Logical Reasoning

PT154 · S1 · Q15 In the winter, ravens survive

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In the winter, ravens survive by eating carcasses; in fact, an individual raven may survive for weeks on one carcass.

Heinrich's Study

It's aimed at Solving a Causal Mystery, so we can use our Explain Curious Fact mindset if that helps us organize the ingredients.

Curious Fact ... Given that ravens survive by eating carcasses and can live for weeks on one carcass, why are they often recruiting more ravens to help them eat one?

One Possible Explanation ... The ravens are benevolent altruists thinking, ?

Heinrich's Explanation ... It's probably juvenile ravens that that are enlisting other junior ravens in order to chase away a local mated pair that has exclusively claimed the carcass.

Evaluate

What sort of Question Type is this? We might be totally confused about what we're doing, so the best thing we can do is to re-read the paragraph and get a good understanding of it.

Glancing at the answers, we see abstract descriptive language, so we would probably interpret this as something like a Method question, in which we basically need to pick any description that matches.

Goal

Pick whichever answer descriptively matches the paragraph.

15.

Which one of the following descriptions best fits Bernd Heinrich's study as reported in the passage above?

  1. He proposed two alternative hypotheses,

    Only One Alternative

    Heinrich does propose an alternative hypothesis. He thinks, "the ravens aren't enlisting other ravens to go eat a carcass together because they're generous and altruistic, it's because if they were on their own they'd get chased away by a mated pair that's claimed the carcass."

    1% picked this

  2. Correct

    His investigation partially confirmed prior

    Why this is right

    Yikes, what an answer. We can sign off on the accuracy of the idea that his investigation partially confirmed prior observations. Prior observation -- "according to many reports", ravens recruit more ravens to eat a carcass. Heinrich's meat experiment partially corroborates this, since juvenile ravens assembled in groups to try to eat the meat "carcass". This means that the phenomenon of ravens recruiting other ravens to go eat a carcass is the opposite of altruism. Rather than being a selfless act of sharing, a juvenile raven is asking other ravens for help (for selfish reasons, because the juvenile can't eat the carcass unless he shows up with a gang of friends). Since this alternate explanation is completely self-interested, instead of selfless, we could say it's radically different, but certainly no one would love that type of strong wording on a first pass.

    Skill tested: Method · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

    88% picked this

  3. He proposed a theory and

    Out of Scope: proposed theory

    There's nothing in the text that suggests he proposed any theory prior to setting out his meat test. All we know is that "this seemingly altruistic behavior struck him as being worthy of investigation".

    6% picked this

  4. He used different methods from

    Opposite: same conclusion

    The earlier conclusion was that ravens were just being altruistic. He did not arrive at that same conclusion. He concluded that the raven enlisting other ravens actually had a selfish motive: they were too puny on their own to displace the mated pair that had already claimed the meat.

    2% picked this

  5. His investigation replicated previous studies

    Out of Scope: replicated previous studies

    We never heard about any previous studies, nor were we given any suggestion that Heinrich replicated anyone else's methodology.

    3% picked this

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