In this essay I shall examine the representation of aggression and its issues in the model animal, the Fruit Fly, Drosophila melanogaster. The Fruit Fly is the model animal for genetics and more recently neuroscience. On the basis of its behaviour conclusions are being drawn that will help in the development of new treatments for clinical entities like aggression and anxiety disorders-the author questions those findings and asks whether more should be done to focus on the actual biology and behaviour-the Umwelt, instead of trying to bridge the gulf between invertebrate and human behaviours.Keywords Aggression . Agonistic behaviour . Invertebrates . Representation . Umwelt
The Adaptive BehavioursThe behaviours of animals since 1956 have been traditionally catalogued as follows.We can see that three adaptive behaviours are at work when a male fruit fly approaches another as in the aggression experiments. There is a blurring and a difficulty in finding out when one behaviour ends. Figures 1 and 2.The chief rule for any good scheme of classification is that it should be natural and conform to discontinuity which exists in nature and which can be recognized by independent observers. The scheme of classification should be logical, and one that includes all related phenomena. (Scott 1956, p.214) When observing the behaviour of thousands of interactions, one has to decide quite what it is that you are interested in. This is achieved through cataloguing a
This paper is an introduction to the new field of biorhetorics. Biorhetorics is an applied form of rhetoric that evolved from the study of classical rhetoric, particularly Aristotelian. The author illustrates the stages of development necessary for the creation of a species-specific rhetoric: by (1) formalising rhetoric so as to create a functional rhetoric, (2) then reducing this to a symbolic rhetoric that can be used in conjunction with the collected data of an organism’s Umwelt (including its genome) to form (3) a species-specific rhetoric. The paper draws upon the latest research on bacterial and viral communication to show the possibilities of biorhetorics. In the course of discussing the nature of biorhetorics the author distinguishes it from argumentation theory and rhetoric/s of biology, and positions alongside other fields used in the life sciences such as biosemiotics, information theory, game theory, etc.
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