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Science

Proof That Nature Hates A Fraud 84

Posted by timothy from the type-r-sticker dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have known for years that insects and animals use distinct markings as status badges. Now, by staging wasp fights, researchers have learned that cheaters never win. Wimpy wasps painted with the markings reserved for a leader get beat up. Even if the fakes win, they still get harassed afterward. The study leader likened it to what might happen to a 97-pound weakling who walks around wearing a black belt. Sooner or later ..."
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Proof That Nature Hates A Fraud More

Proof That Nature Hates A Fraud

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  • Uh oh. (Score:3, Funny)

    by deemaunik ( 699970 ) <ian DOT shepherd AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @03:34PM (#10779658)
    So my plan to get the Alpha Beta Letterman's Jacket and replace my Lambda Lambda Lambda one will fail? Oh noes. I'm doomed!
  • I know some 97 pound black belts who can kick your ass through the room. The small ones often are faster, and some compensate their lack of weight with aggressiveness.

    • Re:weakling (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Planesdragon ( 210349 ) <`slashdot' `at' `castlesteelstone.us'> on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @03:49PM (#10779832) Homepage Journal
      I know some 97 pound black belts who can kick your ass through the room.

      And when they meet a 194 lbs black belt, they probably get thrown in turn. "All else being equal, the stronger man wins."

      A true "black belt" wouldn't walk around with the belt showing in any case; doing so only invites aggrivation, and gives away the small man's most important method of defense: underestimation.

      • Re:weakling (Score:5, Funny)

        by fourtwo ( 825518 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @04:04PM (#10779987)
        But now that this news is out there, maybe a real blackbelt will wear his belt to advertise the fact that he is not a fraud. Then when he is attacked by someone who assumes that he is a weakling impersonating a blackbelt impersonating a weakling impersonating a blackbelt, he can use his new method of defense, "misunderestimation."
      • I know some 97 pound black belts who can kick your ass through the room.

        And when they meet a 194 lbs black belt, they probably get thrown in turn. "All else being equal, the stronger man wins."

        This is not obvious to me. As the previous poster pointed out, small fighters are _fast_. While the smaller black belt would be toast if the heavier one managed to grapple, the heavier one will have a hard time successfully counterattacking as long as the lighter one is on their toes.

        Strength matters, and reach
        • yepp, exactly my opinion. And a person trained in fighting will in most cases win against a person without training, regardless of weight (to some degree). People without fight training (or maybe dancing, too?) have no idea how long their arms reach or how to dodge an attack.

        • Re:weakling (Score:4, Informative)

          by Planesdragon ( 210349 ) <`slashdot' `at' `castlesteelstone.us'> on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @04:56PM (#10780560) Homepage Journal
          Strength matters, and reach matters, but skill matters considerably more than either.

          Very true. Which is why I didn't say "green belt" or "random punk." When our meter of skill is "black belt", we can assume identical values for skill given identical variables.

          If the smaller man is more skilled, or actually is stronger, the larger man is out of luck. But I think a 97-pound strong man would have to be less than four feet tall (i.e., REALLY small) to have a greater lift/weight ratio than the 194 lbs man -- and if you're measuring unadjusted dead lift and the 194 lbs. man is fit, the 97 lbs man is going to be noticably shaped well beyond the human norm.
          • Very true. Which is why I didn't say "green belt" or "random punk." When our meter of skill is "black belt", we can assume identical values for skill given identical variables.

            Um, black belt generally represents the beginning of serious training, as opposed to an endpoint. Depending on how high the school sets the bar, getting to black belt takes 3-6 years or so. That leaves another few decades to continue to improve one's technique.

            Even among the shodans at our school, there is a very wide skill variati
            • Um, black belt generally...

              Which is why it's a horrible phrase to use to measure skill, and a rather foolish proclomation of said ability. But it's what the other guy started with, so rather than bicker about definition I left it there.

              If you took a black belt from a belt-factory and put them up against a green belt from a rigorous, classical, high-bar school, the green-belt may very well wind up winning the majority of matches.

