ABSTRACT
Most animals, and certainly all vertebrates, enter their environment, equipped with a specific morphology, a somewhat less specific set of predisposed behavioral patterns or fixed action patters (FAPs), and a rather loosely predetermined capacity to learn alternative behaviors under situations when they have either an incomplete behavioral “program” or essentially no behavioral “program.” Thus, it might be said that genetic makeup affects morphology most directly, ritualized action patterns somewhat less directly, and the “to be acquired” behaviors least of all. However, precisely because these to be acquired behaviors differ, even between conspecifics, they have not been viewed from the evolutionary perspective which has characterized the biological study of morphology and fixed actions patterns.
