Syllabus
BSCI 360/708B 2012
This course focuses on
understanding the evolution of behavior. Since evolution requires genetic change,
we will begin by examining evidence that genes influence behavior and learn how
to measure their effects. We will then consider how natural
selection operates to produce adaptations and how phylogenetic information can
be used to reconstruct the evolution of behaviors among groups of
animals. Genes, however, are inadequate to describe all behavioral change
because of the inherent flexibility of behavior. For this reason we will
discuss the conditions under which nongenetic modes of transmission, such as
learning and imitation, should evolve. In the next part of the course
predictions about which behavior to expect in a particular ecological or social
setting will be made by using a variety of techniques borrowed from economics
such as optimization and game theory. We will learn how to predict when
competition among animals for space, food, and mates should lead to behavioral
and morphological adaptations. We will also discuss when communication in
animals should be honest or dishonest and discover the situations that favor
cooperative or altruistic behavior. Throughout the course we will
consider how the study of animal behavior may help us to understand our own
behavior as well as to better conserve threatened or endangered species.
LECTURES: two per week on Mondays and
Wednesdays from 11-11:50, PLS 1130. I expect all students to attend all
lectures and to take notes.To supplement your notes, I
will post my powerpoint presentations on the class website (www.life.umd.edu/classroom/bsci360)
usually within 24 hours of the class.
DISCUSSIONS: each Friday at 9, 10 or 11 in 1168
or 1172 PLS. One or two recent scientific papers will be assigned for each discussion
and can downloaded from the Reading List page.
Beginning with the second week, each seminar will be run by two students who
will have prepared questions, that must be turned in
to the instructor in charge of the section at the beginning of the period, to
encourage discussion and clarify the assigned reading. Everyone is
expected to read every paper every week! Performance will be
evaluated by attendance, weekly participation, and preparation as a discussion
leader. If you are unable to come to discussion due to illness, I will
accept a self-signed note from you attesting to the date of your
illness. The note must contain acknowledgement that the information is
true and that providing false information is prohibited under Code of
Student Conduct. To receive credit for a missed Discussion you must write
a 1 page summary of the article(s) under discussion
and give it to me within 2 weeks of the missed discussion. See Hints for discussion preparation below.
TEXTBOOK: Perspectives on Animal Behavior, 3rd Edition (2010) by Goodenough,
McGuire and Jakob (ISBN: 978-0-470-04517-6) is the text for the course. In the
schedule of classes I have listed the chapters or page numbers that relate most
closely to the material covered in each lecture. The book is intended to
supplement, not necessarily duplicate, lecture material.
GRADES: Your final course grade will be
based on the sum of scores for all assignments/exams. The distribution of
points across assignments/exams is as follows:
|
Midterms
I & II |
100
points each |
|
Problem
sets |
20 points |
|
Grant
Proposal |
100
points |
|
Discussion |
80 points |
|
Final |
125
points |
I will assign letter
grades, including pluses and minuses, on a curve based on how your total score
ranks relative to others in the class. After each exam I will indicate how I
would assign letter grades to help you track your progress.
PROBLEM SETS: Most of the central concepts regarding
the evolution of behavior are based on theoretical ideas that have empirical
support. In lecture I will attempt to show you, at least heuristically, how
some of these theoretical conclusions have been reached and provide examples. I
will require that you solve some algebraic problems using the techniques I
present in class. To ensure that you gain competency in these tasks, I will
require that you solve and turn in answers to two problem sets. These
problem sets will be graded and returned to you.
EXAMS: There will be two midterms, October 3 and November 7,
and a final, Saturday, December 15 at 8:00 AM in PLS 1130. Questions
will be a combination of multiple choice, short answer, and problem solving and
will integrate seminar and lecture material in a thought-provoking manner.
Make-up exams will only be permitted with a valid health excuse from a doctor.
Exam questions will be similar in style to problem set questions.
