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Tinbergen's Four Questions
Tinbergen's four questions, named after 20th century biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, are complementary categories of explanations for animal behaviour. These are also commonly referred to as levels of analysis. It suggests that an integrative understanding of behaviour must include: ultimate (evolutionary) explanations, in particular the behaviour (1) adaptive function and (2) phylogenetic history; and the proximate explanations, in particular the (3) underlying physiological mechanisms and (4) ontogenetic/developmental history. Four categories of questions and explanations 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 developmen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nikolaas Tinbergen
Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen (; ; 15 April 1907 – 21 December 1988) was a Dutch biologist and ornithologist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz for their discoveries concerning the organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns in animals. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, the study of animal behavior. In 1951, he published ''The Study of Instinct'', an influential book on animal behaviour. In the 1960s, he collaborated with filmmaker Hugh Falkus on a series of wildlife films, including ''The Riddle of the Rook'' (1972) and ''Signals for Survival'' (1969), which won the Italia prize in that year and the American blue ribbon in 1971. Education and early life Born in The Hague, Netherlands, he was one of five children of Dirk Cornelis Tinbergen and his wife Jeannette van Eek. His brother, Jan Tinbergen, won the first Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Mem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Final Cause
The four causes or four explanations are, in Aristotelian thought, four fundamental types of answer to the question "why?", in analysis of change or movement in nature: the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final. Aristotle wrote that "we do not have knowledge of a thing until we have grasped its why, that is to say, its cause."" r a full range of cases, an explanation which fails to invoke all four causes is no explanation at all."—Falcon, Andrea. 0062019.Four Causes , Aristotle on Causality" ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy''. While there are cases in which classifying a "cause" is difficult, or in which "causes" might merge, Aristotle held that his four "causes" provided an analytical scheme of general applicability. Aristotle's word ''aitia'' () has, in philosophical scholarly tradition, been translated as 'cause'. This peculiar, specialized, technical, usage of the word 'cause' is not that of everyday English language. Rather, the translation of Aristotl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cephalopod Eye
Cephalopods, as active marine predators, possess sensory organs specialized for use in aquatic conditions.Budelmann BU. "Cephalopod sense organs, nerves and the brain: Adaptations for high performance and life style." Marine and Freshwater Behavior and Physiology. Vol 25, Issue 1-3, Page 13-33. They have a camera-type eye which consists of an iris, a circular lens, vitreous cavity (eye gel), pigment cells, and photoreceptor cells that translate light from the light-sensitive retina into nerve signals which travel along the optic nerve to the brain. For the past 140 years, the camera-type cephalopod eye has been compared with the vertebrate eye as an example of convergent evolution, where both types of organisms have independently evolved the camera-eye trait and both share similar functionality. Contention exists on whether this is truly convergent evolution or parallel evolution. Unlike the vertebrate camera eye, the cephalopods' form as invaginations of the body surface (rathe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blind Spot (vision)
A blind spot, scotoma, is an obscuration of the visual field. A particular blind spot known as the ''physiological blind spot'', "blind point", or ''punctum caecum'' in medical literature, is the place in the visual field that corresponds to the lack of light-detecting photoreceptor cells on the optic disc of the retina where the optic nerve passes through the optic disc.Gregory, R., & Cavanagh, P. (2011)"The Blind Spot" Scholarpedia. Retrieved on 2011-05-21. Because there are no cells to detect light on the optic disc, the corresponding part of the field of vision is invisible. Processes in the brain interpolate the blind spot based on surrounding detail and information from the other eye, so it is not normally perceived. Although all vertebrate Vertebrates () comprise all animal taxon, taxa within the subphylum Vertebrata () (chordates with vertebral column, backbones), including all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. Vertebrates represent the overwhelming ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Human Eye
The human eye is a sensory organ, part of the sensory nervous system, that reacts to visible light and allows humans to use visual information for various purposes including seeing things, keeping balance, and maintaining circadian rhythm. The eye can be considered as a living optical device. It is approximately spherical in shape, with its outer layers, such as the outermost, white part of the eye (the sclera) and one of its inner layers (the pigmented choroid) keeping the eye essentially light tight except on the eye's optic axis. In order, along the optic axis, the optical components consist of a first lens (the cornea—the clear part of the eye) that accomplishes most of the focussing of light from the outside world; then an aperture (the pupil) in a diaphragm (the iris—the coloured part of the eye) that controls the amount of light entering the interior of the eye; then another lens (the crystalline lens) that accomplishes the remaining focussing of light in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vertebrate
