1. Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology

[Music] Stanford University this is bio 150 isn't it okay I just wanted to make sure okay so we start off with a scenario 40 year old guy quiet suburban life married fifteen year two kids three and a half dogs everything standard everything's going wonderfully and one day out of nowhere he punches somebody in the face at work totally bizarre out of character the guy is standing there by the water cooler and makes some comment on some baseball team takes exception to it punches him in the face utterly strange things are quiet three months later his

wife of 15 years happy marriage discovers he's having an affair with a 16 year old checkout kid down at the Safeway really weird then three months after that he absconds with all the money at work and bezels that disappears and is never seen again three possibilities first one this guy is a truly deep creep second he is having the most immature midlife crisis you could ever imagine third possibility he has a mutation than one gene in his head and what we'll be seeing is this is exactly the profile that you get in a certain neurological

disease where it's one gene that's out of whack first demonstration at that ok just to get a sense of who's here how many of you think there is a genetic influence on sexual orientation okay how many think it is possible for prenatal events to influence your political opinions thirty years later okay how many think that there is a valid way of using biology to understand who's religious and who isn't yeah you're not quite as many hands there okay alien as long as we're terrain how many people believe in God how many people believe in Souls

how many people believe in evil how many people believe in free will that's gonna change oh I might as well ask is there anybody in this room who actually does believe in evolution just wanted to make sure see what we're dealing with here okay how many think that there is a genetic influence and that there's a basic biological difference a sex difference in levels of aggression how many think there's biological basis of sex differences in intelligence okay who thinks is all explained by Nature who thinks it's all explained by nature who think there's a magnificent

fascinating nuanced interaction between nature yay okay well everybody's gonna get an A+ then you already have the course under control okay so we start off trying to find something in common look at these four events here or not in terms of being scraped out there but these are four circumstances that have something surprising in common having your period having a brain tumor eating a lot of junk food taking anabolic steroids those of you were not oriented to it that's the ones that build up your muscle like testosterone derivatives okay these all have something in common

having your period having a brain tumor eating a lot of junk food and taking a lot of anabolic steroids anybody want to fathom a guess what's the commonality amongst the four of them yeah hormones good okay we're off and running with hormones good even more specific than that something they all have in common come on somebody want to guess see these brief movements of hands there's people change their mind okay it all has to do with hormones they all have hormones in common I say trying to facilitate somebody making the next guess Oh con they

all have something okay we've got to get out of here at some point these all have four things in common all of these have been used successfully in courts of law to explain the behavior of a murderer in the first case in the first case a number of cases where the fact that a woman was having her period at the time of killing someone was part of what a jury said led them to exonerate the person a literature showing that a disproportionate share of female aggression comes around the time of menses next one there is

an area the brain you will know so much about over the next three months called the amygdala that has something to do with aggression and has something to do with fear and you get a brain tumor there and in a number of cases you get someone who is uncontrollably violent and this has also been used successfully in a court of law junk food any of you who are San Francisco history buffs will know 20 years ago 30 years ago at Dan White a dissappointed office seeker assassinated the American Francisco along with Harvey Milk and as

part of his remarkably successful defense for a double murderer that led to a remarkably short jail sentence was the famed Twinkie defense the argument that his addiction to junk food caused wild fluctuations in his blood sugar levels which caused him to do that finally anabolic steroids any number of cases of people having uncontrolled violence arguing because they were weight lifters and a wildly abusive range of taking this stuff had something to do with violence but all four of these together and we get the first of the two points of this entire course which is sometimes

the stuff that's going on in your body can dramatically influence what goes on in your brain second critical point tonight when you've settled back down and you're ready to go to sleep and you're nice and relaxed in your hearts beating nice and slow think the following thought you know that heart isn't going to beat forever think about think about your lips turning blue after they think about the blood flow slowing down think about your feet and your toes getting cold and at that point you will probably be increasing the rate at which that heart beats

and you will have just seen the second key thing in this course which is sometimes what's going on in your head will affect every single outpost in your body and what this course is about is the intertwining the interconnections between your physiology and your behavior the underlying emotions thoughts memories all of that and the capacity of each to deeply influence the other under all sorts of circumstances now what we're going to be doing with this is trying to understand this under fairly difficult circumstances if everybody here was here because they really wanted to understand why

