Evolution, Genetics,

and Experience
Thinking about the Biology
of Behavior
We are the intellectual product of a Zeitgeist
that promotes ways of thinking about the
biological bases of behavior that are
inconsistent with the facts.
• Zeitgeist: the general intellectual climate of
our culture.
• Think about behaviour in terms of
dichotomies is illustrated by two kinds of
questions that people commonly ask about
behaviour.
• Is it physiological or is it psychological?
In western part of the world, during the Dark ages
conflict between science and the Roman Church.
• The famines, plagues, and marauding armies that
had repeatedly swept Europe during the Dark
Ages subsided, and interest turned to art,
commerce, and scholarship this was the period of
the Renaissance, or rebirth (1400 to 1700).
• The conflict was resolved by the prominent French
philosopher Rene Descartes (1596 1650)advocated a
philosophy that, in a sense, gave one part of the universe
to science and the other part to the church. He
advocated:
1. Physical matter, which behaves according to the laws of
nature and is thus a suitable object of scientific
investigation.
2. The human mind (soul self or spirit) which lacks physical
substance, controls human behaviour,
obeys no natural laws, and is thus the appropriate
purview of the church. The human body, including
the brain, was assumed to be entirely physical and so
were nonhuman animals.
 Problems with thinking about the Biology of
Behavior in Terms of Traditional Dichotomies

1. Physiological-or-Psychological Thinking Runs into

Difficulty
• There are two lines of evidence against physiological or
psychological thinking – the assumption that some aspects of
human psychological functioning are so complex that they
could not possibly be the product of physical brain.
• The first line: composed of the many demonstration that even
the most complex psychological changes can be produced by
damage to, or stimulation of, parts of the brain.
• Ex. A man who fell out of bed.
The Case of the Man Who Fell Out of Bed

• When he awoke, Dr. Sacks s patient felt fine that is,

until he touched the thing in bed next to him. It was
a severed human leg, all hairy and still warm! At first,
the patient was confused. Then, he figured it out.
One of the nurses must have taken it from the
autopsy department and put it in
his bed as a joke. Some joke; it was disgusting. So, he
threw the leg out of the bed, but somehow he
landed on the floor with it attached to him.
• The patient became agitated and desperate,
and Dr. Sacks tried to comfort him and help
him back into the bed. Making one last effort
to reduce the patient s confusion, Sacks asked
him where his left leg was, if the one attached
to him wasn’t it. Turning pale and looking like
he was about to pass out, the patient replied
that he had no idea where his own leg was it
had disappeared.
• The second line: composed of demonstrations that some
nonhuman species, particularly primate species, possess
abilities that were once assumed to be purely psychological
and thus purely human. Ex. The Case of the Chimps
• and the Mirrors
 The Case of the Chimps and the Mirrors

