Reading focus
Syllabus: How to Read Psychological Science
Use Figure 1 and Box 2, ‘Practical implications,’ to connect the four questions to the authors' proposed updates. The author-lab copy is numbered 1–7; the final journal article is pp. 712–718.
Why you’re reading it. Distinguish the four questions and examine why answering one does not automatically answer the others.
A question to consider. Write a mechanistic question and a developmental question about remembering a new experience. What kind of observation could bear on each?
Why this reading
A biological explanation can answer several different questions: how a behavior works, how it develops, what it currently does for an organism, and how it evolved. Bateson and Laland explain Tinbergen's framework and examine where its traditional interpretation needs refinement. Their review offers a way to recognize the question a study actually addresses before deciding whether its explanation is adequate.
Before you read
Mechanism concerns processes producing behavior at a particular time; ontogeny concerns development over a lifetime; evolutionary history concerns change across generations. The authors use current utility for what a characteristic presently contributes. Current usefulness is not, by itself, evidence of the historical process that produced a characteristic. These are complementary questions, not a ranking in which an answer about the brain automatically supersedes an answer about development or context.
Read for
- Translate each of the four questions into a question about the same behavior. Figure 1 uses bird song to illustrate this approach.
- Explain why showing a characteristic's current utility does not establish that it originally evolved for that purpose.
- Examine how the discussion of inheritance and development complicates a simple genes-versus-environment distinction.
- Follow the authors' argument for integration: when can an answer to one question constrain an answer to another?
- Use the practical implications in Box 2 to identify which parts of Tinbergen's original framework the authors preserve and which they revise.
Consider afterwards
- For human memory, pose one question about mechanism and one about development. What different evidence would each require?
- Can a proposed evolutionary explanation be convincing before the relevant behavior has been clearly described? Explain what would need to be established.
Editorial context
This review is an interpretation and update of Tinbergen's 1963 proposal. It supports using the four questions as a heuristic while examining their overlap and limitations. It is not a demonstration that every behavior is an adaptation, nor that the four questions have been answered for every behavior. The argument for integrating explanations is particularly useful when evaluating what a narrowly focused biological study contributes to a larger account.