www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/13BABO.html?pagewanted=2
No Time for Bullies: Baboons Retool Their Culture Published: April 13, 2004 Page 2 of 2 But in the baboon study, the culture being conveyed is less a specific behavior or skill than a global code of conduct. You can more accurately describe it as the social ethos of group, said Dr. Andrew Whiten, a professor of evolutionary and developmental psychology at the University of St. The report also offers real-world proof of a principle first demonstrated in captive populations of monkeys: that with the right upbringing, diplomacy is infectious.
He harasses and attacks females, which weigh half his hundred pounds and lack his thumb-thick canines, or he terrorizes the low-ranking males he knows cannot retaliate. Barbara Smuts, a primatologist at the University of Michigan who wrote the 1985 book Sex and Friendship in Baboons, said that the females in the troop she studied received a serious bite from a male annually, maybe losing a strip of flesh or part of an ear in the process. As they age and lose their strength, however, males may calm down and adopt a new approach to group living, affiliating with females so devotedly that they keep their reproductive opportunities going even as their ranking in the male hierarchy plunges. For their part, female baboons, which live up to 25 years compared with the males 18 inherit their rank in the gynocracy from their mothers and so spend less time fighting for dominance. They do, however, readily battle females from outside the fold, for they, not the males, are the keepers of turf and dynasty. The new-fashioned Forest Troop is no United Nations, or even the average frat house. Its citizens remain highly aggressive and argumentative, and the males still obsess over hierarchy. What most distinguishes this congregation from others is that the males resist taking out their bad moods on females and underlings. When a dominant male wants to pick a fight, he finds someone his own size and rank. As a result, a greater percentage of male-male conflicts in the Forest Troop occur between closely ranked individuals than is seen in the control populations, where the bullies seek easier pickings. Moreover, Forest Troop males of all ranks spend more time grooming and being groomed, and just generally huddling close to troop mates, than do their counterpart males in the study. Interestingly, the male faces in the Forest Troop may have changed over time, but the relative numbers have not. Ever since the tuberculosis epidemic killed half the adult males, the ratio has remained skewed, with twice as many females as males. Yet the researchers have demonstrated that the troops sexual complexion alone cannot explain its character. Examining other troops with a similar preponderance of females, the Stanford scientists saw no evidence of the Forest Troops relative amity. I confess Im rooting for the troop to stay like this forever, but I worry about how vulnerable they may be, he said. All it would take is two or three jerky adolescent males entering at the same time to tilt the balance and destroy the culture.
|
http://csua.com/feed/