BIOLOGY 1M03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 22: Kangaroo Rat, Proximate And Ultimate Causation, Sensory Cue
2 Mar 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Evidence for a genetic component to behavior: deprivation experiments: Idea is to deprive an individual of learning experiences early on in life and to test it on a specific behavior. Ex: squirrels burying: isolating squirrels and introducing them to an environment with nuts, squirrels never had the opportunity to learn, but have the genetic wiring to pick these nuts up and bury them. Ex: spiders web spinning: have a genetic blueprint to spin a web (with no prior learning from parents) Ex: kangaroo rat: these animals will sense a snake and in the process, they will leap up and jump away from the danger (an instinctive behavior) Keeping all individuals in identical conditions without any learning (1) holding an environment constant (2) measuring a phenotype (3) breeding individuals with extreme phenotypes (4) measure phenotype in next generation (5) continually repeating step 3.
