Animal Behavior

Animal behavior is studied here through Tinbergen's four levels of analysis, mechanism, development, function, and evolution, so the central question isn't just what animals do but why natural selection shaped them to do it that way, and what that tells us about the evolutionary roots of our own psychology. You'll work through foraging trade-offs, mate choice, parental investment, aggression, communication, and cooperation as optimization and game-theory problems, with five quizzes, a midterm, and a final tracking the material. As a Psychology elective it pairs naturally with evolutionary and social psychology, giving you the comparative and adaptationist toolkit that underlies a lot of modern behavioral science.