Professor studies animals to understand humans
January 17th, 2006
Could learning more about the way animals fight each other help us better understand hardball tactics in the corporate boardroom?
Maybe, according to Lee Dugatkin, professor and distinguished scholar of biology at U of L.
Dugatkin, who has written dozens of articles for academic journals on the evolution of social behavior in animals, also has been quoted on the topic in National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine and similar publications. His 2004 textbook, “Principles of Animal Behavior,” is now being used by students at more than 100 universities worldwide.
“I try to measure the costs and benefits of a specific behavior in animals,” he said. “If the costs and benefits work the same way in humans, then many times the same behavior is seen in humans.”
Although animals tend to compete through physical fighting, people can compete in many ways, Dugatkin said. He is preparing to undertake a new study on how prior experience might affect an animal’s fighting ability, a factor that also could apply to humans. For example, people competing for a small amount of money may behave differently if they know what their opponents have done in the past to get money.
There are quite a few parallels between animal and human behavior, he said.
“Let’s say you are the alpha animal. You get the best food and the best mate but you live a very stressful life because you’re always fighting to hold on to your rank. If another animal challenges you and ends up taking over, you can fall to the very bottom of the pack,” he explained.
Besides probing the science behind animal aggression, Dugatkin just finished work on a new book scheduled to come out later this year. The volume, published by Princeton University Press, explores whether animals can be good just for the sake of being good, a focus of study that could shed new light on the concept of altruism in people.
“For centuries, some of the world’s greatest thinkers have tried to determine whether people are good even when they have nothing to gain from the behavior,“ he said.
“If we can find evidence of altruism in animals — if we know that animals can do something good when it’s not directly linked to their own survival — then there’s a strong justification for looking for this sort of thing in humans.”
