Niko tinbergen 4 questions

Analysis of animal behaviour

Tinbergen's four questions, named after 20th century biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, are complementary categories of explanations for animal behaviour.

These are also commonly referred to as levels of analysis.^[1] It suggests that an integrative understanding of behaviour must include ultimate (evolutionary) explanations, in particular:

Four categories of questions and explanations

When asked about the purpose of sight in humans and animals, even elementary-school children can answer that animals have vision to help them find food and avoid danger (function/adaptation).

Biologists have three additional explanations: sight is caused by a particular series of evolutionary steps (phylogeny), the mechanics of the eye (mechanism/causation), and even the process of an individual's development (ontogeny).

This schema constitutes a basic framework of the overlapping behavioural fields of ethology, behavioural ecolo