all the wildebeest on earth mate in the same week each year we'd have a fighting chance of figuring that one out but that's not what we want to understand we don't want to understand why birds migrate and don't get lost week we want to understand human behavior worse than that harder than that human social behavior and hardest of all in some cases some grossly abnormal human behavior and if you're going to try to do that there's a problem which is officialy it's complicated it is a huge messy process trying to make sense of the biology

of human social behavior and just as all sorts of realms when one deals with messy complicated problems that you need to think about in some wildly interacting way we all have a strategy that we come up with a strategy to make things easier which is that we think in categories we think in categories we take things that are continuo and we break them into categories and we label those categories and we do that in various settings because it could be extremely useful for example somebody give me an estimate on how long this line is a

foot okay people who set a foot what is it that went through your head to figure it out you imagined how long a ruler is this is 11 1/2 inches because there's an eight and it's 11 inches an 8 and a half by 11 but everybody in here has this category in their head things that are kind of the same length as a ruler a continual length and there's a category for that suppose I'm telling you I have some friend who's a runner he runs the mile he's incredibly fast in fact he's one of the

best runners in the country at this point how fast does he have to have run the mile or better for you to be deeply impressed under four minutes and thus we have another categorical boundary there of there's an infinite variety of speeds with which you can run a mile yet we have in our heads this boundary people who are under 4 minute mile errs you are very impressed with okay now I want to impress you with another friend of mine who's a painter and this person is such a great painter that they paint with 11

different colors that doesn't work because that's not a category that we have we don't classify the quality of it all hopefully not we don't classify quality of paintings along those lines but what we begin to see here is in the right areas we have categories that we impose on things that are not categorical here's an example why should you do this when the example go here's one of the classic continua that we ever deal with which is the continue of color the varying wavelengths that take the rainbow from violet to red and there's an infinite

number of spaces in between and what do we do we have rules in English that you divide the continua here and here or whatever and that's what you call a color and this is red everything from here is red everything here is orange so on you take a continuo and you break it into boundaries why do we do them because it makes it easier to store the information away instead of remembering the absolute features of something you simply say it's a it's a sub four-minute mile er it's a line that's almost the length that's about

the length of the ruler it's the color orange how do you know that's the case because go and take people from other language groups where their language arbitrarily divides the rainbow and other points with completely different color terms and they remember different profiles of colors differently than an English speaker might take a colour and if the colour comes right in the center of somebody's a colour counter is a ssin it comes right in the middle of the range of what counts as that colour people remember whether they saw that colour or not far better than

if you show them a colour about the boundary and people will show that as a function of what language they speak taking a continua and you break it into pieces because it's easier to deal with the facts another example of it here we have four objects and as drawn here simply because we have categories to describe the first three do one of those tests of show people a bunch of shapes and they come back an hour later and ask them have you seen the shape before and people are going to be far more accurate with

this than whether they saw this or not because we don't have a word for it we don't have a word that's at all sort of analytical with some squiggly whatever we don't have a clear-cut category think in categories makes it easier for us to remember stuff and it makes it easier for us to evaluate stuff so that's a classic sort of response that we have cognitively to complicated things but there's a bunch of problems with categorical thinking first example and first one you can see from a realm language differences and that not only is there

a continue of infinite number of wavelengths there's a continuum of sounds that humans can make and different languages draw boundaries at different points as to what count as similar sounds or different sounds there's like two different th sounds in English which apparently were not very good at hearing but there's other ones we are and that will affect your ability to remember stuff what word it was depending on whether it is on a dramatically different boundary whether it is sound that sounds different to you or not example of this apparently in Finnish the people do not

differentiate between the sound of a bee and the sound of the P whereas we have no trouble with that but people from Finland do not make that differentiation and I discovered this one day a number of years ago where for reasons I don't even understand I found myself needing to take testicular biopsies on baboons not having sort of learned that in junior high how you do that I called up this guide urology at the med school who happened to be Finnish and I explained to him what I wanted to do and he sort of took

me through the paces and told me what thingy I needed to buy and that sort of stuff and holiday packages of those where you can get a dozen and sort of telling me how to do that and once we went through he said what I want you to do the thing to do at this point is get some practice I want you to practice on a bear what he said yeah practice on a bear and I said are you kidding me he said I know I know it sounds crazy but we have all the residents

do that it's a very good learning device you know either either practice on a bear or an apple here we see the dangers of making mistakes about differences between B and P under certain accept circumstances so we see one of the dangers there which is when you are paying too much attention to categories you can't differentiate two facts that fall within the same category next example remember back at various points of anxiety during exams in such back-when where there was a world of difference between getting a 65 on a test in a 66 on a

