BIOLOGY 1M03 Lecture Notes - Instinct, Wrasse, Classical Conditioning
11 Jun 2013
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Document Summary
After describing behaviour, biologists seek to explain both its proximate and ultimate causes meaning, how it happens at the genetic and physiological levels and how it affects the individual s fitness. In a single species, behaviour may range from highly stereotyped, invariable responses to highly flexible, conditional responses and from unlearned to learned responses. The types of learning that individuals do, the way that they communicate, and the way that they orient and navigate correlate closely with their habitat and with the challenges they face in trying to survive and reproduce. When individuals behave altruistically, they are usually helping close relatives or individuals that help them in return. Ecology is the study of how organisms interact with their physical and biological environments, and behavioural biology is the study of how organisms respond to particular stimuli from those environments. Proximate (or mechanistic) causation explains how actions occur. Ultimate (or evolutionary) causation explains why actions occur.
