Predictably, I oft run into trouble when called upon to explain my behaviour. Questions along the lines of “Why did\/do you …” induce stall. Niko Tinbergen’s (‘On aims and methods of ethology’, 1963) scheme helps me out.<\/p>\n
As a littler chap, I was once stalked by a lioness. Seeing those cold yellow eyes bear into me, “why did I freeze?”<\/p>\n
(1) The proximate <\/strong>why. Mechanistic.<\/p>\n “I froze because {lioness-poised-to-charge-me sense-data} came to be processed by my brain, which consequently co-ordinated a state approximating physical paralysis. “<\/p>\n (2) The ontogenetic <\/strong>why. Conditioning.<\/p>\n “I froze because repeated childhood experience with being hunted by my sisters in the garden had instilled a more-or-less automated freeze-when-hunted-and-spotted reaction within me.”<\/p>\n (3) The phylogenetic <\/strong>why. Evolutionary history.<\/p>\n “65.9 million years ago, an ancestral proto-mammal who had circumstantially come to be endowed with a mutant primitive freeze mechanism survived a dinosaur tirade that wiped out all his non-freezing relatives. Through continued natural selection my phylogenetic traits incorporate a polished edition of this freeze response.”<\/p>\n (4) The functional<\/strong> why. How does the queried behaviour increase fitness?<\/p>\n “Freezing presented a desperate stab at survival, maximizing {my genes\/my\/my species\/…} chances at procreation.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Predictably, I oft run into trouble when called upon to explain my behaviour. Questions along the lines of “Why did\/do you …” induce stall. Niko Tinbergen’s (‘On aims and methods of ethology’, 1963) scheme helps me out. As a littler chap, I was once stalked by a lioness. Seeing those cold yellow eyes bear into … Continue reading Four Whys<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arb"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=585"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":595,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585\/revisions\/595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}