test not particularly different but because there's this boundary drawn there between passing and failing there is this dramatic differentiating we make when you put a boundaries you have trouble seeing how similar things are on either side of it next example one additional problem that you get when you think categorically and for this everybody needs to turn over one of the pieces of paper the paper you're gonna hand in the questionnaire and what I'm going to do is read you a series of phone numbers and I want you to write them down as accurately as possible

okay ready two four three two six four nine six five zero three two six zero two five six five seven seven nine eight three two two four four nine two nine one three one seven one two three one four Oh two six five nine three two four four nine seven four three eight eight four oh eight three one five two eight seven okay now what that laxer size is no that doesn't count towards the great what that will show unsure when in some obsessive bursts of procrastination I actually look through the answers tonight what it's

going to show is the accuracy is going to tank the second you go from the phone number pattern of three digits followed by four breakup that pattern and suddenly we all get screwed up because we're saying wait a second I thought it was a phone number that was one digit now two ditches I can't ends gone and you're on to the next one and what we see there is the third example which is when you pay too much attention to boundaries you don't see the big picture all you see are categories all you see are

wait a second phone numbers are supposed to come with three digits followed by four another example of where we use categorical thinking okay I'm putting up a number serious here okay what's oh my god okay what's the next number in this series and why 42 how come okay so we're kind of oscillating all over the place there okay so that's is valid is anybody else's who else has an exit number in line there what's that forty five how come okay are you going to take that forty five that's very okay what else let me make

it a little bit easier here okay so what's the next number in that series and what I'm telling you is if you think about the world with a certain set of categories in your head you will know the next number in the sequence so what's the next one seven billion okay that one okay seven billion that's another possibility although presumably it would be seven billion anything else any other guesses here as to what happens next fourth fourteen twenty third thirty fourth what's the next one in the sequence yes forty four or how come okay but

remember it's got to be 44th what's that ordinal Cardinal whatever it is what how come you were right you were right anybody who's a New Yorker well know what the next one is these are the subway stocks and you get a bagel with cream cheese and back so you get new yorkers and while everybody else is thinking logical things like 43 and 41 and 45 and 7 billion and all of that you've got this whole world of dividing numbers by subway stops we think in categories we think in categories but as you just saw there

are these problems first one being when you think in categories you underestimate how different two facts are when they fall in the same category when you think in categories you overestimate how different they are when there happens to be a boundary in between them and when you pay attention to categorical boundaries you don't see big pictures now what our goal in this class is going to be is think about this big complex issue of the biology behavior without falling into thinking in categories what do I mean in this regard thinking categorically about a subject like

this there's some chicken and the chicken is standing somewhere and there's some rooster over there that does some sexually solicited exciting thing for the female and in response to that the female picks up and goes running over to the rooster unless we have our first behavioral biology question here why did that chicken cross the road to get to that rooster so you could answer that like an endocrinologist and say well the female have certain levels of estrogen and her bloodstream which made this key hypothalamic areas responsive to the stimulus or you could answer it like

an anatomist of saying well because the fulcrum of a pelvis or whatever is chickens have that allow them to run or you could answer it in the category of an evolutionary biologist that over the millennia chickens that didn't respond to sexually solicited gestures females left fewer copies of their genes and there's all these different categories that we can use to explain what's going on all of these different buckets all of these different buckets which beginning to pull you towards all of the problems we just saw now having trouble telling how different or similar two facts

are having trouble seeing big pictures over emphasizing the importance of the bucket you happen to live inside of and thus suddenly everything about this behavior is explained by a gene a neurotransmitter a childhood trauma a a living inside one bucket what we're going to be doing over and over in here is the main point of the course is looking at how what goes on your body influences behavior emotions memories how what goes on there influences your body looping over and at every one of those points resisting the pole to think categorically oh this is the

explanation for where this behavior came from here's what we're going to be doing instead throughout in terms of the structure of the class when we get to actual behaviors for each behavioral category we will start off by looking at what the behavior looks like because often that takes a lot more objectivity than we initially assumed what does the behavior look like then we will say well what went on in that organism a half second before that behavior occurred to occur to cause it to occur which is the world of what's going on with neurons what's

