MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2099390557 · doi:10.1163/157075605774840950

Do ideas about function help in the study of causation?

2005· article· en· W2099390557 on OpenAlexaff
David F. Sherry

Bibliographic record

VenueAnimal Biology · 2005
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldAgricultural and Biological Sciences
TopicAnimal Behavior and Reproduction
Canadian institutionsWestern University
FundersUniversity of Pennsylvania
KeywordsCausationFunction (biology)Causal modelTransitive relationCausal reasoningPsychologyCognitive scienceCausality (physics)Cognitive psychologyEpistemologyBiologyCognitionEvolutionary biologyNeuroscienceMathematics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract One of Tinbergen's most lasting contributions to the study of behaviour was the distinction he drew between causal, functional, developmental, and evolutionary questions about behaviour. More recently, behavioural ecologists have claimed that understanding the function of behaviour is an important step towards understanding its causes. This claim has, in turn, been criticised for confusing the fundamental distinction that Tinbergen defined. The study of behaviour, however, usually begins by identifying units of behaviour functionally and only then proceeds to causal analysis. Research carried out on four phenomena — disassortative mating by MHC loci, memory for cache sites in food-storing birds, auditory localisation of prey by barn owls, and magnetic orientation — illustrates the contributions made to causal research through understanding the function of behaviour. Understanding function, and sometimes simply a hypothesis about function, defines the causal questions that are asked, identifies novel questions for causal investigation, and sets the criteria that causal explanations must satisfy.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.488
Threshold uncertainty score0.187

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.035
GPT teacher head0.282
Teacher spread0.246 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations25
Published2005
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueAnimal BiologySame topicAnimal Behavior and ReproductionFrench-language works237,207