the following content is provided under a Creative Commons license your support will help MIT open courseware continue to offer highquality educational resources for free to make a donation or view additional materials from hundreds of MIT courses visit MIT opencourseware at ocw.mit.edu all right this is 920 I'm Schneider and this is the first class I will just talk briefly about the organization of the class the procedures and the assignments and then we'll there will be about the last part will just be a talk about various approaches study of animal behavior and the main ones we'll be using in this class so why did you sign up for 920 maybe because it's the house class uh but there are other half classes maybe it's your schedule I make it at 4:00 to decrease schedule conflicts but a few of you still have them especially with the lab on Friday how many of you have a lab at this time on Friday because of that I will I will be posting the slides um if not before class at least after the class and I am I will try to remember to record the class so I can post an MB MP3 file of the audio there won't be any video uh so you won't know what I'm pointing at in the uh in the slides but you should be able to make out what we said you probably won't hear student questions you will miss miss out on some of the discussion that way but you should still be able to keep up with the class so there are various practical reasons can anyone give me a non-practical reason for taking 920 why should you be interested in animal behavior yes okay it might help you with human behavior well we're animals that doesn't mean I will stress animals but particularly when we talk actually in both parts of the class when we talk about ethology that is fixed action patterns instinctive behavior and when we talk about sociobiology adaptive Behavior especially social behavior humans will come out many times all right uh anyway why do I teach it well I think animal Behavior fun I have done research in animal behavior though that's not been the main thrust of my career I am a neuroscientist and I have done a lot of work on brain anatomy and anatomical changes after brain damage but I like animal behavior and I hope that will be evident as I talk I will use examples from my own work as well as from other people's work so it's sort of an undergraduate survey class at the beginning but in the second part it'll become more and more a special topic seminar and that's especially true the last part of the class when you guys will be giving your reports I'm I've already posted on the Stellar website an assignment it's not due until the Wednesday before the Thanksgiving break so you have a lot of time you will make a PowerPoint slide presentation and then you will prepare yourself to give that presentation orally your slides will include notes that will give me more detail about what you would like to talk about even if you don't get to talk about all of it in the notes section whenever you do PowerPoint there's a note section that is not shown during a presentation but you can make lots of notes and that gives me a better idea of the research you've done okay so read that assignment it's not we will let you know if we decide to make any alterations after talking with students and with each other make sure you check that Stell Stellar site regularly uh I will try after every class to make sure I post uh the slides but before the class I will usually post study questions the questions cover class sessions and they cover readings that will be assigned usually they don't cover readings that are listed as supplementary readings if you don't have time to do the supplementary readings it's all right if it's of particular interest to you you should do them and it will help you understand uh the material okay so there's just two small textbooks I choose a smaller book in animal behavior so that we have time to do other kinds of readings and uh like you'll be reading quite a bit of Conrad Lawrence and a little bit from nio tinbergen uh to the classical great ethologists uh and uh I think you'll appreciate uh their observations when you get them directly we also will see uh especially Lawrence in videos that we show in class there will be quizzes and homework and almost always these will be on Wednesdays that is if it's homework it'll normally be due on a Wednesday once in a while on different date but the quizzes I will try to keep limited to Wednesdays we don't always have a quiz that is in a week where we have homework I might decide not to give the quiz but we will always let you know in advance okay so first we'll be going through key Concepts emphasizing ethology and we'll talk about what that is today the readings will be in the Scott textbook but they'll also be uh as I mentioned from other readings and then we'll see some videos relevant to to ethology and then after the midterm we'll be talking about sociobiology that will be mentioned today uh as well and we'll have readings the readings will mainly be a a small book by John Alcock it's called the Triumph of sociobiology which was a very AP title it was written a few years ago but in fact it does Express well how sociobiology has become a major uh force in studies of animal behavior and I will go over some of the key ideas of EO Wilson some of them directly from his writings these are as examples of specific topics most of you have seen these kinds of things if you've had any encounter with animal behavior uh some of them might sound a little bit you know we use specialized language to talk about behavior and it's a little different from what you're used to from just talking about human behavior we talk about eating and animal behavior talk about feeding and foraging and stalking and prey capture and things like that we talk about anti-predator Behavior do humans show anti-predator Behavior you bet they do but we don't usually call it that okay since we don't have too many tigers and lines roaming the streets around here anymore uh terms for SE sexuality are used of course in human behavior and in animal behavior and that will be a little more familiar to you but more specialized terms will occur there uh these are examples you can read those other things I listed uh these are examples of questions and Concepts will that will come up we'll talk about what instinctive behavior is what a fixed action pattern is fix action patterns is it's an