ABSTRACT
In the search for the origins and mechanisms of human functional capacities, the study of nonhuman species has often furnished invaluable insights. Animal research has the advantage of access to physiological mechanisms and organic subsystems to which experimental questions may be addressed with a thoroughness that the study of humans alone would not permit. More broadly, comparison of structure/function relationships between species, and especially in consideration of phyletic relationships among those species, offers a tool by which function may be understood in an evolutionary perspective.
