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This up-to-date review examines key areas of animal behaviour, including communication, cognition, conflict, cooperation, sexual selection and behavioural variation. Various tests are covered, including recent empirical examples.
"To many evolutionary biologists, the central challenge of their discipline is to explain adaptation, the appearance of design in the living world. With the theory of evolution by natural selection, Charles Darwin elegantly showed how a purely mechanistic process can achieve this striking feature of nature. Since then, the way many biologists have thought about evolution and natural selection is as a theory about individual organisms. Over a century later, a subtle but radical shift in perspective emerged with the gene's-eye view of evolution in which natural selection was conceptualized as a struggle between genes for replication and transmission to the next generation. This viewpoint culmi...
Spiders are often underestimated as suitable behavioural models because of the general belief that due to their small brains their behaviour is innate and mostly invariable. Challenging this assumption, this fascinating book shows that rather than having a limited behavioural repertoire, spiders show surprising cognitive abilities, changing their behaviour to suit their situational needs. The team of authors unravels the considerable intra-specific as well as intra-individual variability and plasticity in different behaviours ranging from foraging and web building to communication and courtship. An introductory chapter on spider biology, systematics and evolution provides the reader with the necessary background information to understand the discussed behaviours and helps to place them into an evolutionary context. Highlighting an under-explored area of behaviour, this book will provide new ideas for behavioural researchers and students unfamiliar with spiders as well as a valuable resource for those already working in this intriguing field.
The aim of Advances in the Study of Behavior is to serve scientists engaged in the study of animal behavior, including psychologists, neuroscientists, biologists, ethologists, pharmacologists, endocrinologists, ecologists, and geneticists. Articles in the series present critical reviews of significant research programs with theoretical syntheses, reformulation of persistent problems, and/or highlighting new and exciting research concepts. Volume 34 is purely eclectic and illustrates the breadth of behavior research. Contents include sexual conflict among insects, the evolution of sexual cannibalism, odor processing and activity patterns in honeybees, hormone secretion in vertebrates, bird song organization, food transfer in primates, game theory approaches to mutualism, as well as neural mechanisms of learning and memory and how these change during infant development.
This novel reassessment of the field presents the central concepts in evolutionary game theory and provides an authoritative and up-to-date account. The focus is on concepts that are important for biologists in their attempts to explain observations. This strong connection between concepts and applications is a recurrent theme throughout the book.
"The chapters in this book [posit] that humans clearly have the capacity to make war, but since war is absent in some cultures, it cannot be viewed as a human universal. And counter to frequent presumption, the actual archaeological record reveals the recent emergence of war. It does not typify the ancestral type of human society, the nomadic forager band, and contrary to widespread assumptions, there is little support for the idea that war is ancient or an evolved adaptation. Views of human nature as inherently warlike stem not from the facts but from cultural views embedded in Western thinking"--Amazon.com.
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'A dazzling, funny and elegantly angry demolition of our preconceptions about female behaviour and sex in the animal kingdom ... Bitch is a blast. I read it, my jaw sagging in astonishment, jotting down favourite parts to send to friends and reading out snippets gleefully...' Observer 'A book that is tearing down the stereotypes and the biases. Absolutely fascinating.' BBC R4 Woman's Hour 'From the heir to Attenborough. 5*' - Telegraph 'Glorious ... A bold and gripping takedown of the sexist mythology baked into biology ... Full of marvellous surprises. Guardian 'Colourful, committed and deeply informed.' Sunday Times 'Gloriously original' Daily Mirror A 'sparkling attack on scientific sexis...
Volume II focuses on systems of thought and belief in the history of world sexualities, ranging from early humans to contemporary approaches. Comprising eighteen chapters, this volume opens with a chapter on the evolutionary legacy and then delves into the sexualities of ancient Egypt, the Near East, Greece, and Rome, continuing with pre-modern South Asia, China, and Japan, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. Chapters include an examination of sexuality in the religious traditions of Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and also look at more recent approaches, including scientific sex, sexuality in socialism and Marxism, and the intersections between sexuality, feminism, and post-colonialism.