Reconciling mechanistic and functional perspectives on behaviour

Description

Behavioural biology strives to understand how animals cope with the complex and dynamic environment they are living in. Such understanding can be achieved in very different ways. Disciplines like behavioural ecology strive to explain behaviour on the basis of processes like natural selection, while fields like neurobiology or endocrinology seek to unravel the mechanisms underlying behavioural responses. Communication across disciplines is hampered by the fact that mechanistic considerations play a minor role in most evolutionary arguments, while modern evolutionary insights are not easily incorporated into ‘mechanistic thinking.’ To achieve a (re‑ )unification of the proximate and ultimate behavioural sciences, an increasing number of researchers plead for a new approach that does not focus on the evolution of behavioural response patterns but on the evolution of the mechanisms underlying these patterns. This approach is still in its infancy, but first modelling studies show that it may have important implications. I will illustrate this with three examples. First, I will show that the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation can be strongly affected by the way animals perceive and process information. Second, I will demonstrate that kin selection can hamper, rather than foster, the evolution of effective outcomes when the structure of behavioural interactions is taken into consideration. Third, I will present a mechanistic model for the evolution of animal movement strategies, which reveals that evolution in mechanistic models can be orders of magnitude faster than in traditional models, with significant implications for the efficiency of foraging and the distribution of animals in space. Interestingly, mechanistic models also provide a new explanation for the emergence of individual differences in behaviour (‘animal personalities’).

Periode	20-jul.-2022
Evenementstitel	European Conference on Behavioural Biology 2022: All of life is social!
Evenementstype	Conference
Locatie	Groningen, NetherlandsToon op kaart
Mate van erkenning	International