Classical Ethology PDF

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Lecture notes on the classical understanding of evolutionary psychology...

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Evolutionary Psychology 2 22/01/16

Classical Ethology

The evolution of behaviour, how behaviour has involved – this leads to instinct. Why do people differ so much form other animals? Animals behaved in ways, they knew what to do, without the complex thought processes used by humans. When the animal does things wrong , they don’t really know that they have or why they have.

The concept of instinct was never well defined, it involved the behaviour itself and the urge to perform that behaviour. Aristotle recognized that animals have some capacity to reason, he developed a natural scale, measuring the intelligence of different animals. The idea of the Natural Scale did persist into early comparative psychology in the first half of the 20 th century, it was combined with the idea of evolution and referred to the Phylogenetic scale.

Aside from this scale, the distinction between man and animals persisted for a long time, in particular for theological reasons, that animals didn’t have souls and so could not reason. The theory of evolution reveals the relationship between humans and other animals in a way that didn’t separate them into different chategories. This mean t that human beings had instinct too, and that animals reasoned too. Two lines of thinking Measuring different kinds of what information animals could learn, comparative psychology Concentrated on human behaviour and didn’t consider consciousness, and accepted that humans beings have instincts, argueing that they have more. William James.

Environmentalism (antinativism) Behaviourists argued that instincts didn’t exist at all, bioloigsts argued against them, mostly in Europe, outside the anglo-american area. Each species have very rigid stereotyped behaviour, eg. Ducks have very specific movements that they inherit.

Ethologsists started thinking about genetic determinism, thinking that instinct are not learned, instead they are all inherited, and nothing needs to be learnt from the environment.

Ethology’s Charles Whitman – discusses that some evolved behaviours do occur without any learning necessary, however some things must be leanred. Eg. Birds, pretending to have a broken wing on the Galapagos island.

Ethologists staked a great deal of deprivation studies, in order to see if animals could do behaviours without leanring them.

The argument about the instincts became a simplistic version of the nature nurture debate. They argued that if they could show some form of learning than the behaviour was not instinctive. The behaviourists claimed that if learning was involved, then instinct played no part in behaviour. The topic was ignored from experimental psych for many days, because humans were not just instinct.

It came back with ethology Concepts 1. The fixed action pattern A fixed action that is repeated and unlearnt. Became a massive focus and was taken as a prototype by which all other incidences had to be like. Egg-retrieving behaviour of the greylag goose. Lorenz and Tinbergun observed that once the response was started, it was always finished, even if the egg was taken away, they still tuck empty air in. This is typical of the species, it occurs without any previous experience. Eg. Frog with the tongue, once it starts the tongue flick, it can’t stop. The pattern was thought of as an ordered set of muscular contractions, it didn’t involve any stimulus or thought. However it isn’t stereotyped, it isn’t performed in the same way from one behaviour to another. The taxic component of the response plays a role. Attempts to identify fixed action problems in humans – facial expressions. Flasing eyebrows as a form of greeting is used all over the world.

Signed stimuli Most animals will be ready and able to react to a variety of signed stimuli....