              (And if you grabbed a real 97-lbs weakling whose idea of martial arts is S
          • When our meter of skill is "black belt", we can assume identical values for skill given identical variables.

            You can't assume that fairly. Not all black belts are created equal. I might get a bit of flak over this, but not all martial arts, or martial arts teachers are equal. Put a good Penchak Silat (my personal favorite) fighter up againts your standard Strip mall McDojo Tae Kwan Do blackbelt, and see who wins.

            Additionally, there is a big difference between a fighter, and a martial artist. A good fi
        • The smaller fighter is always at a disadvantage. I remember sparring with my Tae Kwn Do instructor. I am about 6'4" and 230 pounds - not a small person. He was about 5'4" and roughly half my weight.

          First, he couldn't get close enough to get a good hit on me. I could kick at him from a much farther distance. He had to leave a lot of room between myself and him if he wanted to catch his breath.

          Was I slower than him? No, not really. I was bigger, but I had a lot more strength as well. My feet and fists could
          • First, he couldn't get close enough to get a good hit on me. I could kick at him from a much farther distance. He had to leave a lot of room between myself and him if he wanted to catch his breath.

            I'm puzzled as to why he didn't block or dodge your kick and move in to counter before you recovered from throwing it. A smaller person is going to have a lot of trouble throwing the first technique against someone who has longer reach, so reacting to attacks (and ideally, provoking attacks that leave your oppon
            • Same speed, and longer distance, means more travel time. Ditto with the "same acceleration" scenario if you assume the same strength to weight ratio instead of the same speed. Square/cube law means that it's hard for the larger person to have the same strength-to-weight ratio as the smaller person, meaning generally lower acceleration, and an even larger time difference (as well as a time difference even for moving the same distance, and for doing things like changing the direction your body is moving). Exc
          • Um, disrespect not intended twards either you or your instructor, but if your instructor couldn't beat a student, he has no place being an instructor.

            As I said somewhere above, the only thing that matters is training and skill. Forget size all together. As with spoons, "there is no size".

            Through skill all other factors are neutralized. By being able to tell when and where to strike, anyone can beat anyone else hands down. Smaller people can beat someone vastly larger, and larger people can beat everyo
        • Unfortunately none of the footage from tournaments our school has attended is online, or I'd link a few video clips as examples.

          I would like to point out that tournament fighting has absolutely nothing to do with real-world fighting.

          In a tournament fight, a 97lb man punching a 194lb man in the stomach counts as a point. The 97lb man can easily with the bout with a few solid connections.

          In a real-world fight, a 97lb man punching a 194lb man in the stomach will probably hurt his hand, inflict very little
          • I would like to point out that tournament fighting has absolutely nothing to do with real-world fighting.

            Tournament sparring at tournaments is typically non-contact. Practice sparring at the dojo is "light contact", for varying values of "light" (that at one point involved me landing in a weapons rack a few feet away, giving me a healthy respect for kicks). Clean footage of that would be harder to dig up, as less of this was filmed.

            In a real-world fight, a 97lb man punching a 194lb man in the stomach wi
        • If two fighters are of equal skill, the smaller one is at a disadvantage. That's why competitive martial arts have weight classes.

          Small fighters may be fast, but in most cases it takes more than speed to oversome the weight and reach advantage a larger opponent has. Since this discussion is about fighters of equal skill, the small guy _is_ at a disadvantage.

      • And when they meet a 194 lbs black belt, they probably get thrown in turn. "All else being equal, the stronger man wins."

        First, "black belt" represents a large range of skills. A new shodan (first degree black belt) might only have been training for five years, while another person with the same color belt may have been training for forty years. Despite the mystique we've associated with it, a black belt just means competence in the basics.

        I have a photograph of me with Kaicho Tadashi Nakamura [seido.com], founde

        • Third, strategy, guile, and "fighting spirit" play a much larger role in a real confrontation then either size or physical fighting technique. "It's not the size of the man in the fight, but the size of the fight in the man," as the cliche goes.