going on with circuitry where's the explanation for the behavior aha this behavior happened because this part of the brain got activated but just as we're about to settle and happily into that bucket we push back a bit and say well what smell what sound what sensory stimulation in the environment caused those neurons to get activated and produce that behavior and then pushing one step further behind okay well what do hormone levels various hormones in the bloodstream of that animal or individual for the past few hours how do those hormones change how sensitive you are to

those sounds smells etc that caused those neurons to get activated and produce the behavior and all we're going to be doing is working our way back all the way through early velopment fetal life the genetic makeup of an individual the genetic makeup of entire population species the evolutionary pressure on all the way back to their how do you explain each one of these behaviors in the context of those outposts and how are they not really outposts all they are are different ways of expressing the same biological influences if you say ooh here's a hormone that

explains this behavior this behavior is caused by hormone X hormone X is coded for by a gene so suddenly you're not just talking about endocrinology you're talking about genetics and if there's a gene there it has been the subject to selection so suddenly you're talking about evolution if you were talking about what smell sites etc are the cue triggers for behavior by definition you're also talking about fetal development that determined how sensitive those systems were to those sorts of stimuli what we're going to be having over and over again is any one of these buckets

that we spend some time and all we're going to do is think of that bucket is at that point the most convenient way of describing all of the influences that came beforehand and in that regard there's no buckets all there are our temporary platforms and each platform is simply the easiest most convenient way of describing the outcome of everything that came before hand starting with millennia back and evolution okay so that sounds great that's what we're gonna do we're gonna do this and we're gonna be very sophisticated and fancying or thinking about it and we're

not going to fall for categorical thinking all that okay this is a complicated subject and we're smart so we're gonna try to think about that smartly that's great but like maybe this is just an irritating song-and-dance here of ooh we're not gonna fall for categorical thinking like people out there obviously when people are thinking about stuff like behavior and they do this professionally professional biologist biology behavior touch yes and they understand also this is just the straw man who we're going to be more sophisticated in our thinking than endocrinologists and geneticists and all of those

they obviously know that these things interact and this not just one explanation and it's just the area they focus on they understand that let me read you a few quotes to show just how much some of these folks don't understand that first quote give me a child at Birth from any background and let me control the total environment in which he is raised and I will turn him into anything I wish him to be with her doctor lawyer beggar or thief this was John Watson in 1912 one of the founding fathers of the school of

psychology called behaviorism behaviorism that sort of reached this Apogee with this guy BF Skinner in the 1950s this notion that if you could control the rewards the punishments the positive of the negative reinforcement you could turn anybody into anything you want whether doctor lawyer beggar or thief and we know that isn't the case we know that's not possible we know that all you have to do is throw in one other factor like a lot of protein malnutrition during fetal life and you're not going to be able to do that that being a crude example of

just how wrong this guy was you cannot have all the control over the environment and turn somebody into whatever you want here's a guy living pathologically in this bucket that behavior could be explained solely by understanding reward and Punishment interesting factoid this John Watson died shortly after that he was driven out of academia for a wild scandal but he was involved in and he spent the rest of his career apparently as an extremely successful advertising executive going to show you something he may not have been able to turn people into anything he wanted but apparently

he could make them buy all sorts of geegaw nonsense okay next quote normal psychic life depends upon the good functioning of brain synapses if you don't know what synapses are don't panic at this point there are brain cells connect with each other okay normal psychic life depends on the good functioning of brain synapses and mental disorders appear as a result of synaptic Arrangements synaptic adjustments will then modify the corresponding ideas and force them into different channels using this approach we obtain cures and improvements but no failures synaptic adjustments synaptic addition what do you suppose those

little old synaptic adjustments are that this guy is referring to any guesses yes somebody shot at electroshock therapy electroshock therapy you know a little synaptic you wish it were as gentle as electroshock therapy this is even more dramatic synaptic adjustments any other guesses yeah frontal lobotomies you know you want to adjust somebody's synapses see it just like slice off the front third of their brain or so this was a Cosmo nees a Portuguese neurologist who invented frontal lobotomies have have a different name at the time but was the person who started this and something that

was done to tens and hundreds of thousands of people who had absolutely nothing wrong with them one of the darkest chapters of where psychiatry gets in bed with ideology massive criminal destruction of people's brains this is what he had to say about the procedure on his acceptance of his Nobel Prize in Physiology and medicine for having invented it so here we have somebody pathologically living in a world of understand how synapses are working adjust them and with that we obtain cures and improvements but no failures final quote worst one of all the selection for social

