Читать книгу Bird Senses - Graham R. Martin - Страница 18

The origins of thinking about the problem of understanding human and animal senses go back more than 2000 years in western thought. However, it is only during the last 200 years that we have gained real insight into the diversity of sensory information across species. The Darwin–Wallace ideas of natural selection, and Alexander von Humboldt’s ideas about the interrelationships of organisms with their environment, provided two big ideas which now provide broad frameworks for thinking about the senses of animals. They give us many reasons for expecting that senses, and the information that they provide, will differ between species. Importantly they provide ways to account for these differences in terms of their evolution and their ecological functions. We can now appreciate why sensory information might differ between species, and how it is linked to specific behaviours and ecologies.