[00:00.00]Narrator: Listen to a conversation between a student and a professor.
[00:06.50]Male Student: Hi, Professor Anderson. [00:08.17]That was really an interesting lecture in class today.[00:10.81]Female Professor: Thanks, Tom. [00:11.82]Yeah, animals’ use of deception…ways they play tricks on other animals … that’s a fascinating area. [00:18.12]One we’re really just starting to understand.[00:20.51]Male Student: Yeah.You know, selective adaptations over time are one thing…[00:25.00]oh, like uh, nonpoisonous butterflies that have come to look like poisonous ones…[00:30.17]But the idea that animals of the same species intentionally deceive each other…I’d never heard that before.
[00:36.87]Female Professor: Right, like . . . uh, like—there are male frogs who lower their voices and end up sounding bigger than they really are.[00:44.49]Male Student: So they do that to keep other frogs from invading their territory.
[00:47.74]Female Professor: Right. Bigger frogs have deeper voices, so if a smaller frog can imitate that deep voice,well…[00:54.39]Male Student: Yeah, I can see how that might do the trick. [00:57.05]But uh…anyway …what I wanted to ask was, when you started talking about game theory, [01:03.58]well, I know a little bit about it, but I’m not clear about its use in biology.[01:08.62]Female Professor: Yeah…it’s fairly new to biology. [01:11.60]Basically, it uses math to predict what an individual will do under certain circumstances. [01:18.80]For example—a business sells … oh, computers, say. And they want to sell their computers to a big university. [01:26.81]But there’s another company bidding, too. [01:29.21]So what should they do?[01:31.14]Male Student: Well, try to offer the lowest price so they can compete, but still make money.[01:35.60]Female Professor: Right, they’re competing—like a game, like the frogs. [01:39.71]There’re risks with pricing too high, the other company might get the sale …there’s also the number and type of computers to consider. [01:48.90]Each company has to find a balance between the costs and benefits. [01:53.24]Well, game theory creates mathematical models that analyze different conditions like these to predict outcomes.
[02:01.29]Male Student: OK, I-I get that. [02:02.96]But how does it apply to animals?
[02:05.20]Female Professor: Well…You know, if you’re interested in this topic, it would be perfect for your term paper.
[02:10.53]Male Student: The literature review?[02:11.84]Female Professor: Yeah. Find three journal articles about this . . . or another topic that interests you…and discuss them. [02:18.29]If there’s a conflict in the conclusions or something…that’d be important to discuss.[02:22.79]Male Student: Well, from what I’ve looked at dealing with game theory… I can’t say I understand much of the statistics end.[02:29.84]Female Professor: Well, I can point you to some that present fairly basic studies…that don’t assume much background knowledge.[02:36.68]You’ll just need to answer a few specific questions…what was the researchers’ hypothesis …[02:42.22]what did they want to find out. [02:44.10]And how did they conduct their research… [02:46.63]and then the conclusions they came to. [02:48.52]Learning to interpret the statistics will come later.
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