Abstract
Apart from their role in reproduction androgens also respond to social challenges and this response has been seen as a way to regulate the expression of behavior according to the perceived social environment (Challenge hypothesis, Wingfield et al., 1990). This hypothesis implies that social decision-making mechanisms localized in the central nervous system (CNS) are open to the influence of peripheral hormones that ultimately are under the control of the CNS through the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis. Therefore, two puzzling questions emerge at two different levels of biological analysis: (1) Why does the brain, which perceives the social environment and regulates androgen production in the gonad, need feedback information from the gonad to adjust its social decision-making processes? (2) How does the brain regulate gonadal androgen responses to social challenges and how do these feedback into the brain? In this paper, we will address these two questions using the integrative approach proposed by Niko Tinbergen, who proposed that a full understanding of behavior requires its analysis at both proximate (physiology, ontogeny) and ultimate (ecology, evolution) levels.
Highlights
In his classical paper “On aims and methods of Ethology,” Niko Tinbergen (1963) identified proximate causation, survival value, ontogeny and evolution as the four major questions in the study of behavior
On one hand knowledge of the proximate mechanisms underlying a given behavior is crucial to understanding its costs, limits and evolutionary consequences, highlighting the fact that proximate mechanisms contribute to the dynamics of selection
THE FUNCTION OF ANDROGEN RESPONSE TO SOCIAL CHALLENGES The fact that androgen levels change in response to the perceived outcome of an interaction, and not merely by experiencing an agonistic interaction raises the hypothesis that socially driven changes in androgen levels will not directly affect the current interaction, for which the outcome has already been established, but should rather modulate behavioral expression in subsequent social interactions (Oliveira, 2009)
Summary
In his classical paper “On aims and methods of Ethology,” Niko Tinbergen (1963) identified proximate causation, survival value, ontogeny and evolution as the four major questions in the study of behavior.
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