Animal Behaviour - Tinbergens Four Whys, Where are we now?

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Animal Behaviour - Tinbergens Four Whys, Where are we now?

Ethology has developed considerably since early last century where it was regarded as a hobby for naturalists and animal keepers. It has developed into a science of it's own founded by work based on Huxley's three principles of biology by TINBERGEN which urged academics to apply more rigorous experimental techniques and turned a largely qualitative subject into the quantitative science that it is known by today. However this transition has not been easy and during this paper I will outline how the scientific community has approached the subject over the years. I will start by outlining the work done by TINBERGEN and then move onto how his ideas of what the subject was has shaped what it has become.

TINBERGEN described ethology as "the biological study of behaviour" in his paper "On Aims and Methods of Ethology" (1963). This was because at the time there was no consistent public view of what ethology was and even the academics involved differed in their opinion of what the subject entailed. He then broke down the field into two parts, the observable phenomenon (i.e. behaviour or movement), and more radically the