1. Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology

Stanford University, this is biography 150, right? I just wanted to make sure he's okay, so we start with a scenario of a 40 year old man, quiet suburban life, married, fifteen years old, two kids, three and a half dogs, everything is standard, everything is going great and one day . out of nowhere he punches someone in the face at work totally strange out of character the guy is standing there by the water cooler and makes some comment about a baseball team he objects to me punching him in the face Absolutely strange things are quiet three months after his wife of 15 years of happy marriage discovers that she is having an affair with a 16 year old boy who is at the Safeway checkout.

He's really strange and, three months later, he absconds with all the money from work and the bezels disappearing and are never seen again. Three possibilities first. First of all, this guy is a real creep. Second, he's going through the most immature midlife crisis you can imagine. Third possibility, he has a mutation instead of a gene in his head and what we will see is that this is exactly the profile you are in. a certain neurological disease where there is a gene that is out of control first demonstration of that, okay, just to get an idea of ​​who is here.

How many of you believe that there is a genetic influence on sexual orientation? Well, how many think it's possible that prenatal events play a role? your political opinions thirty years later, okay, how many think there is a valid way to use

biology

to understand who is religious and who is not? Yeah, you don't have that many hands there, okay, alien, as long as we're ground, 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 going to change oh might as well ask if there is anyone in this room who actually believes in evolution just wanted to make sure we see what we are trying here, okay, how many think that there is a genetic influence and that there is a basic biological difference, a sexual difference in levels of aggression? thinks that everything is explained by nature who thinks that there is a magnificent and fascinating interaction with nuances between nature yes, okay, well, everyone will get an A+, then you have the course under control, so we start by trying to find something in common, look at these four events here or not in terms of being eliminated, 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 who don't They were geared towards that, those are the ones that build their muscles like those derived from testosterone, okay, all of these have something in common: having your period, having a brain tumor, eating a lot of junk food and taking a lot of anabolic steroids.

Does anyone want to guess what the common point between the four of them is? Yes, hormones are fine. they are running on hormones well, even more specific than that, something they all have in common, come on, someone wants to guess, see these brief hand movements, there are people who change their minds, okay, it all has to do with hormones, everyone They have hormones in common. I say trying to make it easier for someone to make the following assumption. Oh, everyone has something. Okay, we have to get out of here sometime. They all have four things in common.

All of these have been used successfully in court to explain the situation. behavior of a murderer in the first case in the first case a series of cases in which the fact that a woman was having her period at the time of killing someone was part of what a jury said that led them to exonerate The person a literature demonstrating that a disproportionate proportion of female aggression occurs during the time of menstruation. Next time there's an area of ​​the brain that you're going to know a lot about for the next three months called the amygdala that has something to do with aggression and something to do with fear, and you get a brain tumor there and in several 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 in Dan White, a disillusioned office seeker, murdered the American Francisco along with Harvey Milk and as part of his remarkably successful defense of a double murderer that led to a remarkably short prison sentence, was the famous Twinkie defense, the argument that his addiction to junk food caused wild fluctuations in his blood sugar levels. blood sugar, which led him to eventually take anabolic steroids.

A number of cases of people who had uncontrolled violence arguing because they lifted weights and a tremendously abusive variety of taking these things had something to do with the violence, but the four of us together and We get the first of the two points of this entire course, which is that sometimes the things that happen in your body can dramatically influence what happens in your brain. Second critical point tonight, when you have calmed down and are ready to begin. go to sleep and you're nice and relaxed with your hearts beating nice and slow think about the next thought you know your heart isn't going to beat forever think about your lips turning blue after thinking about the blood flow slowing down think about your feet and your fingers get cold and at that point you'll probably be increasing the rate at which your heart beats and you've just seen the second key thing in this course, which is that sometimes what's going on in your head will affect every outpost. in your body and what this course is about is the interweaving of the interconnections between your physiology and your behavior, the underlying emotions, the thoughts, the memories, all of that and the ability of each to profoundly influence the other under everything. type of circumstances.

