6. Behavioral Genetics I

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Stanford University.

[SIDE CONVERSATIONS]

OK, let's get going.

Let's see.

First off, apologies for Friday.

Sometimes, what seems like a flawless set

of connecting flights on paper turn out not to be in reality.

So hopefully, people made good use of the time.

OK.

We are ready for our next bucket, our next bucket,

our third one in this series, just in time

to convince you that we just keep jumping these.

As soon as you get accustomed to one approach, here

we are, yet another one, where we

are going to trash everything that's come before us.

OK.

What have been the two broad approaches so far?

The first one, the sociobiological/evolutionary

psychology one-- behavior evolves

exactly under the same sort of wind tunnel of selection

as does the heart of a giraffe, blah, blah,

that whole song and dance.

Following certain rules, you could

generate fairly structured predictions

about social behavior.

And then, the we-win version of using that is,

here's what we predict.

Here is the way we explain this complex system

of social behavior, using these rules which

assume certain degrees of heritability of behavior,

following certain rules of evolution.

And until you come up with a better explanation

for how this goes on, we win.

This is how behavior works.

Then we shifted over to the molecular end.

And what we saw was, on a certain sort of trendy level,

molecular biology is the answer to the people who

would sit around to the sociobiologists