GRANT PROPOSAL: The remaining portion of your
grade will be based on a report, not longer than 5 single-spaced type-written pages (excluding references), which will be
written in the form of a grant proposal. Any topic which is related to animal behavior can be chosen,
even if it was not discussed in class. If you are unsure how to begin this
assignment, please read the suggestions below and note
that I will spend a lecture period discussing this assignment after the first
midterm. The TA and I are also very willing to discuss ideas with you.
But, please do not wait until the last minute! Five
copies of these proposals must be handed to us absolutely no later
than 5 PM on November 26.
Proposals will be evaluated
by the instructors and other students in the class and then discussed during a
mock panel meeting which will take place during the
last two discussion periods. Your proposal will be distributed to three
students who will each read and prepare a written evaluation of your proposal.
Then, one of the reviewers will lead the panel discussion and write a written
summary of that discussion. After all proposals have been reviewed, the TA and
I will rank them and assign grades using the criteria that are indicated below. I intend for this to be an
valuable learning experience that should give you a good idea of how
governmental money is allocated to scientific research as well as enable you to
appreciate the efforts and ideas of your classmates.
OFFICE HOURS: My office (BioPsych 2223) hours
will be Wednesday 1-2 PM or by appointment. You can also schedule an
appointment with me after class, by email wilkinso@umd.edu
or by phone (301-405-6942). If you discover that you are having
difficulty with either the lecture or reading material,
come see me or the TA. We are available to help, but you must take the
initiative to meet with us. I can be most easily reached by email. If you have
a short question, don't hesitate to send it to me by email. I will attempt to
answer you within a day. As appropriate, I will broadcast answers to questions
I receive over a class listserv or on the class website.
TA: Danielle Adams will be the
teaching assistant for this course. Danielle will also meet students in
BioPsych 2223 and her office hours will be Mondays from 10:00-11:00 PM. You can
also schedule an appointment with her after class or by email at dadams37@gmail.com.
CELL PHONES: Cell phones should be turned off and
put away during every class period. Cell phones are
not permitted during exams and will be confiscated if we see them in use. Any
student that is a repeated offender of ringing/talking on a cell phone in the
classroom will be referred to the Honor Council under the Student Code of
Conduct classroom disruption policy for disciplinary action.
ACADEMIC DISHONESTY : You should be aware that academic dishonesty is a serious offense that will not be tolerated in this course. The University of Maryland, College Park has a nationally recognized Code of Academic Integrity, administered by the Student Honor Council. This Code sets standards for academic integrity at Maryland for all undergraduate and graduate students. As a student you are responsible for upholding these standards for this course. It is very important for you to be aware of the consequences of cheating, fabrication, facilitation, and plagiarism. This is especially important when writing your grant proposal. If you have any doubt about what constitutes plagiarism, please ask us. For more information on the Code of Academic Integrity or the Student Honor Council, please visit http://www.shc.umd.edu. To further exhibit your commitment to academic integrity, remember to sign the Honor Pledge on all examinations and assignments: "I pledge on my honor that I have not given or received any unauthorized assistance on this examination (assignment)."
ACADEMIC ACCOMODATIONS: If you have a documented disability,
you should contact Disability Support Services 0126 Shoemaker Hall. Each
semester students with documented disabilities should apply to DSS for
accommodation request forms which you can provide to
your professors as proof of your eligibility for accommodations. The
rules for eligibility and the types of accommodations a student may request can
be reviewed on the DSS web site at http://www.counseling.umd.edu/DSS/eligibility.html.
RELIGIOUS OBSERVANCES: The University System of Maryland
policy provides that students should not be penalized because of observances of
their religious beliefs, students shall be given an opportunity, whenever
feasible, to make up within a reasonable time any academic assignment that is
missed due to individual participation in religious observances. It is
the responsibility of the student to inform the instructor of any intended
absences for religious observances in advance. Notice should be provided
as soon as possible but no later than the end of the schedule adjustment
period. Prior notification is especially important in connection with
final exams, since failure to reschedule a final exam before the conclusion of
the final examination period may result in loss of credits during the
semester.
