4
David B. Dusenbery
defined so as to require muscles or glands and thus exclude the vast majority of
organisms from having behavior (McKechnie 1978; Zuriff 1985).
Environment
Individual
Causal inputs
Fitness
\
_1
I~
Genome
~
0
cS>
f
I
Learning
Memory
Information
Sensation
Sensory systerV
l
Outputs
Beh~vior
Fig. 1. Input-output relationships of the individual organism. Every individual interacts
with two distinct "spaces": its material environment and the gene pool or flow to which it
belongs. Behavior of the individual creates its outputs to the environment and its fitness in
the environment controls its output (reproduction) to its gene pool. This figure illustrates
the influences (arrows) between the environment and the individual and major pathways
controlling behavior within the individual
An attempt to generalize the concept of behavior from its use in animal behavior
studies to all organisms (Dusenbery 1996) has Jed to the conclusion that behavior
constitutes those activities that generate outputs from the organism to its
environment. Behavior includes those activities that change the environment either
by moving the organism (or part of it) to a new location or modifYing the present
location. With this view, all the interactions between an organism and its
environment are included within one of the three categories: causal and sensory
inputs and behavioral outputs. These concepts are summarized in Fig. I.
· All three types of interaction involve states of the environment, and are thus
interdependent because behavior indirectly changes both types of input (indeed
that is behavior's function). By themselves, sensory inputs have no value to the
organism; they gain value only when they are associated with important causal
inputs in ways that allow predictions about the occurrence of particular causal
inputs at another place or later time. The organism usually exploits these
predictions by using them to control some aspect of its behavior, which changes its
David B. Dusenbery
defined so as to require muscles or glands and thus exclude the vast majority of
organisms from having behavior (McKechnie 1978; Zuriff 1985).
Environment
Individual
Causal inputs
Fitness
\
_1
I~
Genome
~
0
cS>
f
I
Learning
Memory
Information
Sensation
Sensory systerV
l
Outputs
Beh~vior
Fig. 1. Input-output relationships of the individual organism. Every individual interacts
with two distinct "spaces": its material environment and the gene pool or flow to which it
belongs. Behavior of the individual creates its outputs to the environment and its fitness in
the environment controls its output (reproduction) to its gene pool. This figure illustrates
the influences (arrows) between the environment and the individual and major pathways
controlling behavior within the individual
An attempt to generalize the concept of behavior from its use in animal behavior
studies to all organisms (Dusenbery 1996) has Jed to the conclusion that behavior
constitutes those activities that generate outputs from the organism to its
environment. Behavior includes those activities that change the environment either
by moving the organism (or part of it) to a new location or modifYing the present
location. With this view, all the interactions between an organism and its
environment are included within one of the three categories: causal and sensory
inputs and behavioral outputs. These concepts are summarized in Fig. I.
· All three types of interaction involve states of the environment, and are thus
interdependent because behavior indirectly changes both types of input (indeed
that is behavior's function). By themselves, sensory inputs have no value to the
organism; they gain value only when they are associated with important causal
inputs in ways that allow predictions about the occurrence of particular causal
inputs at another place or later time. The organism usually exploits these
predictions by using them to control some aspect of its behavior, which changes its