Exploring Animal Behavior: Readings from American Scientist

by Paul W. Sherman and John Alcock

Book Overview

This anthology contains 34 articles published since 1977 in American Scientist, the journal of the scientific society Sigma Xi. Articles illustrate how behaviourists think about and conduct their research, and provide greater insight into the behaviour of selected vertebrate and invertebrate species than most textbook accounts.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0878938168
• ISBN13: 9780878938162
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: Sinauer Associates
• Length: 321 Pages
• Weight: 2.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 8.5" x 11.0"

Customer Reviews

great book

If you know what Biology class you're taking, and you need this book, buy it here. I bought it, and within 2 days it was delivered to my home. I was surprised with how fast it arrived.

great reading for an undergraduate student

As a third year university studentm, I read this text as supplementary reading for our Animal Behaviour undergraduate course last semester. Throughout the duration of the course I was suitably impressed with the presentation of the material in the class (particularly due to the notable performances of the two profs teaching it) but found that this text was a truly engaging read that helped round out my learning experience. While it does not follow the structure of a true scientific report, we do keep in mind that it is composed of excerpts from a scientific magazine that also caters towards the laypeople (i.e. those who have no major scientific background), just like Scientific American and Wildlife Conservation (although both those magazines are even more general than the American Scientist!). I found this to be one of the best supplementary texts that we have been given at the university so far, due to the scope of interesting topics presented, from canid domestication to prairie-vole partnerships to human mating strategies. As many of my other classmates, I read the rest of the book (as well as parts of the other assigned textbook) without the necessity of our profs assigning readings, growing more and more attached to the amazingly captivating field of ethology.As I mentioned before, this text is not written in the format of a scientific journal, but it still educates and inspires readers of our generation to investigate the issues discussed further in depth (even during our spare time) by using those aforementioned scientific journals to glean valuable insight into actual experimental methods. Excellent!