Lecture will be held in English

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About the lecture

Optimal Advertising and The Fallacy of Honest Signalling

For the past decades, our view of sexual selection has been dominated by the idea that ornaments and displays evolve to honestly indicate the advertiser’s quality (honest signaling) and that this happens because choosers evolve adaptive preferences for informative quality indicators (yielding good-gene benefits). However, our empirical research on captive zebra finches indicates that advertising signals are largely uninformative, and that choosers seem to not even strive for high-quality partners. These results can be ignored, but I will explain why they may actually be symptomatic of a logically flawed paradigm. The same reasoning that refutes selection acting “for the good of the species”, and at the level of individuals instead, applies to honest signaling. I propose that good-gene sexual selection, like group selection, cannot be entirely dismissed but is largely irrelevant for the evolution of displays. Instead, a shift in focus towards a theory of “optimal advertising” appears promising. Accordingly, displays evolve to be resilient to stress, widely affordable, and uninformative about quality, while choosers lack mechanisms that could enforce a more informative design. Displays hence resemble commercial advertisements which are designed to persuade rather than to inform.

Registration for lunch with the speaker /for Ph.D. students/

The sponsored lunch usually takes place in the Campus River restaurant. Please meet the speaker and other students at 12:45 at the reception desk at the main entrance (building B22, see the map below).