Posted: November 13th, 2022

Whatever “sentence” is closest is used for the next generation of copying, again with a few errors thrown in.

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Book: https://3lib.net/book/11182455/b31850
Slides are screenshots. Looks like a lot but it’s not.
Review the slides and book from Chapters 1 & 2
Submit a written response to the following questions:
1. To explain how the blind process of natural selection—a process dependent on random events (mutations)—can generate complex adaptations, Richard Dawkins invites us to imagine that an evolved attribute is like an English sentence—like a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, such as, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL (Dawkins 1986). The odds that a monkey would produce this line by tapping at a typewriter are vanishingly small, 1 in 10,000 million million million million million million (1 in 1040). These are not good odds. But instead of trying to get a monkey or a computer to get the “right” sentence in one go, let’s change the rules so that we start with a randomly generated letter set, such as SWAJS MEIURNZMMVASJDNA YPQZK. Now we get a computer to copy this “sentence” over and over, but with a small error rate. From time to time, we ask the computer to scan the list and pick the sequence that is closest to METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL. Whatever “sentence” is closest is used for the next generation of copying, again with a few errors thrown in. The sentence in this group that is most similar to METHINKS … WEASEL is selected to be copied, and so on. Dawkins found that this approach required only 40 to 70 runs (generations) to reach the target sentence. What was Dawkins’s main point in illustrating what he called cumulative selection? In what sense is this example not a perfect analogy for natural selection?
2. William Searcy and colleagues played recorded songs to captive female song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) that had been given hormone implants shortly after being taken to the laboratory from the wild (Searcy et al. 2002). The recorded songs came from male song sparrows that lived in the females’ population, as well as from males living various distances (18, 34, 68, 135, and 540 kilometers) from that population. Songs from males living 34 or more kilometers from the females’ population were not nearly as effective in eliciting the precopulatory display as songs from local males. However, songs from males living only 18 kilometers away were about as sexually stimulating as local songs. These data have relevance for more than one ultimate hypothesis on song learning by male sparrows. What are the hypotheses, and what importance do these findings have for them?
3. What features of language learning in humans are similar to song learning in birds? What do these similarities suggest about the genetic and developmental bases of human language learning? Do comparisons with birds also suggest some interesting hypotheses on the adaptive value of learned language for members of our species?

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