Final answer:
Niko Tinbergen established four critical questions to help understand animal behavior, focusing on causes, biological mechanisms, evolutionary purposes, and development of behavior, taking into account the distinction between innate and learned behaviors.
Step-by-step explanation:
According to Niko Tinbergen, a pioneering ethologist, to understand an animal's behavior researchers must define it by considering four key questions. These questions help to clarify not just what the animal does, but why it does it:
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Behaviors can be essentially categorized into two groups: instinctual/innate behaviors, which are genetically wired and not majorly influenced by the environment, and learned behaviors, which adapt based on environmental experiences.