5. Protecting Your Vulnerabilities

Your Evolutionary Heritage

A blackbird chick drops a wriggling worm from its tiny beak. It scrambles in the grasses of its nest but is too uncoordinated as yet to pick up the worm from the twig it is under. It begins to make cheeping noises while holding his head up in the air with a gaping beak. Quickly the mother flies back to her nest to help her chick.

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The cheeping noise from the baby blackbird is an example of a behavior whose function is a call for care and attention. You might think of this as infantile behavior, but in the most successful species, it is called care soliciting and is thought to be a mature behavior. In the animal world, the call for help arises in situations where ...

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