Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology

What we are going to be doing over and over in here as the main
point of the course is looking at how what goes on in your body
influences behavior, emotions, memories.
How what goes on there influences your body, looping over.

Categories

Disadvantages of using categories:

when you are paying too much attention to categories,
you can't differentiate two facts that
When you put up boundaries, you have trouble seeing how
similar things are on either side of it.
e.g: difference between getting a 65 (Fail) on a test and a 66 (Pass)
on a test.
when you pay too much attention to boundaries,
16:57you don't see the big picture.
17:00All you see are categories.

2. Behavioral Evolution
1st building block

individual selection
behaving to optimize/ maximize the number of copies of their own
genes to pass on to the next generation.
Remark: individual selection selfish genes

2typeofselectionunderindividualselection:
natural selection is about is
20:41processes bringing about an organism who is more adaptive,
20:47Darwin soon recognized there was a second realm of selection,
sexual selection.
is selecting for traits that have no value whatsoever in terms of
survival or anything like that.
but for some random, bizarre reason, the opposite sex
likes folks who look this way.
So they get to leave more copies of their genes.
Differentiate between natural selection & sexual selection
Natural selection bringing
E.g: about big, sharp antlers in male moose,
and they use that for fighting off predators or fighting
E.g: A natural selection manifestation of it
22:53being, you're good at running away from predators.
22:56Selection for speed, for certain types of muscle metabolism,
23:00for certain sets of sensory systems that will tell you
23:03there's somebody scary around.
E.g: Sexual selection might account for the fact
that the antlers are green, paisley patterns all

2 nd
Relativities between organism
closer a relative is to you,
the more genes they share in common with you.

kin selection

I will gladly
25:20lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.
25:24And that's the math of the relatedness.
25:27You passing on one copy of your genes
25:30to the next generation is, from the sheer mathematics of just
25:34how evolution is going to play out over the generations,
25:37is exactly equivalent as giving up your life for eight cousins
25:43to be able to each pass on a copy of their genes.

3 rd
reciprocal altruism
They've got to be social.
37:06They've got to be smart.
37:07Why do they have to be smart?
37:08Because they have to remember, this
37:10is the guy who owes me a favor from last Thursday.
They need to be able to recognize individuals.
They have to be long lived enough so that there's
37:19a chance of interacting with that individual
37:21again and establishing this reciprocity.
37:24You would thus predict you would see
37:26systems of reciprocal altruism only in long
37:30lived social vertebrates .

23. Language
29:50
In 90% of cases, you get slightly different localization
29:55
of Wernicke's and Broca's, in particular the areas related
29:59
to reading when you have a language which
30:01
instead of an alphabet is a pictograph language.
30:04
For example, Chinese, a pictograph language,
30:07
you get slightly different areas of activation, and thus
30:12
slightly different areas of strokes
30:14
will produce a Chinese Broca's aphasia, or an alexia,
30:21
that sort of thing.