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Instinct is the inherent inclination of a living organism towards a particular complex behaviour, containing innate (inborn) elements.The simplest example of an instinctive behaviour is a fixed action pattern (FAP), in which a very short to medium length sequence of actions, without variation, are carried out in response to a corresponding clearly defined stimulus.
In evolutionary psychology, people often speak of the four Fs which are said to be the four basic and most primal drives (motivations or instincts) that animals (including humans) are evolutionarily adapted to have, follow, and achieve: fighting, fleeing, feeding and fucking (a more polite synonym is the word "mating"). [1]
[5] James wrote that humans had many instincts, even more than other animals. [5] These instincts, he said, could be overridden by experience and by each other, as many of the instincts were actually in conflict with each other. [5] In their Evolutionary Psychology Primer Tooby and Cosmides make note of James' perspective, and also quote him ...
The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us. [87] John Webster, a professor of animal husbandry at Bristol, argues: People have assumed that intelligence is linked to the ability to suffer and that because animals have smaller brains they suffer less than humans.
Early humans were nowhere near as equipped to deal with danger as we are now -- so a wild animal or a person we don't know approaching us could be a sign of potential danger. Nowadays, we don't ...
The great apes (Hominidae) show some cognitive and empathic abilities. Chimpanzees can make tools and use them to acquire foods and for social displays; they have mildly complex hunting strategies requiring cooperation, influence and rank; they are status conscious, manipulative and capable of deception; they can learn to use symbols and understand aspects of human language including some ...
The existence and nature of emotions in non-human animals are believed to be correlated with those of humans and to have evolved from the same mechanisms. Charles Darwin was one of the first scientists to write about the subject, and his observational (and sometimes anecdotal) approach has since developed into a more robust, hypothesis-driven ...
Birds have been shown to possess highly sophisticated cognitive abilities, such as the toolmaking of the New Caledonian crow and the language-like categorization abilities of the grey parrot. [12] Structures of the limbic system, which MacLean proposed arose in early mammals, have now been shown to exist across a range of modern vertebrates.