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After our class, I'm interested in how the set points are set and adjusted. It makes sense to me that we have some kind of a set point for body weight, body temperature, etc - it's probably just one of the mechanisms for our physiological regulation. What I'm curious about, however, is how do our bodies decide the proper set point? I'm pretty sure there is a strong influence by genetics, but that doesn't explain how our bodies sometimes alter the set point drastically. Is there a specific location in our brain that controls the set point? Hypothalamus seems to be capable of controling body weight by regulating some important hormones, but still, to what stimuli does it react and change the set point? Also, for people with severe obesity, do their set points work properly? Is their obesity a result of a wrongly set set point, or of a set point failure, or maybe both?
Another thing I'm very interested in is the bird songs we discussed in class. As Professor Grobtein said, depending on the species, birds from sister species may or may not be able to distinguish the song patterns between two closely related taxa if they have no previous exposure to them. It really intrigues me because it reminds me of the paper I did on the greenish warbler ring species last semester. (A brief but very useful introduction: http://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~irwin/GreenishWarblers.html).  Since there are interbreeding zones between neighboring subspecies, it must also react to songs from its most closely related subspecies, so I wonder how do these birds learn their own subspecies' song. Or maybe those birds in interbreeding zones just randomly learn one of the two existing patterns?