7. Behavioral Genetics II 

"We'll come back to the amygdala, don't panic." subtle pun

this guy is giving me an excuse to blame my parents all over again

I recommend this class to EVERYYBODY. I studied psychology for years and this really bridges the gaps. The teacher is super educated, I wish I could chat with him. Thumbs UP!!!

"By controlling for the environment, you have removed your ability to see the role of environment " That's such a great point.

"When you look at things like juggling your DNA just when you are making new neurons, what you see over and over is what human genes are about most dramatically is coding for ways in which you have freedom from the effects of genetics" Totally blew my mind. When you end a lecture on that note its hard not to immediately move to the next one. So thankful to Stanford for bringing this up.

Can we all appreciate this guy's intelligent humor

Just to vent, this camera person is blowing my mind on how they decide to not show the visuals on the board that Sapolsky's directly talking about. They're problably not even listening, just thinking 'gotta keep his head in the middle, gotta keep his head in the middle, gotta keep his head in the middle, gotta keep his head in the middle.'

Incredible ability to lecture without reference to notes. Astonishing memory along with knowledge.

I think this dude breathes through his ears. Never pauses. I took 6 semesters of biology, chemistry, pathophysiology and medicinal chemistry each and 2 semesters of physics in college and honestly don't think I'd know how to takes notes in these lectures.

This is absolutely amazing. This entire lecture series is a total gift for those of us who don't have the means to attend a Stanford class. Sapolsky is brilliant and this material will tie in nicely to the courses I'm taking in community college. Thank you for making this public!

This one kid has been coughing for the past four lectures! I hope they get better =(

This exemplifies the true spirit of education. Thank you Stanford for saving us from having to watch television and allow our brains to melt away.

I'm going to invent an app that identifies when I stop paying attention and pauses the youtube video.

They should investigate plant IQ in the environment of my home, as they all tend to die. And please don't come and say the common factor is me. They die even if I'm away for a month.

Russkie Metro Dogs behavioral vs molecular genetics review, prenatal environment Lamarckian evolution Modern methods: 80s, find diff in phenotypes Genetic Marker method, find a family w disease hemophelia, etc Bioethical considerations Sequencing genomes 17:00 Microarrays, Bioinformatics TL, macromutation Basil Crescent hormone, mice v monogamous v polygamous Genes for autism, social propensity BDNF brain-derived neurotrophic factor trains amygala to be anxious or fearful Dopamine, pleasure anticipation, novelty craving NP 31:00 Chance: Brownian motion, mitochondria 40:00 Heritability 1:09:00 25 yr study, Duke U, heritability of aggression, anti-social (formerly sociopathic) vs abuse by cold distant moms 1:22:00 Math & verbal performance vs gender vs nation / environment

He is the Bob Ross of biology

Sapolsky putting every piece of information right where it has to be, and so fluently and undertstandable. My brain tickles after watching a video of him

"number of fingers is massively affected by genes but has 0% heritability, and tendency to wear earrings has 100% heritability despite being entirely cultural" These examples perfectly capture the difference between "trait x has high heritability" and "trait x is genetic"

Robert Sopolsky is one of thee most talented pro's I have ever encounted I cannot thank him enough. It takes alot to catch and keep my attention and he did it hands down..........SQUIRREL

If I were taking this class back in the day, I would’ve needed this lecture recorded. It is SO rich in content, I’d want to listen to it multiple times.

This lecture started a little bit "slowly" but towards the end there were some really interesting and important points!

Thank you Robert Sapolsky. I will never be able to look at genetics in the same way ever again. You completely changed my views on the matter and for that I salute you.

I like how theres a continuous trashing of things he just taught. Watching 7 of these in 3 days probably is a little skewed though, as the actual trashing happened over years or decades. But it really speaks to how little we actually know, even as I am aware of his approach I keep coming to conclusions in my head like "well, this explains X" and not 5 minutes later hes like - let me just wipe the board clean. again. Really appreciate the uploads! Thank you! Man, this Internet thing is cool.

where ever the beard goes, is where the camera goes

These classes are so amazing! Thank you for sharing all this knowledge Standford University and Mr. Sapolsky, the studies mentioned about the importance of the environment related to gender performance are very revealing!

