Ethology

Last updated

Honeybee workers perform the waggle dance to indicate the range and direction of food. Waggle dance photo.png
Honeybee workers perform the waggle dance to indicate the range and direction of food.
Great crested grebes perform a complex synchronised courtship display. Grebe Courtship (detail).jpg
Great crested grebes perform a complex synchronised courtship display.
Male impalas fighting during the rut Fighting impalas edit2.jpg
Male impalas fighting during the rut

Ethology is a branch of zoology that studies the behaviour of non-human animals. It has its scientific roots in the work of Charles Darwin and of American and German ornithologists of the late 19th and early 20th century, including Charles O. Whitman, Oskar Heinroth, and Wallace Craig. The modern discipline of ethology is generally considered to have begun during the 1930s with the work of the Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and the Austrian biologists Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, the three winners of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Ethology combines laboratory and field science, with a strong relation to neuroanatomy, ecology, and evolutionary biology. [1]

Contents

Etymology

The modern term ethology derives from the Greek language: ἦθος, ethos meaning "character" and -λογία , -logia meaning "the study of". The term was first popularized by the American entomologist William Morton Wheeler in 1902. [2]

History

The beginnings of ethology

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) explored the expression of emotions in animals. Charles Darwin 1880.jpg
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) explored the expression of emotions in animals.

Ethologists have been concerned particularly with the evolution of behaviour and its understanding in terms of natural selection. In one sense, the first modern ethologist was Charles Darwin, whose 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals influenced many ethologists. He pursued his interest in behaviour by encouraging his protégé George Romanes, who investigated animal learning and intelligence using an anthropomorphic method, anecdotal cognitivism, that did not gain scientific support. [3]

Other early ethologists, such as Eugène Marais, Charles O. Whitman, Oskar Heinroth, Wallace Craig and Julian Huxley, instead concentrated on behaviours that can be called instinctive in that they occur in all members of a species under specified circumstances. [4] [5] [2] Their starting point for studying the behaviour of a new species was to construct an ethogram, a description of the main types of behaviour with their frequencies of occurrence. This provided an objective, cumulative database of behaviour. [2]

Growth of the field

Due to the work of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, ethology developed strongly in continental Europe during the years prior to World War II. [2] After the war, Tinbergen moved to the University of Oxford, and ethology became stronger in the UK, with the additional influence of William Thorpe, Robert Hinde, and Patrick Bateson at the University of Cambridge. [6]

Lorenz, Tinbergen, and von Frisch were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973 for their work of developing ethology. [7]

Ethology is now a well-recognized scientific discipline, with its own journals such as Animal Behaviour , Applied Animal Behaviour Science , Animal Cognition , Behaviour , Behavioral Ecology and Ethology . In 1972, the International Society for Human Ethology was founded along with its journal, Human Ethology. [8]

Social ethology

In 1972, the English ethologist John H. Crook distinguished comparative ethology from social ethology, and argued that much of the ethology that had existed so far was really comparative ethology—examining animals as individuals—whereas, in the future, ethologists would need to concentrate on the behaviour of social groups of animals and the social structure within them. [9]

E. O. Wilson's book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis appeared in 1975, [10] and since that time, the study of behaviour has been much more concerned with social aspects. It has been driven by the Darwinism associated with Wilson, Robert Trivers, and W. D. Hamilton. The related development of behavioural ecology has helped transform ethology. [11] Furthermore, a substantial rapprochement with comparative psychology has occurred, so the modern scientific study of behaviour offers a spectrum of approaches. In 2020, Tobias Starzak and Albert Newen from the Institute of Philosophy II at the Ruhr University Bochum postulated that animals may have beliefs. [12]

Tinbergen's four questions for ethologists

Tinbergen argued that ethology needed to include four kinds of explanation in any instance of behaviour: [13] [14]

These explanations are complementary rather than mutually exclusive—all instances of behaviour require an explanation at each of these four levels. For example, the function of eating is to acquire nutrients (which ultimately aids survival and reproduction), but the immediate cause of eating is hunger (causation). Hunger and eating are evolutionarily ancient and are found in many species (evolutionary history), and develop early within an organism's lifespan (development). It is easy to confuse such questions—for example, to argue that people eat because they are hungry and not to acquire nutrients—without realizing that the reason people experience hunger is because it causes them to acquire nutrients. [15]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Scott, Graham (2007). Essential animal behavior (Nachdr. ed.). Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publ. ISBN   978-0-632-05799-3.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Matthews, Janice R.; Matthews, Robert W. (2009). Insect Behaviour. Springer. p. 13. ISBN   978-90-481-2388-9.
  3. ↑ Keeley, Brian L. (2004). "Anthropomorphism, primatomorphism, mammalomorphism: understanding cross-species comparisons" (PDF). York University. p. 527. Archived (PDF) from the original on 17 December 2008. Retrieved 19 December 2008.
  4. ↑ "Guide to the Charles Otis Whitman Collection ca. 1911". lib.uchicago.edu. Retrieved 21 September 2022.
  5. ↑ Schulze-Hagen, Karl; Birkhead, Timothy R. (1 January 2015). "The ethology and life history of birds: the forgotten contributions of Oskar, Magdalena and Katharina Heinroth". Journal of Ornithology. 156 (1): 9–18. Bibcode:2015JOrni.156....9S. doi:10.1007/s10336-014-1091-3. ISSN   2193-7206. S2CID   14170933.
  6. ↑ Bateson, Patrick (1991). The Development and Integration of Behaviour: Essays in Honour of Robert Hinde. Cambridge University Press. p. 479. ISBN   978-0-521-40709-0.
  7. ↑ "The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1973". Nobelprize.org. Retrieved 9 September 2016. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1973 was awarded jointly to Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen 'for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns'.
  8. ↑ "Goals". International Society for Human Ethology. Archived from the original on 24 March 2024. Retrieved 24 March 2024.
  9. ↑ Crook, John H.; Goss-Custard, J. D. (1972). "Social Ethology". Annual Review of Psychology. 23 (1): 277–312. doi:10.1146/annurev.ps.23.020172.001425.
  10. ↑ Wilson, Edward O. (2000). Sociobiology: the new synthesis. Harvard University Press. p. 170. ISBN   978-0-674-00089-6.
  11. ↑ Davies, Nicholas B.; Krebs, John R.; West, Stuart A. (2012). An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology (4th ed.). John Wiley & Sons. ISBN   978-1-4443-3949-9.
  12. ↑ "What it means when animals have beliefs". ScienceDaily. 17 June 2020. Retrieved 18 June 2020.
  13. ↑ Tinbergen, Niko (1963). "On aims and methods in ethology". Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie. 20 (4): 410–433. Bibcode:1963Ethol..20..410T. doi:10.1111/j.1439-0310.1963.tb01161.x.
  14. ↑ MacDougall-Shackleton, Scott A. (27 July 2011). "The levels of analysis revisited". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 366 (1574): 2076–2085. doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0363. PMC   3130367 . PMID   21690126.
  15. ↑ Barrett et al. (2002) Human Evolutionary Psychology. Princeton University Press. ISBN   9780691096223 [ page needed ]

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.