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Cognitive Ecology: The Evolutionary Ecology of Information Processing and Decision Making
Books etcetera
Cognitive Ecology: The Evolutionary Ecology of Information Processing and Decision Making edited by Reuven Dukas, University of Chicago Press, 1998. $95.00/£75.95 hbk, $30.00/£23.95 pbk (x + 420 pages) ISBN 0 226 16932 4 (hbk), 0 226 16933 2 (pbk) In 1963, Niko Tinbergen published a paper1 called On aims and methods of ethology in which he argued that the study of animal behaviour should not confine itself to one approach but should ask four different kinds of question: those about underlying mechanisms, those about adaptive significance, those about development and those about phylogeny. Tinbergen himself made major contributions to answering all of these questions and always made a point of stressing the connections between ethology and other disciplines such as physiology. Indeed, he once described his own work as ‘physiology without breaking the skin’. In 1966, Robert Hinde published the first edition of his monumental Animal Behaviour: A Synthesis of Ethology and Comparative Psychology2. The study of animal behaviour was, at that time, a broad discipline with a catholic view of what constituted its subject matter. However, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, one part of ethology – the part concerned with adaptive significance – began to command greater attention than all the others. Fuelled by the success of the ‘selfish gene’ approach to behaviour and by new ideas about kin selection, reciprocal altruism and sexual selection, behavioural ecology effectively took this one of the four questions from its parent discipline and set itself up as a new and fashionable field, with its own journal and its own society. Questions about the mechanisms underlying behaviour were seen as much less exciting and interesting than the new adaptive theories. Eventually , but only a long time later, behavioural ecologists began to realize that considering just adaptive questions without also considering the others was very limited. Mechanisms underlying behaviour were not only interesting in their own right but they also contributed directly to theories about adaptation. Behavioural ecologists effectively rediscovered ethology but – perhaps because of its association with out-dated models of motivation, steadfastly refused to let the actual word pass their lips. Instead a new term came into being: cognitive ecology3. Now, it is greatly to be welcomed that behavioural ecologists have now taken an interest in mechanism (and development and phylogeny, come to that), and this book edited by Reuven
Dukas is a very valuable contribution to the field of animal behaviour. I thoroughly recommend it for anyone who wants up-to-date and stimulating accounts of animal orientation (chapter by F.C. Dyer) spatial memory (D.F. Sherry), risk-sensitive foraging (M. Bateson and A. Kacelnik) and how animals decide whether to feed or flee from predators (R. Ydenberg). There are also wide-ranging and very valuable chapters on learning in song sparrows (M. Beecher et al.) and partner choice (L.A. Dugatkin and A. Sih) and by Dukas himself on ecological aspects of learning. All these authors do an admirably synthetic and inter-disciplinary job, carrying out cognitive ecology’s aim to ‘integrate proximate knowledge from neurobiology, genetics and cognitive psychology’ (p. 6). However, there is a disconcerting implication running through the book that such integration is new, rather than a redressing of a relatively recent imbalance. In the first chapter, for example, Dukas states that: ‘Research in ethology addressed aspects of evolution (e.g. Tinbergen, 1951; von Frisch 1967; Lorenz 1981); however, such research rarely focused on problems of acquisition and manipulation of information by animals. Until recently, such issues were unique psychological territory.’ (p. 3). That this is an over-simplification is evidenced by many references throughout the same book to the older ethological literature, such as that on supernormal stimuli in M. Enquist and A. Arak’s stimulating discussion of signal form and that on landmark learning in insects by both Dyer and Sherry. I am not saying that there is ‘nothing new under the sun’. There is much here that is very new and very exciting. All subjects must move on and a broad overview is particularly valuable in today’s
world of expanding scientific literature. But although the answers might be new, the questions and the desire to be synthetic are what ethology has always been about. So why ‘Cognitive Ecology’? If cognitive is taken to mean representational then this excludes non-representational mechanisms such as habit learning or unlearnt responses. In this case, the question arises as to why ecologists should want to exclude such mechanisms – in other words why it should be important to make a distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive ecology. On the other hand, if ‘cognitive’ includes (as it seems to in this book) everything to do with perception and manipulation of information, learning and memory, unlearnt as well as learnt behaviour, no such distinction is necessary but the word cognitive loses some of its force. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and will use it as a major source of information. It was the title I had a little problem with. Marian Stamp Dawkins Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, UK OX1 3PS. tel: +44 1865 271215 fax: +44 1865 310447 e-mail: [email protected] References 1 Tinbergen, N. (1963) On aims and methods of ethology Z.Tierpsychol. 20, 410–433 2 Hinde, R.A. (1966) Animal Behaviour: A Synthesis of Ethology and Comparative Psychology, McGraw-Hill 3 Real, L.A. (1993) Toward a cognitive ecology Trends Ecol. Evol. 8, 413–417
BOOK REVIEWS Publishers: send copies of books you would like to be reviewed in TICS to the Editor. Readers: would you like to review a particular book for the journal? Contact the Editor to discuss the project. Other types of publications (software, CD-ROMs, films, art exhibitions, etc.) will be considered as well. Send any ideas or proposals for reviews to the Editor.