Loving this series. Behavioral Genetics I & II were pretty difficult to get through though. I think the big take away from them is genetics vs environment is complicated, so don't get too excited about correlation graphs.

this is my most absolute favourite teacher

Hi Stanford. I have just finished my masters degree in psychology and am currently unemployed. I will gladly record and edit lectures for you for free as I have a lot of free time on my hands. Please say yes. I know the internet is hungry for these kind of videos in better quality. With a non-clicking camera-man.

Blessings on you, Prof Dr Sapolsky. Your work is a welcome antidote to output of behavioural genetics.

If every professor were like Robert Sapolsky I’d be taking college courses for fun

These lectures are so eye opening and mindblowing its beautiful. Love Professor S

I love reading comments complaining about free content on RU-vid.

i am a physician who has treated addiction for the last fifteen years of my career. I have argued against the importance of heritability whenever given the chance, for this unfortunate outcome for so many people and which only appears to be getting worse, both as the 50% number has been used as an inevitability factor because its “genetic” and even worse to make addiction a “disease” like diabetes or hypertension that again gives the unfortunate little choice in the matter. It is no exaggeration when I tell you I have been the lone voice a the American Board of Addiction Medicine conferences and at meetings of the Arizona Society of Addiction Medicine. In conclusion I can tell you there is no such thing as addiction medicine outside of how can healthcare make a buck. Thank you for these two lectures on behavioral genetics.

I know why you show up here... it's for us. thanks, Sapolsky.

I had a cramp in my stomach after this lecture. You just trashed anything and everything I did know and used for my thinking process. Thanks for doing that ;)

Why am I paying so much for tuition fees when this stuff is free?! Mind blown in every lecture!

I feel so lucky to be attending lessons all over again :D And with this amazing amazing professor :D The only challenge is, where do I start? What do I watch next? lol ...

I can't stress enough how much I like this guy classes XD and I don't even know what i'm doing here I'm just have a bachelor's degree in translation studies and I'm from Venezuela XDXD

His Humor is so well-timed and intelligent that sometimes people pass up a chance to laugh because the important information is just around the corner - what a genius way of captivating the audience !

anyone else taking a 5 min break whenever he tells, in real time? :'D

I don't know why youtube recommended me this , but i will never regret it . I want to become a doctor and this will help me a lot .

After some physics, and behavioral science, you get to intuit that Brownian motion is not random per se, but stochastic - a result of complex interdependence (Gleick's book can help you intuit, which I why, I think, that Sapolsky put it in required reading). The intuition can be followed up by studying complex statistics ( it now requires complex algorithms - computer programs, instead of the more basic stats we get undergrad). I guess this is why any team working on biological behavior has to include a total number-crunching computer programmer or three. Einstein's stuff on Brownian shows that there is a tendency to remain within some limits - this, too, is important to remember in genetic and biological science: that limits occur, including the one which Sapolsky has only just touched - optimality vs. the complex constraints he is going through. The use of "infinite" does not mean what many think it means. Categorical thinking, warned against at the beginning, is a cognitive heuristic; generalization can lead to missing variation. Just to illustrate both overgeneralization, and use a generalization heuristic better, Moscow dogs which he mentioned are several different groups. One, the wolflike furry-tail, is the one most avoidant (NOT in subways) of humans. There are social dogs who read individual (relevant) human characteristics, more and less territorial ones, subway socialites, subway travelers just using it as do pipples. By the way, wolves vary in the adaptive traits these dogs show - I study wolves, with some focus on individual differences; none of the differences mentioned in material about these dogs are foreign to wolves, although they are generally avoidant of humans (humans are death to all wild, self-willed animals. One recent wolf in Germany, just watching, evaluating, learning, a basic wolf trait, was, of course, shot by official fiat due to humans' idea that anything having teeth not running away from them is dangerous. Overactive amygdalae in your species...). Wolves use BDNF too, but their lifespan is only 4k-5k days, 130 to maybe 190 moons, at best, in the real world. This means their evaluation skills are more quickly developed, and must be more accurate - wolves have no time for psychopaths, Machiavellians, the large capacity humans indulge in for complex deception and betrayal. They can recognize these things, when presented by humans - at least the ones who survive it.

I love how unbiased this guy is, he's making all these arguments for the influences of environment while constantly acknowledging the effects of genes. He's a rare gem in the "pick as side" cultural era. 💎

these lessons are extraordinary and confirm other studies on human behavior ... fantastic and great Sapolsky Teacher

Professor Sapulsky. I found you when I left RU-vid unattended. The topics you discussed literally woke me up from sleep. Thank you!

