Posted by Swift Claw [208.216.106.154 - ip208216106-154.corb.net] on 11 January 2002 at 01.34.43 ZuluTime:
One of the current books I am picking up from time to time is Ravens in Winter by Bernd Heinrich, which is something like an extra-long paper compiled of his hypotheses and field notes on the recruitment behavior of ravens at food supplies. You might like it, you might not, I really don't know.
This expert, I thought was interesting, so I will share it with you all.
John Maynard Smith, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Sussex, formalized the argument in 1974 in the famous "dove-hawk" analogy in his theory of evolutionary stable strategies. In this analogy an animal can either be a "hawk" (defined as one who always escalates until it either wins or is seriously injured) or a "dove" (one who never escalates and, if it's opponent escalates, then backs down). The contestants fighting over food (or any other resource) never know beforehand which strategy their opponent will use; hawks and doves look alike. Clearly the individual "should" be a hawk when the chances are great of confronting a dove, because there is little danger of retaliation. But when the chances of facing a hawk are great, it is best to be a dove to avoid likely injury. Since the relative value of either strategy depends on the frequency of encounters with the other, neither hawk nor dove can exist long by itself. For example, when doves are plentiful, hawks will enjoy huge advantage and thrive, because they seldom get hurt when attacking and their opponents usually back down. Conversly, when hawks are common, they meet each other frequently and are killed or injured frequently, and doves (who always back down from a hawk but not necessarily from each other) have the advantage of not being killed or injured in an encounter. Therefore, in the long run, the evolutionary stable strategy--the "rational" (mathematical) strategy or Darwinian fitness to the one adopting it--is for both
behaviors to exist in the population at the frequency where costs (injury or death) and benefits (rewards from winning a contest) reach a compromise that ultimately maximizes reproduction.
...
Robert M. Axelrod, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, in 1984 wrote a book about alternate non-kin-based sharing mechanisms, The Evolution of Cooperation. He considered the results arising from different hypothetical strategies that contestants might use and then tested the strategies, not through evolution as is normally done in Nature, but via computer tournaments where one strategy could be pitted against the other within the computer, which would then determine the survivor, or the "best" strategy resulting from the seletion of one versus the others. He ran fifteen strategies submitted by different game theorists, and after the survivor had emerged, he advertised a second tournament in professional journals and magazines for personal computers, telling the contestants the results from the first round. Sixty-three more programs to challenge the survivor were submitted, and a second round-robin was held on the computer.
The winning behavioral strategy, submitted by Anatol Rappoport of the University of Toronto, was this: Automatically cooperate (share), giving the other the benefit of the doubt, and then do whatever the other did on the previous move. In this, the "tit-for-tat" strategy, cooperation breeds on itself. It is neither a hawk nor a dove strategy. It is both. Although a dovish individual might get bested in the first encounter, it is never exploited by the same hawk twice.
The message of the tit-for-tat strategy is that being "nice" is far more successful than being "mean." According to the computer simulation of the "meanest" versus the "nicest" possible strategies, nice guys finish first if they retaliate promptly but do not have too long a memory, and if they never try to get ahead by trying to get the other guy down. Is this how ravens behave? Perhaps. ...
And with this, I leave this board now, and I don't know how frequently I will come back, or if I even will. Unfortunatly, like many things in life, it's not really worth my time anymore. Enjoy it while you do.
~Swift Claw
(Roving Raptor)