Aggression in Confined Populations.

This chapter is concerned with a specific experimental situation which has been particularly useful for studying mouse aggressive behaviour and the way in which it changes in response to environmental factors. It is therefore a technique which may help in understanding the evolution of aggression, but it is worth reiterating a point made by Cairns (1) that the problems of aggression are the problems of social interaction. It follows therefore that if aggression is studied in isolation, that is out of its behavioural context, the results are unlikely to be informative. Similarly although a study of a single species can contribute to our knowledge of the evolution of social behaviour the nature of specific adaptation makes it unlikely that it could by itself provide a model of the general process.