science market
Brain size and behaviour
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing biologists is to understand how the brain produces behaviour, and how natural selection acts on the brain. As evolutionary biologists, we can look for and attempt to explain variation in brain morphology among species, and indeed recently there have been a large number of studies that have done just this. Most of these are attempts to correlate variation in whole brain size (and in some cases, brain areas) with the evolution of complex cognitive abilities and behaviours. For example, significant correlations have been found between brain size and behavioural flexibility, social intelligence, mating behaviour, and spatial cognition. Whilst it is possible to see the limitations of this approach in the long-term, it has raised the important questions of how whole brain size might be subject to selection, and why might it correlate with an array of different behaviours?
This symposium will explore these questions, by asking contributors to talk about their own findings, as well as why we might expect these correlations to exist. We aim to encourage lively debate on this topic, and to consider the challenges of studying the evolution of the brain and complex behaviour.
The organisers of this session are Dr Sue Healy (Institute of Evolutionary Biology, University of Edinburgh tel: 0044 131 650 7363; email: s.healy@ed.ac.uk) and Dr Candy Rowe (Centre for Behaviour & Evolution, Newcastle University candy.rowe@ncl.ac.uk, Phone: 0044 191 2228671)
Possible contributors: Candy Rowe (Newcastle, UK), Suzanne Schultz (Liverpool, UK), Robin Dunbar (Oxford UK), Clive Catchpole (RHUL, UK), Kate Buchanan (Deakin, Australia), Louise Barrett (Lethbridge, Canada), Sue Healy (Edinburgh, UK), Rob Barton (Durham, UK), Dick Byrne (St Andrews, UK), Simon Reader (Utrecht, the Netherlands), Kevin Laland (St Andrews, UK), Nicky Clayton (Cambridge, UK), Nathan Emery (QMCL, UK), Laszlo Garamszegi (Antwerp, the Netherlands), Marcel Eens (Antwerp, the Netherlands), Louis Lefebvre (McGill, Canada)
