Whatever scale of size or contour of shape an animal’s body takes, that body comes with and develops a scheme of behaviors. If behavior is defined to be the organized and integrated patterns of activity by which an organism responds to its environment, then even the single-celled protozoa, the simplest of animals, exhibit behavior. An animal’s suite of behavioral responses and patterns may be as simple as the feeding response of a hydra or as complex as the migratory patterns of snow geese. Whatever the behavioral pattern and level of complexity of that pattern, it has been molded by natural selection to perfectly fit the needs and lifestyle of the animal.
The Science of Ethology
Although humans have studied aspects of animal behavior since antiquity, the scientific foundations for the study of animal behavior were laid down in the 1930s with the work of Dutch zoologist Niko Tinbergen and Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz. With the awarding of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz, and Niko Tinbergen the beginnings of modern ethology, the discipline of animal behavior (not to be confused with ethnology, which compares and contrasts different human cultures) came to be.
No discussion of ethology would be complete without mentioning Irenus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, who was the first behaviorist to apply ethological methods to the study of human behavior. Utilizing side-viewing cameras that prevented the subjects from knowing they were being observed, Eibl-Eibesfeldt was able to compare gestures and body language across a wide range of culture. By doing so he identified numerous innate behavior patterns in humans.
Ethological research is conducted both in the field and in the laboratory setting and encompasses a number of specific scientific disciplines that fall under the general heading of animal behavior or ethology (Gr. ethos, custom + logos, study):
- behavioral ecology (the study of how adaptation shapes behavior and ensures reproductive success)
- behavioral genetics (the study of the role of genetics in the behavior of animals)
- comparative psychology (the study of behavior as it relates to the mental existence of animals other than humans).
The study of ethology is sometimes separated from the study of animal behavior on the technicality that animal behaviorists usually study learned behaviors while ethologists focus on innate behaviors. Also, animal behaviorists tend to be trained in psychology, while ethologists are usually zoologists.
Ethologists Struggle to Answer Two Main Questions
Behavioral biologists seek the answers to two basic questions: how do animals behave and why do animals behave the way they do? The how questions are concerned with proximate causation because they deal with immediate causes or with the way the behavioral patterns develop in the life of the animal. The why questions are concerned with ultimate causation and seek to answers to the adaptive, reproductive, or ecological significance of the behavior and how it evolved in the first place.
To answer the questions of how and why, behaviorists examine and study behavior from four perspectives: (1) causation, the causes of behavior, (2) development and control, the formation and regulation of the behavior in the development of the individual, (3) function, the significance of the behavior in assuring the survival and reproduction of the animal, and (4) evolution and genetics, the origin of the behavior in the evolution of the species as determined from comparative and phylogenetic studies (e.g. mapping behavior onto a phylogenetic tree to see how behavioral traits evolve within and among lineages) and the genetic component of the animal that results from that evolution.
Ethology not only delves into the immediate questions of how and why animals behave as they do but also holds the promise of better understanding broader issues such as animal ecology and animal evolution.
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