the development of the first theoretical models of animal contests, developed in the 1970s. Before this time, with a few notable exceptions (e.g. Williams 1966, Lack 1968),most researchers in the disciplines of ethology and ecology routinely (and usually implicitly) applied group or species selection interpretations to what they saw. This ethos did not generally apply to evolutionary biologists or population geneticists, whose analyses were usually founded on principles derived from Darwinian natural selection.
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- Information
- Animal Contests , pp. xi - xxPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013
References
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