matina >> academics
I began graduate studies in the Biology department at the University of Washington in Fall 2002. I
am working in Carl
Bergstrom's lab, and also spend a lot of time at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology in Leipzig working with Michael Lachmann.
research interests
Generally speaking, I am interested in the evolution of communication systems
and other social behaviors in animals. Unlike, say, foraging behavior, the
selective advantage of a social behavior depends on the behavior of other
members of the population. Evolutionary game theory is a powerful tool which
can be used to model the evolutionary dynamics of social behavior in a
population, or to predict the long-term results of such evolution. Any social
behavior can be seen as a strategy in a game, played by a population of
individuals. Each individual's payoff in the game depends on the strategies of
all members of the population. These strategies are inherited, either
genetically or culturally, and reproductive success is proportional to payoff
in the game.
projects
- evolution of communication: How
do animal communication systems evolve? What kinds of systems could
evolve in an environment where natural selection acts to increase
communicative success? How does learning influence the evolution of
these systems? Can this tell us anything about how human language
might have evolved?
- bet-hedging and phenotypic plasticity: When environments
fluctuate randomly, any genetic strategy which is optimized for any one
of the possible environments will suffer during the others. An optimal
strategy, when no information is available about the environment, is to
"hedge one's bets", or randomize between optimal strategies for the
different environments. When reliable cues about the environment are
available, however, phenotypic plasticity is more advantageous. What
happens when unreliable cues about the environment are given?
Can bet-hedging still be an optimal strategy?
curriculum vitae