Читать книгу The Behavior of Animals - Группа авторов - Страница 23

Many people are interested in animal behavior out of mere curiosity, the need to know more about something. This is all very fine but there always comes a time when someone will ask “what is the purpose of studying animal behavior?” This question, whether from a research colleague, a friend, or a granting agency requires an answer expressed in terms of benefits to society. We see two areas in which animal behavior research can contribute to human society: animal welfare and understanding human nature.

Animals are important contributors to wealth and quality of life. They provide us with nourishment, the means to find cures and treatments for our illnesses, as well as invaluable companionship. Almost all of the information contained in this book relies on experiments and research conducted with animals. There is a growing concern that animals used for human benefit, however, be exposed to as little unpleasantness as necessary. Are housing cages too small, or densities of individuals too high? Is the knowledge acquired from experiments sufficiently important to authorize animal experimentation? The answer to such, often difficult, questions depends in many ways on knowing something about an animal’s behavior (Chapter 10).

People are endlessly curious about people and the sheer number of disciplines devoted uniquely to the study of human beings is eloquent testimony to this fact (e.g., medicine, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology). Animal behavior can provide insight into human behavior in two ways. More conventionally, phenomena observed in animals can be generalized, although often in some modified way, to humans. For example, just as a new antibiotic drug that cures an infection in some nonhuman primate can also be used, perhaps in a slightly modified way, to cure infections in humans, so can knowledge about how an animal learns be extended and applied to human learning. The second way, however, involves generalizing an approach rather than a result. For instance, can we learn anything new about human behavior by applying an evolutionary cost–benefit analysis to the things we do? This is what an area known as evolutionary psychology does (Chapter 17).