ABSTRACT
This chapter is an analysis of the biological bases of behavior from a novel point of view. Ever since the time of Descartes, scientists have taken the biological bases of behavior to be the physiological mechanisms and anatomical structures involved in behavior. This traditional view is rejected here in favor of the idea that the biological bases of behavior are ecological. I argue that what makes a particular behavior occur as it does is a result of how that behavior has evolved in a complex and changing environment. The claim being pursued here is that animals can perceive the resources for behavior—which I call affordances, after Gibson (1979, Ch. 8)—surrounding them, and that animal behavior is based on this ability to appreciate what the environment offers. Thus, what makes a particular behavior the kind of behavior it is is how it functions as a mode of resource usage. The physiological mechanisms and anatomical structures involved in that resource usage are, of course, of tremendous importance, but they do not constitute the behavior; indeed these mechanisms and structures vary with the functional tasks of the animal. Therefore valid general theories of behavior must take the functional ecological facts of behavior as primary—or so the ecological approach being promoted here proposes.