ethological term for instinctive Behavior but it's actually fairly complex but there's a regular pattern in in most of these behaviors uh they're not the same as reflexes and we will make that very clear in the class why do animals why do some animals migrate halfway around the earth just to made and rais young what is the evolutionary origin of kissing do animals kiss yes they do and it has its origins in animal behavior and it has been traced uh pretty convincingly why do animal behaviorists engage in genan County why would they have to do that it's related to a question down here why might a work the last one why might a worker ant behave differently depending on whether it mother Queen is promiscuous or monogamous it makes a difference they behave differently the question is why that why question has different levels it can be approximate question that is what stimuli is he responding to you know what what are the mechanisms of the behavior or it could be what we call an ultimate question which is not a theological term here ultimate question in this class simply means what is the evolutionary significance why what makes it adaptive for the an to behave in the way he does it's the major issue in sociobiology what's a darwinian puzzle behaviors appear that are difficult at least at the beginning to explain in terms of darwinian evolution we can't figure out how they're adapted so they're a puzzle we call them darwinian puzzles why is the killing of infants adaptive in some animals how could that ever be adaptive you should be able to explain that and we will do that in the class now some of your projects will be on topics we cover in the class but not all of them in fact most of them will not be directly on any details that I bring up in the class but I do expect you when you're dealing with the animal behaviors that you want to discuss in your reports I expect you to interpret them in terms of the principles and concepts of ethology and sociobiology that you learn in the class okay what do I expect outside of class readings study question questions I will post these study questions for every class I want you to try to answer them if possible at least some of them before the class I might just ask you sometimes some of these questions and I might not tell you who I'm going to ask otherwise you know you might say well I might as well be passive I can read it later but I find that when you say that it means usually you won't read it you'll try just to get it what I say in class and hope that gets you by no you will do much better if you read so read just for key Concepts there will be a lot of examples details of animal behavior but at least try to get the key ideas and that's what I'll be emphasizing I will try to if you think I'm talking about some detail that's not a key concept you let me know maybe some aspects of animal behavior are just I just find them fascinating okay I posted and some of you have seen this we've been looking at the Stellar site I posted quite a while ago a first reading from a book by Jim Corbett Corbett was not an ethologist and he was not a sociobiologist he was actually a hunter he was often hired to track down and kill manaing tigers and lions in Asia and in Africa he was probably the best of hunters that did that kind of thing and he was also an amateur naturalist and he's written some things about his uh hunting methods and I've posted some things about what he his his knowledge that display his knowledge about what he calls sensitivity to the Jungle the signs of the Jungle a good naturalist learns those kinds of things so please read that uh you'll be asked about it in the first homework I've written the first homework but I will wait for feedback from the teaching assistants before I finalize that it won't be due until a week from today so for the next session there's I posted the first chapter of Graham Scott in case you don't have it but I won't be posting later Scott readings since you're supposed to get that book but I do post I I did post chapter 11 from Timber's book uh it's his semi- poopular book curious naturalists and uh I've posted study questions already on those readings as well as some for today's session okay these are things we've talked about so how have we learned about animals of course many of you have pets and have made some of your hobbies concern animals uh you've encountered animals in the natural world or at you've gone to Zoological Parks you've certainly encountered them in some films but we also picked them up from common beliefs we call folklore about animals there's a long history about that you can pick up in a library these books that appeared in the middle ages they're called the medieval be beastiaries or they they portray animals in a fantastic way and the reason was they heard stories that came from observations of African and Asian animals that they didn't have in Europe and these were stories in Europe and they because they were second third and fourth hand stories they were often greatly EX exaggerated and distorted but and it was commonly believed that in the Middle Ages people just didn't have any accur accurate ideas about animal behavior at all but recent scholarship in that field has shown that even though that may have been common folklore it was not generally representative of what was known uh the people who were really interested in details of animal behavior even in the Middle Ages and there was a lot more known you why would you expect people to know about animals in some realistic terms even even a long time ago even before the Middle Ages why would you expect it well think of farming if you're going to raise animals or use animals for work you have to understand something about their behavior dogs have been domesticated uh probably well before people could write okay so really goes back into prehistory and uh certainly uh people knew a lot about the domesticated wolves that we call dogs stories that in the folklore that still abound especially in cities concern rats and uh whole books have been written about that I have one of them here called more cunning than man it's basically three stories about rats uh it's not written by a scientist he's interested in reports newspaper reports uh what people say the stories they pass on and the stories about rats are most amazing you know there's stories about giant rats when you hear the story you'd swear the rat must be