HINTS FOR DISCUSSION
PREPARATION: The
intent of weekly discussions is to help you learn to think critically and speak
confidently about animal behavior research. You should try to understand the
assigned material and uncover its strengths and weaknesses by drawing on what
you have learned to date. Identify the main points and critically examine the
data and logic the authors use to support their conclusions. Don't be
intimidated by statistical or scientific terms you do not understand. Just
because this paper was published does not mean that it is necessarily correct.
Your responsibility is not only to understand the research, but
to evaluate its importance and quality. By the end of the term you should have
a better appreciation for the kind of research currently being conducted on
animal behavior and for the process scientists use to reach general
conclusions, such as those described in the text.
When you are responsible
for presenting the week's paper, do not merely reiterate what the paper says.
Your job is to encourage and lead discussion. The best way to do this is to
BRIEFLY summarize the work, and then either ask questions of the group or
suggest an interpretation that will provoke disagreement. Come prepared with
several questions and pose them to the class. You can choose either to work
through the paper systematically, or identify the major weakness (or strength)
and build discussion around this.
Each week those members of
the class not presenting should come to discussion with at least one question
or criticism (positive or negative) about the assigned paper. If you do not
understand some aspect of the paper, ask your classmates for clarification. You
can use the following set of questions to help guide you through understanding
the main points, and evaluating the paper's strengths and weaknesses.
What is the paper's primary
objective? Is it clearly stated and logically developed? Does the research
attempt to test a specific hypothesis or is the work descriptive? Are the
methods appropriate for achieving the stated objective? Is the work
observational or experimental? Are the observational techniques free from bias
and/or is the experimental design free from flaws? Are the data analyzed
appropriately? What have the authors discovered? Are there any inconsistencies
in the results? What conclusions do the authors draw from the results? Is each
conclusion supported by the results presented or by cited work? Where do the
authors speculate, if at all, and are these speculations logical? What is the
contribution of this research to our understanding of the stated objectives and
the larger field of which the research is a part? What kind of follow-up work
would increase our understanding of the main questions?
GRANT PROPOSAL SUGGESTIONS:
The grant proposal is a
chance for you to explore in greater depth anything you have discovered or
always thought was interesting about animal behavior. I want you to be creative
and try to come up with a problem that either has not been treated in
sufficient depth, which has been ignored, or appears to be involved in some
kind of controversy. Be problem-oriented, not organism-oriented. If you are
unable to pick a suitable organism for testing your ideas, come see me or the TA. We will be glad to discuss this assignment
with you.
Choice of Topic
Be problem-oriented, not animal-oriented. Good research in animal behavior
provides answers to general questions that apply to many animal species. At
least three different styles of presentation can be successful. One
particularly effective method is to focus on an area of controversy. Examples
of such areas are honest vs deceptive advertisement, good genes vs nonadaptive
models of sexual selection, evolution of eusociality through parental
manipulation of sibling cooperation, etc. Frequently, controversy exists
because conflicting theories have been proposed in the absence of supporting
data. A good grant proposal reviews the theory sufficiently to identify the
kind of data necessary to discriminate between competing hypotheses. An
alternative approach is to reexamine a traditional idea from a new perspective.
This often means challenging what is commonly viewed as conventional wisdom. As
an example, Wynne-Edwards notion of group selection clearly challenged the
traditional view of Darwinian natural selection and stimulated extensive
thinking about levels of selection and the evolution of altruistic behavior.
This particular example illustrates, though, that if you overstate your case,
as Wynne-Edwards did, you lose credibility. The third approach is to extend
previous studies in new directions or to a finer level of analysis. Tom
Seeley's work on honeybee language, learning and communication, which built
upon the classic studies of von Frisch, is a fine example of how progress can
be made by continuing to pursue a single area over a long time period.
