ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how the key areas of behavioural study relate to one another, and the extent to which at least some degree of combined approach can overcome some of the criticisms and some of the conceptual problems which each faces as a separate discipline. Refined techniques of lesion induction, degeneration studies, aggregate and unit recording and analysis of cellular activity, and neurochemical and neuropharmacological analyses have been gradually drafted into brain-behaviour studies. The genetics of behaviour is the cornerstone of evolutionary studies of behaviour. Behaviour is also the neurosciences' major route into evolutionary biology, and the neurosciences have become one of the most vigorous and important areas of process biology. C. Pittendrigh suggested the word teleonomy to describe valid studies of adaptations based on the knowledge or study of the history of selection pressures, ineluding current animal–environment interactions, and the way in which these have moulded phenotypic traits.