Vertebrates () comprise all animal taxon, taxa within the subphylum Vertebrata () (chordates with vertebral column, backbones), including all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. Vertebrates represent the overwhelming majority of the phylum Chordata, with currently about 69,963 species described. Vertebrates comprise such groups as the following: * Agnatha, jawless fish, which include hagfish and lampreys * Gnathostomata, jawed vertebrates, which include: ** Chondrichthyes, cartilaginous fish (sharks, Batoidea, rays, and Chimaeriformes, ratfish) ** Euteleostomi, bony vertebrates, which include: *** Actinopterygii, ray-fins (the majority of living Osteichthyes, bony fish) *** lobe-fins, which include: **** coelacanths and lungfish **** tetrapods (limbed vertebrates) Extant taxon, Extant vertebrates range in size from the frog species ''Paedophryne amauensis'', at as little as , to the blue whale, at up to . Vertebrates make up less than five percent of all described a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Species
In biology, a species is the basic unit of Taxonomy (biology), classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can reproduction, produce Fertility, fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. Other ways of defining species include their karyotype, DNA sequence, morphology (biology), morphology, behaviour or ecological niche. In addition, paleontologists use the concept of the chronospecies since fossil reproduction cannot be examined. The most recent rigorous estimate for the total number of species of eukaryotes is between 8 and 8.7 million. However, only about 14% of these had been described by 2011. All species (except viruses) are given a binomial nomenclature, two-part name, a "binomial". The first part of a binomial is the genus to which the species belongs. The second part is called the specifi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Behavioural
Behavior (American English) or behaviour (British English) is the range of actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems or artificial entities in some environment. These systems can include other systems or organisms as well as the inanimate physical environment. It is the computed response of the system or organism to various stimuli or inputs, whether internal or external, conscious or subconscious, overt or covert, and voluntary or involuntary. Taking a behavior informatics perspective, a behavior consists of actor, operation, interactions, and their properties. This can be represented as a behavior vector. Models Biology Although disagreement exists as to how to precisely define behavior in a biological context, one common interpretation based on a meta-analysis of scientific literature states that "behavior is the internally coordinated responses (actions or inactions) of whole living organisms (individuals or groups) to internal and/or external st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anatomical
Anatomy () is the branch of biology concerned with the study of the structure of organisms and their parts. Anatomy is a branch of natural science that deals with the structural organization of living things. It is an old science, having its beginnings in prehistoric times. Anatomy is inherently tied to developmental biology, embryology, comparative anatomy, evolutionary biology, and phylogeny, as these are the processes by which anatomy is generated, both over immediate and long-term timescales. Anatomy and physiology, which study the structure and function of organisms and their parts respectively, make a natural pair of related disciplines, and are often studied together. Human anatomy is one of the essential basic sciences that are applied in medicine. The discipline of anatomy is divided into macroscopic and microscopic. Macroscopic anatomy, or gross anatomy, is the examination of an animal's body parts using unaided eyesight. Gross anatomy also includes the branch of s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Trait (biology)
A phenotypic trait, simply trait, or character state is a distinct variant of a phenotypic characteristic of an organism; it may be either inherited or determined environmentally, but typically occurs as a combination of the two.Lawrence, Eleanor (2005) ''Henderson's Dictionary of Biology''. Pearson, Prentice Hall. For example, having eye color is a ''character'' of an organism, while blue, brown and hazel versions of eye colour are ''traits''. The term ''trait'' is generally used in genetics, often to describe phenotypic expression of different combinations of alleles in different individual organisms within a single population, such as the famous purple vs. white flower coloration in Gregor Mendel's pea plants. By contrast, in systematics, the term is ''character state'' is employed to describe features that represent fixed diagnostic differences among taxa, such as the absence of tails in great apes, relative to other primate groups. Definition A phenotypic trait i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Organism
In biology, an organism () is any life, living system that functions as an individual entity. All organisms are composed of cells (cell theory). Organisms are classified by taxonomy (biology), taxonomy into groups such as Multicellular organism, multicellular animals, plants, and fungi; or Unicellular organism, unicellular microorganisms such as protists, bacteria, and archaea. All types of organisms are capable of reproduction, Developmental biology, growth and development, homeostasis, maintenance, and some degree of response to Stimulus (physiology), stimuli. Beetles, squids, tetrapods, mushrooms, and vascular plants are examples of multicellular organisms that Cellular differentiation, differentiate specialized tissue (biology), tissues and organ (anatomy), organs during developmental biology, development. A unicellular organism may be either a prokaryote or a eukaryote. Prokaryotes are represented by two separate Three-domain system, domains – bacteria and arc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Population
Population typically refers to the number of people in a single area, whether it be a city or town, region, country, continent, or the world. Governments typically quantify the size of the resident population within their jurisdiction using a census, a process of collecting, analysing, compiling, and publishing data regarding a population. Perspectives of various disciplines Social sciences In sociology and population geography, population refers to a group of human beings with some predefined criterion in common, such as location, race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. Demography is a social science Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of soc ... which entails the statistical study of populations. Ecology In ecology, a population is a group of organisms of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
