Q8 - A study of guppy fish shows that a male guppy will alte

[ohthatpatrick]

What does the Question Stem tell us?
Strengthen

Break down the Stimulus:
Conclusion: Male guppy changes its courting pattern in response to female's feedback.
Evidence: Males had more orange on one side and tended to show the females their orange side more during courtship; the males with more orange showing tended to get more females.

Any prephrase?
There's a glaring New Guy in the conclusion here. "In response to feedback" from the females? We didn't hear anything about that. We just heard that the orange side was associated with more success with the females and that males showed that side more often. In order to believe that the males responded to feedback from the females, we need to hear a story that sounds more like, "When the males showed females their non-orange side, the females lost interest. So the males were like, 'Come back! Come back! Check out my orange side!'" Since this conclusion deals with causality, we can strengthen it two different ways:
1. Rule out an alternative explanation for why males showed more of their orange
or
2. Increase the plausibility that FEMALE FEEDBACK caused the males to show more orange.

Correct answer:
A

Answer choice analysis:
A) This strengthens with a classic "No cause, no effect" answer. If the author thinks that female feedback is causing males to show their orange side more, then the author would think that WITHOUT female feedback, the males WOULD NOT be showing their orange side as much. That's what this answer choice is giving us. To get there we have to assume that the model DID NOT provide realtime feedback to the male guppies. But that is a safe assumption. To assume the contrary, that the model DID provide realtime feedback that mimicked that of a female guppy, is a much more exotic assumption to make.

B) This is irrelevant and unhelpful. We don't care about "many" other species.

C) We don't care about quantity of offspring.

D) We don't care what color females are.

E) This does almost nothing. If the guppies COULDN'T see each other, then it would be pretty impossible to believe that female feedback could have caused the males' behavior. But learning that the guppies could see each other does almost nothing to increase the plausibility of the female-feedback hypothesis.

Takeaway/Pattern: When the correct answer tries to increase/decrease the plausibility of the author's causal story, the most common type of correct answer is (A): the "control group", which shows that when we remove the supposed-cause, we stop seeing the observed effect.

#officialexplanation

[LsatCrusher822]

Could somebody please explain why E is not correct?

Premise 1: Females drawn to males with more orange
Premise 2: Males tended to show females more orange during courting
Conclusion: Male guppy will later courting patterns in response to feedback from female guppy

I saw this as causal reasoning as its the response from the females that induces the males to show more orange.

A) I didn't like this answer choice because I thought we had to make an assumption that the model that was substituted actually didn't move or respond to anything. Sure a model could be a dummy, and just stay in place, but in many experiments its possible that this model can move and act like the female guppies. This wasn't made clear at all..

B) Irrelevant... who cares about other species

C) More orange coloring? More offspring? these topics are irrelevant and out of scope

D) Who cares about females having orange... do we know if this alters male courting patterns?

E) I thought this could strengthen by removing another potential explanation. If they couldn't directly interact, perhaps this means that they couldn't speak to one another or get the females to mate with the males through physical contact. Notice how the stimulus only talks about "courting patterns." Obviously in order for two organisms to mate, there needs to be physical contact. But do we know if guppies' courting patterns require them to touch one another?

Because A to me require a bigger leap to justify itself, I ended up going with E. So it would be great if anyone could shed some light on this!

Thank you

[DavidP715]

ohthatpatrick can you respond to that^

[RuthS478]

Same question as posted above, if someone could respond to it that would be great!

[Misti Duvall]

Hi! Patrick's post above tackles answer choice (E) and why it's not correct. If you have a more specific question after reading his explanation, happy to answer!