Reddit reviews Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach

If it's maladaptive and variation exists in the population, selection can act on individuals to change the frequency of the behavior in a population. These behaviors as responses to stimuli are coded in DNA, that's how they become fixed (in the hardy-weinberg sense) in a population. Do you think snakes are so smart they are self aware of their own behavior and the behavior of others in the population? We're so far out of what the literature shows at this point I don't think that I can continue this conversation. In each response, you're moving the goal posts. There are some really good resources out there to help, things like http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/animal-behavior-13228230 and https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0878939660

• Alcock's Animal Behavior: an evolutionary approach is a classic and very renowned textbook. It satisfies both your needs and it is relatively updated to the latest knowledge of animal behavior. Although exhaustive, it is a gigantic text. https://www.amazon.com/Animal-Behavior-Evolutionary-John-Alcock/dp/0878939660
  
• It's not a book, but MIT's Open Courseware on Animal Behavior should satisfy your curiosity: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/brain-and-cognitive-sciences/9-20-animal-behavior-fall-2013/index.htm
  
• Manning and Dawkin's Introduction to Animal Behavior is also awesome and a really good read and much more approachable than Alcock's https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Animal-Behaviour-Aubrey-Manning/dp/0521165148
  
• Lastly, Broom and Fraser's Domestic Animal Behaviour and Welfare is excellent read if you are more into cats dogs, etc. https://www.amazon.com/Domestic-Animal-Behaviour-Welfare-Donald-M/dp/1780645635

Alcock's Animal Behavior is a great textbook that ties behavior to evolutionary processes. I just started a PhD where one component is ethology, which I haven't had a course in. This was the book my advisor recommended.

As far as ecology goes, the only general ecology book I've used was my undergrad text, which is pretty approachable if you don't have background- Smith and Smith - Elements of Ecology. I took aquatic ecology and terrestrial ecology, was underwhelmed with both texts.