Question

Ethology is the study of
(a)Behaviour of animals
(b)Past life of an organism
(c)Disease-causing pathogens
(d)None of the above

Answer 1

The word ethology comes from the ethos of the Greek language, meaning "character" and logia which means "the study of". In 1902, American myrmecologist (an individual who studies ants) William Morton Wheeler first popularised the term.

Complete answer:
The term Ethology was employed by Saint-HiLaire (1859). Ethology is the empirical and analytical study of animal behavior, typically concentrating on behavior under normal circumstances and presenting behavior as a characteristic that is evolutionarily adaptive.
The behavior of animals is important to the survival and reproduction of individuals and the study of their behavior is therefore important in order to fully understand evolution.
Ethology deals with two kinds of causal behavioral explanations; one that deals with motivational processes and animal experience (proximate explanations) as causing behavior; and one that deals with selection forces and phylogenetic influences that cause behavioral evolution (ultimate explanations).

Additional Information: Ethology is one of the few non-medicine biological disciplines that have produced Nobel prizes and is a discipline with long traditions.
The empirical study of an organism's past existence is known as paleontology.
Pathology is defined as the scientific study of disease-causing species.
So, the correct answer is, option (a) ‘Behaviour of animals’.

Note: While many naturalists have researched aspects of animal behavior over the years, with the work of biologists Nikolaas Tinbergen of the Netherlands and Konrad Lorenz of Austria in the 1920s, the modern science of ethology is widely considered to have emerged as a distinct discipline. Ethology is a blend of field science and laboratory. It is closely linked to other fields, such as neuroanatomy, evolution, and ecology. Instead of a single animal community, the ethologist is interested in the behavioral mechanism and frequently studies one form of action (e.g: aggression) in a variety of unrelated animals.