Examples of behavioral biology in the following topics:
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- Behavioral biology is the study of the biological and evolutionary bases for such changes.
- One cannot study behavioral biology without touching on both comparative psychology and ethology.
- One goal of behavioral biology is to distinguish the innate behaviors, which have a strong genetic component and are largely independent of environmental influences, from the learned behaviors, which result from environmental conditioning.
- Innate behavior, or instinct, is important because there is no risk of an incorrect behavior being learned.
- These behaviors are “hard wired” into the system.
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- Biopsychology is the application of the principles of biology to the study of mental processes and physical behavior.
- Biopsychology—also known as biological psychology or psychobiology—is the application of the principles of biology to the study of mental processes and behavior.
- Because all behavior is controlled by the central nervous system, biopsychologists seek to understand how the brain functions in order to understand behavior.
- Philosophers like Rene Descartes proposed physical models to explain animal and human behavior.
- In The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James argued that the scientific study of psychology should be grounded in an understanding of biology.
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- Evolutionary psychology seeks to understand human behavior as the result of psychological adaptation and natural selection.
- Evolutionary biology emerged as an academic discipline in the 1930s and 1940s, along with the study of animal behavior (ethology), both of which heavily influence the development of evolutionary psychology.
- The field also draws on cognitive psychology, behavioral ecology, artificial intelligence, genetics, anthropology, archaeology, biology, and zoology.
- The brain produces behavior in response to external and internal inputs.
- These mechanisms combine to produce observable behavior.
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- Culture relates to nature (our biology and genetics) and nurture (our environment and surroundings that also shape our identities).
- This is an example in which cultural shifts (the domestication of animals) can lead to changes in behavior that affect biology (genetic adaptation to process lactose).
- Instead, it is a useful heuristic, or way of thinking, that can be very productive in understanding behavior.
- Social Darwinism was the belief that the closer a cultural group was to the normative, Western, European standards of behavior and appearance, the more evolved that group was.
- Neither culture nor biology is solely responsible for the other.
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- In classical conditioning, a behavior is paired with an unrelated stimulus; in operant conditioning, behaviors are modified by consequences.
- Conditioned behaviors are types of associative learning where a stimulus becomes associated with a consequence.
- Classical conditioning is a major tenet of behaviorism, a branch of psychological philosophy that proposes that all actions, thoughts, and emotions of living things are behaviors that can be treated by behavior modification and changes in the environment.
- In operant conditioning, the conditioned behavior is gradually modified by its consequences as the animal responds to the stimulus.
- In this way, the animal is conditioned to associate a type of behavior with the punishment or reward.
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- It attempts to explain and examine social behavior within that context.
- Often considered a branch of biology and sociology, it also draws from ethology, anthropology, evolution, zoology, archaeology, population genetics, and other disciplines.
- Sociobiologists believe that human behavior, like nonhuman animal behavior, can be partly explained as the outcome of natural selection.
- They contend that in order to fully understand behavior, it must be analyzed in terms of evolutionary considerations.
- Sociobiologists reason that common behaviors likely evolved over time because they made individuals who exhibited those behaviors more likely to survive and reproduce.
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- Simple learned behaviors include habituation and imprinting, both of which are important to the maturation process of young animals.
- The majority of the behaviors discussed in previous sections are innate or at least have an innate component.
- In other words, variations on the innate behaviors may be learned.
- Innate behaviors are inherited and do not change in response to signals from the environment.
- Simple learned behaviors include habituation and imprinting, both of which are important to the maturation process of young animals.
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- Innate behaviors, such as kinesis, taxis, and migration, are instinctual responses to external stimuli.
- Innate or instinctual behaviors rely on response to stimuli.
- Even humans, with our great capacity to learn, still exhibit a variety of innate behaviors.
- Another activity or movement of innate behavior is kinesis: undirected movement in response to a stimulus.
- Another example is klinokinesis, an increase in turning behaviors.
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- Behaviors that lower the fitness of the individual engaging in the behavior, but increase the fitness of another individual, are termed altruistic.
- Examples of such behaviors are seen widely across the animal kingdom.
- There has been much discussion over why altruistic behaviors exist.
- Thus, there is reciprocity in the behavior.
- This behavior is still not necessarily altruism, as the "giving" behavior of the actor is based on the expectation that it will be the "receiver" of the behavior in the future; a concept termed reciprocal altruism.
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- Scientists gain insight into a species' biology and ecology from studying spatial distribution of individuals.
- Scientists gain additional insight into a species' biology and ecology from studying how individuals are spatially distributed.
- Patterns are often characteristic of a particular species; they depend on local environmental conditions and the species' growth characteristics (as for plants) or behavior (as for animals).