as big as a dog at least and uh stories about the incredible harm and the fact is they have caused incredible harm and that's one reason rats are often hated and feared now of course in a department like this they're used in the laboratory uh we don't look at rats that way at all but if if you're in New York and you're in a poor area and your building is infested with rats then it's a different story they uh they they have attack people damage them at night uh but probably the things that have made Rats the least popular is the diseases they have spread or in been some way responsible for the spread of diseases like shagas disease there's uh the book covers a lot of that and one of the uh there's there's quite a few diseases like that that rats have been involved in spreading but the one that is commonly attributed to rats is the the diseases that have caused the worst uh pandemics in human history what am I talking about what were the worst pandemics that killed a third of the population of Europe that killed probably more than 30 million people in Asia large numbers in Africa what do we call that disease the plague bubonic plague it was a horrible disease and there was no way to cure it so people tried various ways they had great fear of it many people thought the world was coming to an end during that period when they saw everybody in a building die children invented nursery rhymes in in their play singing about you know you know Ring Around the Rosie pocket full of posies why were they putting flowers in their pocket to counter the smell of death we make it a game now children you know I'm talk the game ends you know We All Fall Down that was dying the children turned it into a game uh but what how were rats involved what animals what really now we know it's a certain organism that causes it but what was the vector was it rats Excuse me yes it was the fleas on the rats and rats died and and when they died there they lost body heat children would sometimes play with the dead rats and the as the body heat dropped the the fleas would leave the dying body and jump on anything any warm live body which have often was children or other human beings and it was the fleas that were spreading the disease but people didn't know that and so they blamed various things some areas they killed every dog because they blamed dogs or cats or they blamed if you're in one country you blame the neighboring countries or in many cases it was blaming an ethnic group or blaming Jews it was horrible because they were desperate and ignorant and of course the way that disease has been controlled is through better hygiene and better knowledge anyway I just point out here not all Ro rodents are hated as much as rats we still have hamsters and Geral which are cute little rodents and used as pets as well as in some research and we know we use animals for various things so we know about them that way we use them for meat we use them to make leather uh uh we use them in sports for hunting and to helpess hunting we don't hunt dogs we use dogs to hunt other animals they're used in some religions as you know uh but we use them in science what what are they in science they are standin for humans usually we use them as models of course the most popular animal now for that is the mouse because of the genetic variance uh and the ease of uh creating specific models of pathologies by altering genes but when we're using animals we're often depending on behavioral tests and what are we studying we're studying a human disease but to understand what we're really doing we need to know something about animal behavior and unfortunately a lot of people using animals all the time don't know much about animal behavior we also know about them from groups like The Human Humane Society and the animal rights movement it's human oriented in a very different way sometimes with very anthropomorphic thinking sometimes it's more anthropo mentis think thinking their thinking must be like our thinking their feelings must be like our feelings I'm not arguing that they're not we know they have nervous systems if they're mammals that are very similar to ours but we think of them commonly as being conscious and I would argue that that's probably the case it's not the same as our Consciousness but we know it arises in nervous activity I'm not saying we can explain it by nervous activity but it's correlated with it and animals have that too different religions have very different attit itude so I'm sure some of you that are parts of different Rel or follow different religions uh if you do know some of these extremes on the one pole you have Judaism and Christianity that believe in control of nature dominance of Nature and so forth and then you have examples like jism where they they're totally Pacific and don't believe in harming any life and we've had examples of that in West too like Albert schwitzer was like that but in this class we take a basic science approach it will be descriptive and experimental and uh we will use the perspective of evolution throughout most of the class scientific work has focused on individual organisms we'll talk about that first it's focused on societies so we'll talk about that next but it's also had other focuses like on the habitat and the species in the habitat uh and the interactions of all living things that's with the non-living things in that particular habitat interactions with climate the topography and so forth and then there's sciences that Focus on a single species or group of species you have mology for example that deal generally with all aspects of mamals including Behavior Behavior Anatomy physiology and so forth or primatology dealing with primates as a group a major field but not we don't call it primatology within say experimental psychology generally but it's used that way and uh among anthropologists and others and then of course we have the amateur naturalists disciplined hobbyists and that's important in this field just like it has been in astronomy because they've made major contributions in fact it was amateur naturalists that led to the initial discoveries that led to the whole development of ethology so first of all focus on the individual organism in America it was called in the last century comparative psychology it's sometimes still called that uh the real Focus was on humans but they used animals uh their main the main type of study in the Heyday of that