|
A monkey will scream to warn its neighbors when a predator is nearby. But in doing so, it draws dangerous attention to itself. Scientists going back to Darwin have struggled to explain how this kind of altruistic behavior evolved. Seriously, this is not that hard. If the prey is relatively mobile, for most predators the gig is up if the prey is aware of them. If the prey is alerting it's friends that a predator is around, then that particular animal has seen the predator and is usually therefore relatively safe from it. For example, if an angry dog is barrelling towards your unsuspecting friend, shouting out may draw attention towards you, but you can shout and take countermeasures at the same time. It's not a zero-sum game, and you don't need hundreds of iterations to make it beneficial to yourself. I mean, hell, watch a random Attenborough nature special, and you're likely to hear him talk about the prey spotting the predator, leading to an abandonment of the hunt. The strange maths continues with the "Bat's Dilemma" example. In the case where both bats do the same thing, share or not share, there are disconcordant outcomes. Same population of bats, same amount of food available, yet somehow there is much more hunger if they don't share. This would only make sense if each bat only occasionally had a meal from a source which was much larger than it could eat by itself, then had a long period without finding food... in which case, sharing the excess really isn't a dilemma, since it's excess. I really don't understand the maths in that example. Game theory really does seem to be a hammer desperately searching for anything that looks like it might possibly be a nail. It is interesting that the end of the article says it has some suitability for microbe research, where things are much more stimulus/response and much less complex. |