When my Dad moved to Caltech in 1969 there was no neuroscience department or program per se. But there was a behavioral biology concentration within the Biology Division that included the likes of Konishi, Allman, Benzer and eventually Koch and Bower. I’ve often mentioned behavioral biology as the third circle of the Venn diagram that describes our scientific focus at Krasnow. What is behavioral biology–and how does it differ from neuroscience?
To my mind, behavioral biology examines the behavior of animals, but also plants and bacteria within the context of an individual’s biology and the larger biosphere. Thus bacteria travel up a gradient of nutrient by reducing the frequency of random tumble behavior and that is behavioral biology. At the same time the vocalizations of non-human primates and birds are produced by the brain, but are meaningful within the context of their social surroundings and the evolutionary constraints of fitness selection. These vocalizations/calls are also the stuff of behavioral biology.
Certainly Konrad Lorenz’s field of neuroethology falls within the realm of behavioral biology, but to my mind so does the predatory behavior of certain insect-eating plants.
Rob Shumaker’s wonderful work on Orangutan language and numerosity skills is behavioral biology at its best I think.
What about neuroscience?
For me neuroscience is focused pretty much exclusively on the collection of neurons that we call brains. Certainly one aspect of what brains do is produce behaviors, but Walter Freeman might perhaps suggest that those behaviors are an epiphenomenon of what brain’s really do: which is change their ensemble states.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 