Now what we're going to do What we're doing with this is trying to understand this in pretty difficult circumstances, if everyone here was here because they really wanted to understand why all the wildebeests on Earth mate in the same week every year, we would have a great possibility of solving it, but that is not what we want to understand, we do not want to understand why birds migrate and do not get lost. We want to understand

human

behavior worse than that, more difficult than that

human

social behavior and, most difficult of all, in some cases, some extremely abnormal human being. behavior and if you're going to try to do that, there's a problem that's officially complicated, it's a huge, complicated process trying to make sense of the

biology

of human social behavior and all sorts of areas when you're dealing with complicated, messy things. problems that require thinking in some tremendously interactive way we all have a strategy and we come up with a strategy to make things easier, which is to think in categories we think in categories we take things that are continuous and we divide them into categories and we label those categories and we do it in various settings because it could be extremely helpful, for example, for someone to give me an estimate of how long this line is per foot.

Okay, the people who set foot, what did they go through their heads to calculate? Did you imagine how long a ruler is, this is 11 1/2 inches because there's an eight and it's 11 inches and 8 and a half by 11, but everyone here has this category in their head, things that are about the same length as a rule a continuous length and there is a category for that, I guess I'll tell you, I have a friend who is a runner, he runs the mile, he is incredibly fast, in fact he is one of the best runners in the country right now, how fast do you have? have run the mile or better so that you are deeply impressed in less than four minutes and therefore we have another categorical limit there, there is an infinite variety of speeds with which you can run a mile, but we have this limit in our heads, people who are under 4 Minute Mile Errors you are very impressed ok now I want to impress you with another friend of mine who is a painter and this person is such a good painter that he paints with 11 different colors which doesn't work because that's not a category that We have, we don't classify the quality of all that, hopefully, we don't classify the quality of the paintings in that sense, but what we begin to see here is that in the right areas we have categories that we impose on things that are not categorical. an example of why you should do this when the example here is one of the classic continua that we always deal with, which is the continuation of color, the different wavelengths that take the rainbow from violet to red and there are an infinite number of spaces between them and what we have rules in English that 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 you take a continuum and you divide it in limits Why do we do them because it makes it easier to store the information rather than remember the absolute characteristics of something?

You just say it's a sub-four-minute mile, it's a line that's almost the length of a ruler. It's the color orange, how do you know that's the case? Because you see and take people from other language groups where their language arbitrarily divides the rainbow and other dots with completely different color terms and they remember different color profiles differently than an English speaker would. color and if the color comes right in the center of someone's color counter it's a sin, it comes right in the middle of the range of what counts as that color, people remember whether they saw that color or not much better than if you show them a color over the boundary and people will show that depending on the language they speak, taking a continuum and you break it into pieces because it's easier to deal with the facts, another example of this here we have four objects and how it is drawn here simply because having categories to describe the first three do one of those tests where you show people a bunch of shapes and they come back an hour later and ask them if they've seen the shape before and people will be much more accurate with this than if they saw the shape . this or not because we don't have a word for it we don't have a word that's analytical with some scribbles whatever we don't have a clear category thinking in categories makes it easier for us to remember things and makes it easier for us to evaluate things, so it's a classic type of response that we have cognitively to complicated things, but there are a lot of problems with categorical thinking, the first example and the first that can be seen from a scope of language differences and that is not. just that there are an infinite number of wavelengths, there is a continuum of sounds that humans can make and different languages ​​draw boundaries at different points as to what is considered similar sounds or different sounds, there are like two different th sounds in English who apparently weren't very good listeners, but there are others who are and that will affect your ability to remember what the word was depending on whether it's on a dramatically different border, whether it's a sound that sounds different to you or not.

An example of this apparently in Finnish is that people don't differentiate between the sound of a bee and the sound of P, while we don't have a problem with that, but people in Finland don't make that distinction and I discovered it one day ago. several years, where for reasons I don't know I even understood that I needed to take testicular biopsies from baboons without having learned that in high school, how to do that. I called this urology guide at the medical school who turned out to be Finnish and explained to him what he wanted to do. and he walked me through and told me what things I needed to buy and those kinds of things and vacation packages where you can get a dozen and he told me how to do it and once we were done, he said What I want you to do right now is practice a bit.