utility must be accomplished by some social institution if mankind is not to be ruined by domestication induced degeneracy the racial idea as the basis of our state has already accomplished much in this respect we may and we must rely on the healthy instincts of the best of our people for the extermination of elements of the population loaded with Drake's anybody want to guess who that was Hitler not a Hitler that behavioral biologist he was a little bit busy at the time this was instead one of Hitler's main scientific propagandists this was somebody living pathologically in

a box a box that doesn't even exist having notion of race and ethnicity and genetics and all of that saying let me fix that one let me exterminate the elements of the population loaded with dregs and I'll fix up that little problem with fixing something that ain't broken who was this this was a scientist named Konrad Lorenz Konrad Lorenz he probably a lot of us are familiar with Konrad Lorenz was one of the founding fathers of ethology we'll learn all about that but he like everybody knows him winding up in all the little kid nature

books Konrad Lorenz discovered imprinting and birds and he'd be going on he was this little Austrian guy with this two big white beard and he'd always have these little Austrian shorts and suspenders and there would be a whole bunch of duckies following him because they thought he was mom and he was totally charming and irresistible of this sort of imprinting with his ducky kids and he also happened to be a rabbit Nazi propagandist who went to his grave saying that there was nothing wrong with what he did these are not crappy fourth-rate scientists these are

not people working at you know the University of the desert of podem or whatever these are among the most influential scientists of the last century these are people who influenced how people were educated and when we decided it wasn't worth the effort of doing it these are people whose influence led to the brains being destroyed of hundreds of thousands of people who have nothing wrong with them these are the people who led to the notion that you fix up a problem that doesn't exist by exterminating 9 million people these are not minor scientists these are

the most influential people in the last century coming out of science in many ways living pathologically inside their own buckets and how they could explain the entire world and thus again our goal is going to be to not fall for that to think about human behaviors and in some cases to think about some of the most disturbed motives some of the most frightening damaged human behaviors and resist the temptation to think inside a bucket and find the explanation again every level we're going to talk about genes hormones neurons and fire mental influence whatever it is

that point will simply be the easiest way of describing all of the influences that came before they're not even temporary buckets there's no buckets that will be our goal now thinking about this in approaching human behavior the biology of human social behavior often the biology of abnormal humans human social behavior we're gonna have three intellectual challenges and the first one is recognizing circumstances where there is nothing fancy about us whatsoever we're just like every other animal out there and where the challenge is to accept that let me give you an example you are a hamster

you are a female hamster and you're sitting in your chair cage and as a female hamster what you do is you ovulate every 5 days or so and you're going about your business and everything's great now somebody puts another female hamster in the cage with you and over the subsequent month or so what happens is both of you will begin to lengthen your cycles and eventually synchronize them so that you were both ovulating the same afternoon on a regular basis amazing this actually works this way and menstrual ovulatory synchrony people understand how this works in

hamsters it is done with olfaction with pheromones with chemical airborne signals from one female to another and you can prove this by electrically recording from olfactory systems or if you don't have much funding you could take like a paper clip over the female hamsters nose and she doesn't synchronize then it's all done with olfaction and what seemed most amazing is you put the two females together and there's a way of disrupting it put a male hamster in there and suddenly the cycles desynchronized and shortened and you break it up with male pheromones and what's even

more remarkable is you put the two females together and it's not random who synchronizes the other one the dominant female synchronizes the subordinate one totally understood people have been working on this for years and it works this way in-line goats and sheep and dogs and cats and pigs apparently you could go to a 7-eleven somewhere in Iowa and you could buy a can of pig ovulatory synchronization spray and take it home and just run why I have no idea why you would want to do that but nonetheless that's how you like it's up there with

the cans of Cheez Whiz or whatever and it's that well understood and what's remarkable is it works exactly the same way in us as humans where it is known as the Wellesley effect the fact that over the course of freshman year this was first shown in Wellesley 1970 over the course of freshman year women freshman year roommate tended to lengthen and synchronize their cycles and it was done with olfaction women who had olfactory deficits didn't synchronize with their roommates they would synchronize unless they were having close intimate relationships with a male in which case they

