Les caractères comportementaux sont de très bons indicateurs de phylogénie

Résumé 0

Excellent workers have made good use of behavioral data to produce evolutionary trees since before Darwin. Careful, evolutionaryminded studies of behavior were already available in the 1950s, and they earned a Nobel Prize in 1973. Lessons learned from these pioneers are still valuable today, although they are generally unknown to modern workers. Fundamentally, a good researcher treats behavior no differently from morphology when defining what the evolutionary steps between characters are. Unfortunately, the two main schools of thought regarding how to study behavior are not prepared to identify characteristics that are produced through a process of descent with modification, the central theme of Darwinian biology. Modern phylogenetic perspectives are strong tools, but they require a great deal of information about many species, and a careful, detailed effort to specify what exactly is evolving, and how. It is unfortunate that the great majority of efforts in behavioral ecology are not based on the principle of specificity regarding a process of descent with modification. Careful workers produce behavioral data that are at least as good as morphology, and better than DNA for producing evolutionary trees by modern methods.