I want you to practice with a bear. What he said, yes, 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 doing it, it's a very good learning device. You know, whether it's practicing with a bear or an apple. Here we see the dangers of making mistakes about the differences between B and P under certain accepted circumstances, so we see one of the dangers there. which is when you are paying too much attention to the categories, you cannot differentiate two facts that fall within the same category, the following example brings to mind several points of anxiety during exams at that time, when there was a world of difference between getting a 65 on a test at 66 on a test is not particularly different, but because there is this boundary between passing and failing, there is a dramatic differentiation that we make when you set limits, you have trouble seeing how similar things are on both sides below.

For example, an additional problem you have when you think categorically and for this everyone must turn over one of the sheets of paper that you are going to hand in the questionnaire and what I am going to do is read you a series of phone calls. numbers and I want you to write them as accurately as possible, okay, done, two four three two six four nine six five zero three two six zero two five six five seven sevennine 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 well now what's that size laxer no, that doesn't count towards the big thing that will show up insecure when In some obsessive bursts of procrastination, I actually review the answers tonight, what it will show is that the accuracy will collapse the moment you move beyond the pattern of number of Three-digit phone followed by four breaks that pattern and suddenly we're all ruined because we say wait a second I thought it was a phone number that was one digit now two ditches that I can't finish and you move 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 is wait, a second phone number is supposed to be followed by three digits. by four, another example of where we use categorical thinking.

Okay, I'm putting a serious number here. Well, what is it, my God? Okay, what's the next issue in this series and why? 42, how come? Okay, so we're kind of swinging all over the place. Okay, so that's valid, it's from anyone else who has an exit number in line. What is that forty-five? How come it's okay, you're going to take that forty-five? That's great, what else let me make it a little easier? the next number in that series and what I'm telling you is that 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 is the next seven billion? billion that's another possibility, although presumably it would be seven billion anything else, any other guesses here about what's going to happen next quarter fourteen twenty-three thirty quarter what's next in the sequence yeah forty-four or how is that okay, but remember that it has to be the number 44, what is it? that ordinal cardinal whatever he is, how come you were right? you were right anyone who's a new yorker knows what's next these are subway stocks and you get a bagel with cream cheese and vice versa so you get new yorkers and while everyone else is thinking logical things like 43 and 41 and 45 and 7 billion and all that you have this whole world of dividing numbers by subway stops we think in categories we think in categories but as you just saw, first there are these problems When you think in categories, you underestimate how different two facts are when they fall into the same category.

When you think in categories, you overestimate how different they are when there happens to be a boundary between them and when you pay attention to categorical boundaries. Let's not look at big pictures now, our goal in this class will be to think about this large and complex topic of

behavioral

biology without falling into thinking in categories. What do I mean in this sense? Think categorically about a topic like this. There are some chicken and the chicken is standing somewhere and there is a rooster there who does something sexually exciting to the female and in response to that the female picks him up and runs towards the rooster unless we have our first biology question of the behavior here, why? that chicken crossed the street to get to that rooster, so you could answer that like an endocrinologist and say well, the female has certain levels of estrogen and her bloodstream, which caused these key hypothalamic areas to respond to the stimulus or you could answer it like an anatomist saying well because the fulcrum of a pelvis or whatever it is that chickens have that allows them to run or one could respond in the category of an evolutionary biologist that for millennia chickens that did not respond to sexually requested gestures females left fewer copies of their genes and there are all these different categories that we can use to explain what's going on, all these different groups, all these different groups that start to drag you into all the problems that we just saw, now we have trouble saying how different or similar two facts are. having trouble seeing large images and overemphasizing the importance of the cube you live in and therefore suddenly everything about this behavior is explained by a gene, a neurotransmitter, childhood trauma, living inside a cube, what we are going to do over and over again.

Here is the main point of the course: observe how what happens in your body influences behavior, emotions, memories, how what happens there influences your body, going around and at each of those points resisting the pole to think categorically, oh this is the explanation of where this behavior came from, this is what we are going to do in terms of the structure of the class, when we get to the actual behaviors for each behavior category, we will start by looking at what the behavior looks like because often that requires much more objectivity than we initially assume. What does the behavior look like?