D synchronize and what's most cool of all is it's not random who synchronizes to who the studies tend to show is the individual who is more socially outgoing extroverted dominating is the one who synchronizes the other one and this is well enough understood that when Iowan in college people would sit around the dinner table and say stuff like oh when we roomed together in the summer I had her synchronized by August 1st this is what happens if you hang out with biologists but we're exactly the same the challenge there is recognizing there's nothing fancy about

us at various points in the class we will look at comparisons between the human and the chimp genome and it's virtually the same some of the time we are just a plain old off-the-rack animal second challenge is going to be circumstances where we appear to be just like everybody else all the other organisms out there but we do something very different with the similarity let me give you an example here you have two humans two individuals who are going through a ritual they are sitting at a table here absolutely silent they're making no eye contact

and they do nothing more physically taxing and every now and then one of them picks up their hand and moves a little piece of wood on the table and if these happen to be the right two individuals in the middle of a chess grandmaster tournament these people are maintaining blood pressure for six hours running that you only see in a marathon runner these people are going through thousands of calories a day doing nothing more than thinking and this is outrageous because you look at one of these chess grandmasters who's just taken down an opponent and

took their queen or whatever and they will have the exact same physiology as some male baboon on the Savannah who's just to rip the stomach open of his worst rival and we're doing it there just with thought and some of the time which mark allowed us is we have absolutely typical boring physiology but we use it in ways that no other animal could we get stressed by the inevitability of our mortality we get stressed by reading something awful let us happen to a child on the other side of the planet we get stressed by somebody

zooming past us in some sports car and we decide that we are now economically inadequate and you never even see the person's face you just see the car we get stressed reading about something awful happening to a character and a novel this is a whole realm of things that we could do that nobody else does and on the flip side we can feel compassion and empathy for a loved one but we can also do the same for someone on the other side of a planet and a refugee camp we can feel compassion for a member

of another species we feel badly when our pets are injured this is another realm where the physiology of the response the empathy the emotional bonding all of that it's the same boring physiology as every other animal out there and we are using it in a way that is unrecognizable now some of the time the challenge is the third category which is when we are doing something that no other animal out there has anything remotely similar to let me give you an example here a shocking example you have a couple they live together they come back

at the end of the day from work they talk the dinner they talk some more they go to bed and they have sex they talk some more they fall asleep the next day they do the same exact thing they come home from work they talk they eat they talk they go to bed they have sex they talk some more they do this every single night for 30 days running hippos would be repulsed by this because hardly anybody out there in the animal kingdom has non-reproductive sex let alone day after day and nobody else out there

talks about it afterward what we've got here is a whole novel domain of human being language use aspects of our sexuality this profoundly damaging human uniqueness of some individuals confusing aspects of sexuality with aggression in some cases we are going to be out there on our own trying to understand what's up okay so that would be the general strategy for the course we will resist categorical thinking over and over and over and not just because that's cool and nuanced and subtle all of that but fall into categorical thinking and you can do unspeakable damage and

a realm of silent science that makes a difference we will do so thinking constantly about ourselves as a boring species just like all the others out there as a species that has the same boring physiology but uses in ways that are unrecognizable as a species that does some things that are simply without precedent out there and constantly struggling with what does biology have to do with it okay general structure of the course the first half of the course is going to be an overview and introduction to the various buckets the various categories and what we're

going to go through is understanding sort of an introduction to evolutionary theory an introduction to what molecular genetics has to do with behavior the behavioral genetics ethology the brain endocrinology each of these buckets and you know what happens next which is in the second half of the course we will look at specific behaviors and in each case rip apart the buckets and in each case do the strategy of what does the behavior look like what happened to second before the world of neurons what happened with the sensory stimuli that trigger those neurons etc all the

way back to the evolutionary selective pressures so the first half of the course is going to be the introduction to the bucket and I will tell you right off the bat it is a total pain in the rear because of what we're going to be doing is like every two-and-a-half lectures just when you were getting the vocabulary down we're going to jump to a completely different bucket it is going to be dizzying and unpleasant and all of that and then second half of the course oh the rewards finally come of then putting all the pieces

together looking at individual categories of behavior sexual behavior aggressive behavior parental behavior schizophrenia depression personality disorders language use in each of these cases what's going on a second before what's going on ten million years before where do all these buckets disappear in the interactions so that's going to be the strategy for the course something critical about how the course was designed is it's got no prerequisites because I really think this is a subject that everybody on earth should be forced to learn about at a gunpoint and thus like it's a good thing I think to

