Introduction: Mechanisms of Animal Behaviour

This book comprises four volumes, roughly dealing with the four main problems in animal behaviour, namely the causation, development, function and evolution of behaviour. The way in which these four topics were assigned to the different volumes is pragmatic, and there is bound to be some overlap. Nevertheless, we feel that the division of the study of animal behaviour into these four questions, is helpful and will lead to a better understanding of the subject. In this we follow Niko Tinbergen, one of the founding fathers of behavioural biology, who first identified these four problems in a publication from 1963 (Chapter 2 of the present volume). Animal behaviour was studied before Tinbergen, and it is instructive to dwell briefly upon the prehistory of the field. The scientific study of animal behaviour is also called ethology, a term used first by the 19th century French zoologist Isidore Geoffroy Saint Hilaire but then used with its modern meaning by the American zoologist Wheeler (1902). Ethology is derived from the Greek ethos, meaning 'character'. There is some resemblance with the word 'ethics', which is derived from the same Greek word. This is perhaps not so surprising, seeing that ethics is basically about how humans ought to behave. Unfortunately the word 'ethology' is often confused with the word 'ethnology' (the study of human peoples), with which it has nothing in common. The term 'ethology' is not used as much as it used to be, although there is still an active animal behaviour journal bearing this name. Instead of 'ethology', nowadays many authors use the words 'animal behaviour' or 'behavioural biology' when they refer to the scientific study of animal behaviour. Early days Scientists and amateurs have studied animal behaviour long before the word 'ethology' was introduced. For instance, Aristotle had many interesting observations concerning animal behaviour. The study of animal behaviour was taken up more systematically mainly by German and British zoologists around the turn of the 19th century. The great British naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882), in his classic book on the theory of evolution by natural selection (Darwin, 1859), devoted a whole chapter to what he called 'instinct'. As early as 1873, the British amateur investigator Douglas Spalding recorded some very interesting observations on the attachment behaviour of young domestic chicks to abnormal objects, a phenomenon that was later called 'imprinting', after the German 'Prägung' (see the paper by Konrad Lorenz reproduced here …