Regardless of which approach you decide to adopt, use as your ultimate
criterion how much you like the subject. If you can't get excited about it, you
won't be able to convince anyone else to give you money.
Identify a central question around which to build your grant proposal. This is
without doubt the most difficult part of this assignment. You should consider
the book as a good starting place to look for potential grant proposal topics.
If nothing you like easily comes to mind, use the Web of Science or Google
Scholar to search on particular topics. You can also browse through the
latest issues of the behavior journals such as Animal Behaviour, Proceedings of the Royal
Society of London, series B, Behaviour, Behavioral Ecology, Ethology,
Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology or review journals such as Trends in Ecology
and Evolution, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, or Quarterly Review of
Biology, or Biological
Reviews. If you are off campus, you will need to first authenticate
your student staus by going to http://researchport.umd.edu/
and login with your university ID. You then will need to click on the
"Databases" tab at the top of the page if you want to use Web of
Science or on the "E-Journals" tab and type in the name of the
journal (e.g. Animal Behaviour) into the search bar. Follow the links to
the online source of the paper. You can then browse through the archives of the
journal or the latest volume. Most journals now publish articles online
before they appear in print or in databases.
If you find an article that
sounds interesting, read it, and read some of the references that are cited in
it. You should be able to trace an idea back to its origin by just reading a
handful of articles and quickly decide if the topic is suitable for a grant
proposal. After you identify a topic, try to develop a central question, e.g.
why do large white wading birds often form foraging groups? While much of the
material in this course centers on "why" questions that inquire into
the adaptive significance of behavioral traits, you should not feel inhibited
from asking more mechanistic questions, e.g. how do some bats manage to fly
hundreds of miles from nursery colonies to winter hibernation sites and
successfully return to the exact same site where they were born? Notice that
both of my questions specified particular animals even though the ideas, group
foraging and migration, are very general topics in animal behavior. You must
also decide on an appropriate animal group to investigate after you have
decided on a question. This requires careful thought because the animal you
choose dictates, to a large extent, the kind of observations or experiments
that can be performed. If you decide on a question, for example why do some
animals seek extra-pair copulations?, but cannot think
of an appropriate organism, come see me or send me email. I am most familiar
with terrestrial vertebrates and insects, but I may have access to more sources
on other animal groups than you can find easily. Do not choose an organism at
random. You should be able to justify both your study question and animal.
Thus, you should be able to claim, without too much imagination, that this animal
is better than any other for investigating the topic you have chosen.
List
Alternative Hypotheses: After picking a question and organism you should
attempt to enumerate all possible alternative hypotheses
which can answer your original question. Typically, one of these will be
a null hypothesis which often states that the observed
pattern is due to chance, rather than as a consequence of past selection. You
should present these hypotheses without bias, i.e. do not state that you
believe one over the others unless you have direct evidence for making such a
conclusion. The purpose of your research should be to test between these
hypotheses. For the group foraging question, for example, you might suggest
that being in a group somehow decreases predation on individuals or
alternatively, increases each bird's foraging success. Note that these
particular examples are not mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, this is often
the case in biology and consequently, you usually need to test both
alternatives, not just one. Once you have suggested as many alternatives as you
can you should devise experimental or observational tests that allow you to
unambiguously reject as many of these hypotheses as possible. If you initially
propose a correlative study, i.e. observations on free-ranging animals, you
should also suggest experiments that will identify causal relationships. Such a
combination of observational and experimental studies often leads to the most convincing
results.
Organization:
The following outline and page lengths are merely a suggestion. If your
project more easily fits another format, feel free to use it. However, you
should cover all of these topics in your proposal and write no more than 5, single-spaced
typewritten pages. References cited, figures and tables can
be included in addition to the 5 pages of text.
Purpose and
Objectives: (1/2 page) This introductory section can be very brief - a
single paragraph is often enough. Most people state the underlying question and
then describe how they will answer it, i.e. will this be lab work, field
studies, both, etc. Alternative hypotheses can be included here, but they often
make more sense in the Proposed Work section after more background has been
provided.
