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SUMMARY:Games Animals Play - Professor Nick Davies\, University of Cambrid
 ge
DTSTART:20160226T173000Z
DTEND:20160226T183000Z
UID:TALK58861@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Janet Gibson
DESCRIPTION:Abstract\n\nIn the final paragraph of The Origin of Species\, 
 Charles Darwin leaves us with the vision of Nature as an "entangled bank"\
 , where individuals struggle to survive and reproduce in a world of compet
 itors\, predators and parasites. In this lecture\, I shall explore the gam
 es animals play in these struggles. Some are behavioural games\, resulting
  in an extraordinary mix of cooperation and conflict in animal families\, 
 where sexual partners and parents and their offspring sometimes help one a
 nother\, but sometimes cheat. Some are games played over evolutionary time
 \, where strategies escalate over the generations between competitors\, an
 d between enemies and their victims\, leading to extremes\, not only in we
 aponry and cruelty\, but in ornamentation and beauty\, too. I shall illust
 rate these themes especially with examples of mating games in birds and ev
 olutionary arms races between cuckoos and their hosts\, to show how the ru
 les of the games can be unravelled by a combination of bird watching and f
 ield experiments.\n\nBiography\n\nNick Davies is Professor of Behavioural 
 Ecology at the University of Cambridge\, and a Fellow of Pembroke College.
  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 2015 he gave the Croonian Lect
 ure. His book "Cuckoo - Cheating by Nature" was published recently by Bloo
 msbury.
LOCATION:LMH\, Lady Mitchell Hall
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