Okay, so, at the functional level, then the question becomes, what is the payoff
that any trait you're interested in explaining has for reproductive success?
Why is it that an animal, basically, how does the trait you're trying to explain,
in this case, bird song, how does it pay off?
What is it that it does to help with an organism to have
more successful reproduction and successful survival?
And in the case of the lyrebird song,
what's thought is that lyrebirds are a sexually dimorphic species,
males have beautiful plumage, are slightly larger than females.
While females are the investing sex,
they invest in offspring, and they sit on the nest, and spend more time investing
in energy in creating the eggs and and the nest, etc.
And so females are very picky about which
male lyrebird they're going to take as a mate, and one of the ways
they can choose the mate that has the strongest genetic value is
the bird that has this long plumage and has this incredible ability to mimic.
And it ends up that females are attracted to novel songs, and
males that can produce the fanciest, most novel songs are the ones
that typically the females swoon over and choose as their mates.
So that would be, at the functional level, why do birds have this complex song?
Because female lyrebirds prefer it and
the males that are able to produce those songs are gonna have more offspring and
a higher payoff for that trait than those that don't have it.
So the final level is the proximate level, now this is
where I think most people think about when they're trying to explain a behavior.
They're trying to say why is it that a dog is able to solve that problem?
They wanna know the mechanism, what's, as we've talked about in terms of cognition,
the internal process and
what are the different explanations that might be there.