So we'll say well, what happened in that organism half a second before that behavior occurred to cause it to occur, what is the world of what's going on. neurons what is happening with the circuits where is the explanation for the behavior aha this behavior occurred because this part of the brain was activated but just when we are about to settle down and happily in that cube we step back a little and say well, what does it smell, what sound? What sensory stimulation in the environment caused those neurons to activate and produce that behavior and then take another step back?

Well, what do hormone levels do? Various hormones in the bloodstream of that animal or individual during the last few hours. How do those hormones change? you are sensitive to those sounds, smells, etc. that caused those neurons to activate and produce the behavior and all we are going to do is go back to the early development of fetal life the genetic makeup of an individual the genetic makeup of species of entire populations, the evolutionary pressure from their origins, How do you explain each 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 endocrinology, you're talking about genetics and if there's a gene there, it's been the subject of selection, then suddenly you're talking about evolution, if you were talking about what odor sites etc. are the triggers for behavior, by definition, too you're talking about fetal development that determined how sensitive those systems were to those kinds of stimuli that What we're going to have over and over again is any of these groups that we spend some time in and all we're going to do is think about that group, which at that time is the most convenient way to describe all the influences that came. beforehand and in that sense there are no cubes, there are all our temporary platforms and each platform is simply the easiest and most convenient way to describe the result of everything that came before, starting with millennia ago and evolution, okay, that sounds cool, that's where we are.

We're going to do, we're going to do this and we're going to be very sophisticated and fanciful or we're going to think about it and we're not going to fall into categorical thoughts, it's all good, this is a complicated topic and we're smart, so I'm going to try to think about it intelligently. , that's great, but maybe this is just an irritating song and dance of ooh, we're not going to fall into categorical thinking like people, obviously, when people think about things like behavior and they do. this professional biologist, biology, behavior, touches, yes, and they also understand that this is just the straw man, we are going to be more sophisticated in our thinking than the endocrinologists and geneticists, and they all obviously know that these things interact and this is not just one. explanation and it's just the area they focus on, they understand that let me read you some quotes to show how much some of these people don't understand.

That first quote: "Give me a child at birth of any origin and let me control the total." environment in which he was raised and I will turn him into anything I want him to be with his 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 peak with this guy BF Skinner in the 1950s this notion that if you could control rewards, punishments, positive and negative reinforcement, you could turn anyone into anything you wanted, whether they were a doctor, a lawyer, a beggar or a thief, and we know That is not the case, we know.

That's not possible, we know that all you have to do is add another factor, like a lot of protein malnutrition during fetal life, and you won't be able to do it. That's a stark example of how wrong this guy was. You can't have complete control over the environment and turn someone into whatever you want. Here's a guy who lives pathologically in this cube. That behavior could be explained only by understanding reward and punishment. An interesting fact: John Watson died shortly after and was expelled from the academy. for a wild scandal he was involved in and spent the rest of his career apparently as an extremely successful advertising executive who was going to show them something that maybe couldn't turn people into what he wanted, but apparently could get them to buy it all. kind of nonsense, okay, next quote, normal psychic life depends on the proper functioning of brain synapses, if you don't know what synapses are, don't panic, at this point there are brain cells connected to each other, okay, normal psychic life depends on the good.

The 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 get cures and improvements, but no crashes. Synaptic adjustments. Also, what do you suppose those little ones? Synaptic adjustments are that this type refers to any guess. Yes, someone shot electroshock therapy. Electroshock therapy. You know, a little synaptic. You wish it were as gentle as electroshock therapy. This is even more dramatic. to adjust someone's synapses, I see it as cutting off the front third of their brain, or something like that.

This was a Cosmo, you need a Portuguese neurologist who invented frontal lobotomies. He had a different name at the time, but he 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 in which psychiatry sleeps with ideology, the massive criminal destruction of people's brains, this is what he said about the procedure when accepting his Nobel. Prize in Physiology and Medicine for inventing it so here we have someone living pathologically in a world of understanding how synapses work, adjusting them and with that we obtain cures and improvements but not failures final quote worse one of all the selection for social utility must If not we want humanity to be ruined by degeneration induced by domestication, the racial idea as the basis of our state has already achieved much in this sense, we can and must rely on the healthy instincts of the best of our people to achieve this through some social institution . the extermination of elements of the population loaded with Drake, it's anyone's guess who Hitler was, not a Hitler, that

behavioral

biologist, he was a little busy at the time, instead, he was one of Hitler's main scientific propagandists, he was someone who he lived pathologically in a box. a box that doesn't even exist having a notion of race and ethnicity and genetics and all that saying let me fix that let me exterminate the elements of the population loaded with scum and I will fix that little problem by fixing something that is not broken, who was it?