          What part of "all else being equal" didn't you understand?

  • Star bellied sneeches had bellies with stars (Score:4, Funny)

    by Col. Klink (retired) ( 11632 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @03:43PM (#10779761)
    ...but the plain bellied sneeches had none upon thars.

  • Only a matter of time... (Score:3, Funny)

    by nekoniku ( 183821 ) <justicek&infosource,info> on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @03:46PM (#10779788) Homepage
    Coming soon to ESPN2: Extreme Wasp Fighting!

  • If that's true... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Scaba ( 183684 ) <joe@joefranDEBIANcia.com minus distro> on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @03:46PM (#10779802)

    Cool. Does this mean we'll be rid of Dubya before 2008?

    • I'm a King, Peachy!

      "'A god can do anything,' says I. 'If the King is fond of a girl he'll not let her die.'
      'She'll have to,' said Billy Fish. 'There are all sorts of gods and devils in these mountains, and now and again a girl marries one of them and isn't seen any more. Besides, you two know the Mark cut in the stone. Only the gods know that. We thought you were men till you showed the sign of the Master.'

  • This is idiotic (Score:5, Insightful)

    by itwerx ( 165526 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @03:57PM (#10779919) Homepage
    The whole premise of this article is silly. They're assuming that A - those markings are the only signals and B - that they can reproduce them well enough to fool the other wasps.
    Hello?!? McWasp?!? (Er, McFly!)
    • The whole premise of this article is silly. They're assuming that A - those markings are the only signals and B - that they can reproduce them well enough to fool the other wasps.

      Also the article inadvertenty noted another problem:

      Assuming the honest wasps weren't just reacting to the odor of Testor's, there must be some way they sleuthed out the imposters.

      They were joking, but think about it -- we know that insects see a very different range of colors than we do. Did they make sure that the paints t
    • Hrm, I suppose I should have said "experiment" rather than "article" :)
    • "Idiotic"? Tell me about it.

      1. Wimpy wasp gets beaten up by bully wasps.
      2. Wimpy wasp gets painted.
      3. Wimpy wasp gets beaten up by bully wasps.

      Can we redirect our scientific research to something more practical, like the use of Mexican jumping beans as a method of interstellar travel?
    • It could be a conflict of things. Perhaps the dominant wasps also have "dominance" pheremones, and by painting geek wasps to look like dominant wasps, the resulting discordance within the wasp community with whatever other signalling mechanisms they have simply caused the conflict.

      There are different ant species that get tricked by some spiders (behavior, pheremone or just physical similarity)... There are others that know when ants Not From This Cluster are dropped in, and they quickly dispatch the outsid
  • Perhaps a kind entymologist can answer me these questions three:
    • how do true dominants get their markings? are they simply pigments in the chitin (implying genetic pathways with perhaps environmental causes to expression) or were they earned like battle scars?
    • did they test how two true dominants reacted against each other? (the article only mentions putting the fake war-painteds against true dominants) one would think that the loser would still be harassed regardless of markings being fake or real
    • did t

  • The ultimate zoology nerd prank... (Score:5, Funny)

    by iamlucky13 ( 795185 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @04:17PM (#10780122)
    Putting "kick me" signs on animals backs.

  • Black Belts (Score:2, Funny)

    by Ralman ( 103115 )
    Hey, I wear a black belt, a black leather belt. It is the only color belt that goes with my all black outfit.

    Hey a guy has got to do something to scare and itimidate the other coworkers away so I can read slashdot.
  • how do they find out that the fake wasp was being picked on by the wasps? I mean its not like they get up and start cursing him off or anything, or is there something i dont know about wasps? And how do the wasps know the fakes when we see politicians and believe what bullshit they make up. i say we fight the politicians and have scientists looking at us and see if any of the people make fun of the fake. it could have the same results.

