Abstract
Since Krebs and Davies’s (1978) landmark publication, it is acknowledged that behavioural ecology owes
much to the ethological tradition in the study of animal behaviour. Although this assumption seems to be
right—many of the first behavioural ecologists were trained in departments where ethology developed
and matured—it still to be properly assessed. In this paper, I undertake to identify the approaches used
by ethologists that contributed to behavioural ecology’s constitution as a field of inquiry. It is my contention
that the current practices in behavioural biology owe ethology something much subtler than the
simple transposition of Tinbergen’s Four Problems for heuristic purposes. Demonstrating what ethology
inherited from the long naturalist tradition shows the tensions that strained the field and that later led to
the loss of both its unity and its specificity. It also allows for a precise delineating of what behavioural
ecology picked up from the ethological practice, and it helps to cast some light on the introduction of economical
thinking in behavioural sciences.