#21 - Concept Reference, Must Be True, Author's Perspective, Subject Perspective

[evagabs]

Hello There,

Why is C the answer? Papi's results didn't conclusively concede that homing ability was due to map sense due to the drawbacks of his experiment. I left the passage feeling as if it is most likely not outward displacement, and no one has proved map sense theory either without any experiment drawbacks.

I chose A bc it said in the passage tat "Papi has posited that map sense if olfactory" and the line before that the author said map sense theory seemed more promising.

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi there evagabs,

Let's start at the start. The passage starts with two main theories of how homing pigeons manage to find home. Either they track their outward displacement (like honeybees) or they have some sort of undetermined map sense. We know our author isn't a fan of the first theory (see the first sentence of the second paragraph). The author calls the map sense "more promising." Even though we don't know the mechanism, it seems Papi is also a fan of the map sense theory as he conducted experiments to see how it would work. From the author's words, and Papi's actions, we can deduce that they both think that the map sense explanation is the more probable one.

The problem with answer choice (A) is that the author is pretty clear we don't know how the map sense works. The olfactory explanation didn't pan out in experiments. See the last paragraph for details on how the map sense seems to still work even without the olfactory cues.

Hope that helps