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This volume is devoted principally to the theme of behavioral
develop ment. The study of ontogeny has attracted some of the most
bitter and protracted controversies in the whole field of ethology
and psychology. This is partly because the arguments have reflected
more general and continuing ideological battles about nature and
nurture. In the opening essay, Oppenheim shows how these debates
have recurred in much the same form over the last century. His
chapter also brings out a more worrying feature of such argument.
He demonstrates that authors who are well known for their strongly
held partisan views have written in much more balanced ways than is
usually admitted. Although the ex cluded middle is familiar enough
in academic argument, the dynamic tensions actually present in
developing systems may be particularly prone to polarize debate
about what is actually happening. This point is elegantly explored
by Oyama in her essay on her concept of maturation."
One of the attractive features of the great classical ethologists
was their readiness to ask different kinds of questions about
behavior - and to do so without muddling the answers. Niko
Tinbergen, for instance, was interested in the evolution of
behavior. But he also had interests in the present-day sur vival
value of a behavior pattern and in the mechanisms that control it
from moment to moment. Broad as his interests were, he clearly
separated out the problems and recognized that questions about the
history, function, control, and development of behavior require
distinct approaches - even though the answers to one type of
question may aid in finding answers to another. The open-minded
(and clear-headed) style of ethologists like Tinbergen was based on
a recognition that there are diverse ways of usefully con ducting
research on behavior. This consciousness has been partially sub
merged in recent years by new waves of narrowly focused enthusiasm.
For instance, the study of the behavior of whole animals without
recourse to lower levels of analysis, and the treatment of
sociobiological theories as ex planation for how individuals
develop, has meant that the relatively fragile plants of
neuroethology and behavioral ontogeny have almost disappeared under
the flood."
This volume is subtitled "Alternatives" because we wanted to devote
at least a part of it to the alternative ways in which members of
the same species behave in a given situation. Not so very long ago
the supposition among many ethologists was that if one animal
behaved in a particular way, then all other members of the same age
and sex would do the same. Any differences in the ethogram between
individuals were to be attributed to "normal biological variation.
" Such thinking is less common nowadays after the discovery of
dramatic differences between members of the same species which are
of the same age and sex. Alternative modes of behavior, though now
familiar, raise particularly interesting questions about current
function, evolutionary history, and mechanism. Do the differences
rep resent equally satisfactory solutions to a given problem? Are
some of the solutions the best that those animals can do, given
their body size and general condition? Is an alternative solution
adopted because so many other individuals have taken the first? If
so, do the frequencies reached at equilibrium depend on
differential survival of genetically distinct types or do they
result from decisions taken by individual animals? If the
alternatives are induced during development, as are the castes of
social insects, what is required for such triggering? The questions
about alternative ways of behaving are addressed in some of the
chapters in this volume."
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