Great series of lectures. I wish the readings were included in description of lectures.

This is the lecture I seem to understand the most! The others just went over my head 🤯

Short summary: Genes are the default settings of humans. Since we are very adaptive to our environment (cf. epigenetics), we get far away from our default settings very rapidly. Therefore, genes do not define much of the variability between us but for people evolving in very similar contexts. In this lecture, he proceeds to give various example of the interactions between genes, environment and their respective effects on human behavior

wow this is mind blowing. I just wish, that earlier in life, I could have come across a teacher like this. Imagine everyone being educated by people as enthused as this. But I guess that is a big point in what he is saying.

The last ten minutes are great!

·nature/nurture has left the chat·

The kid filming does a very diligent job following the speaker, but never zoomed out to show the figures the speaker is drawing. For Christ sake, look to the right!

After reading a few comments about the bad camerawork and still being unconvinced, I finally see what you people are talking about. A third of the information is missing!

love his sense of humor and focus mind

He blows my mind every single time

This is so cool. So packed with awesome information. This stuff is a bit more difficult than previous sections, but the payoff is great. Go Dr Sapolsky. Go Stanford.

The extent to which he builds rock solid purely-genetic arguments just to utterly destroy them to pieces is remarkable

1:24:31 A woman studying in a physics PhD program in Turkey here. It is so sad to see my country listed as one of the worst. I would like to think the situation is improved since then. But still. :(

Please get a better camera person next time. Specifically: 1. Point camera at the diagram the lecturer is pointing at. 2. Point camera at the audience when lecturer asks them to raise hands. 3. Point camera at picture that lecturer puts up (think Arctic Fox from previous lecture). Otherwise, really enjoying this lecture series.

The scarr-rowe effect is relevant to what Mr Sapolsky talks about starting around 1:05:50. The scarr rowe effect shows that heritability rises or lowers depending on the level of socioeconomic status; the argument is that people in poorer environments dont reach their genetic maximum due to environment stunting their growth thus lowering their IQ. Antihereditarians claim that because POC suffer from lower socioeconomic status this prevents them from reaching their maximum potential IQ but the issue is that in recent research we find the heritability of POC twin studies for IQ are similar to the ones used for whites (half or more) meaning that the between group gaps are indeed mostly genetic and that it's a predisposed lower IQ that causes lower socioeconomic status not versa.

The moment he mentioned vasopressin being social I was waiting for the autism comment. I was not disappointed.

I stan Sapolsky and I've been trying to make my students watch these lectures🙂

You start the video. And, from the very first instant, what strikes you is the irresistible flow of verbal energy coming from our Incredibly Learned Professor. It's as if his brain is under pressure from all the ideas packed in there, all jostling for expression, and opening his mouth acts at once as a welcome vent for the pressure to explode and dilate in the free air. The term that comes to mind is the ancient Greek word PNEUMA, the blast of breath that projects the inspired soul of a prophet. Of course the prophet here is spreading the message of science, of demonstrable knowledge. Notice also the inseparable physical energy, how the professor’s compulsive rhetorical outpour is supported by an incessant back and forth pacing, with emphasis projected through sweeping arm gestures. It is the same source of energy that globally activates the legs, the arms, the voice and the brain, driving the words out and fuelling the body’s obsessive motion. The total effect has a certain theatrical power, and keeps the students awake and hanging to every word from the start to the end. A distant modern echo of Aristotle's style of giving his lessons ceaselessly walking through the gardens of his Lyceum in Athens, surrounded and followed by his mesmerized students.

Having read about this stuff off and on after having discovered Steven Jay Gould essays 40 years ago - this is perfect,

This was an amazing class

One small criticism of the camraperson, at about 1:03 the professor's head is being tracked well, but we can't see the information he introduces he introduces on the board. There was a similar problem on an earlier lecture mentioning tame and untame foxes, when the image above the board was not visible. It would be handy in many cases to be able to zoom out or radically change the view to see context, audience reaction, things like that. I realize this isn't a tv production though.

🤔💓😜 thank you! Love love learning about the function of the amygdala. I'm giving a biology presentation about fear of climant change and aspects of human behavior.

This is the best lecture!

I think this was his best lecture

This one is really really good

great course, I would prefer it even more if the camera was fixed in a large view so we could see the stimuli he shows.

