When ‘What Animals Do’ Doesn’t Seem to Cover It

[groovedaddy]

Certain things should never be taken for granted, among them your spouse, your mother, the United States Constitution, and the precise meaning of words that are at the heart of your profession.

Daniel Levitis was working as a teaching assistant for an animal behavior course at the University of California in Berkeley, and on the first day of class, the professor explained that the shorthand definition of a “behavior” is “what animals do.”

O.K., that’s the freshman-friendly definition, Mr. Levitis thought. Now how about the unabridged, professional version? What is the point-by-point definition of a behavior that behavioral biologists use when judging whether a particular facet of the natural world falls under their purview? After all, animals digest food and grow fur, yet few behavioral researchers would count such physiological and anatomical doings as behaviors.

Mr. Levitis asked the professor for the full definition of a behavior. She referred him to their textbook, with its promising title, “Animal Behavior.” To his surprise, neither that textbook nor any other reference he consulted bothered to spell it out. “It was assumed that everyone knew what the word meant,” said Mr. Levitis, who is completing his doctorate at Berkeley.

Mr. Levitis decided to ask the people who should know best: working behavioral biologists. The provocative and crisply written results of his quest, carried out with his colleagues, William Lidicker Jr. and Glenn Freund, appear in the current issue of the journal Animal Behaviour. Among the highlights of the report: biologists don’t agree with one another on what a behavior is; biologists don’t agree with themselves on what a behavior is; biologists can be as parochial as the rest of us, meaning that animal behaviorists tend to reflexively claim the behavior label for animals only, while botanists sniff that, if the well-timed unfurling of a smelly, colorful blossom for the sake of throwing your seed around isn’t the ultimate example of a behavior, then there’s no such thing as Valentine’s Day; and, finally, words may count, but thoughts do not.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/science/21angier.html?th&emc=th

[MADem]

1. Fascinating! nt

[mike_c]

2. interesting-- I've taught animal behavior and run into the same issues....

...although, to be fair, I'm mostly comfortable with the definition of behavior that I give my students:

Behavior is an animal's response to stimuli, usually-- but not always-- involving motor responses.

That definition excludes most physiological events like growing fur or getting hungry, but it certainly includes external responses to physiological stimuli, such as seeking food as a response to hunger. Many biological "definitions" have somewhat fuzzy boundaries, however. That's just something biologists have to learn to live with-- we often deal with phenomena that are difficult to unambiguously categorize.