This was a scientist named Konrad Lorenz Konrad Lorenz, many of us are probably familiar with him. Konrad Lorenz was one of the founding fathers of ethology, we will learn all about it, but he, like everyone, knows it. In all the children's nature books, Konrad Lorenz discovered the imprint and the birds and said he was a little Austrian with two big white beards and he always had these little Austrian shorts and suspenders and there was a whole group of little ducks following him. because they thought it was mom and he was totally charming and irresistible in this kind of impression with his ducklings and he also turned out to be a Nazi propagandist rabbit who went to his grave saying there was nothing wrong with what he did these are not fourth rate scientists category these are not people who work at Podem Desert University or whatever these are some of the most influential scientists of the last century these are people who influenced how people were educated and when I decided it wasn't worth the effort to do so.

These are people whose influence led to brains being destroyedof hundreds of thousands of people who had nothing wrong. These are the people who led to the idea that a problem that does not exist is solved by exterminating 9 million people, these are not minor scientists, these are the most influential people of the last century, coming out of science in many ways, living pathologically within their own cubes and how they could explain the whole world and therefore again our goal will be to not fall into that, to think about human behaviors and in some cases, to think about some of the most disturbing motives, some of the most terrifying damaged human behaviors and resist the temptation to think inside a bucket and find the explanation anew each time. level we are going to talk about genes, hormones, neurons and fire, mental influence, whatever it is, that point will simply be the easiest way to describe all the influences that came before, they are not even temporary cubes, there are no cubes that will be ours. aim. now thinking about thisIn approaching human behavior, the biology of human social behavior, often the biology of abnormal humans, human social behavior, we will have three intellectual challenges and the first is to recognize circumstances in which there is nothing sophisticated about us, Whatever it is, we are like any 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 are sitting in your cage chair and as a female hamster, what you do is you ovulate every 5 days or so. and you go about your business and everything is great now someone puts another female hamster in the cage with you and over the next month or so what happens is you both will start to lengthen your cycles and eventually synchronize them so that you both are ovulating the same afternoon on a regular basis.

It's amazing that this actually works this way and menstrual ovulatory synchrony people understand how this works in hamsters. It is done by smell with pheromones with chemical signals transmitted through the air from one female to another and you can try this by recording electrically from olfactory systems or if you do not have much funds you can place like a clip on the nose of the female hamster and she will not It synchronizes, then everything is done with smell and what seemed most surprising is that you put the two females together and there is a One way to interrupt it is to put a male hamster there and suddenly the cycles become desynchronized and shortened and you break it with male pheromones and what is even more remarkable is that you put the two females together and it is not random who synchronizes the other, the dominant female synchronizes. the subordinate totally understood that people have been working on this for years and it works this way online 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 pork ovulatory timing spray and take it home and just run why I have no idea why you would want to do that but anyway that's how you like it, it's right up there with cans of Cheez Whiz or whatever and you get the idea well and the remarkable thing is that it works. in exactly the same way in us as human beings, where it is known as the Wellesley effect, the fact that during the first year this was first demonstrated in Wellesley 1970 during the first year the female roommates of the first year tended to lengthen and synchronize their cycles and it was done with smell, women who had olfactory deficits did not synchronize with their roommates, they would do so unless they had close intimate relationships with a man, in which case they synchronized and best of all, It's not random who syncs with who.

Studies tend to show that the individual who is more socially extroverted, extroverted, and dominant is the one who synchronizes the other and this is so well understood that when Iowans were in college, people would sit around the table and say things like Oh, when we shared a room. in the summer I synchronized it on August 1st this is what happens if you get together with biologists but we are exactly the same the challenge is to recognize that there is nothing special about us at various points in the class we will see comparisons between the human and the chimpanzee genome and it's pretty much the same sometimes we're just a regular old animal.

