Interesting course. Pretty thorough: starts off with how the brain works, starting with a single neuron and moving on to networks and entire regions, then the effect of hormones and neurotransmitters. This is the most difficult bit to follow. Relies a bit too much on the diagrams in the course guide to work really well on audio.

The next bits are easier though as the course moves on to genes and evolution, then ethology. The final section brings everything together and concentrates on aggression and how it fits it with the way things work.

The key word of the course is "interaction". Sapolsky at all times stresses the sheer complexity of how the brain works. There's practically no such thing as a "gene for" anything to do with behaviour: everything is due to the interactions between various systems. The glands interacts with hormones, hormones interact with the brain (which is itself a gland), neurotransmitters interact with neurons, genes interact with the environment, the environment switches on genes. In spite of the complexity though, Sapolsky does manage to paint a good picture of how things work overall.

The emphasis on complexity also makes the course a bit of an inoculation against the over-simplistic abuse of sociobiology. As I see it, the political abuse of sociobiology tries to use it to write off certain groups as intrinsically too stupid to be educated, or too violent to be pacified, or too soft to function in the corporate world. What looking at the complexity shows us is that this it's almost never possible to write off behaviour this way: any genetic influence on behaviour depends on environmental and learned factors to be expressed.

A few details that interested me.

• If you're subjected to a moderate amount of short-term stress, steroid hormones called glucocorticoids are released. These lead to an increase in dopamine. (LTP is increased too).

  This seems to me might be a mechanism by which Aristotle's concept of literary catharsis works. Temporarily stressing yourself with a horrible story can leave you happier, and possibly wiser.

• The importance of environmental influences in the womb are more important than previously thought. If you stress out a pregnant rat, the children of that rat are more easily stressed, and their stress periods last longer.

  In the Dutch "hunger winter" in WW2, children born afterwards showed "thrifty metabolisms": they stored calories more efficiently, but were more prone to diabetes and other conditions. The surprising bit is that their children were also prone to the same condition.

  What this looks like to me of course is Lamarckian evolution. Acquired characteristics are being passed on to descendents after all.

• It looks like Calvin's father might have had a point about building character. An adult is more likely to perform moral acts at his own expense if as a child he's been forced to exert a degree of self-discipline.

The core point of popular sociobiology seems to be that it's not about the scientists and it's not about the media, the only important thing is the interaction between the two.

As ex-journalist Terry Pratchett put it in his novel The Truth:

"People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things ... well, new things aren't what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don't want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds."

So consider the question of whether women talk more than men (Deborah Cameron). About 61% of studies show men talk more than women, 4% show women talk more than men. But the 4% are the ones that get all the attention: like the dog biting the man, they tell use what we already think is true.

But I'm not sure the interaction stops there. If you can get vastly more media attention by confirming prejudices, I suspect that creates a temptation for academics to produce suitable research. I wonder how much dodgy research like the girls prefer pink because they've evolved to gather berries thing is encouraged by that.

Coming soon
Next TTC course is Conquest of the Americas by Marshall C. Eakin.

Web
Useful Latin phrases.

ADHD vs parenting.

Tallest horse.

YouTube: Adolf Hitler performs: "I Will Survive".

Electioneering. Kaletsky on the London election:

Yet this conventional wisdom is completely wrong. Mr Johnson and Mr Livingstone, far from being blundering political innocents, are both politicians of the first rank. Mr Livingstone not only managed to outmanoeuvre and humiliate both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown by becoming the first Mayor of London, but proved himself to be the only British politician of his generation to confront Margaret Thatcher and win in the long run. Mr Johnson cannot, yet, claim any such electoral triumphs, but he has managed to survive verbal gaffes and personal scandals as serious as the ones that ended the career of David Blunkett and a host of Tory Cabinet ministers from the Thatcher years.