• An organism is self-aware to the

extent that it can be shown
capable of becoming the object
of its own attention. . . . One way
to assess an organisms capacity
to become the object of its own
• attention is to confront it with a
mirror.
• . . . I gave a number of group-
reared, preadolescent
• chimpanzees individual exposure
to themselves in mirrors. . . .
Invariably, their first reaction to
the mirror was to respond as if
they were seeing another
chimpanzee. . .
• After about two days, however, . . . they . . . started to use
the mirror to groom and inspect parts of their bodies they
had not seen before, and progressively began to
experiment with the reflection by making faces, looking at
themselves upside down, and assuming unusual postures
while monitoring the results in the mirror. . . .
So in an attempt to provide a more convincing
demonstration of self-recognition, I devised an unobtrusive
and more rigorous test. . . . Each chimpanzee was
anesthetized. . . . I carefully painted the uppermost portion
of an eyebrow ridge and the top half of the opposite ear
with a bright red, odorless, alcohol soluble dye. . . .
Following recovery from anesthesia . . . the mirror was
then reintroduced as an explicit test of self-recognition.
Upon seeing their painted faces in the mirror, all the
chimpanzees showed repeated mark-directed responses,
consisting of attempts to touch and inspect marked areas on
their eyebrow and ear while watching the image. [See
Figure 2.2.] In addition, there was over a three-fold increase in
viewing time. . . . Several chimpanzees also
showed noteworthy attempts to visually examine and
smell the fingers which had been used to touch these facial
marks. I suspect that you would respond pretty much the
same way, if upon awakening one morning you saw yourself in
the mirror with red spots on your face.
 There were two cases that illustrate these two
kinds of evidence
• The first case: Oliver sack’s account of the man who fell out of
bed.
• Suffering from Asomatognosia, a deficiency in the awareness of
parts of one’s own body.
• Asomatognosia typically involves the left side of the body and
usually results from damage to the right parietal lobe.
• Asomatognosia is a neurological disorder characterized as loss of
recognition or awareness of part of the body. The failure to
acknowledge, for example, a limb, may be expressed verbally or as
a pattern of neglect. The limb may also be attributed to another
person, a delusion known as somatoparaphrenia.
• Although the changes in self awareness displayed by the patient
were very complex, they were clearly the result of brain damage.
• The second case G.G. Gallup’s research on self-wareness in
chimpazees.
• Even nonhumans, which are assumed to have no mind, are
capable of considerable psychological complexity – in this
case, self awareness.
• Although their brains are less complex than the brains of
humans, some species are capable of levels of psychological
complexity that were once believed to imply the existence of
a human mind.
 Nature or Nurture thinking runs into difficulty
• Factors other than genetics and learning were shown to
influence behavioral development, factors such as the fetal
environment, nutrition, stress, and sensory stimulation also
proved to be influential.
• Behavior always develops under the combined control of both
nature and nurture not under the control of one or the other.
• Three general points:
1. Neurons become active long before they are fully developed.
Ex. Motor development occurs in Three Types of Patterns:
1. Reflex
2. Reaction or Automatic response
3. Skill
• Reflexes- are involuntary, predictable changes
in muscle tone in response to sensory input.
These changes may be movements of body
parts or as subtle as shifting of muscle tone
(tightening up or tensing).
Hand grasp reflex Foot grasp Reflex
Tonic- labyrinthine-prone
2. Reactions- are automatic responses to
sensory input that are act to keep body parts in
alignment, maintain equilibrium and prevent
injury.
• Parachute or Propping
Reactions- are protective
extension movements of
the limbs used to break or
prevent a fall.
• Four reactions named for the
direction in which the body is
falling:
• Downward
• Sideward
• Forward
• Backward
• Prone supine
Sitting

Standing
• Skill -A motor skill is a learned ability to cause a
predetermined movement outcome with maximum
certainty. Motor learning is the relatively permanent
change in the ability to perform a skill as a result of
practice or experience. Performance is an act of
executing a motor skill.
Skill movements
• 2. The subsequent course of their development (eg
the number of connections they form or whether or
not they survive) depends greatly on their activity,
much of which is triggered by external experience
and
• 3. Experience continuously modifies genetic
expression.
 Human Evolution
• Darwinism is a theory of biological evolution developed by
the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and others,
stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through
the natural selection of small, inherited variations that
increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and
reproduce.
• The theory of evolution by natural selection, first formulated
in Darwin's book "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, is the
process by which organisms change over time as a result of
changes in heritable physical or behavioral traits. Changes
that allow an organism to better adapt to its environment will
help it survive and have more offspring.
 This model boils down to the
single premise that all behavior is
the product of interactions among
three factors: (1) the organism’s
genetic endowment, which is a
product of its evolution; (2) its
experience; and (3) its perception
of the current situation.

