Academic literature on the topic '060304 Ethology and Sociobiology'

This case study examines differences between how the animal‐behavior‐research fields of ethology and sociobiology account for female ornamental traits. I address three questions: 1) Why were female traits noted in early animal‐behavior writings but not systematically studied like male traits? 2) Why did ethology attend to female signals before sexual‐selection studies did? 3) And why didn't sexual‐selection researchers cite the earlier ethological literature when they began studying female traits? To answer these questions, I turn to feminist and other science‐studies scholars and philosophers of science. My main framework is provided by Bruno Latour, whose model I position within relevant feminist critique (Latour 1999). This approach provides an interactive account of how scientific knowledge develops. I argue that this embedded approach provides a more compelling reading of the relationship between gender and science than does focusing on androcentric biases. My overall aim is to counter arguments by some feminist biologists that feminist tools should emphasize the correction and removal of biases, and to address their fears that more rigorous critiques would lead to relativism or otherwise remove science as a tool for feminist use.

AbstractAnswers to the question, “What is a farm animal?” often revolve around genetics, physical attributes, and the animals’ functions in agricultural production. The essential and defining characteristics of farm animals transcend these limited models, however, and require an answer that avoids reductionism and encompasses a de-atomizing point of view. Such an answer should promote recognition of animals as beings with extensive mental and social capabilities that outline the extent of each individual animal’s existence and—at the same time—define the animals as parts of wholes that in themselves are more than the sum of their parts and have ethological as well as ethical relevance. To accomplish this, the concepts of both anthropomorphism and sociobiology will be examined, and the article will show how the possibility of understanding animals and their characteristics deeply affects both ethology and philosophy; that is, it has an important influence on our descriptive knowledge of animals, the concept of what animal welfare is and can be, and any normative ethics that follow such knowledge.

Evolutionary studies of human behavior and design are increasing in popularity. There are now few topics or disciplines where an evolutionary perspective is not applied. For the past 40 years, evolutionary approaches to human behavior and design have been given many names, e.g. human ethology, human sociobiology, human behavioral ecology, evolutionary anthropology and evolutionary psychology. This diversity may be confusing when one first becomes interested in evolutionary studies. Different names have come and gone – often because they have become unpopular in someone’s mind – while some names have survived and remained, but are often used with different meanings. This article presents the preliminary result of a scrutiny of names used in the evolutionary literature and what they mean. I also briefly discuss why there is a surplus of names and consider if we should attempt to find one name for the field(s) or if we should continue with the diversity.

Abstract This paper compares various explanatory concepts of food sharing in humans. In many animal species, parents share food with their offspring, thus investing into the 50% of their own genes present in each child. Even in modern families of industrialised societies, there is a very significant flow of material goods from the parent to the offspring generation. Sharing food between reproductive partners is also easily explainable in evolutionary terms: „food for sex“ as male strategy is observed in some primate species. Sharing within one’s group in small-scale societies can be explained also as consequence of its members being actually rather closely related to each other; this, among others, gives credit to the concept of group selection which gains attention again after having been discarded by classic sociobiology. The ethos of individual and group sharing can quite readily be transferred to larger groups, i.e. a whole nation or, especially in the case of unusually devastating natural disasters, to members of other societies. Food sharing beyond genetic relationship or reproductive interest has been explained as „tit for tat“ and „reciprocal altruism“. Events of give and take, however, are, how the last example demonstrates, quite often non-symmetrical, i.e. one partner shares much more than the other. „Tolerated theft“, a behavioural trait in non-human primate species thought to be a stepping stone for the typical preparedness of humans to share, does not play a big role in traditional societies, which provide an important base to discuss the topic. The Trobriand Islanders, e.g., have a very complex system of sharing. In the years of competitive harvest, their yield of yam is distributed to close relatives, especially to fathers and elder brothers. The donors keep almost nothing for themselves, are however given as well, so that everybody has enough to live. High rank men receive a partly enormous surplus, by which their status is increased. Western farmers would find this generosity quite strange. It is one outcome of the human tendency to create bonds through food gifts. It is interesting, that Marcel Mauss has well described the power of the gift which generates a counter gift, but did not inquire evolutionary nor ontogenetic building blocks of the often very complex acts and rituals of giving and receiving one finds in all cultures. It seems reasonable to take an evolutionary position and argue that those of our ancestors who were generous and socially competent with a well-developed emphronesis (Theory of Mind) were preferred interaction and marriage partners and that this sexual selection was the ultimate mechanism spreading the motivations and behaviours involved in sharing. To counteract cheaters humans have a rather sharp perception to detect those who don’t play by the rules and a very strong motivation to punish them, even accepting, in doing so, high costs for themselves. This strongly disproves the idea that humans mainly act on rationale choice. Rather, we are endowed, one must conclude, with a very powerful, archaic sense of balanced social interaction, of fairness and justice. This raises the interesting question whether the laws governing social conduct, made by all cultures of the world, are contra or secundum naturam. For quite some time, in the wave of sociobiological thinking, the common stand was that humans are dangerously egoistic beings and that their antisocial instincts must be kept in check by powerful laws. As Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, the founder of human ethology as a discipline, has stated and as recent primatological and anthropological research has corroborated, humans are much more social than postulated by some authors. The Ten Commandments are built on not against basic human tendencies. Konrad Lorenz spoke of animals having “morally analogous” behaviours and was criticised for this. Modern research is rehabilitating him. The joy of sharing, a proximate behavioural set of motivation, is typical for our species. Notwithstanding expectations of economic and status gain this biopsychologically rooted tendency most likely is the engine driving the systems of do ut des, so marvellously developed in our species.

