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Problems of Animal Behaviour by David McFarland, Longman, pp 158, Pounds
sterling 14.50

WHY DO animals switch from one activity to another? What makes them
stop feeding, say, and start scratching? Assessing why or how animals make
behavioural decisions is central to ethology, the study of animal behaviour.
But ethologists have found some aspects of animal motivation particularly
troubling. Why, for example, do animals sleep? How can we tell if animals’
behaviour has purpose, or whether they suffer? Problems of Animal Behaviour
addresses some of these elusive questions.

Presented as a series of essays aimed at the ‘advanced student’ or researcher
in animal behaviour, the book sets out to analyse ‘motivational problems
requiring functional explanation’. David McFarland’s concern is to look
at behaviour both as mech anism (how decision-making works now) and in terms
of evolutionary function – how the mechanism has evolved.

Sleep is one example. Animals are clearly motivated to sleep, yet what
function it serves – either for the individual animal or in evolutionary
terms – remains a subject of much debate. As McFarland notes, it is not
too surprising that animals rest, thereby conserving valuable energy. But
what is puzzling is why they should do so in such a peculiar manner, shutting
down sensory input, losing muscle tone and so risking predation.

As a series of topics for discussion, the book is admirable. It begins
by addressing what is perhaps the most fundamental question about motivation:
how priorities are decided. If an animal is hungry and thirsty, for example,
but a mate comes along, what does it do? Priorities, moreover, may change
over time, as may the costs and benefits. Many ethologists, including McFarland,
have addressed these complex questions experimentally. Yet, as he admits,
‘How all these considerations are fitted together in the design of an animal
remains a problem’ for ethological theory.

Other, perhaps equally problematic, topics McFarland considers are:
animal suffering; the economics of altruism (when does it pay to be altruistic?);
whether behaviour is goal directed or purposive; and cognition, or animal
awareness. Each of these provokes debate, and sometimes disagreement, between
biologists.

McFarland’s position in regard to these disparate questions is consistent.
He focuses upon the mechanisms that might underlie particular behavioural
processes, refusing to accept claims that go beyond available evidence.

It is this refusal that makes these essays good material for debate.
It will also provoke many of those who are dissatisfied with mechanistic
explanations of animal behaviour. In discussing whether an animal’s behaviour
can be said to be directed towards some goal, McFarland concludes that positing
goal-directedness, or purpose, is not necessary. Apparent goals may be achieved
as a consequence of the behaviour, without supposing that the animal ‘had
in mind’ what it wanted to achieve.

Arguing for animal awareness or cognition may also be going too far:
McFarland emphasises that even apparently intelligent solutions do not necessarily
imply that the animal is thinking. Animals can behave remarkably like robots,
even if they are highly intelligent ones.

McFarland claims that our desire to attribute to animals concepts such
as purpose needs explanation: ‘Humans,’ he says, may ‘have a predilection
for such teleological explanation.’ In discussing behaviour that appears
to be deliberately deceitful, for example, he asks whether ‘humans (are)
designed (by natural selection) to assume that deceitful acts . . . by others
are intentional?’

Yet other, equally persistent, beliefs also need explaining. One is
the parallel drawn here, and elsewhere, between concepts in ethology and
economics. This is hardly surprising, because ethologists drew explicitly
on economic ideas in developing recent theory. Yet there is a tendency in
some writing on ethology to see the parallel as rather more than the descriptive
device that it is, a tendency that needs explaining. The parallel is imperfect:
‘We cannot expect to find animal millionaires.’

Good topics for debate these may be, but the structure of the book puzzled
me. There seems little attempt to link chapters, even on themes with some
overlap. Sleep, for example, seems to present problems of motivational priorities:
yet it is not discussed until the fourth chapter. Animal suffering, too,
overlaps with debates about cognition. Perhaps few readers will do as I
did, and read straight through. But for those that do, more guidance would
have been helpful.

Basing a book on rather unconnected essays also introduces the risk
of repetition: for example, McFarland’s analogy of humans shopping for coffee
in supermarkets came up three times. Yet the themes of this book do raise
important questions for anyone interested in why animals or people do what
they do. Many of these questions may be unanswerable. The problem with thinking
about goal-directedness, McFarland says, is that we never can have good
evidence that ‘goals’ are represented inside another’s head, be that animal
or human; but social life may require that we behave ‘as if’ they did. If
intentionality did not exist, we would have to invent it.

Lynda Birke is a lecturer in continuing education at the University
of Warwick.