function

including causation, ontogeny, function, and evolutionary history. Although each of these four approaches requires a different kind of scientific investigation, all contribute to solving the enduring puzzle of how and why animals, including humans, behave as they do. A familiar example of animal behaviour—a dog wagging its tail—serves…

With respect to function: How does the dog’s tail-wagging behaviour contribute to genetic success? The focus of this question is rooted in the subfield called behavioral ecology; the answer requires investigating the effects of tail wagging on the dog’s survival and reproduction (that is, determining how the tail-wagging…

In studying the function of a behavioral characteristic of an animal, a researcher seeks to understand how natural selection favours the behaviour. In other words, the researcher tries to identify the ecological challenges, or “selection pressures,” faced by a species and then investigates how…

…terms of the activities or functions that are missing in nonliving things. The life processes of every organism are carried out by specific materials assembled in definite structures. Thus, a living thing can be defined as a system, or structure, that reproduces, changes with its environment over a period of…

…superficially similar and serve similar functions but have quite different structural and developmental patterns. The arm of a human, the wing of a bird, and the pectoral fins of a whale are homologous structures in that all have similar patterns of bones, muscles, nerves, and blood vessels and similar embryonic…

…science until the advent of functional considerations in which the correlation between structure and function was consciously investigated; as by French biologists Buffon and Cuvier. Cuvier cogently argued that a trained naturalist could deduce from one suitably chosen part of an animal’s body the complete set of adaptations that characterized…