The second challenge will be circumstances where we appear to be like everyone else, every other organism that exists, but we do something very different with 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, in absolute silence, they are not making eye contact and they are not doing anything more physically exhausting. Every once in a while one of them raises his hand and moves a little piece of wood on the table and if these are the right two individuals in the middle of a chess grandmaster tournament, these people keep their blood pressure up for six hours straight.

You only see in a marathon runner these people who consume thousands of calories a day without doing anything but thinking and this is outrageous because you look at one of these chess grandmasters who has just defeated an opponent and took away his queen or you name it and he will do it. we have exactly the same physiology as a male baboon in Savannah who is just going to open the stomach of his worst rival and we do it there just by thinking and sometimes what Mark allowed us is that we have an absolutely typical boring physiology, but we use it in a way that no other animal could.

We stress over the inevitability of our mortality. We get stressed by reading something horrible. He lets us pass it on to a child on the other side of the planet. We get stressed when someone walks past us while we are playing sports. car and we decide that now we are financially inadequate and you don't even see the person's face, you only see the car, we get stressed by reading about something horrible that happens to a character and a novel, this is a whole area of ​​​​things that we could do that no one else does and on the other hand 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 in a refugee camp we can feel compassion for a member of another species we feel bad When our pets get injured, this is another area where the physiology of the response, the empathy, the emotional bond, all of that is the same boring physiology as any other animal and we use it in a way that is now unrecognizable sometimes .

The challenge is the third category, which is when we do something that no other animal has anything remotely similar to. Let me give you an example here, a shocking example. You have a couple who live together and come back at the end of the day. from work they talk about dinner they talk a little more they go to bed and have sex they talk a little more they go to sleep the next day they do exactly the same they come back from work they talk they eat they talk they go to bed they have sex they talk a little more they do this every night for 30 days running the hippos would be repulsed by this because almost no one in the animal kingdom has non-reproductive sexual relations, much less day after day and no one else talks about it afterwards what we have here is a completely novel domain of use of language by the human being, aspects of our sexuality, this deeply harmful human singularity of some individuals, confusing aspects of sexuality with aggression, in some cases we will be alone trying to understand.

What's happening? Well, that would be the general strategy for the course. We will resist categorical thinking over and over again, and not just because it's cool and nuanced and subtle, all that, but we will fall into categorical thinking and you can cause unspeakable harm and a kingdom. of silent science that makes a difference, we will do so by constantly thinking of ourselves as a boring species, like everyone else, as a species that has the same boring physiology but uses it in unrecognizable ways as a species that does some things that simply They are unprecedented and constantly struggle with what biology has to do with it.

Okay, general structure of the course. The first half of the course will be an overview and

introduction

to the different groups, the different categories and what we're all about. What we're going to do is understand a kind of

introduction

to the theory of evolution, an introduction to what molecular genetics has to do with behavior, behavioral genetics, ethology, brain endocrinology, each of these groups and you know what happens next, which is in the second half of the course. We will observe specific behaviors and in each case we will destroy the cubes and in each case we will apply the strategy of what the behavior looks like.

What happened to the second before the world of neurons. What happened to the sensory stimuli that activate those neurons etc... way back to evolutionary selective pressures so the first half of the course will be the introduction to the cube and I will tell you right away that it is a total pain in the butt because to what we are going to do. it's like every two and a half classes just when you were learning the vocabulary we're going to jump into a completely different bucket it's going to be dizzying and unpleasant and all that and then the second half of the course oh the rewards finally come from putting all the pieces together looking at individual categories behavioral sexual behavior aggressive behavior parental behavior schizophrenia depression personality disorders use of language in each of these cases what is happening a second before what is happening ten million years before where is everyone?

These cubes disappear in interactions, so that will be the strategy for the course. Something critical about how the course was designed is that it has no prerequisites because I truly believe that this is a topic that everyone on earth should be forced to learn at gunpoint. and so I think it's a good thing that this isn't one of those upper level biology classes. Let me get an idea of ​​who's here. How many of you are biology guys? Here it is, good for you, thanks for coming to see what you think in three months, but anyway the class has been explicitly designed to have no backstory.

