The idea of making this book arose from a symposium at the XVI International Botanical Congress in St. Louis, USA in August 1999, which brought together some of the contributors of this book. The idea, then, was to inform botanists of important recent developments in pollinator behavior, cognition, and sensory biology. These new findings and perspectives have numerous implications for the evolution of plants and the shaping of plant community structure. Our rationale for such a symposium was that we thought that many botanists are hard-pressed to keep up with the literature concerning pollinator neuroethology and behavioral ecology. Therefore, the field of plant–pollinator interactions is somewhat hobbled by stereotyped, anachronistic, scale-limited, or just simplistic views of how animals really interact with flowering plants.

Our discussions during the symposium (and with other contributors outside the symposium), however, revealed much more profound gaps than just the one between botanists and zoologists. Pollination biology is poised at the boundary between two different traditions, those of proximate and ultimate reasoning in biology. On the one hand, evolutionary ecologists tend to seek adaptive explanations for biological characters – how do the observed traits benefit the animal or plant? Physiologists and neuroethologists, on the other hand, prefer to consider the mechanisms by which environmental stimuli provoke or modify behavior. Unfortunately, these two groups of scientists have little commerce; they publish in different journals, attend different conferences, and tend to disparage each other's views. This was how the biological world was divided until a few years ago.