I think this is a sus at best question and answer combination. The behaviour of the meerkat which is being credited as 'evidence' to the supposedly altruistic intentions of the sentinel meerkat isn't even remotely altruistic. It could well be the case that this behaviour (barking to alert the others) is its job and it's compensated for that job via a lower fatality rate and thus a higher percentage chance of having progeny and carrying on its genetic lineage (and this is actually the likely answer in nature).

Is the person making the argument in this question not presupposing that the action is altruistic without providing any evidence? Who says the evidence supports an altruistic conclusion? The argument definitely (wrongly) assumes the barking is because of the cause they suspect, but it is also certainly presenting evidence that presupposes the behaviour is in support of the conclusion, i.e answer choice B.

The question is asking which of the following is a questionable tactic used - so the writers have said only answer choice A is a tactic used when answer choice B could be a tactic also used. How has this answer stood the test of time without being redacted? Am I missing something?

#help How is it 'close enough' to equate 'try to be good' with 'make efforts to live by moral standards'? I don't understand this. I understand that D isn't well supported, but we have been encouraged throughout the entire curriculum to not make massive leaps / assumptions such as that which is required to select answer choice B. Moral standards are not mentioned once in the stimulus and surely mean a completely different thing. It's more than a little frustrating that JY doesn't acknowledge this and simply skips past it, when this would be the determining factor in ruling this answer choice out in another question. I can hear him saying 'moral standards? where did we talk about moral standards? I know that hypocrisy leads to good, but nothing about moral standards' #feedback

How are we supposed to know which 'argument' is being referred to in this question? Could this not be referring either to the 'T rex argument' or to the 'author's argument' that the former was too hasty? I got this right after much deliberation, but I thought for awhile about A as it would seem that the T rex argument people's argument was inconsistent with the 'conclusion' which is that the former was too hasty. Because how could an argument be consistent with a second argument saying the former was too hasty. Anyone have any insight here about how to tell which argument is being referred to when there are two?

But answer choice D doesn't say that the second and third studies were shit and that there was nothing we could conclude from them though, right? It says that the studies did not examine enough children to provide significant support for any conclusion regarding a causal relationship, which the doctor isn't even making. The doctor is saying that if there were a causal relationship, then it probably dissipates with age. But the data he collected was merely correlation based in all of the three studies. So, regardless of whether or not the second and third studies were good enough to draw causal data (and how could this even be done!), it says nothing about correlation, which is actually the only data the doctor mentions. Why does it seem that these crucial details / differences make all the difference in questions, until suddenly they become trivial?

Put another way, does the fact that we can't draw causal data from the second and third studies matter at all if the only data the scientist had drawn from any of the three studies in the first place was only that of correlation? The rest, as per the stimulus, comes from the doctor's imagination for all we know.

#help can any LSAT tutor explain why it's a more reasonable assumption that an actor in a play would not have a copy of the play and not know enough about the play to do better than a 'slipshod handling' than it is to assume that a spectator remembered the lines of his favourite character? These two assumptions at the very least seem to be very similar in terms of reasonableness, so how should we go about determining the (un)reasonableness of assumptions in cases like this? If it is up for debate about which of the two sets of assumptions is more ridiculous, wouldn't that mean there isn't actually a conclusive answer here? I thought it was the case that there are four horribly wrong answers and one definitively correct one. Any help would be much appreciated as this seems to be a very important LSAT skill generally.

#help Does the wording on answer choice E not leave room for ambiguity? Interpreting it as 'what is social in nature cannot be a matter of morality' will make it immediately incorrect because we don't know the relationship (if any) between social and morals. But couldn't it also be read as 'what is social in nature could possibly not be a matter of morality' i.e 'what is social in nature may have nothing to do with morality as a concept' - which would be strongly supported by the stimulus. Am I missing something? Because both interpretations of (could not) are possible and carry radically different answer strengths.

#help Does 'in evolutionary terms' in answer choice C not reduce its accuracy? I get the issue with B, but is the author of passage B actually taking issue with explaining something 'in evolutionary terms' or is he merely suggesting there may be more to the story than the evolutionary mechs?

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#help Does answer choice C not require us to make some pretty unreasonable assumptions? Would we not have to assume that 'concern' and 'interest' are found somewhere in the stimulus? The mere presence of 'common themes' implies that concern and interest are what is driving those themes? And that is a more reasonable assumption than that ancient and present cultures hold storytelling to be roughly equal in importance, given its apparent universality?

#help Kevin / JY can you spell out a bit more about how you'll know if you were too aggressive? You say there's a built in error-correction-mechanism, but what does this actually look like? Do you mean that when you read passage B you'll know the answer to this particular question must have been D and not B, presumably because of some smoking gun you find in passage B which shows it to be totally unconcerned with historians avoiding bias?

And if this were the case, how would you keep the question straight in your head if you've already 'moved on' from it, confident in the overly aggressive stance?

#help JY where are you getting that the author makes a value judgement that predator populations should be used to keep pests in check? The author says that in some cases they are the only option and that parathion usage specifically is ill advised (presumably because it only kills the predator and not the pest?), but the author makes no claim about where predator populations should be used or whether or not they should be - just that they are sometimes necessary. I got 24 correct, but I don't see anything in the text which supports it.

#help Is it a problem at all that the stimulus presents necessary conditions and mistakes them for sufficient while the correct answer choice presents sufficient conditions and mistakes them for necessary? Should we consider sufficiency / necessary confusion to be the same as necessary / sufficient confusion? At least for questions where they don't specify a difference in the answer choice? I think that's what may have thrown me on this question.

#help Would answer choice C be the correct answer if this were a sufficient assumption question? Given that it would certainly guarantee the truth of the conclusion? #feedback I wish JY would point this out more often as I think that's the more crucial recurring theme than what he's explained in this question.