Work in groups. Each group will consider one of the descriptions of animal and human behavior presented below. Your task is to try to explain them as best you can. Once you have done this conduct a class seminar in which you summarize your group's findings and try to answer the discussion question below.
1) The oystercatcher will abandon its own egg when presented with a super-normal plastic model many times the natural size, an egg it could not possibly have laid.
2) The silver-washed fritillary butterfly males are more sexually attracted to rotating brown and black striped cylinders than the fluttering wings of their own females.
3) Herring gull chicks instinctively peck at the red spot located at the base of their parent's beak. This stimulates the adult bird to regurgitate partially digested food into the mouths of their chicks. However, if the young are presented with a red pencil and a model of its parent's head and beak, it will prefer the pencil.
4) Composite photos of the faces of women of a similar age blended together produces a face that most men find attractive. This has led to the conclusion that what we consider to be a beautiful face is an average of many faces. Research on Japanese and Caucasian women in the last decade has revealed that these composite faces can be enhanced to make them even more attractive. This is accomplished by increasing the size of the lips and eyes, raising the cheeks and narrowing the chin, and finally by reducing the distance between the mouth and the chin, and the chin and the nose. The proportion of young women who have these very delicate features are extremely rare (Wilson, 1997 p. 256).
Question for discussion
Why are animals and humans attracted to models that do not exist in reality or that are very infrequent?
Answers
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