Proximate pathways underlying social behavior

•Integrative study of animal behavior can both shift and re-enforce paradigms.•Social behavior lends itself well to such an integrative approach.•We emphasize five proximate pathways underlying social behavior.•We recommend taking both a 'forward' and 'reverse' genomics approach.•We argue for studying transitions between different social states or phenotypes.

The organism is the central unit integrating genomic, developmental, and environmental forces. Animal behavior is fundamental to this process. The integrative study of animal behavior demands numerous interdisciplinary approaches to tackle fundamental questions across multiple levels of organization, diverse taxonomic groups, and various spatial and temporal scales. Social behavior is well-suited for integrative studies since it is ubiquitous, and because sociality represents a pinnacle of biological complexity. We review five proximate pathways that may underlie vertebrate social behavior and its environmental connection: neural circuits, neuroendocrine regulation, gene expression, epigenetic regulation, and genome structure. We suggest researchers take both a 'forward' and 'reverse' genomics approach, and probe the mechanistic bases of animal social behavior by studying transitions between social states or phenotypes.