FIGURE 2.3 A schematic illustration of

the way in which many
biopsychologists think about the
biology of behavior.
• Darwin presented three kinds of evidence to support
his assertion that species evolve: (1) He documented
the evolution of fossil records through progressively
more recent geological layers. (2) He described striking
structural similarities among living species (e.g., a
human s hand, a bird s wing, and a cat s paw), which
suggested that they had evolved from common ancestors.
(3) He pointed to the major changes that had been brought
about in domestic plants and animals by programs of
selective breeding. However, the most convincing evidence of
evolution comes from direct observations of
rapid evolution in progress . For example, Grant (1991) observed
evolution of the finches of the Galápagos Islands a population
studied by Darwin himself after only a single season of drought.
Figure 2.4 on page 26 illustrates these four kinds of evidence.
• Darwin argued that evolution occurs through
natural selection. He pointed out that the members of
each species vary greatly in their structure, physiology,
and behavior, and that the heritable traits that are associated
with high rates of survival and reproduction are
the most likely ones to be passed on to future generations.
• He argued that natural selection, when repeated for
generation after generation, leads to the evolution of species
that are better adapted to surviving and reproducing in their
particular environmental niche. Darwin called this process
natural selection to emphasize its similarity to the artificial
selective breeding practices
employed by breeders of domestic animals.
• Evolution by natural selection is one of the best substantiated
theories in the history of science, supported by evidence from
a wide variety of scientific disciplines, including paleontology,
geology, genetics and developmental biology.
• The theory has two main points, "All life on Earth is
connected and related to each other," and this diversity of
life is a product of "modifications of populations by natural
selection, where some traits were favored in and
environment over others.
• Videos
• Darwin’s Theory of Evolution
• Darwin – evolution through natural selection
• Members of each species vary greatly in their structure
physiology, and behavior, and that the heritable traits that are
associated with high rates of survival and reproduction are
the most likely ones to be passed on to future generations.
• Fitness, in the Darwinian sense, is the ability of an organism to
survive and contribute its genes to the next generation.
• Social behavior play an obvious role in evolution.
• Ex: the ability to find food, avoid predation, or defend one’s
young obviously increase an animal’s ability to pass on its
genes to future generations
A taxonomy of the Human species.
 A taxonomy of the Human species.

• Domain. Eukaryota.- organism with nucleus and have

membranous structures.

• Kingdom. Animalia. Metazoa, includes all animals. Animals

are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms, which are
heterotrophic, meaning they obtain nutrition from organic
sources. Most animals obtain nutrition by ingesting other
organisms or decomposing organic material.
• Phylum. Chordata. chordates possess a notochord,
a hollow dorsal nerve cord, pharyngeal slits, an
endostyle, and a post-anal tail, for at least some
period of their life cycle. Animals with backbone and
spinal cord.
• Class. Mammalia. - a warm-blooded vertebrate
animal of a class that is distinguished by the
possession of hair or fur, the secretion of milk by
females for the nourishment of the young, and
(typically) the birth of live young.
• Order. Primates.- from Latin, plural of primat-, primas ] : any
of an order (Primates) of mammals that are characterized
especially by advanced development of binocular vision
resulting in stereoscopic depth perception, specialization of
the hands and feet with opposable first digits for grasping,
and enlargement of the cerebral hemispheres and that
include humans, apes, monkeys, and related forms (such as
lemurs and tarsiers
• Family Homindae. Walk upright - 1. Hair instead of fur 2)
Opposable Thumbs 3) Higher brain to body size ratio- a high
level of intelligence 4) Binocular Vision- both eyes focus on
one object also known as depth perception
• Genus. Homo. - Human
• Species. Sapiens. Modern human
• Homo erectus Where
Lived: Northern,
Eastern, and Southern
Africa; Western Asia
(Dmanisi, Republic of
Georgia); East Asia
(China and Indonesia)
When Lived: Between
about 1.89 million and
143,000 years ago
• Early African Homo erectus fossils (sometimes called Homo ergaster) are
the oldest known early humans to have possessed modern human-like
body proportions with relatively elongated legs and shorter arms
compared to the size of the torso. These features are considered
adaptations to a life lived on the ground, indicating the loss of earlier tree-
climbing adaptations, with the ability to walk and possibly run long
distances. Compared with earlier fossil humans, note the expanded
braincase relative to the size of the face. The most complete fossil
individual of this species is known as the ‘Turkana Boy’ – a well-preserved
skeleton (though minus almost all the hand and foot bones), dated around
1.6 million years old. Microscopic study of the teeth indicates that he
grew up at a growth rate similar to that of a great ape. There is fossil
evidence that this species cared for old and weak individuals. The
appearance of Homo erectus in the fossil record is often associated with
the earliest hand axes, the first major innovation in stone tool technology.
• Homo floresiensis
• Nickname: the Hobbit
Where Lived: Asia
(Indonesia)
• When Lived: About
100,000 – 50,000 years
ago
• The fossils of H. floresiensis date to between about
100,000 and 60,000 years ago, and stone tools made
by this species date to between about 190,000 and
50,000 years old. H. floresiensis individuals stood
approximately 3 feet 6 inches tall, had tiny brains, large
teeth for their small size, shrugged-forward shoulders,
no chins, receding foreheads, and relatively large feet
due to their short legs. Despite their small body and
brain size, H. floresiensis made and used stone tools,
hunted small elephants and large rodents, coped with
predators such as giant Komodo dragons, and may
have used fire.