Transcript: Robert Sapolsky on Behavioral Evolution at Stanford

 

Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky discusses Behavioral Evolution in detail at Stanford. This lecture took place on March 31, 2010. Below is the full transcript.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here: Robert Sapolsky on Behavioral Evolution at Stanford

TRANSCRIPT: 

The often asked question: What’s the difference between Bio 150, Bio 250, and — is it Hum Bio 160? No difference. It’s exactly the same. So like the same requirements, same unit. So take whichever one makes your life easiest.

Let’s see. Any other procedural stuff? Well, the answers are back from Monday’s questionnaire. And a variety of interesting answers. Not surprisingly, given the size of a group.

Why have you taken this course? Really want to know about animal behavior, but willing to deal with humans. Because I’m substituting it for Bio 43, which I don’t want to take. My dad used to make me read books about human behavior and biology as punishment. That doesn’t make any sense. I know one of the TAs, so I figure that guarantees me an A. OK, guys, that’s in your court.

One I really liked, because I want to be a filmmaker after college. Yay, interdisciplinary.

What else? My first grade teacher is making me. Tom McFadden told me to. I’m a hyper-oxygenated dilettante. I wanted to, somewhat correctly pointing out, why have you taken this class? I haven’t taken it yet. A number of people reporting that, in fact, that was the correct answer. And my favorite, why have you taken this course? Yes.

Relevant background, relevant background. I’m human, I’m human and I often behave. I’m human and I have biology. 19 years of being confused about human behavior. Not really, sort of. Seeing crazy behavior as an RA in an all frosh dorm. And I date a biologist.

Let’s see. There was also the question on there of — did the thing on the board look more like an A or a B. And just to really facilitate that one, I forgot to put the A and the B up. But that taps into a cognitive something or other, which maybe I’ll get back to at some point.

Telephone numbers. Reading them off, accuracy dramatically tanked as soon as the three number, four number motif went down the tubes. And when it came back briefly, accuracy came back a little bit.

Finally, let’s see. All of you guys conform to a standard frequent gender difference, which is everybody was roughly equally — by gender – roughly equally likely to see dependent as the opposite of independent. A small minority went for interdependent. However, one finding that has come up over and over is that far more females are interested in peace than males, males are more interested in justice.

OK, have you taken the bio core? Quote, no way Jose. Somebody pointing out quite correctly, don’t settle for peace or justice. Then of course, there was a person who responded to that question by writing those words are just symbols. Need to know assumed meaning.

There was one questionnaire that was carefully signed in something approaching calligraphy, it was so beautiful and was otherwise blank.

For years running, the course, the subject that most people really want to hear, and most people really don’t want to hear, is about the biology of religiosity. And for 22 years running now, Stanford students are more interested in depression than sex.

1. So we start off. I keep telling Hennessy about this, but nothing gets done.

We start off. We start off, if I can open this — which is something you can do if you have a certain type of training. If you’re some osteologist, or whatever these folks are called. If you are presented those two skulls and told this one’s a female, this one’s a male, you can begin to figure out stuff like how heavy, how large the body was of that individual, what diseases they had, had they undergone malnutrition, had they given birth, a lot of times, a few times, were they bipedal. All sorts of stuff you could figure out from just looking at these skulls.

What today’s lecture, and Friday’s, is about is the fact that with the right tools under your belt, you could look at these two skulls and know that information. You are a field biologist, and you’ve discovered this brand new species. And you see that this one nurses an infant shortly before leaping out of the tree, leaving only the skull. And this one has a penis, shortly before leaping out of the tree and leaving a skull. So all you know is this is an adult female and an adult male.

And if you’ve got the right tools there, you can figure out who is more likely to cheat on the other. Is the female more likely to mess around, or is the male? How high are the levels of aggression? Does the female tend to have twins, or one kid at a time? Do females choose males because they have good parenting skills, or because they’re big, hunky guys? What levels of differences in life expectancy? Do they live the same length of time? You would be able to tell whether they have the same life expectancy or if there’s a big discrepancy between the two. All sorts of stuff like that, merely by applying a certain piece of logic that dominates all of this.