Periodic table of human sciences

Tinbergen's four questions, named after Nikolaas Tinbergen and based on Aristotle's four causes., are complementary categories of explanations for behaviour. These are also commonly referred to as levels of analysis. It suggests that an integrative understanding of behaviour must include both a proximate and ultimate (functional) analysis of behaviour, as well as an understanding of both phylogenetic/developmental history and the operation of current mechanisms.

When asked about the purpose of sight in humans and animals, even elementary school children can answer that animals have vision to help them find food and avoid danger (function/adaptation). Biologists have three additional explanations: sight is caused by a particular series of evolutionary steps (phylogeny), the mechanics of the eye (mechanism/causation), and even the process of an individual's development (ontogeny). Although these answers may be very different, they are consistent with each other. This idea was formulated in the 1960s when Tinbergen delineated the four questions based on Aristotle's four causes.

This schema constitutes a basic framework of the overlapping behavioural fields of ethology, behavioural ecology, comparative psychology, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and anthropology. It was in fact Julian Huxley who identified the first three questions, Niko Tinbergen gave only the fourth question, but Julian Huxley's questions failed to distinguish between survival value and evolutionary history, so Tinbergen's fourth question helped resolve this problem.

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the only scientific explanation for why an animal's behaviour is usually well adapted for survival and reproduction in its environment. However, claiming that a particular mechanism is well suited to the present environment is different from claiming that this mechanism was selected for in the past due to its history of being adaptive. The literature conceptualizes the relationship between function and evolution in two ways. On the one hand, function and evolution are often presented as separate and distinct explanations of behaviour.

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