Thanks to the pandemic, I have been gifted with lot of time for walks on my terrace and one of the best ways I used these walks was listening to Dr. Robert Sapolsky and his Stanford University lectures on “Human Behavioral Biology”. The lectures were mentioned by Anand Gandhi in his discussion with Kunal Shah on the topic “Biology of Money” and it got me curious to start watching them. Luckily the complete series of 25 lectures is available in Youtube for everyone to watch.
The lectures just opens you to so many questions in the realm of animal and in particular human behavior. And along with these questions, it just provides you a very loose framework on how you can go about trying to find some high level pointers to make sense of the exhibited behavior. The first half of the series impresses on you the different steps of the framework and why it is so difficult to conclude concretely on the cause of the behavior. The second half tries to explain different common behaviors exhibited by animals using the framework and shows how each step may have contributed to the cause of the behaviors. The image below summarizes this framework and I have picked it from a more recent talk by Dr. Sapolsky in JCCSF.
Just to give few examples on the kind of questions the lecture series touches upon, I am listing down few that I made notes of.
1) How did allowing abortion judgement help in decrease in crime rate in US states?
2) How do children pick accent from where they live and not from their parents?
3) What impact does violent childhood have on kids and does it mean they are going to be violent themselves in their adulthood?
4) Is there any relation between genes and sexuality?
5) Does stress in early life cause aggression in adulthood?
6) Does stress of pregnant mother cause the child to be more aggressive in adulthood?
7) How do new born animals identify their parents? Can they identify their relatives?
8) Why do dogs and animals in general lick other animals?
9) Are patients suffering from Schizophrenia actually more violent compared to normal people?
10) What role does genes play in deciding a human’s behavior in different situation?
11) What do hormones contribute to a human’s reaction to certain situations?
13) Do we see instances of sacrifice in animals for the betterment of their own species?
14) Finally if human behavior is anyways controlled by such a framework, is there then anything called free will of a human?
The above list is a very small subset of questions that you are introduced to as part of these lectures.
Not only do we get introduced to this vast breadth of possibilities and explanation on how different things are connected to analyze a human social behavior, the course work as part of this lecture series also introduces you to a completely different topic of Chaos Theory from the world of Physics. It is Chaos Theory which forms the basis of the framework introduced in this lecture series. As explained by Chaos Theory, some minute change in the initial conditions can cause large variations in later state. The lecture series impresses upon you how minute changes that might have happened hundreds of years ago in the evolution process or some minute change in environment just seconds ago might cause major variations in how an animal might react to a given situation.
This beautiful amalgamation of Chaos Theory to explain the framework to understand human social behavior is what makes this lecture series so unique.
