Tinbergen's four questions
[1] It suggests that an integrative understanding of behaviour must include ultimate (evolutionary) explanations, in particular: When asked about the purpose of sight in humans and animals, even elementary-school children can answer that animals have vision to help them find food and avoid danger (function/adaptation).
Biologists have three additional explanations: sight is caused by a particular series of evolutionary steps (phylogeny), the mechanics of the eye (mechanism/causation), and even the process of an individual's development (ontogeny).
[3] Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the only scientific explanation for why an animal's behaviour is usually well adapted for survival and reproduction in its environment.
[6] There are several reasons why natural selection may fail to achieve optimal design (Mayr 2001:140–143; Buss et al. 1998).
One entails random processes such as mutation and environmental events acting on small populations.
Once the vertebrate eye was constructed, there were no intermediate forms that were both adaptive and would have enabled it to evolve without a blind spot.
[5] Some prominent classes of Proximate causal mechanisms include: In examining living organisms, biologists are confronted with diverse levels of complexity (e.g. chemical, physiological, psychological, social).
In the latter half of the twentieth century, social scientists debated whether human behaviour was the product of nature (genes) or nurture (environment in the developmental period, including culture).
Many forms of developmental learning have a critical period, for instance, for imprinting among geese and language acquisition among humans.
Over many generations, the success of the species' behaviour in its ancestral environment—or more technically, the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) may result in evolution as measured by a change in its genes.
Four ways of explaining visual perception: Four ways of explaining the Westermarck effect, the lack of sexual interest in one's siblings (Wilson, 1998:189–196): Four ways of explaining romantic love have been used to provide a comprehensive biological definition (Bode & Kushnick, 2021):[8] Sleep has been described using Tinbergen's four questions as a framework (Bode & Kuula, 2021):[9] Konrad Lorenz, Julian Huxley and Niko Tinbergen were familiar with both conceptual categories (i.e. the central questions of biological research: 1.
This "biopsychosocial" framework clarifies and classifies the associations between the various levels of the natural and social sciences, and it helps to integrate the social and natural sciences into a "tree of knowledge" (see also Nicolai Hartmann's "Laws about the Levels of Complexity").