If most of Stanford teachers are of his and Susskind's level, then this is the best school in the world! I went to UCLA and I had a few exceptional teachers, including Dr. David Sanchez who was beyond exceptional (DEAD POET'S SOCIETY-level teacher in Differential Equations, of all things!), but I have seen a lot of very good Stanford teachers in these RU-vid videos. Great!

good day to be a biology student! thanks stanford!

"Is there a gene for picking at grubs or is there a gene for if you are really tall and you peck at grubs and people don't make fun of you" - I need this one bad

It would have been good to show the white board once in a while.

he seems like such an amazing teacher

This is not that far out into the future any more. I am hopeful. People will even want to have this done to themselves, because being loving feels sooo much better.

ARound. 1:15 to end genetic & environmental factors in 1) depression 2) in aggression followed thereafter by genetic ie Y chromosome & environmental factors in 1) math ability in 2)verbal ability.

this series really exposes the American myth that anyone can achieve the American Dream. thank you

Minor point: Brownian motion is where the molecules in a gas or liquid run into each other randomly like a stadium full of bumper cars. Brown observed this by looking pollen grains in water and seeing that these grains were moving randomly (because they were being hit by random water molecules). This being said, all you really need to take away from it is "movement in cells is random".

whoooaaaaa. that very last sentence blew my mind so hard. talkin brains splattered on the walls blown!

Mothers are generally teaching young boys certain skills (protection / providing) and girls another set (beauty / nurturing) she gives boys toys that promote spacial awareness and mathematics. Girls are given dolls and taught to care.

57:28 tripped me out what the hell I was saying 100% in my head before he explained it

2:30 i think that one reason that selecting for behavioral traits also carries along traits relating to coat colors and hair curliness is that the brain and the skin both start out as part of the embryonic ectoderm.

It's interesting what he says about heritability being equal to variability. In the merriam webster dictionary it says: _"the proportion of observed variation in a particular trait (as intelligence) that can be attributed to inherited genetic factors in contrast to environmental ones"_ Before he emphasized his view, I understood this definition the other way around. Maybe another word should be used, because of its counter-intuitiveness.

I think one of the things that blew my mind the most.... "Data are plural." 0.o

I don't think Brownian motion is actually "completely random". Anyway, I think it is enough to know that the stuff in a cell is always in motion within the cell, and when the cell splits the stuff other than the DNA goes to different cells depending on where they are in the parent cell at the time. What goes where is statistically reliable.

Where can i access the referenced extended notes (at about 7:00) for the lecture?

Does anybody knows could we find a list of literature used for this course somewhere?

Love how theres somone clicking in their pen like a crazy person the entire video. Cant even fall asleep to the video.

This guy's puns are fresh and make you assimilate things more clearly, am pretty sure it's a requirement for being a Stanford teacher. I mean, 1:05:31 "The Swiss cheese index of the brain" you gotta have an advanced degree to come up with that kind of stuff.

Heritability - the lower the number the less it's explained by variation in gene (alleles) and the more it's explained by other factors such as environment.

The complex conjugate "cavity" of "i", as crystalline-modulation bubble-context structure in a quantum field hierarchical-strata, would restrict variability in the tendency for random bonding in the cells, as it does for all phys-chem wave integration of time. Includes a well explained concept of the distinction between occurrence in infinite complexity, and specificity of evolutionary selection, that's a recognition of the range (by modulation-frequencies) of multiple choice solutions to environmental adaptations. Eg AI is a mechanically restricted methodology that's rare in universal occurrence, and must eventually rely on the same processes of information integration as biology to develop. The books, "The Black Cloud", and "A for Andromeda", by Fred Hoyle is well worth reading.

Memories^^또 불러도 좋을듯 아니 계속 우리가 느낄수 있는것같아 내 플레이리스트에 저장해놨야겠구먼

When he says" we will come back to that point in greater detail later" ,Am I right the translation of that is " we will never touch that subject again."?? I loved his story about meeting Barbra McClintoc

In this lecture a reference was made to introductory and advanced lectures by Teaching Assistants and other professors about endocrinology and (something else). Are those lectures available to non-students? Thank you.

Holy smokes, they just get better and better.

"Amigdala has a lot to do with fear and anxiety and that sort of thing and we will come back to it. Don't panic." 😂

Thank you Dr. Sapolsky :)

i want to give a thumbs up, but i was involved in an industrial accident.