Question

Explain how proximate environmental conditions can shape play behavior, providing an example.

Answer 1

Proximate causes help to explain the process as to how the animal’s behavioral machinery and environmental factors interact so that a particular the behavior is produced. For example let us take bird migration. A plausible ultimate explanation that is accepted till now is that ancestors of the migrating birds present today were reproductively more successful than birds that did not migrate or in other words,there occured natural selection for migration.In this same scenario, the plausible proximate explanation says that either a drop in temperature or a shortened daylight triggers the behavioral mechanisms in population of migrating birds present today and this in turn makes them to undergo the process of migration.