Background:
(1 page) This often consists of two parts: a review of relevant theoretical and
empirical studies and justification for why the animal system which you plan to
use was chosen. This section should be sufficiently detailed to enable the
reader to place your study in the broader context of related work and make it
clear why your study is needed or will be important. If you have pilot data
that relates to the proposed experiments, this is the appropriate place to
include and discuss it.
Proposed
Work: (2 pages) This should be a description of
the experiments, observations, and analyses you propose to conduct to test your
alternative hypotheses and answer your original question. Enough detail is
needed to show you know what you are talking about and to convince the reader
that these are practical things to do in the time period of the grant. Ideally,
this should be a logical progression of experiments such that the results from
one influence the next. Clearly state how each experiment or observation
addresses each hypothesis. For this paper, you need not worry about time
limits, but try to think about 1 to 3 year time periods. In a formal proposal
you should be conscious of statistical design and include such details as
sample sizes and appropriate statistical procedures you plan to use to evaluate
the results of each experiment. You needn't worry about statistics for this
proposal. If you propose to do several different experiments or have multiple
observation periods, you should consider including a table that clearly
outlines the schedule you plan to follow. The more organized you appear to be,
the more likely a reviewer will believe that you can accomplish what you
propose.
Potential
Results: (1 page) This is an optional section in which you predict the
outcome of each experiment. You should attempt to interpret the results of each
experiment such that you can foresee each possible outcome. Preferably, it
should be made clear that exciting results will be forthcoming no matter what
result you obtain.
Impact:
(1/2 page) How will your results affect the big
picture? Who should care about what you discover and why? Why should someone
give you money rather than contribute money to find a cure for AIDS? These are
hard questions, but every scientist has to be able to justify why their
research is of value. This need not require any kind of immediate benefit nor
relate to improving human living conditions. The quest for knowledge is
sufficient if you can provide evidence (i.e. list recent relevant references)
that lots of people are also interested in the same problem.
References:
You should use citations in the text, e.g. (Smith, 1996), whenever you mention
the results or ideas of a previous study. I expect you to locate primary
references, i.e. original research articles published in journals, rather than
secondary references, i.e. summaries of studies from textbooks, review
articles, or articles written for a lay audience, such as newspaper or popular
magazine articles. Any articles cited in the text must be fully referenced in a
literature cited section at the end of your paper. You
should adopt a consistent format for these references. A good example is
provided by the journal Animal Behaviour at the end of every article. You can
also adopt the format I use in my lecture outlines.
Dos and
Don'ts
Dos: Create subdivisions within sections to highlight topics and improve
readability.
Include figures that convey information simply and dramatically
Include a flowchart to link experiments if more than three or four are planned.
Hand in five
copies of your proposal.
Don'ts:
Go beyond page limits.
Miss deadline for submission.
Make grammatical or typographical errors.
Write for the specialist; rather, write for the informed lay
person.
Forget to summarize importance of project at the end of the proposal.
Evaluation
Each student will submit five copies of their proposal. Three of your
classmates will read and comment on your proposal. During the last two
discussion section meetings we will discuss our reviews and the class will rank
the proposals and recommend the best for funding. The instructions
for reviewers follows. This is very much like the process used by
governmental organizations, such as the National Science Foundation, when they
solicit reviews from external sources.
Please provide a frank, critical appraisal of this project proposal. Evaluate
the grant on creativity in choice of subject and design of research, adequacy
of experimental or observational protocol in testing hypotheses, logic and
clarity of presentation, and potential impact of the research on the scientific
community as well as on society. Use the scale at the bottom of the page to
categorize your overall impression of the proposal. If you do not sign the
proposal, your comments will be returned to the applicant anonymously.
___ Excellent _____ Very good ____ Good ____ Fair ____
Poor