(WIP) Ok, so we got two environments: famine and plenty. And we got two organisms: doves and hawks. Each day, the organisms go out to find food. They may find food for themselves, in which case they eat it, and survive. They may find more than one piece of food, in which case they reproduce. And they may also find a piece of food *and* another organism. What happens next depends on the organism. A dove will offer to share the food with the other. A hawk will fight for the food. If two doves meet, then each gets half the food, and this may not be enough to survive. If a dove meets a hawk, the the hawk gets all the food. And if two hawks meet, then they fight over the food, but the fight might kill one or both of them. When there is plenty of food, doves dominate. Hawks occasionally steal food from a dove, but that dove will get food elsewhere, while hawks have a habit of killing each other. The doves still manage to find enough food to survive and reproduce, and so are never at risk. Hawks, however, have a chance to die because of in-fighting. Eventually there will be very few hawks, but probably not none. When there is a famine, hawks dominate. There is no uncontested food, and every dove eventually meets a hawk, and starves. Sure, a lot of hawks die too, but eventually their population stabilizes. There are no doves. Suppose now that the environment oscillates between famine and plenty. While the hawks will survive, in smaller numbers, the times of plenty, the doves don't survive the famine. Eventually, plenty of famine, only hawks survive. Let's introduce the raven. A raven will behave like hawks when food is scarce, and like doves when food is plentiful. In an environment that oscillates between times of famine, and times of plenty, the raven will dominate to the extent that no doves or hawks remain. During times of plenty, all the hawks die off, but none of the doves or ravens do. During times of famine, all the doves die off, but hawks and ravens survive. After a few cycles, there are only ravens left. The successful behavior is to peaceful or warlike *depending on your environment*. Some of you may recognize this as Mixed Strategy Nash Equilibrium (MSNE). Here, the dove and the hawk are each strategies (hence "mixed"). Lets be mathematicians and say the value at stake is V, and the cost of fighting is C. Players know the math and choose the best stratgy. if V/2>C then players will always choose hawk. If V/2 < C then players will choose hawk at the probability of V/2C. If the value at stake is low compared to cost, then players are more likely to choose dove. If there is no value in fighting, because food is plentiful, then nobody chooses hawk. Humans are the raven. But are we constantly running MSNE calculations in our head? Certainly we have the ability to reason, and do weigh various decisions consciously. But how does our brain know the values of V and C? We can't possibly know that. We can make decisions about buying a car, given its price and interest rates, and gas mileage etc, but can we put specific value on human interactions, or national interactions? We can't. We only have a perceived level of famine vs plenty. ...