Blumberg, M. S., & Alberts, J. R. Incidental emissions, fortuitous effects, and the origins of communication. Perspectives in Ethology, Volume 12, D. H. Owings, M. D. Beecher, & N. S. Thompson (eds), New York, Plenum Press, 1997, pp. 225-249.

In recent years, a small group of animal behaviorists has been calling for a renewed focus on proximate mechanisms in the study of behavioral evolution (Kennedy, 1992; Stamps, 1991). These calls have been made to counter the current view, implicit in most contemporary analyses of animal behavior, that we can understand ultimate causation without worrying about the mechanistic details. As noted by Stamps (1991), however, today's "students of ultimate causation in behavior have begun to 'rediscover' the importance of proximate mechanisms" (p. 342). Specifically, there is a growing realization that proximate mechanisms are not mere details -- rather, they vitally shape our understanding of function and of the evolutionary origins of behavior and structure.

Communication is an area of animal behavior, we argue, that can especially benefit from a renewed focus on proximate mechanism. This argument is developed as follows: (1) Students of animal communication have tended to make preliminary assumptions of function when confronted with novel signals; (2) these assumptions of function have steered us away from studying the proximate mechanisms that underlie signal production; and (3) by assuming function and ignoring mechanism, we #arrive at a distorted view of# the communicatory relations between senders and receivers and, in addition, deny ourselves a path to understanding the evolutionary origins of communication. This argument is supported by examples of how appropriate emphasis on mechanism broadens and deepens our understanding of communication.