Welcome to Ethology and Behavioral Ecology. Why Do We Study Animal Behavior?
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Transcript of Welcome to Ethology and Behavioral Ecology. Why Do We Study Animal Behavior?
Welcome to Ethology and Behavioral Ecology
Why Do We Study Animal Behavior?
To understand the natural world.Why Build Bowers?
VogelkopAmblyornis inornatus
MacGregor's
Why Decorations?
Satin bowerbird bower and court
Greatbowerbird
To Better Understand Ourselves.
Where Did “Consciousness”
Come From?
Part 1: An Historical Overview of the Scientific Study of Animal Behavior
Interest in Behavior -- A Rough Indicator
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1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980
Year
# Psychologists in USA
The Ancients
Needed to observe animals for obvious reasons but this was not formally systematized and generally not communicated.
Greeks -- Aristotle and the scala naturae or chain of being
• Continuum with types grouped by similarity
• A central aspect of the chain was continuity
of the animal and human mind
History of Animal
Behavior
Sources:
•Evolution
•Philosophy
•Neural-medical
"Proximate" and "Ultimate" approaches
The Birth of Evolutionary Approaches to Behavior
The evolutionary study of animal behavior may have begun before Darwin with Herbert Spencer (1858) -- Principles of Psychology –
• continuity of mental states
• ranking again – reflex to volition.
• not surprisingly, he was a Lamarckian.
Darwin and Animal Behavior
The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)Expressions of the Emotions of Man and Animals (1872)
Darwin tended to rely on anecdotes that he fitted to his theories
• Serviceable associated habits (associative learning)
• Antithesis – animals outwardly express their inner emotions
Image from Goodenough, McGuire, and Wallace. Perspectives on Animal Behavior. Second Ed. 2001. Wiley
Early Nature-Nurture Dicotomy
Nature -- behavior springs from inherited factors and is little (if at all altered by experience).
Nurture -- behavior comes from experience (learning) and these behaviors are little influenced by genetic differences in animals.
The notion is that the two sources of behavior (and other elements of the phenotype) are separate -- the cause is one or the other.
The Years After DarwinLate 1800s -- Romanes
• Emphasized continuity of animals and humans
• Injective knowledge – knowing what is going on inside of animal by knowing what you feel in the same situation and when you perform similar actions.
• He used his subjective interpretations to make a table of emotions of where various emotions first arose
Romanes List
Emotion
Shame, deceit
Revenge, anger
Grief, hate, cruelty
Pride, resentment
Sympathy
Affection
Jealous, anger
Pugnacity, industry, curiosity
Sexual feelings
Surprise, fear
Animals in which the emotion first appears
Apes, dogs
Monkeys, elephants
Carnivores, rodents
Birds
Ants, wasps and bees
Crustaceans
Fish
Insects and spiders
Molluscs
Larvae of insects, annelids
Naturalistic Animal Behavior in the Early 1900s
Loeb -- everything was a forced movement or tropism toward or away from stimuli
Craig on stereotyped behaviors (1918)
consummatory – the act itself -- Craig believed it to consist of very fixed behavioral components
"drive" -- animal is motivated
appetitive (variable) brings animal into proper stimulus situation -- shows plasticity and purpose
tendency for a quiescent period afterwards