The Heiligenberg Rule

When I was at the International Congress for Neuroethology in August, I tweeted this piece of advice offered for neuroethologists:

Use the champion animal.

Speaker Bill Kristan attributed this Walter Heiligenberg. The idea is simple: study the animal that is the best adapted, or makes greatest use of some feature or ability.

I was fascinated that I had never heard this quote before, even though Heiligenberg is well-remembered in the neuroethology community. (He died in 1994). I was further fascinated by how “sticky” this quote was at the meeting. “Champion animal” turned up in talk after talk, until by day 5, I was calling it “the Heiligenberg rule.”

I wondered if Heiligenberg had ever written that that memorable advice down. After running into a few dead ends in Google and Google Scholar, I found this, which seems to be the origin of the phrase (Heiligenberg 1991):

We have learned that some animal species are champions in particular aspect of sensory or motor performance and that such superior capabilities are linked to highly specialized neuronal structures. Such structures incorporate and optimize particular neuronal designs that may be less conspicuous in organisms lacking these superior capabilities (Bullock 1984, 1986a,b). Moreover, the behavioral repertoire of such “champion” species readily offers paradigms for testing the performance of their special designs at the level of the intact animal.

I was a little disappointed that the verifiable version of punchy, memorable advice is stuck in longer, more mundane scientific prose. I suppose I should not be surprised, given that many other great ideas start off as rather lengthy bits in print, and get shorter (and more memorable!) in the retelling.

For instance, the phrase, “an inordinate fondess for beetles,” is often quoted (or misquoted) as being from J.B.S. Haldane. According to Stephen Jay Gould, who researched the phrase (reprinted in his book Dinosaur in a Haystack), Haldane almost certainly said this in conversation. But the versions of this idea that Haldane wrote down (“endowed with a passion...for beetles”) are nowhere near as good as “inordinate fondness.”

Then there’s the story of how a quote from a business professor in the 1960s became widely attributed to Charles Darwin. And in that case, too, the quote got shorter and more memorable with repeated retelling.

I am sort of hoping that Heiligenberg might have said the short version in conversation. The idea is worth encapsulating in a short, powerful sentence instead of academic prose.

References

Heiligenberg W. 1991. The neural basis of behavior: a neuroethological view, Annual Review of Neuroscience 14(1): 247-267. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.ne.14.030191.001335

Gould SJ. 1993. A special fondness for beetles. Natural History 102(1): 4.

Photo from here.