field in the middle of the last century was studies of learning and it still is uh in many Labs uh the animals used are mostly rats and mice as models for studying learning and that's it's interesting that that was not the approach to animal behavior in Europe at that same time why do you think that was well think of what was unique about what was going on in America what was our approach to education the idea was that we start life with pretty much a blank slate and by education we can create individuals we can influence individuals in very way various ways our children can become whatever they can become just through learning through making the effort you can do anything if you just put your mind to it how many of you have heard that from your parents most of us you know did you ever ever hear well you behave that way because you've inherited that behavior and that's your instinct no if you were in Europe it was very different okay but that was the belief in America it was wrong but it was also very beneficial because what did it lead to it led to Universal education arguably the best in the world the country that tried to educate everybody regardless of Origins regardless of wealth okay and that at the time that developed was unique and uh it's not we're not the only country that does that now but at that time it certainly was and it was encouraged in its popularity by ideas of Educators I used John Dewey as an example his dates are 1859 to 1952 he was very influential the emphasis was on practicality and the shaping of the individual through learning very important in the development of Educational Systems in America and either implicitly or explicitly they believe that we start life with a blank slate and that was the what came out of that in Psychology including this comparative psychology I'm talking about uh is that same idea they focus their whole effort on learning almost nothing on instinctive Behavior Behavior unless they wanted that that was the realm of the physiologist and who studied reflexes they didn't study more complex instinctive behavior that we'll be talking about in this class and so theorists arose who tried to come up with a system of learning to explain all human behavior you've all heard of BF Skinner you've probably heard of thorite inventor of various puzzle boxes and describer of instrumental learning so for a long time you pick up a book on learning and it was about instrumental learning and classical conditioning the two main kinds of learning are they hardly but in fact that's what was was taught and it was a major part of psychology in the middle of the last century in fact that persisted for some time in the second half the last century 20th century but in Europe it was very different in Europe you had the development not within psychology but within the field of zoology part of biology okay zoy ol ologists zoology is the field wherein ethology the study of natural behavior patterns developed this is I will take Conrad Lawrence a leader in that field uh from his book the foundations of ethology uh he defined ethology this way it's the dis it's the discipline which applies to the behavior of animals and humans all those questions asked and methodologies used as a matter of course in all the other branches of biology since Charles Darwin's time ethology or the comparative study of behavior is based on the fact that there are mechanics mechanisms of behavior which evolve in philogyny that is among different animals of different types exactly as organ evolve so that the concept of homology can be applied to them as well as to morphological structures the origins of this approach was in Ornithology and in fact in amateur Ornithology and these are the two people that we attribute the initial discoveries to Charles Otis Whitman in America these were the dates of his Publications he kept a collection of doves and pigeons in aviaries and he studied them and then Oscar heinroth director of the Berlin Zoo his Publications 1910 1928 1930 he studied the a rich collection of waterfall kept at the Berlin Zoo so they were both studying captive animals captive Birds but very different kinds of birds and they independently discovered that motor patterns just like morphological characteristics can be inherited can be homologs across different species but Darwin knew a lot of this already and in his book he talks for example about dog behavior if you look at this picture compare this picture with this picture what's different about these two dogs you can tell right away this this is a friendly dog and this is not this is an aggressive dog how many of you can recognize that immediately oh come on surely you have pet dog and you know that difference this is what your dog looks like when he's greeting you and you've been gone for a long time and he's greeting you your especially his master coming home uh this is a dog usually when they act like this towards humans it can be dangerous okay but they certainly act like this in faced with other dogs and Darwin saw these patterns because he could recognize them in one dog after another these were inherited patterns of behavior they were instinctive behaviors and he applied that concept to human behavior as well for example in his book this is his from his book the expression of the emotions in man and animals uh as were these pictures here he's showing various pictures of human emotional Expressions our emotional expressions are instinctive patterns that are the same across all of us across various RAC all Homo sapiens show these kind same patterns yeah they they you say oh but the Japanese don't make the same Expressions when they're happier or this or oh yes they do but then in addition of course we develop certain ways of using Expressions uh for different meanings well ethology has been applied to human and and uh not just by Darwin but much as as Lauren pointed out the proof that humans really had instinctive inherited behavior patterns though it was suggested by Darwin and he was accurate in his descriptions but the real proof came from iel ield erus iel ield wrote a large book in called human ethology in 1989 available in the library I have a copy in my office and if you're interested in how these ideas apply to human you will find them described there I'll say a little bit more about human ethology next time just so you'll know how H IUS felt went about uh proving to anybody who