Fish schooling is a phenomenon of long-lasting interest in ethology and ecology, widely spread across taxa and ecological contexts, and has attracted much interest from statistical physics and theoretical biology as a case of self-organized behaviour. One topic of intense interest is the search of specific behavioural mechanisms at stake at the individual level and from which the school propert...

Research on attachment is widely regarded in sociology and feminist scholarship as politically conservative - oriented by a concern to police families, pathologize mothers and emphasize psychological at the expense of socio-economic factors. These critiques have presented attachment theory as constructing biological imperatives to naturalize contingent, social demands. We propose that a more ef...

Ethology is the study of the function and evolution of an animal's behaviour in its natural environment. Why should ethology be an important consideration for veterinarians? Being familiar with the norm allows the veterinarian to know when they have been presented with the abnormal this is the case whether we are considering physiological or behavioural parameters. Understanding not only what i...

COURSE DESCRIPTION: The course is designed for graduate students in biology wanting to aquire a more detailed working knowledge and appreciation of mammalian diversity in structure, function, ethology, and ecology. Knowledge and skills aquired in this course will be useful to field and laboratory studies in ecology, evolution, animal behavior, biogeography, wildlife management, and related disc...

Our goal in this paper is to provide enough of an account of the origins of cognitive ethology and the controversy surrounding it to help ethicists to gauge for themselves how to balance skepticism and credulity about animal minds when communicating with scientists. We believe that ethicists’ arguments would benefit from better understanding of the historical roots of ongoing controversies. It ...

Ethology, the evolutionary science of behaviour, assumes that natural selection shapes behaviour and its neural substrates in humans and other animals. In this view, the nervous system of any animal comprises a suite of morphological and behavioural adaptations for solving specific information processing problems posed by the physical or social environment. Since the allocation of behaviour oft...

In his new collection Dan Dennett looks over a broad range of themes, from philosophy of mind to artificial life and from ethology to animal psychology. All the essays were written in the past twelve years and have already been published in conference volumes or in specialized journals. The purpose of the collection is, as the author says, to group such essays "for the convenience of students a...

From the 1950s, John Bowlby, one of the founders of attachment theory, was in personal and scientific contact with leading European scientists in the field of ethology (e.g., Niko Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz, and especially Robert Hinde). In constructing his new theory on the nature of the bond between children and their caregivers, Bowlby profited highly from their new approach to (animal) behavi...

A computational model of action-selection is presented, which by drawing on ideas from Ethology, addresses a number of problems which have been noted in models proposed to date including the need for greater control over the temporal aspects of behavior, the need for a loose hierarchical structure with information sharing, and the need for a flexible means of modeling the influence of internal ...