    • Re:Natural Loophole ? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Forbman ( 794277 )
      Well, if you go into a commercial chicken house, and paint red spots on a couple of chickens, those chickens will get pecked to death (oddly enough, they don't do it if they're coverd with shit). With my own chickens, they seem to like pecking at my preety, shiny wedding ring. It's not bad when they're 3 weeks old, but by the time they're 8 weeks old, they're big enough that it starts to hurt.

      Our sheep, we tried putting coats on them this summer. Well, we didn't get them all coated. The ones that were coat

  • This rocks! (Score:3, Funny)

    by PrvtBurrito ( 557287 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @04:43PM (#10780382)
    Wasp fights, as a scientist, I went in to the wrong damn field.

    BUT, a movie quote does come to mind:

    some dude: I could beat you in a fair fight.
    capt sparrow: That's not much incentive for me to fight fair, then, is it?

  • Legal? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Spudley ( 171066 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @04:47PM (#10780456) Homepage Journal
    Staging wasp fights? I can't believe that's legal.

    I mean... they banned cock fighting, bear baiting and dog fights years ago! How come wasps don't get protection?. :D

    Ah well... I guess even entomologists need the excitement of work place betting occasionally. ;)

    • Re:Legal? (Score:2, Funny)

      by jlapier ( 739283 )
      those WASPs voted for a war president, let them duke it out....

    • they banned cock fighting, bear baiting and dog fights years ago!

      Then how can Nintendo sell Pokemon video games? Shouldn't Pokemon, as a glorification of criminal animal fighting (though Nintendo officially denies this), be rated M just like the GTA series?

  • C'mon people, its GIANT insects (zoomed in) FIGHTING!
    This beats rubber monster movies, wrestling, and mechs fighting anyday.

  • pheremones et. al (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MankyD ( 567984 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @05:06PM (#10780680) Homepage
    Aren't there things other than markings that might distinguish a leader? Chemical scents and flying patterns and what not. Does the fake even know that the scientists have made him a leader? If not, how is he to try to assert himself?
    • Does the fake even know that the scientists have made him a leader? If not, how is he to try to assert himself?

      He almost certainly doesn't know, but the point of dominance markings mirroring a wasp's eagerness for dominance would most likely be to prevent wasps from engaging in unnecessary violence. That is, a reluctant wasp sees a dominant-marked wasp and knows not to mess with him, while an aggressive wasp sees a non-dominant-marked wasp and knows there's no need to vie with him for dominance. That le
  • Master Yoda has the Force, you should doubt it not.

  • Been there (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 )
    Just before my first day at Junior High, my older sister told me to put a big-ass comb in my pocket. This was a status symbol back then.

    But, people kept grabbing the comb and tossing it all over the place. I couldn't do anything about it. I was not strong enough (back then) and did not have enough buddies to help. The fact that I could not get the comb back was an ad for further abuse. No more status combs for me.
  • Yep, it looks like this site was tested on IE only.

    I officially don't like that site now.
  • ...after he has been outed. We also know that nature likes frauds that get away with it. Just like people, then.

    Proving the obvious sounds like a good job. Or a good fraud...

  • other way around? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 1nv4d3r ( 642775 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @08:53PM (#10782967)
    Do 'leader' wasps that are painted to look weak still get respect?

  • beer-quiche game (Score:3, Interesting)

    by k2enemy ( 555744 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @01:28AM (#10784832)
    sounds similar to a frequently used pedantic game in game theory called the beer-quiche game. basic idea is that a wimp can send a signal of being tough by drinking beer rather than eating quiche (which he prefers) in order to avoid getting beaten up.

    as always, google has more info [google.com]

  • This is news? Bumfights proved this same theory a year or so ago... and it was MUCH more entertaining.
  • accept to get paid to carry it out. I though in the insect world, body language had as much to do with it as pheromones and looks did. I mean, the painted wasps had no idea they had "royal" markings, so how can you expect them to act dominant if their role is normally subordinant? If the painted wasps could have mimiced movements of the dominant insects then the results may have been different.

    However the conclusion that cheaters in nature dont prosper, what about the thousands of plants animals and insec

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