have this not be one of those upper level bio classes let me just get a sense of who's here how many of you are bio types bio majors hum bio psychology anthro are there any English Lit grad students in here okay good for you thank you for coming see what you think in three months but nonetheless the class has been designed explicitly to have no background whatsoever how are we going to do that we're gonna do the usual song and dance of weekly sections and reviews and all that sort of thing but in addition during

this first half of the course when we're jumping from category to category we're going to have each week additional sections a catch-up section which is for people who have no background in that area getting you through the basics and getting you up to speed so that you will be able to then know what's up during the lectures so those will be posted the first one of these is let me make sure I've got this yes it will be this Thursday at 7:30 in the room next door and this is going to be the introduction to

of canary theory and getting you ready for what will be the evolution lectures Wednesday and Friday of this week if you don't have a strong background go to these catch-up sections the TAS who will be giving it are really expert in those areas lots of background and this will be your chance to catch up look through the handout I think I have a bunch of terms there or something where if you're not terribly familiar with those terms and some discipline that's a sign that you should probably go for some of the catch-up stuff if you

really are just doing this sort of being very adventurous with no background if you can take it pass/fail that will take off a lot of the pressure as well because you could then actually pay attention to stuff here and the whole point here is to be able to do this even if you don't have a science background because the obvious argument I would make is everybody has to learn behavioral biology because we're being behavioral biologists every time we serve on a jury every time we vote whether or not money should be spent on solving some

problem whether it's a problem whether it's solvable or not every time we try to make sense of a family member sunk in depression are they having a biochemical disorder or are they just indulging themselves we were behavior biologists all the time so it's a probably good thing that we'd be informed once so they catch up with these sections there take advantage of them what else we will have weekly sections the usual type people are not assigned to sections there's going to be I don't know 18 of them or so a week at various times go

to whichever works for you there will be in midterm in the middle the midterm coming as we finish the last of those categories last of those buckets there will be a final there's no paper or anything like that so that will be the pattern what else other stuff here office hours my office hours are up on the handout other things breaks we will with any luck be able to we I with any luck we'll be able to be organized enough so that during each stretch of class there will be a five-minute break in the middle

so you could stand up and just get to the front of the line for the Froome and then we will resume promptly before you get in there so just to let you clear your heads a bit assignments books reading there are two books that I have assigned for the course one is by me and you don't even have to read it just go buy a bunch of copies and bring me the receipt and you got a great grade in there okay so that's one's gonna be pertinent to the second half of the course we're going

to give you a list of the chapters that make the most sense to read the other book is a book by an author named James Glick called chaos chaos year after year after year in this class provokes the strongest opinions a quarter of the people decided is the most irritating irrelevant thing that could possibly have been assigned in the class and hate it but half the people never quite figure out what's up with it and 1/4 of the people their life is transformed they no longer have to meditate they no longer have to have a

book just they are at peace at peace I tell you because what this book does is introduce this whole radically different way of thinking about biology taking apart a world of reductionism for 500 years we all have been using a very simple model for thinking about living systems which is if you want to understand something that's complicated you break it apart into its little pieces and once you understand the little pieces and put it back together you will understand the complex thing and what chaos as an entire field is about and this was pretty much

the first book that was meant for the lay public about it what chaos shows is that's how you fix clocks that's not how you fix behaviors that's not how you understand behaviors behavior is not like a clock behavior is like a cloud and you don't understand rainfall by breaking a cloud down into its component pieces and gluing them back together so read through that book a lot of it is from physical sciences rather than biological so we'll just be suggesting the chapters you should read I will tell you it is the first book since like

baby Beluga where I've gotten to the last page and immediately started reading it over again from the front because along with baby belugas had the greatest influence of my life I found this to be the most influential book in my thinking about science since college so that is a sign there will also be a bunch of lectures in the second half of the course covering these fields of chaos and complexity and if you really think about it it is going to force a change in everything else that you bring to thinking about this subject in

addition at this moment there is not a reader because I'm trying to avoid having to get you guys to have to buy a reader I'm trying to redo all the assigned readings so that will just be from papers that are available online that you'll be able to download I'm about halfway through getting them there with any luck there will not have to be a reader but if it does exist it's not going to be big it won't be terribly expensive but there will be a bunch of readings online to download and it will vary in

