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Ethology, the study of animal behaviour, has been a topic of interest since the 1930s.The pioneers of the field include Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and Austrian biologists Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz [13] [14] [15] (the three won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973 for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour ...
The start of behaviour genetics as a well-identified field was marked by the publication in 1960 of the book Behavior Genetics by John L. Fuller and William Robert (Bob) Thompson. [1] [10] It is widely accepted now that many if not most behaviours in animals and humans are under significant genetic influence, although the extent of genetic ...
Behavioral ecology, also spelled behavioural ecology, is the study of the evolutionary basis for animal behavior due to ecological pressures. Behavioral ecology emerged from ethology after Niko Tinbergen outlined four questions to address when studying animal behaviors: What are the proximate causes, ontogeny, survival value, and phylogeny of a behavior?
Behavioral epigenetics is the field of study examining the role of epigenetics in shaping animal and human behavior. [1] It seeks to explain how nurture shapes nature, [2] where nature refers to biological heredity [3] and nurture refers to virtually everything that occurs during the life-span (e.g., social-experience, diet and nutrition, and exposure to toxins). [4]
Behavioral plasticity is the change in an organism's behavior that results from exposure to stimuli, such as changing environmental conditions. [1] Behavior can change more rapidly in response to changes in internal or external stimuli than is the case for most morphological traits and many physiological traits.
In behavioral ecology, adaptive behavior is any behavior that contributes directly or indirectly to an individual's reproductive success, and is thus subject to the forces of natural selection. [1] Examples include favoring kin in altruistic behaviors , sexual selection of the most fit mate, and defending a territory or harem from rivals.
Human behaviour genetics is an interdisciplinary subfield of behaviour genetics that studies the role of genetic and environmental influences on human behaviour. Classically, human behavioural geneticists have studied the inheritance of behavioural traits. The field was originally focused on determining the importance of genetic influences on ...
Phenotypic plasticity refers to some of the changes in an organism's behavior, morphology and physiology in response to a unique environment. [1] [2] Fundamental to the way in which organisms cope with environmental variation, phenotypic plasticity encompasses all types of environmentally induced changes (e.g. morphological, physiological, behavioural, phenological) that may or may not be ...