Developing broad brains: the importance of an early introduction to evolutionary thinking in undergraduate...

There have been a number of calls for neuroscience to embrace a wider range of model systems. Authors of these opinion pieces have emphasized the inherent value of explicitly evolutionary and comparative work in neuroscience and the value of diversity in applied and biomedical research. However, few of these papers address the role of undergraduate neuroscience education in preparing students to pursue, much less value, evolutionary and comparative neuroscience. Here, we argue that the field of neuroscience would benefit from the explicit inclusion of evolutionary and comparative neuroscience in introductory courses. We first review the state of introductory neuroscience curricula and available teaching materials, before discussing the importance of an early introduction to evolutionary and comparative ideas, challenges to incorporating these ideas into introductory courses, and finally offer a number of strategies to increase student awareness of the diversity of systems available for neuroscience research. We speculate that introducing students to evolutionary and comparative neuroscience early in their education may increase retention of students with an evolutionary or comparative bent, which may increase the number of researchers interested in pursuing these questions in their careers, while also making students bound for health, biomedical research, or engineering professions more aware of the value of evolutionary and comparative approaches.