304 Trends in Cognitive Sciences – Vol. 2, No. 8,
August 1998
Cognitive Ecology: The Evolutionary Ecology of Information Processing and Decision Making edited by Reuven Dukas, University of Chicago Press, 1998. $95.00/£75.95 hbk, $30.00/£23.95 pbk (x + 420 pages) ISBN 0 226 16932 4 (hbk), 0 226 16933 2 (pbk) In 1963, Niko Tinbergen published a paper1 called On aims and methods of ethology in which he argued that the study of animal behaviour should not confine itself to one approach but should ask four different kinds of question: those about underlying mechanisms, those about adaptive significance, those about development and those about phylogeny. Tinbergen himself made major contributions to answering all of these questions and always made a point of stressing the connections between ethology and other disciplines such as physiology. Indeed, he once described his own work as ‘physiology without breaking the skin’. In 1966, Robert Hinde published the first edition of his monumental Animal Behaviour: A Synthesis of Ethology and Comparative Psychology2. The study of animal behaviour was, at that time, a broad discipline with a catholic view of what constituted its subject matter. However, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, one part of ethology – the part concerned with adaptive significance – began to command greater attention than all the others. Fuelled by the success of the ‘selfish gene’ approach to behaviour and by new ideas about kin selection, reciprocal altruism and sexual selection, behavioural ecology effectively took this one of the four questions from its parent discipline and set itself up as a new and fashionable field, with its own journal and its own society. Questions about the mechanisms underlying behaviour were seen as much less exciting and interesting than the new adaptive theories. Eventually , but only a long time later, behavioural ecologists began to realize that considering just adaptive questions without also considering the others was very limited. Mechanisms underlying behaviour were not only interesting in their own right but they also contributed directly to theories about adaptation. Behavioural ecologists effectively rediscovered ethology but – perhaps because of its association with out-dated models of motivation, steadfastly refused to let the actual word pass their lips. Instead a new term came into being: cognitive ecology3. Now, it is greatly to be welcomed that behavioural ecologists have now taken an interest in mechanism (and development and phylogeny, come to that), and this book edited by Reuven
Dukas is a very valuable contribution to the field of animal behaviour. I thoroughly recommend it for anyone who wants up-to-date and stimulating accounts of animal orientation (chapter by F.C. Dyer) spatial memory (D.F. Sherry), risk-sensitive foraging (M. Bateson and A. Kacelnik) and how animals decide whether to feed or flee from predators (R. Ydenberg). There are also wide-ranging and very valuable chapters on learning in song sparrows (M. Beecher et al.) and partner choice (L.A. Dugatkin and A. Sih) and by Dukas himself on ecological aspects of learning. All these authors do an admirably synthetic and inter-disciplinary job, carrying out cognitive ecology’s aim to ‘integrate proximate knowledge from neurobiology, genetics and cognitive psychology’ (p. 6). However, there is a disconcerting implication running through the book that such integration is new, rather than a redressing of a relatively recent imbalance. In the first chapter, for example, Dukas states that: ‘Research in ethology addressed aspects of evolution (e.g. Tinbergen, 1951; von Frisch 1967; Lorenz 1981); however, such research rarely focused on problems of acquisition and manipulation of information by animals. Until recently, such issues were unique psychological territory.’ (p. 3). That this is an over-simplification is evidenced by many references throughout the same book to the older ethological literature, such as that on supernormal stimuli in M. Enquist and A. Arak’s stimulating discussion of signal form and that on landmark learning in insects by both Dyer and Sherry. I am not saying that there is ‘nothing new under the sun’. There is much here that is very new and very exciting. All subjects must move on and a broad overview is particularly valuable in today’s
world of expanding scientific literature. But although the answers might be new, the questions and the desire to be synthetic are what ethology has always been about. So why ‘Cognitive Ecology’? If cognitive is taken to mean representational then this excludes non-representational mechanisms such as habit learning or unlearnt responses. In this case, the question arises as to why ecologists should want to exclude such mechanisms – in other words why it should be important to make a distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive ecology. On the other hand, if ‘cognitive’ includes (as it seems to in this book) everything to do with perception and manipulation of information, learning and memory, unlearnt as well as learnt behaviour, no such distinction is necessary but the word cognitive loses some of its force. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and will use it as a major source of information. It was the title I had a little problem with. Marian Stamp Dawkins Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, UK OX1 3PS. tel: +44 1865 271215 fax: +44 1865 310447 e-mail: [email protected] References 1 Tinbergen, N. (1963) On aims and methods of ethology Z.Tierpsychol. 20, 410–433 2 Hinde, R.A. (1966) Animal Behaviour: A Synthesis of Ethology and Comparative Psychology, McGraw-Hill 3 Real, L.A. (1993) Toward a cognitive ecology Trends Ecol. Evol. 8, 413–417
BOOK REVIEWS Publishers: send copies of books you would like to be reviewed in TICS to the Editor. Readers: would you like to review a particular book for the journal? Contact the Editor to discuss the project. Other types of publications (software, CD-ROMs, films, art exhibitions, etc.) will be considered as well. Send any ideas or proposals for reviews to the Editor.
304 Trends in Cognitive Sciences – Vol. 2, No. 8,
August 1998