Richard Prum: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, sometimes albatrosses don’t breed until they’re 20 years old or even, on average, maybe it’s what — 10 years old. What are they doing in the meantime that’s so important? Well, that is a deep question. I actually have a student working on delayed maturation. What are they getting better at, right? Because life history theory tells you that there’s no upside to delaying reproduction if all things are equal, but they must be getting better at something. A lot of people think it’s foraging. Raising that one young on an island, and foraging hundreds of miles out in the ocean and returning, and there’s the whole social relationship to raise an albatross family. It’s tough. Being efficient enough to raise may take years to develop. You’ve got to get good at foraging before you can raise a baby, and certain diets certainly require that. We have the same thing in many large gulls. It could be that they’re getting better at foraging. One thing I like about ornithology is it has a lot of game theory, just like economics does. Sometimes when I read it, it feels very familiar. Let me ask you whether you all have the same problem that we do. With economic theories of signaling, once you get past the very simplest model, typically there are many multiple equilibria that theories are hard to test. They can predict all kinds of things, and you don’t know what to do next. Does ornithology have the same problem with signaling, an extreme of multiple equilibria?…

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