some cases it will be reading the whole paper in some cases I'll be suggesting you just read the abstract in some cases it will be to understand what's happening in the behave in the paper in detail in some cases this is an example of how people in this bucket think about this problem just read the abstract so all of that will be assigned and made clear what other stuff there's going to be a huge amount of information online the coursework is going to be set up for the class there will be copies of the handouts

there will be lecture notes lecture notes that I have that will be about five to ten pages covering each lecture which will get to about the middle of the course and I suspect I will run out of steam by then so they won't care for the second half there will be commonly asked questions there will be a Q&A there will be course logistics some of the slides will be put up in there make use of that there will be announcements about time changing for office hours and things like that make you make use of that

and people who are not formally enrolled we are figuring out a way for you to get access to it as well we've also made the decision that after this lecture the handouts will not be on paper and that is because by roughly for each lecture we will go through about 5,000 pieces of paper even double-sided all of the stuff will get posted on coursework the day before and if that's going to make it impossible for you to follow what happens in class because you are the last human on Stanford who is not living off of

the computer screen come and talk to me and we will slip you an actual paper copy of the handouts most of them with any luck we can avoid using paper just because of how many people there are in here let's see other stuff sections sections will start this Thursday the regular sections all of those will be posted the times for that office hours won't start until next week a midterm will be in an evening rather than during a class time and if we're on schedule the class time that day it will be used for review

and anything else Oh a very good suggestion just now given that the class before here is humongous and thus we have the impossible problem of a lot of people trying to get out of that while a lot of people are trying to get into that it might work best for everybody to come in from the top so that you flow down the stairs seamlessly and drive out those other people before us out the door there that might work a whole lot better final thing is we have a team of TAS here and they are great

here they are TAS stand up and be embarrassed okay stand up those there they are there's all but one of them who is in transit there they are these guys are great they have either taken the course before in some cases they have T aid the course before their grad students in various of the bucket specialties I would strongly suggest taking advantage of the sections what will evolve after the first few weeks is there will be the regular sections going over the course material sort of the usual way there will also be more advanced sections

for people who have stronger backgrounds take advantage okay you guys can sit down leaving them standing there awkwardly for hours afterward take advantage of the sections really greatly skill TAS okay so that's basically what we got going here are there any questions units okay somebody emailed without units the class is five units and it's because we are meeting for so many hours a week actually for a while the class was the sixth unit course and that was because of Condoleezza Rice because when she is the Provost here she totally screwed the biology department by upping

our teaching requirements under really nasty conditions so what we all decided was to find ways every single sleazy trick we could do to puff up the number of units we were supposedly teaching so for a while the five unit class here we did do six units but eventually they caught us so we stopped doing that so first first she did that and then weapons of mass destruction so it's a five minute class at the moment say hi from me if you run into her on campus so five units the workload I think will be commensurate

with that but it's mainly because of heavy class time one additional thing lectures are going to be tape and put up online within a day or so on coursework the reason for that is given that this spans two-hour block a lot of people have to miss one of the hour blocks and in the past it is work to be able to get the stuff up online so that will be advantageous for some folks okay question yes there was a question up there that was okay you take it back okay any other questions bagel guys did

you get your bagel or did somebody eat it okay good good and the social contract comes through yep what's up yes I don't remember May 3rd May 3rd for the midterm 7:30 in the evening it is a Monday June 4th for the final ok more questions yeah what's the format of the midterm in the file in an ideal world given the whole emphasis here on no buckets blah blah etc it would be long essays and requirements of sonnets and sensitive haikus about the hypothalamus but simply because in the numbers and here we are reduced to

sort of like lowest common denominator a lot of multiple-choice questions just to make things saner for the TAS because it is an unbelievable job to try to engrave this many papers that quickly broadly intellectually what the midterm is going to be about is just touching base making sure you understand the basics of each of those buckets each of those disciplines a little bit of forcing you to think across disciplines what the final is going to be entirely about is forcing you to think across the disciplines across the buckets there so it's going to be so

very different intellectual foci in their mid term have the facts that hopefully it won't be quite as mindless is that but that's the main function of the midterm okay more questions yep okay th did you guys decide to videotape the ketchup section audio okay that okay either office hours or it's going to be taped and put up online and of course works and if there's critical handouts visuals those will be posted there as well good more questions yeah yes and it's gonna be for each it's going to be in advance of the next three lectures

since young final is at 7:30 for two hours the fine of all of the final of the final five fifteen twelve fifteen just to get that up there twelve fifteen more questions any are for more please visit us at stanford.edu