“It Felt More like a Revolution.” How Behavioral Ecology Succeeded Ethology, 1970–1990

Abstract

As soon as ethology's status diminished in the early 1970s, it was confronted with two successor disciplines, sociobiology and behavioral ecology. They were able to challenge ethology because it no longer provided markers of strong disciplinarity such as theoretical coherence, leading figures and a clear identity. While behavioral ecology developed organically out of the UK ethological research community into its own disciplinary standing, sociobiology presented itself as a US competitor to the ethological tradition. I will show how behavioral ecology took the role of legitimate heir to ethology by rebuilding a theoretical core and an intellectual sense of community, while sociobiology failed to use its public appeal to reach disciplinary status. Meanwhile, ethology changed its disciplinary identity to encompass all biological studies of animal behavior.

The early rise and spread of evolutionary game theory: perspectives based on recollections of early workers

“…While ethology had mostly been preoccupied with describing an animal's behaviour patterns, behavioural repertoires and the internal system of 'drives', or internal states evoking them [56], the new science of behavioural ecology focused on adaptive value and represented a major change in approach (see Stuhrmann's detailed account [57], and also [58,59]).…”

“…In a nutshell, EGT found its place among the three major theories available in behaviour studies, alongside inclusive fitness and (frequency-independent) optimization theory. Two major places for the spread of new theories among students of animal behaviour were certainly the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the United Kingdom [57]. Documenting the flux of information from and to these places certainly sheds much insight into the rapid growth of behavioural ecology [57].…”

How tracking technology is transforming animal ecology: epistemic values, interdisciplinarity, and technology-driven scientific change

“…Second, I argue that tracking technology is transforming how decisions are made about collecting, processing, analysing and interpreting movement data. Animal ecology has long drawn on theoretical elements from other disciplines, especially economics models and evolutionary theories (Bolduc, 2012;Grüne-Yanoff, 2016;Stuhrmann, 2022). Tracking technology has led to new sorts of interdisciplinarity emerging for animal ecologists, leading them to engage with new disciplines and in more intensive collaborations.…”

Genetic conflicts and the case for licensed anthropomorphizing

“…Biology, and especially the branch of the discipline dedicated to studying animal behavior, has wrestled with it for decades (for overviews see, for example, Mitchell et al 1997;Crist 1999;Daston and Mittman 2005). Several influential names in ethology-in many ways the predecessors of behavioral ecology and, to a lesser extent, sociobiology (Stuhrmann 2022)-addressed the topic numerous times. This included Niko Tinbergen (1963), Konrad Lorenz (who dealt with the topic in his Nobel lecture; 1974), and, in particular, J.S.…”