How are we going to do that? We will do the usual song and dance of the weekly sections. and reviews and all that kind of stuff, but also during this first half of the course, when we jump from one category to another, each week we will have additional sections, a refresher section that is for people who have no experience. in that area, teaching you the basics and getting you up to speed so that you can then know what happens during the conferences, so that they can be published. The first one is let me make sure I have this, yeah.

It will be this Thursday at 7:30 in the next room and this will be the introduction to the theory of canaries and will prepare you for what will be the evolution conferences on Wednesday and Friday of this week if you do not have a strong background go to these refresher sections the TAS that will teach it is really an expert in those areas a lot of background and this will be your chance to catch up look at the handout I think I have a lot of terms in there or something, if you're not very familiar with those terms and some discipline, that's a sign that you should probably try to catch up if you're really doing this kind of being very adventurous with no experience, if you can let it go. failing that will also take a lot of pressure off of you because then you could pay attention to things here and the point here is to be able to do this even if you don't have a science background because the obvious argument that I would make What we do is that everyone has to learn biology of behavior because we are behavioral biologists every time we are part of a jury, every time we vote whether or not money should be spent on solving a problem, if it is a problem, if it has a solution or not, every time we try.

To make sense of a family member mired in depression, does he have a biochemical disorder or is he just indulging? We were behavioral biologists the whole time, so it's probably good that you brief us once so you can catch up on these sections there. take advantage of them what else we will have weekly sections the usual type people are not assigned to sections there will be I don't know about 18 of them a week at various times go with what works for you there will be midterm midterm comes when we finish the last of those categories, the last of those groups there will be a final, there will be no paper or anything like that, so that will be the pattern, what other things here, office hours, my office hours are increasing. spread out other things breaks with a little luck we can with a little luck we can organize ourselves enough so that during each section of class there is a five minute break in the middle so you can get up and just go to the front of the line for Froome and then we'll move on quickly before I get there, so just to clear up the assignments a little bit, book reading, there are two books that I've assigned for the course, one is mine. 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, okay, that one will be relevant for the second half of the course that we're going to do.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 people decided that it is the most irritating irrelevant thing that could possibly have been assigned in class and you hate it, but half of the people never find out what happens with it and 1/4 of the people their life is transformed, they no longer have to meditate, they no longer have that having a book they are simply at peace in peace I tell you this because what this book does is present this radically different way of thinking about biology dismantling a world of reductionism for 500 years we have all been using a very simple model to think about biology. living systems.

That is to say, if you want to understand something that is complicated, you break it down into its little pieces and once you understand the little pieces and put them back together, you will understand how complex it is and what chaos is about as a whole field and this was more or least the first book that was intended for the non-specialized public about it, what chaos shows is this is how clocks are fixed this is not how behaviors are fixed this is not how behaviors are understood behavior is not like a clock the behavior is like a cloud and you don't understand itIt rains breaking a cloud into its components and sticking them back together, so read that book, much of it comes from physical sciences rather than biological sciences, so we will only suggest the chapters you should read.

I'll tell you it's the first book since Baby Beluga, where I got to the last page and immediately started reading it again from the beginning because, along with Baby Beluga, it had the biggest influence on my life. I found this to be the most influential book on my thinking. science since college, so that's a sign that there will also be a lot of lectures in the second half of the course that will cover these fields of chaos and complexity and if you really think about it, it will force a change in everything else you bring. to think about this issue also at this moment there is no reader because I am trying to avoid having to make you have to buy a reader.

I'm trying to redo all the assigned readings so that they are just from the jobs. that are available online and that you can download. I'm halfway through getting them there. With any luck, there won't have to be a reader, but if there is, it won't be big, it won't be terribly expensive. but there will be a lot of readings online to download and they will vary in some cases it will be to read the full article, in some cases I will suggest you read just the summary, in some cases it will be to understand what is happening in the document in detail in some cases this is an example of how people in this group think about this problem just read the summary so that all that is mapped and it becomes clear what else there will be a lot of information online the course work will be prepared for the class, there will be copies of the handouts, there will be lecture notes, lecture notes that I have that will cover between five and ten pages each lecture, which will arrive about halfway through the course and I suspect that by then I will run out of steam like this that you won't care about the second half there will be an FAQ there will be a question and answer session there will be course logistics some of the slides will be placed there take advantage of that There will be announcements about the schedule change for office hours and things like that will make you use of that and people who are not formally registered, we are looking for a way for you to access it and we have also made the decision that After this conference, the booklets will not be in paper and that is because approximately for each conference we will go through about 5,000 sheets of paper, even double-sided, all the material will be posted in the coursework the day before and if that is going to be enough.

