EARLY PERSPECTIVES ON THE EVOLUTION OF BEHAVIOR - WHITMAN,CHARLES,OTIS AND HEINROTH,OSKAR

The study of behavioral evolution is often traced back to two of the o riginal ethologists, Charles Otis Whitman and Oskar Heinroth. In this review I argue that Whitman and Heinroth, in their most commonly cited works, emphasized very different aspects of the problem of behavioral evolution. In particular Whitman discussed the phylogenetic origins o f behavior, and addressed such issues as common ancestry, character tr ansformation, and character polarity. This work anticipated the curren t study of what could be called ''historical ethology''. By contrast, Heinroth studied behavioral function; he asked how environmental or so cial factors might influence the evolution of behavior, and he asked h ow variation in such factors might explain behavioral differences amon g different taxa. I argue that Heinroth anticipated, to a certain exte nt, the field of behavioral ecology, and in particular the discussion of adaptive costs and benefits in behavioral biology. The distinction between the work of Whitman and Heinroth, and indeed between the field s of historical ethology and behavioral ecology, corresponds to a gene ral distinction between ''historical'' and ''equilibrium'' factors in explaining the process of behavioral evolution.