Attack. Nurture. Escape. Behavior lies at the core of an animal’s ability to thrive in response to environmental challenges.
Decades of research have sought to understand why certain behavioral variants arise under certain environmental conditions. More recently, it has become clear that physiological mechanisms influence how micro- and macro-evolutionary processes unfold, but these mechanisms are rarely integrated into an ultimate framework. Our lab unifies these perspectives and traverses levels of biological complexity, from socially induced changes in hormonal and gene activity that generate individual differences, to plasticity in behavior that occurs across a lifetime, to evolutionary patterns that arise over millennia.
