The study of animal behaviour continues to expand rapidly within several diverse disciplines. It seems as the author says ‘more than ever worthwhile to introduce the subject through an approach based on general biological principles’.
The basic plan of this highly successful textbook remians unchanged, but throughout the whole work extensive re-writing has been carried out where new information has changed the original material. Probably the most extensive changes are in the discussion of the nature of aggression in chapte 4. The dispute on this topic has become widespread and it offers a good opportunity to illustrate some of the problems inherent in the study of motivation.
Work on animal societies is increasingly coming to involve sociologists and anthropologists as well as zoologists. Much of the recent work on social organizations has yielded fascinating results, and is put into its true biological perspective in the new chapter devoted to social behaviour.
{from inside book jacket}