read studied his book that he was right about this more popularly we know about body language which became a really popular craze for a while some time ago uh now it's sort of entered the the common parlament but that is all based on these instinctive patterns we know about neuroethology we'll say a little bit about that in the class but it's not primarily a class on Neuroscience so I won't stress it but I can say that studies of the brain have led to uh studies of instinctive how instinctive behaviors are controlled and brain studies have been used to distinguish different kinds of aggression for example but they're all things already known to ethologists obviously if patterns are very different than they expressed differently in brain activity okay now if the focus is on societies and social behavior then we're usually not talking about ethology though I can should say there's a lot of overlap between ethological studies and sociobiological studies but the the main emphasis of the work in sociobiology has been different Edward O Wilson at Harvard was the one who invented the term sociobiology though it it had been used before for example by C Judson herck a comparative anatomist who wrote a book on human nature and Behavior Uh but it was very speculative and if you read what he actually says about sociobiology was very different from EO Wilson because he never even refers to Darwin so it was really Wilson that brought a lot of different he was basically a review of L many different aspects of social behavior in many different species and in his last chapter it was about humans and that is what caused him so much trouble it was actually a Revolt among humanists and even scientists here at MIT that tried to they wanted the whole field suppressed I know that's hard to believe that in recent years that actually happened but I was already at MIT when that was happening I met eel Wilson I liked Ed a lot and U I had also like he did trouble understanding why why people were getting so upset Conrad Lawrence has been attacked also because he applies ethology to human behavior too see a lot of people do not want any of the stuff that we apply to animals to apply to humans they it became it becomes a political thing and I will just urge you to keep politics separate from the science but that's what people were doing and at the time this came out it was ideologies were being argued a lot uh socialist ideologies communist ideologies believe strongly in not anything in herit okay in very for very different reasons than say what we talked about in the development of education in America very different approaches but that led to a more vent vent opposition to socio biology and we'll go through that history um in the middle of the class when we start talking about sociobiology it's very different from cultural anthropology it's very different from sociology in fact sociologists have been very resistant to applying to the application of darwinian ideas and evolution to social behavior of humans uh many cultural Anthropologist the same way it's culture that determines our Behavior not biology they that's almost a quote from some of these people I hope you don't end up believing that but anyway here's from EO Wilson's book I just wanted to show you how he conceptualized uh get this so you can see it here was the way he conceptualized these fields of studied behavior in 1950 he has ethology and comparative psychology in America ethology in Europe is quite separate which they were at that time here he has the beginnings of sociobiology but the word was not being used in 1950 it was part of Behavioral ecology okay just part of ecology and that was closely connected to population biology so that was that was the close link just like over here on the other side you have integrative [Music] neurophysiology closely linked to cell biology in the middle you have these behavioral fields ethology and comparative psychology okay so then 1975 is when the term sociobiology originated the ties to population bi biology were made explicit by EO Wilson uh ethology and biopsychology or physiological psychology it went by various names now it's often just neuroscience and behavior or behavioral Neuroscience uh had become a little more closely linked but I think he's overly optimistic because in 1975 those two Fields were still largely separate in the way they were carried out uh the work being done and here's the way he envisioned it back in 1975 and 80 when he published his books he saw sociobiology increasing these fields decreasing it hasn't actually happened quite like that uh what has happened is that both ethology and experimental studies of animal behavior in America including of learning have become much more integrated with ideas of sociobiology uh in fact the most recent books in animal behavior I was reading them this Summer uh they go to Great Lengths to bring so to integrate almost discuss in a pretty seamless way sociobiology and ethology for example what I didn't like about them is that they start out with all this Gene counting and you feel like you're studying not animal behavior but the some uh mathematical field uh it's hard a little hard to describe but I didn't feel it was very successful if you don't know much about animal behavior in the first place you'll find it really dull so I didn't I don't take that TCH but you will learn the same things okay if you focus on the habitat and the species the habitat supports then you're talking about ecology and you can find the field of Behavioral ecology talking mainly about Behavior if you focus on a single species and we've already mentioned this you can talk about primatology orology if you're just studying sitations entomology if you're studying insects if you're looking in mology though you will find topics that you simply don't find in ethology or physiological psychology running speeds of land an mammals submersion times of aquatic mammals and amphibians tunnel structures of burrowing mammals the composition of milk in various mammals the biomass of animals the total mass of all animals in a habitat or in a region or the mass per unit area on the Earth's surface you don't find those in these other behavioral books but you do find them in mology books and then we discuss the amateur naturist and that's where I will end and we'll I will tell you a little bit more about these topics at the beginning of the next class