Apologies—my blog distillation of “what I learned” is glossing over a lot of stuff that the actual book covers properly: the difference between models where agents only meet the other type vs. also their own type is discussed in §3.3.2–3, and “taller person leads, shorter person follows” is an example of what O’Connor calls “gradient markers” in §2.3.2.
As far as dancing goes, I think it’s kind of like how we give cute mnemonic names like “Hawk–Dove” to payoff matrices of a particular form that don’t quite make sense as a literal story about literal hawks and literal doves, but evolutionary game theory in general really is useful for understanding the behavior of animals (including birds).
Apologies—my blog distillation of “what I learned” is glossing over a lot of stuff that the actual book covers properly: the difference between models where agents only meet the other type vs. also their own type is discussed in §3.3.2–3, and “taller person leads, shorter person follows” is an example of what O’Connor calls “gradient markers” in §2.3.2.
As far as dancing goes, I think it’s kind of like how we give cute mnemonic names like “Hawk–Dove” to payoff matrices of a particular form that don’t quite make sense as a literal story about literal hawks and literal doves, but evolutionary game theory in general really is useful for understanding the behavior of animals (including birds).