It's impossible for you to follow what's going on in class because you're the last human being at Stanford who doesn't live outside the computer screen, come talk to me and we'll send you an actual hard copy of the handouts, most of them with a bit of luck We can avoid using paper just because of the number of people here. Let's look at other sections. The sections will begin this Thursday. The regular sections, all of them, will be published. Those office hours will not begin until next week. It will be in the afternoon instead of during class time and if we are on schedule, that day's class time will be used for review and anything else.

Oh, a very good suggestion right now, since the previous class here is huge and therefore we have the impossible problem of many people trying to get out of it while many people try to get in, it would be best if everyone came in from the top to that you can go down the stairs without problems and expel others. people before us at the door, that might work much better. The last thing is that we have a TAS team here and they are great here, they are TAS, stand up and be ashamed, okay, stand up, those who are there, they are all there except one. who's in transit there, they're, these guys are great, whether they've taken the course before, in some cases, they've helped the course before their graduate students in several of the cube specialties.

I would highly suggest taking advantage of the sections that will evolve later. The first few weeks there will be regular sections that will review the course material in the usual way. There will also be more advanced sections for people who have a stronger background. Take advantage. Well, you guys can sit there and let them stand there awkwardly for hours afterwards. get a lot out of sections, TAS skill, okay, that's basically what we have here. Are there any questions about the units? Well, someone sent an email without units. The class is five units and it's because we meet 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 was the dean here, she totally ruined the biology department by increasing our teaching requirements in really unpleasant conditions, so what we all decided was to find ways of every sleazy trick we could. do to increase the number of units we were supposed to be teaching so for a while in the five unit class here we did six units but eventually we got caught so we stopped doing that so first she did that and then weapons of destruction massive, so it's a five minute class right now, say hi for me if you run into it on campus, so five units, the workload I think will be proportional to that, but it's mainly due to the intense class time class, an additional thing that the lectures will be recorded and posted. online in about a day during course work, the reason is that this covers a two hour block, many people have to miss one of the hour blocks and in the past it was work to be able to get things online, so that's going to be advantageous for some people, okay, ask, yeah, there was a question up there that was okay, take it back, okay, any other questions, bagel guys, did you get your bagel or did someone eat it?, okay, okay , and the social contract is fulfilled, yes, what is it? up yes, I don't remember May 3 May 3 for the midterm exam 7:30 in the afternoon it's Monday June 4 for the final exam ok, more questions yes, what is the format of the midterm exam in the file in a world ideal given all the emphasis?

Here, without cubes, blah, blah, etc., it would be long essays and sensitive sonnet and haikus requirements about the hypothalamus, but simply because in the numbers and here we are reduced to a kind of lowest common denominator, many multiple choice questions only to make. Things are more sensible for the TAS because it is an incredible job trying to record so many documents that quickly, generally speaking, intellectually, what the midterm will be about is just touching base, making sure you understand the basics of each one of those groups, each of those disciplines. A little bit of forcing yourself to think about all the disciplines what the final is going to be about is forcing you to think about all the disciplines and all the groups there, so there will be very different intellectual approaches in the medium term and they will have the facts that, hopefully , It won't be that stupid, but that is the main function of the midterm exam.

Okay, more questions. Yes, okay. Did you decide to videotape the audio of the ketchup section? Okay, okay, either during office hours or it will be recorded and posted online and Of course, it works and if there are critical visual handouts, those will also be posted there. Well, there will be more questions, yes, yes, and it will be for each one, it will be before the next three lectures, since the youth final is at 7:30 for two hours. well of all the endings of the five fifteen twelve fifteen just to get there twelve fifteen more questions, any one is for more, visit us at stanford.edu