发信人: forestsong (Pia), 信区: Biology
标 题: Re: neuroscience vs ethology
发信站: The unknown SPACE (Wed Jul 5 15:12:02 2000) WWW-POST

There is a whole tradition called Neuroethology. I guess it
is more defined by
the kind of questions they ask. They typically try to figure
out what kind of
purpose does a neural strucutre serve, what behavioral
consequences a neural structure has and what evolutionary
advantages does it confer. But it's really a loose
confederation of researchers.
I guess gems in this tradition that I know of include
Gibson's ethological theory of vision and recent researches
on how the visual system is optimally tuned to the
statistics of the natural scene. Then they are some really
nice work on bat echolocation and electrical fish jamming
response. They basically said, OK this brain structure is
this way because it supports this behavior and it serves
this evolutionary advantage and performs this computation.
It's just really beautiful when you can connect up all
levels like that but it entails a lot of hard work and only
comes once in a while. :)


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※ 来源:．The unknown SPACE bbs.mit.edu．[FROM: rigel.ccs.brand]