HANDICAP PRINCIPLES

Handicap Principle

Handicap Principles and evolution of communication

Handicap principle

The theory of disability (or "handicap principle") is a hypothesis of biological evolution originally formulated by biologist Amotz Zahavi in 1975 to explain how evolution has developed solutions that enable animals to send signals " honest "and worthy of trust between individuals who have any interest contrary to bluff and deceive them. The theory suggests that disability trustworthy signals must have a high cost for the 'reporting', a cost that could be supported by an individual who has not, or less, a personality trait. Thus, in the case of sexual selection by a partner of the opposite sex, the theory suggests that animals with better capabilities biological signal this fact through a morphology or behavior disabilities, and it so real, reduce these biological capacities higher.

The key idea is that the traits involved in sexual selection operate on the principle of conspicuous consumption of resources, noting that the individual can afford to spend unnecessarily resource, simply by providing the proof is to say by making it really, spending this resource need. The recipient knows that the signal is synonymous with quality in the reporting since reporting of lower quality simply could not afford to produce signals so extravagant and unnecessary.

This theory thus offers an explanation for certain behaviors and anatomical features of the apparently aberrant evolutionary point of view, which would seem at first to reduce the chances of survival of the individual animal that exhibits. This principle has given rise to a number of debates and disagreements, and ideas that Zahavi explains about the importance of disability are in the field of biology are marginal. However, the theory has had some success, and most researchers in this field now believe that it helps to explain some aspects of animal communication.

Evolution of communication

The world organic is filled with smells of sounds, movements and signal power by which animals interact in different contexts such as the attraction of the partner, the competition for resources, search for food Any communication involving two individuals, a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter produces a signal which is the support physics of information. The signal causes a change of behavior / physiological state of the receiver. The receiver can sometimes use this information to make decisions that result in a behavioral response (Zahavi , 1975). The response of the receiver is likely to affect the survival of the issuer as well as on his own. Any exchange of information between two animals is not comparable to a communication (eg, a mouse that makes noise while moving does not communicate with the owl which hunt, the echolocation that allows an animal to move in space or to locate their prey through the echo of his own sounds is not a communication). We consider a communication when this process is a benefit in terms of survival of the individual, group, species. We restrict here to the intra-specific communication, eliminating situations is more or less contentious - and sometimes real - when ...