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This chapter discusses how personality and behavioral diversity are important determinants of genetic diversity and the long-term persistence of populations, and also describes the anthropogenic factors influencing behavioral diversity in the wild and in captivity. This is followed by a discussion on the role of personality research in identifying potential threats such as exotic and invasive species. The chapter concludes with recommendations for understanding managing behavioral diversity.

This chapter poses the question of the evolution of intellectual faculties. But a satisfactory explanation demands insight into the evolutionary origins of some of our most striking attributes—our intelligence, language, cooperation, teaching, and morality—yet most of these features are not just distinctive, they are unique to our species. That makes it harder to glean clues to the distant history of our minds through comparison with other species. At the heart of this challenge lies the undeniable fact that we humans are an amazingly successful species. Our range is unprecedented; we have colonized virtually every terrestrial habitat on Earth; exhibit behavioral diversity that is unparalleled in the animal kingdom; and resolved countless ecological, social, and technological challenges. When one considers that the life history, social life, sexual behavior, and foraging patterns of humans have also diverged sharply from those of other apes, there are grounds for claiming that human evolution exhibits unusual and striking features that go beyond our self-obsession and demand explanation.

This chapter presents some of the methods in experimental evolution that can be used to study the evolution of behavior, illustrating how these can be applied toward understanding the origin and mechanisms of behavioral diversity. One method is artificial selection, a powerful tool used to explore the question of how behavior evolves; another is mass selection, which relies on an experimental setup that sorts individuals into groups depending on a particular behavior. An alternative approach for identifying mechanisms of behavioral evolution is to use experimental methods to explore genetics and physiology of real behavioral shifts that occurred among populations or species in nature. The chapter describes how laboratory experimental tools, such as genetic engineering and pharmacology, were used to discover the evolution of mating systems in voles.

This chapter provides a far-ranging review of the evolution of energetics in both birds and mammals. It notes that energetics effectively integrates diverse aspects of the natural history of an organism with conditions in the environment. The chapter explains that this integration is most evident in endotherms as a result of their high cost of maintenance and the limited quantities and qualities of resources in most environments. It emphasizes that endotherms which show the greatest ecological and behavioral diversity have the largest diversity in energetics. The chapter notes that basal energy expenditures in endotherms are correlated principally with body mass, but also with body composition and its relation to activity level, food habits, climate and its surrogates latitude and altitude, as well as life with restrictive habits or in restrictive environments.

Two of the largest and, arguably, most interesting groups of Drosophila are the Hawaiian Drosophila, a lineage of over 600 species that have diversified rapidly in the Hawaiian Islands; and the cactophilic Drosophila replete species group, a clade of over 100 species endemic to the New World. As these lineages have been well-studied, this chapter uses a phylogenetic approach to compare and contrast these lineages to understand the similarities and differences leading to rapid morphological, behavioural, and ecological change. It finds that the large adaptive radiation of Drosophila endemic to Hawaii are characterized by high morphological and behavioural diversity, particularly in secondary sexual characters, and wide ecological breadth, accounting for nearly one half of the native plant families endemic to the archipelago. In contrast, the replete group has only diversified exclusively on Cactaceae, and maintains high morphological diversity in primary sexual characters and behaviours.