New humanities, e.g. sociobiology, human ethology, evolutionary anthropology, etc., have delivered a lot of new knowledge. As a result, scientists have to update some old traditional concepts. The research objective was to examine the phenomenon of solidarity in the context of new approaches. The author compared the biological and anthropological characteristics of this phenomenon and defined it via specifically social forms of human interaction and historical cases. The connectivity of biological communities and the solidarity of human associations revealed some similarities and differences. Human abilities for self-restraint and discipline are consequence of the conscious nature of solidarity. Solidarity as a specifically social form of interaction does not result from the psychological characteristics of people. It expresses the ways people interact with each other, according to their number and degree of convergence. The most important psychological sign of the solidarity of natural groups is their organicity, or integrity, as well as the mutual coordination of individual feelings and experiences. Solidarity is the cohesion of human communities, based on historical types of social interaction. The degree of unfavorable environment and the degree of internal coordination of interests and feelings determine the degree of unity of the group. The author identified two main stable forms of solidarity in history – organic and rationalized. The historical dynamics of the division of labor and personalization determine these forms of solidarity. The author also established the following historical forms of organic solidarity: patrimonial, family-clan, egalitarian, class, and chiliastic.

AbstractThe paper expresses the authors' views on the growing interest in primate social cognition, particularly among descriptive primate ethologists. Its characteristics are the hope to extract cognitive interpretations from field anecdotes, the free use of intentional language, and the untested and so far untestable idea that primate intelligence was selected in social contexts. We believe that 1) To understand how the animal itself represents the structure of its group or its habitat is perhaps the most ethological ethology there is and well worth pursuing. The study of social cognition, in particular, has long been neglected. 2) However, it requires of ethologists that they learn from established cognitive science and integrate its categories with their own. This is an interdisciplinary enterprise. 3) A traditional inductive study begins with anecdotes, which then are translated into hypotheses, which in turn are subjected to empirical tests including experiments. Sociobiology began to publish hypotheses without tests; the social cognition move now goes on to publish anecdotes without hypotheses, with a strong penchant for anthropomorphic interpretations in terms of social manipulation. This is little more than applying human prejudice. Phylogenetic and cognitive insights will come from testing alternative levels of organization in an animal's social knowledge about the same behavioral interaction. The experiment is the largely unavoidable method. Examples are given. 4) The speculation of the social origin of primate intelligence is tentatively interpreted in two possible directions. A version based on ROZIN's (1976) view that generalized mammal intelligence evolved from context-specific "Adaptive Specializations" seems the more accessible to ethological thinking and method.