Real World Hawk-Dove Game in Nature
For the first time in history, scientists have identified a population of birds that actually play out the hawk-dove game naturally. And to make it even better, the animal population are birds! As discussed in class, the hawk-dove game is a model of a situation where being aggressive pays off if and only if the other player is passive, and where both players being passive results in mutual loss. The game is categorized by the following payoff matrix:
The phenomenon was found in a population of Gouldian finches where the “hawks” are rarer red-headed variety of the finch, and the “dove” is the more common black headed variety of finch. According to game theory, the optimal distribution of doves to hawks should be 70 doves to thirty hawks. The amazing thing is that in nature, this still held! In the finch population, for every 30 red headed finches (hawks) there were approximately 70 black headed finches (doves).
The articles goes on to extend these findings to make a more general claim about how aggression and violence on the whole are detrimental to a population. This based off research that a large concentration of of black headed finches hurts the population, and their number eventually decrease, but only after the damage is done.
I found this article particularly interesting because it took the concepts we learned in class and applies them to real world situations. The real kicker, however, is that this particular application of game-theory is not being applied to a human situation. This logic on how situations should be handled is a logic that plays out in nature as well!