Class sessions are interactive, so this will incorporate elements of the prepared presentation and notes on things we also discussed.

(In progress)

Historical views

Aristotle
Qualitative difference between humans and animals (instinct vs. reason)

Descartes
Qualitative Differences (reflex vs. rationality); animals as automatons; justification of vivisection
(Resource: T.H. Huxley’s 1874 essay on Descartes and consciousness)

Spallanzani
Bats and echolocation
(Resources: Donald Griffin on the history of bat echolocation discoveries (includes corrections and extensions of ideas I talked about in session), Wikipedia article on Lazzaro Spallanzani)

Darwin
Behav. traits distributed just like others
(Resources: Darwin Online, PDF of 1890 edition of "Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals)

Lloyd Morgan
Do not attribute a behavior to a higher faculty if it can be reasonably explained by a lower one.

Thorndike, Watson, Skinner
Mental states are unobservable, and thus nothing should be cast in those terms

Ethologists

Three ethologists honored with a Nobel Prize (1973, Medicine or Physiology)
Niko Tinbergen
Karl von Frisch
Konrad Lorenz

Background to Animal Behavior

Ecology
– Life histories
– Species interactions

Evolution
– Adaptation
— Natural selection
— Sexual selection

Framework

Niko Tinbergen’s 4 questions
– What is the mechanism of the behavior?
– How was that developed in the animal’s lifetime?
– What is the function of the behavior?
– How did that function evolve?

Proximate and Ultimate questions
– These also split on individual vs. population lines