Читать книгу The Behavior of Animals - Группа авторов - Страница 20

Much of the research and theorizing of early ethologists such as Lorenz and Tinbergen was concerned with the causation of behavior. When Tinbergen was invited to move from the Dutch University of Leiden to the University of Oxford, he established the Animal Behaviour Research Group, while at the same time the ecological ornithologist David Lack was taking over the newly founded Edward Grey Institute of Ornithology. The coincidence of having both these scientists and their followers in the same department in Oxford sowed the seeds of a discipline that was to blossom much later in the mid-1970s under the name of behavioral ecology.

Behavioral ecology arose out of the fusion of evolutionary ecology, population ecology, and ethology. A number of conditions were ripe in the mid-seventies for such an event. In 1975 the Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson published Sociobiology, The New Synthesis (1975). Wilson’s book was firmly grounded in population genetics and evolutionary biology. Its clear presentation of William D. Hamilton’s concepts of inclusive fitness, kin selection, the evolution of altruism and social groups among others, provided the essential foundations for a successful evolutionary approach to social behavior. Not long after that, in 1978, John R. Krebs at Oxford University and Nicholas B. Davies at Cambridge co-edited a book they called Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach, which applies a similar evolutionary approach but this time to all, not just social, behavior. The publication of that book marks the official birth of behavioral ecology, which now includes sociobiology (see Chapter 17).

Behavioral ecology today is more of an approach than a body of accumulated fact. Its initial success grew out of a combination of optimality theory and evolutionary thinking that pictures the expression of behavioral traits as constrained trade-offs between their evolutionary benefits and costs (Chapter 11). The development of the concept of the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) by the British evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith (1982) allowed this cost–benefit approach to be applied to a wide range of behavioral interactions. Evolutionary thinking and the cost–benefit approach cast a new light on behavioral systems such as foraging, fighting, and habitat selection (Chapter 11). When applied to communication it raised an important number of questions concerning the design of signals and their functions (Chapter 14). While early ethologists tended to picture sexual reproduction as a cooperative venture between males and females, the evolutionary approach has somewhat subverted this idyllic view. Mating systems and mate choice (Chapter 12) as well as conflicts of interests between mates (Chapter 14) have become exciting and rapidly developing areas of the discipline. Darwin himself pictured behavior as a character that was modified over generations by selection. Behavior, hence, has a history that can be and is studied with contemporary organisms (Chapters 15 and 16).