An adaptationist perspective on social learning, social feeding, and social foraging in Norway rats.

This chapter reviews data collected in my laboratory since 1983. It is more explicitly Darwinian in its approach than is usually the case in discussions of behavior acquisition by animals. First, in a brief introduction, I discuss my view of the relationship between the study of social learning in animals and what Lewontin and Gould have referred to, albeit unsympathetically, as the "adaptationist program" (Gould & Lewontin, 1979; Lewontin, …