Aping Monkeys with Mathematics
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چکیده
This chapter offers evidence that as a means of understanding the functional and evolutionary biology of the primates, mathematical models are at least worth their weight in paper. The basic idea of mathematical models and the possibilities and the limits of their usefulness are outlined in Section 1, "Mathematical Models." As morphological arguments for evolutionary conclusions have become better defined, the use of mathematical models in morphology has increased. This trend is not without difficulties (as examined in Section 2, "Morphology in Evolutionary Arguments"). As behavioral and social characteristics of animals have appeared in evolutionary arguments, mathematical models are needed even more to help keep ideas dynamic (rather than typological), clear, and consistent (as explained in Section 3, "Behavioral Taxonomy"). Recent studies of casual social groups among human and nonhuman primates exemplify an explicit mathematical characterization of one aspect of social life. This characterization may provide a useful base for comparative evolutionary inferences (detailed in Section 4, "Monkeys en Masse") . The data used in quantitative studies of social groups can be related to frequencies of other aspects of behavior (asymmetric relations such as dominance, symmetric pairwise relations such as play partnership, and individual behaviors) by representing data in multidimensional contingency tables (in Section 5, "Data Structures and Models for Social Behavior"). The frequencies of behaviors obtained from multidimensional contingency tables, and the frequency distributions of choice of habitat, may be interpreted functionally on the basis of recent mathematically formulated discoveries in the psychology of operant conditioning (discussed in Section 6, "Frequencies of Behavior"). But most of the use of mathematical models in
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تاریخ انتشار 2009