Just as a thorough understanding of an animal’s morphology requires knowledge of how it develops before it hatches from an egg or emerges from its mother’s womb, a complete understanding of an animal’s behaviour requires knowledge of the animal’s development during its lifetime. To gain this knowledge, one asks how the individual’s genes and its experiences cause it to behave as it does. The ontogeny of behaviour is a subject which arouses considerable interest, perhaps because of the seeming contrast between humans and other animals in how behavioral skills are acquired. Whereas humans extensively adjust their behaviour based on experience (that is, through the process of learning), the behaviour of many animal species seems to be automatic, as if it were pre-programmed. And yet, if there really were a difference between humans and other animals in how behaviour develops, it would certainly be one of degree, not of kind.
Behavioral development is a field of study in which there have been intense clashes of opinion. Prior to the 1960s there existed a profound disagreement between European (particularly German) ethologists and American psychologists regarding methods and interpretations of such studies. The ethologists described many examples of animals showing complex behaviour patterns in response to particular stimuli under circumstances that seemed to preclude the opportunity for learning. Indeed, learning (based on external influences) was contrasted with genetic control of behaviour (based on internal influences). Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz, who won a Nobel Prize for his ethological studies, went so far as to classify behaviour patterns into two distinct categories: acquired and innate.
Regarding the latter, adult herring gulls (Larus argentatus) have a red spot on the lower tip of their bill. When these birds have food for their chicks, the adults point their bill downward while waving it slowly back and forth in front of the young. Newly hatched chicks will accurately peck at the red spot on the parent bird’s bill, suggesting that a herring gull chick possesses innate (that is, genetically based) knowledge of where to peck for food. Ethologists termed pecking behaviour a “fixed action pattern” to indicate that it was performed automatically and correctly the first time it was elicited, apparently regardless of the animal’s experience.
The psychologists, in contrast, assumed that experiences with the environment (that is, learning processes) were the main, or even exclusive, determinants of ontogeny. Accordingly, they saw nothing in the pecking behaviour of herring gull chicks that could not be explained by learning while still in the egg, conditioning, or by trial-and-error learning. For example, chicks might “learn” to peck before hatching as a result of the rhythmic beating of their heart, or they might have a pecking reflex and simply learn to associate a food reward with pecking at the parent’s bill. Moreover, a chick’s pecking accuracy improves with age, and after about two days it requires, in addition to the red spot, the complete configuration of an adult’s head and bill to elicit pecking.
What the acquired-innate dichotomy obscured is that learning is possible only after the animal has already been steered by its genes to develop its behaviour in a certain way. An animal may well learn, but which experiences are important to the development of its behaviour depend on those that have promoted the genetic success of its ancestors. Reciprocally, whatever experiences an individual already has had can influence how its genes are activated and thus can affect their subsequent role in shaping its behaviour. Modern animal behaviourists see the stark dichotomy of acquired versus innate as far too simplistic; no behaviour is either strictly innate or entirely learned. Rather, all behaviours are the result of a complex interaction between genes and the environment.
Behavioral genetics
The evidence is now compelling that genes influence behaviour in all animals, including humans. Indeed, an increasing share of biomedical research is devoted to the hunt for genes involved in human behavioral maladies such as alcoholism, obesity, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer disease. Often these studies are pursued using animal models with subjects that include mice, rats, and dogs with behavioral symptoms resembling those of humans. It is, therefore, unfortunate that the idea that genes affect behaviour is the subject of much heated and confused discussion. The principal point of confusion arises from equating genetic influence on behaviour with genetic determination of behaviour. To do so is to mistakenly believe that identifying genes “for” a behaviour implies that the gene controls, fully and inevitably, this behaviour. In actuality, to say that there are genes “for” a particular behaviour means only that within a population of individuals there exists genetic variation underlying some of the differences in this specific behaviour. To cite an example involving a morphological trait, the statement that there are genes for coat colour in guinea pigs (Cavia porcellus) or horses (Equus caballus) means that genetic variation in the guinea pig or horse population is responsible for some of the variation in coat colour.
Furthermore, identifying a gene that influences a behaviour does not imply that the behaviour is inevitable; there is considerable variation among behaviours in the relative importance of the individual’s genetic constitution and its environment to the expression of the behaviour. Occasionally, the possession of a particular form of a gene does consistently result in the individual having a particular form of a behaviour; more frequently, however, the form of the behaviour is due to a complex interaction between genes and environment.
The strength of the influence of genes on a particular behaviour is quantified by a genetic measure called “heritability.” Heritability is defined as the fraction of the total variation in a trait among individuals in a population that is attributable to the genetic variation among those individuals. The remaining source of the variation is, of course, the environment. Values of heritability range between zero and one. The smaller the environmental variation experienced by the individuals in a population, the greater will be the fraction of the total variation in the behaviour that is the result of genetic variation.
One way to measure the heritability of a behavioral trait is to determine the average values of the behaviour for the parents and offspring in a sample of families within a population and calculate the linear relationship between offspring values and parental values. The slope of this line reveals the heritability of the behavioral trait in that population. For example, the heritability of the calling behaviour that male crickets (Gryllus integer) use to attract females has been measured. In any one population, some males chirp away for many hours each night, others call for just a few hours, and still others almost never call. The heritability of calling duration for one Canadian population that was studied was 0.53. The value indicates that slightly more than half of the variation in calling duration arose because males differed genetically and slightly less than half arose from environmental differences. (For example, the more parasites a cricket had acquired, the less food he had obtained, and thus the less he might be able to call on a given night.)
The degree of genetic influence on a particular behaviour is not a fixed characteristic. Rather, heritability can vary greatly depending on how much environmental variation is experienced by individuals in the specific population being studied. Thus, regarding the calling behaviour of male crickets, if every male fed well, thereby eliminating several environmental influences on calling, the numerical value of heritability would be considerably higher.
Numerous studies involving diverse species, including humans, have detected some level of heritability for every trait that has ever been examined. For example, the mean value of heritability for morphological traits, such as body and wing length, is 0.46; for life history traits, such as fecundity and life span, is 0.26; and for behavioral traits, such as calling duration and fighting stamina, is 0.30. Thus, the genetic influence on the characteristics of individual animals falls generally between 30 and 50 percent for most traits.