If you could swap jobs with one of the Scientists in this zone for a day – which one would you pick?

Question: If you could swap jobs with one of the Scientists in this zone for a day - which one would you pick?

Asked by ryanpendlebury1 to Freya, Katy, Louise, Pamela on 19 Mar 2010 in Categories: About.
- Louise Pendry answered on 19 Mar 2010:
  
  oooooo – that’s an easy one.
  
  They all sound great but the one that really grabs me is Freya’s. Freya’s work sounds amazing. I studied cooperation in animals at uni years ago and it fascinated me. Loved Richard Dawkins’ books – especially The ‘Selfish Gene’.
  
  I’ll never forget this study.
  Vampire bats suck blood from other animals to survive. If they go for too long without a meal they starve to death. Vampire bats will share their blood with other bats and this means that other bats that have not eaten don’t starve to death. Now this doesn’t sound like it makes sense – why give your food away to another bat and increase your own risk of dying? The bats don’t just help out family members – they also let non-family members have a feed but why?????? Well, it turns out that these bats will only share with bats that share with them. If you don’t play fair and share too then they won’t give you any blood when you need it. So…. bats cooperate with each other in order to increase their own chances of survival. A bat being nice is really just covering its own butt!
  
  You want to chat to Freya more about this – the evolutionary basis of cooperation is fascinating! Freya will be a font of knowledge on this topic 🙂
- Freya Harrison answered on 20 Mar 2010:
  
  Ooh, that’s a good question. I think I’d swap with Katy and look at engines for a day – it’s something totally different from what I do and a topic I know very little about, so it would be really interesting to learn something new. I admire people who can make things (and make things work!) so it would be really great to meet some engineers. And I have to admit that I’d be intrigued to see the chicken strike test in action…
- Katy Milne answered on 20 Mar 2010:
  
  Freya. I have never studied biology but as I have got older I have found it more and more interesting. I think there must be loads of parallels between the way animals behave and the way we behave. Why do we do we behave the way we do? Someone asked earlier why girls are paranoid about boys. Does that have an evolutionary purpose? It would be great to have an insight into those things.
- anon answered on 22 Mar 2010:
  
  What a cool question!
  
  I was initially tempted to say I’d try Pam’s job, but I’ve already been a PhD student and I know exactly how hard that is! As a result, I would not take on Pam’s work, not even if you paid me.
  
  Freya’s day starts with coffee and that’s a winner for me but I think I would find that I would end up creating really strange psycological experiments for people and animals alike. So probably not hers.
  
  Louise always comes across as a lovely individual and she gets to play with chickens so I’d have to try hers. BUT my only knowledge is with frozen ones, ready for baking, SO I’d probably have to choose Katy’s job in which they throw frozen chickens into jet engines.
  
  Katy has the best of both worlds, she gets to fly round the world and do experiments. Kinda like me! only she probably gets paid more!
  
  🙂
- Pamela Docherty answered on 22 Mar 2010:
  
  I think I would pick Katy because that trial she described where they broke the wing of a plane sounds brilliant! Plus it would be interesting to see what life is like in industry, rather than the sleepy old world of academia!

Comments

Freya commented on 20 Mar 2010:

Cheers Louise! There’s a nice web page about blood sharing in vampire bats here: http://www.bio.davidson.edu/people/vecase/behavior/Spring2002/Perry/altruism.html
The existence of reciprocity (“you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”) in animals other than humans is quite a hot topic in cooperation research.
- Louise commented on 20 Mar 2010:
  
  No worries – if I ever get to come to Oxford and I’ll have to come and check out your work. You can be the scientist I spend a day with! My favourite scientist is not a million miles away from your office door – literally – anyway 🙂
  Thanks for the article. Do they still investigate cooperation using iterated prisoner’s dilemma type stuff? Or this that really old hat now? I loved all the stuff about evolutionarily stable strategies and Hawk/Dove models. Just wish I could remember it!
  - Freya commented on 22 Mar 2010:
    
    You’d be welcome! There is a vast, sprawling literature on prisoner’s dilemma and game theory… which has little overlap with the ecological/evolutionary literature. We could have a really long and heated conversation about this, but in short my opinion (fwiw) is that a lot of the game theoretical work is really artificial. I think it definitely has a use, but it’s gone beyond being used as a tool to becoming this whole little universe geared to explaining situation that might not actually exist. Though I do use game theory-based ideas in my work because they are handy starting points. This paragraph might make no sense as I’ve been in since 8 and had no coffee yet 😀

Question: If you could swap jobs with one of the Scientists in this zone for a day - which one would you pick?