Perspectives in Ethology

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. The Nature and Description of Behavior Patterns

   • Hugh Drummond

   Pages 1-33

3. Individual Differences in Animal Behavior

   • P. J. B. Slater

   Pages 35-49

4. Toward a Falsifiable Theory of Evolution

   • Nicholas S. Thompson

   Pages 51-73

5. Evolutionary, Proximate, and Functional Primate Social Ecology

   • Dennis Robert Rasmussen

   Pages 75-103

6. Social Structure and Individual Ontogenies: Problems of Description, Mechanism, and Evolution

   • R. Haven Wiley

   Pages 105-133

7. On a Possible Relation Between Cultural Transmission and Genetical Evolution

   • J. E. R. Staddon

   Pages 135-145

8. The Behavior of Organisms, as it is Linked to Genes and Populations

   • Wolfgang M. Schleidt

   Pages 147-155

9. From Causations to Translations: What Biochemists can Contribute to the Study of Behavior

   • Steven P. R. Rose

   Pages 157-177

10. Behavior and the Physical World of an Animal

    • Steven Vogel

    Pages 179-198

11. Escalated Fighting and the War of Nerves: Games Theory and Animal Combat

    • Peter G. Caryl

    Pages 199-224

12. Science and the Law: A Muddled Interface

    • Kenneth R. Wing

    Pages 225-243

13. Back Matter

    Pages 245-249

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One of the attractive features of the great classical ethologists was their readiness to ask different kinds of questions about behavior - and to do so without muddling the answers. Niko Tinbergen, for instance, was interested in the evolution of behavior. But he also had interests in the present-day sur­ vival value of a behavior pattern and in the mechanisms that control it from moment to moment. Broad as his interests were, he clearly separated out the problems and recognized that questions about the history, function, control, and development of behavior require distinct approaches - even though the answers to one type of question may aid in finding answers to another. The open-minded (and clear-headed) style of ethologists like Tinbergen was based on a recognition that there are diverse ways of usefully con­ ducting research on behavior. This consciousness has been partially sub­ merged in recent years by new waves of narrowly focused enthusiasm. For instance, the study of the behavior of whole animals without recourse to lower levels of analysis, and the treatment of sociobiological theories as ex­ planation for how individuals develop, has meant that the relatively fragile plants of neuroethology and behavioral ontogeny have almost disappeared under the flood.

• animal behavior
• behavior
• biology
• development
• ecology
• evolution
• evolutionary biology
• ontogeny
• plants
• theory of evolution

• Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England

  Paul Patrick Gordon Bateson

• Department of Zoology, Duke University, Durham, USA

  Peter H. Klopfer

Policies and ethics