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This handout contains the philosophy, goals, structure and procedures
of the course. Since the course has a fairly complex structure, you should
re-examine this prospectus from time to time. Be sure to visit the web
page too: www.brown.edu/Courses/Bio_45/
I. About The Course
Animal behavior is a user friendly subject. The fascinating ways animals
behave should motivate your curiosity and imagination. Trying to figure
out how and why they do what they do should drive your desire to learn
and practice the basics of behavior research. Lectures, readings, and
films will provide the factual, conceptual and methodological framework
for turning your curiosity into a scientific study of animal behavior.
Journal assignments and discussions will let you to do science while you
are learning how it works.
The conceptual core of the course is an evolutionary approach that has
been particularly effective in revealing and offering explanations for
complex behavior. This evolutionary approach is known as behavioral ecology.
The behavioral ecology 'way of thinking' is young enough to be ripe with
change and internal controversy. Focusing on behavioral ecology allows
me to show you how shifts in the way we think about behavior can reveal
previously hidden explanations. Although our focus will be on the function
of behavior, we will also look at some of the underlying mechanisms involved.
More details on behavioral mechanisms can be found in your text and in
neurobiology and psychology courses (e.g., Psych 50).
Behavioral ecologists face some clear challenges: How can ideas about
evolution be tested in short time periods? How can carefully controlled
experiments be done under natural conditions? How do the results of laboratory
experiments relate to natural conditions? You will learn some basic "tools"
for meeting these challenges under laboratory and field conditions. While
you are doing this, you will be interacting directly with the process
-- observing and thinking about animals behaving. Bio 45 is primarily
about what animals are doing and how they got that way. The
more you observe and think about the behavior of animals you encounter
the better.
Our evolutionary focus will involve four central questions:
1) How does behavior solve basic problems of survival and
reproduction?
2) How are behaviors shaped by the developmental, ecological and social
environments in which they occur?
3) Can we develop and test general rules or models of how animals should
behave?
4) How can we do all this scientifically?
Bio 45 is designed to help you to develop your
skills in critical thinking and in reading and evaluating original scientific
literature. You will see how biases (factual, historical, conceptual
and sexual) enter into the way science is done; and you will learn how
scientists deal with these biases. You will learn to take advantage of
your own imagination and the insights that are gained by shifting your
perspective between different views of behavior: proximate versus ultimate
cause, lab versus field studies, and male versus female perspectives.
Our exploration of behavioral ecology will emphasize the basic process
of doing science -- generating ideas and testing them. You are going
to be directly involved in this process for the entire course. That will
take a lot of time and effort, but the rewards are clearly worth it. I
cannot emphasize enough that this is not a course where I teach you some
things about behavior. It is a course where, if you become directly involved,
you will acquire knowledge, develop skills and broaden your perspectives.
Before you read any further, you should know about my view of science
and science education:
A. Some scientists feel that students need a solid background in facts
and methodology before they can start doing science on their own. I
feel that you should start doing science while you accumulate the factual
and procedural background. That is not to say that facts and vocabulary
are not necessary -- they are absolutely essential. However, they will
make more sense and be retained better if you start using them and discovering
some of them yourself. You have been using the basics of scientific
exploration since soon after you were born. You need to accept that
what you do at first may not be all that sophisticated. If you are reluctant
to participate in the process given your "lack of background", I hope
to change your mind.
We will focus on a conceptual background to and formalization of a
process of exploration that you already know. You should expect to get
confused about some things. This confusion is good if it makes you think,
talk with others about your ideas and watch animals more closely.
B. Science (or any other human endeavor) cannot be totally objective
(free of bias). A good scientist must come to grips with how to recognize
and deal with bias. That bias comes from many sources: your gender,
your culture, your experience with biology, your personal value system.
How we view and understand the causal connections among things depends
on our perspective. Those who can look or think from several perspectives
usually get further than those who are locked into just one perspective.
In this course we will look at how a variety of different perspectives
can influence what we see and how we think. You are invited, in your
journal and discussions to consider changes that might result from other
perspectives.
C. The biological world is not ordered in a linear fashion.. However,
biology is often taught as a set of disciplines (genetics, morphology,
biochemistry, cell biology, etc.) that reflect "levels of organization"
with chemicals at one end cells and organisms sort of in the middle
and ecosystems at the other end. These are historical and conceptual
artifacts, invented to deal with the complexity of biology. Life is
a good deal less orderly!
Consider that an animal's behavior is a result of that animal's design
and its experience and the designs and experiences of all of the other
organisms it interacts with; plus non-biological processes that influence
these designs and experiences. Each design is the result of historical
interactions of the previous designs and experiences of ancestors of
those animals. How can this be a linear process? How do we deal with
this complexity? We'll make a start.
D. Science does not follow a simple "true/false" path to the answer.
Rarely is "either it is A or it is B" true in science and especially
in holistic fields like behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology.
Usually the answer is: "Whether it is A, B, both, or neither depends
on ...". We live in an age where there is a vast amount of information
to and the more we learn, the less obvious everything gets. I will present
animal behavior as a slowly evolving understanding of how little we
know about the real world. I encourage an objective and skeptical (but
not cynical) attitude toward the basic 'way of thinking' presented in
the course.
WARNING: By now you should be thinking,
"This is like several courses rolled into one and that means it is likely
to get pretty messy and involve a lot of work on my part." You are correct
and should consider whether or not you have the time or desire to sort
it all out this semester.
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