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Pat Monaghan, Behavioral ecology and the successful integration of function and mechanism, Behavioral Ecology, Volume 25, Issue 5, September-October 2014, Pages 1019–1021, https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/aru082
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Broadly speaking, researchers working in the field of animal biology can be divided into 2 camps: those who seek to understand the processes that will enable us to identify, alleviate, and if possible cure, human ailments—that is, the biomedical sciences, and those who want to understand the processes responsible for the diversity that we see in animal form and function—that is, the zoological sciences. The approach to variation differs greatly between the two ( Monaghan and Birkhead 2013 ). For biomedical scientists, commonality is what they are after, pathways that are highly conserved across species and hence can be easily studied in relatively simply animals; variation muddies the waters and is something to be avoided. For the zoological-based scientists, variation within and among species is a central focus, and an evolutionary framework is used as the scaffold on which to build an understanding of the origins, consequences, and maintenance of variation. Both approaches are immensely valuable, but, to the detriment of both, communication between these camps has not been what it should be.
