Yes! Thanks for mentioning Tinbergen. His four questions, as they are sometimes called, are so useful that it may be worth posting - this is from Oxford's continuing education site....
The four questions are:
Function (or adaption😞 Why is the animal performing the behaviour? In which way does the behaviour increase the animal’s fitness (i.e. its survival and reproduction)? Examples are plentiful and include, among many others, nurturing of young to increase their chance of survival, migration to warmer (and more food rich) habitats, escaping or avoiding attention from predators etc.
Evolution (or phylogeny😞 How did the behaviour evolve? How has natural selection modified the behaviour over evolutionary time? This is typically addressed by the comparative approach, where the behaviour in question is compared among closely related species. Examples include how flight in birds may have evolved from gliding in dinosaurs or how the vertebrate and cephalopod eyes have evolved by convergent evolution, with the former having a blind spot, while the latter does not.
Causation (or mechanism😞 What causes the behaviour to be performed? Which stimuli elicit or what physiological mechanisms cause the behaviour? Examples include the role of pheromones and hormones, such as increasing testosterone levels (caused by increasing day length) causing male display behaviour in many species of birds, moving shadows causing ragworms to withdraw into their burrows or contrast on beaks causing herring gull chicks to peck.
Development (or ontogeny😞 How has the behaviour developed during the lifetime of the individual? In what way has it been influenced by experience and learning? Examples include how courtship behaviour improves with age in many birds and how predators learn to avoid toxic or dangerous prey with experience.
I wonder if the development (or ontogeny) questions could be applied to our responses to the scent of flowers. We do come to associate certain positive experiences with nice smelling flowers.
I am perplexed as to why the closing parentheses in my Oxford U quote are showing as sad faces. Are others seeing this, too? Is this a SFN glitch encountered before?