Theoretical Models
The producer/scrounger game contains cheaters. Producers search for their own food while scroungers take the food others have found. Scroungers benefit when producers are common. Producers benefit when scroungers are rare. If there are many scroungers and few producers, the producers are easily able to find food since there is much less competition. If there are few scroungers and many producers, the scroungers can easily cheat. The scroungers are no longer competing against each other to take the producer’s food. A bird can be a scrounger. Instead of foraging for its own food, the scrounger will wait until another bird comes back with food. The next day, the scrounger will follow the successful bird to the patch. The cheating bird reaps the benefits without putting in the effort that the producer put in to find the food. Experiments on this model have been performed on the Scaly-breasted Munia.
Read more about this topic: Cheating (biology)
Famous quotes containing the words theoretical and/or models:
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)