About leaving the neuroscience lab

Comparative neuroscience aims to understand, among other things, the biological origin of human behavior. However, how assumptions about brain functioning and evolution affect the study of animal brains for accomplishing this goal has yet to be satisfactorily considered. In this chapter, I discuss changes in assumptions that have guided comparative neuroscience studies in the second half of the last century. I show that, contrary to what most scholars believed, evolution does not always proceed from the simplest to the most complex. Moreover, species-specific behavioral functions cannot be localized to relatively fixed areas of the brain because brain functions depend on environmental and developmental factors that affect how the brain responds to stimuli. Because understanding the evolution of behavior requires studying brain plasticity and variations across social and nonsocial contexts, neuroscience must move out of the laboratory and aim its lens at free-living subjects in naturalistic settings. The investigation of human uniqueness, I argue, must embrace the ecology (and ethics) of animal models more than we were prepared to do a few decades ago.