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Science

The Primate Police 40

Posted by Zonk from the won't-you-take-me-to-monkey-town dept.
An anonymous reader writes "LiveScience reports on research indicating that certain monkeys act like cops in a group. When they removed the enforcers, the monkey society fell apart. The rest of the monkeys quickly formed cliques with friends and family and interaction between the groups ceased. More interesting is how the monkeys 'vote' for their law enforcement officials, by baring their teeth to show deference. From the article: 'When an individual receives these voting signals from most of the group, it shows he is well respected--or feared--and he becomes the new sheriff in town.'"
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The Primate Police More

The Primate Police

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  • Fox Hit Pay Dirt! (Score:4, Funny)

    by grogdamighty ( 884570 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @02:54PM (#14570636) Homepage
    Finally Fox can combine some of their best programming: Cops and When Animals Attack!

  • there's something now (Score:4, Insightful)

    by caffeinemessiah ( 918089 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @02:55PM (#14570649) Journal
    just more proof that we're related to our simian cousins -- even in our society, certain monkeys decide to become cops.
  • Didn't Dr. Jane Goodall [janegoodall.org] figure this out twenty-five years ago?

  • Unforgiven (Score:5, Funny)

    by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohn@noSpAM.gmail.com> on Thursday January 26, 2006 @02:57PM (#14570677) Journal
    Bill Monkey: Who's the owner of this canopy?
    Monkey Dubois: I, I am. I bought the place for 12 bananas in '79 and ...
    [Will throws feces at him]
    Little Bill Daggett: You, sir, are a smearing son of a bitch! You just roadappled an unarmed man!
    Bill Monkey: He should have armed himself if he was goin' to decorate his tree with my friend.
    Little Bill Daggett: You'd be Will Monkey out of Missouri; smearer and fecal slinger of innocent women and children.
    Bill Monkey: I'm Will Monkey and I've shat on most everything that walks or crawls; and now I'm here to brown you Little Bill for what you done to Ned.
    Little Bill Daggett: [walking toward Will] All right boys, he's only got one handful left. When he throws, cowpie this son of a bitch down.

  • Overlords (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I for one welcome our new monkey overlords.

    *bars teeth*

  • I disagree with the conclusion (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    After RTFA, it seems pretty clear that the "researchers" failed to establish proper control guidelines and jumped to the nearest conclusion that supported their hypothesis.

    Based on the skimpy article, I submit an alternate hypothesis: that the submissive monkeys became fearful when [unseen?] overlords came in and "removed" their elected officials. This caused them to form small protection groups. The article also does not document how long this behavior continued.

    Consider the following experiment: Start a s
    • Ah, but why do those people form small groups? Why, after living in a small, tightly-knit community for many years, do they fragment into smaller, family-based groups? Why do these groups then exhibit hostility towards each other?

      Possibly because the presence of those elected officials establish the expectation of a "safe" society that allows these groups to mix, and then police their interactions?

      I know you were going for a cheap "hah, aren't scientists stupid - look what else it could have been" poo-fli

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @03:25PM (#14571062)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • That's surreal... (Score:5, Informative)

    by eth4n0L ( 836004 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @03:33PM (#14571177) Homepage

    Just last night, I cited the Nature article in question in an assignment regarding poorly-written scientific papers (focusing on the quality of writing itself, not the quality of the research).

    This is the abstract of the article in question:

    All organisms interact with their environment, and in doing so shape it, modifying resource availability. Termed niche construction, this process has been studied primarily at the ecological level with an emphasis on the consequences of construction across generations1. We focus on the behavioural process of construction within a single generation, identifying the role a robustness mechanism2--conflict management--has in promoting interactions that build social resource networks or social niches. Using 'knockout' experiments on a large, captive group of pigtailed macaques (Macaca nemestrina), we show that a policing function, performed infrequently by a small subset of individuals3, significantly contributes to maintaining stable resource networks in the face of chronic perturbations that arise through conflict. When policing is absent, social niches destabilize, with group members building smaller, less diverse, and less integrated grooming, play, proximity and contact-sitting networks. Instability is quantified in terms of reduced mean degree, increased clustering, reduced reach, and increased assortativity. Policing not only controls conflict3, 4, 5, we find it significantly influences the structure of networks that constitute essential social resources in gregarious primate societies. The structure of such networks plays a critical role in infant survivorship6, emergence and spread of cooperative behaviour7, social learning and cultural traditions8.

    Citation, if you're interested: Flack, J. C.; Girven, M.;de Waal, F. B. M.; Krakauer, D. C. Policing stabilizes construction of social niches in primates. Nature. 2006, 439, 426-429.

    • that abstract seemed really clear to me. It seemed intelligent and well structured, and summarized the reasarch methodology and findings in an easy-to-understand way. What about the writing do you note as being weak or poorly done?
      • We have a component of our class where we analyze scientific writing from a more liberal-arts perspective; as I said, we were looking at it with more of a critical eye toward style and diction than accuracy.
        • Sure, I follow you. I'm curious *what* aspects of the style and diction you found lacking.
        • Nature, being a short-format and high-profile journal, is nearly impossible to write for in a flowing, style-conscious way. The short length requirement of the articles calls for extreme terseness and high information density, and thus high jargon density.

          Your analysis would be better served by several different articles of the same, long-format journal.

  • Monkeys and middle-schoolers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lonesome Squash ( 676652 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @03:46PM (#14571377)
    My wife teaches at a small middle school. For years she was complaining about this one class. Far more than other classes at this school, this one was torn apart by clicquishness, mean gossip, social scheming, climbing, backstabbing, deliberate exclusion, etc. -- all the sins for which middle school is notorious. She often said that the problem was that there were no clearly dominant figures in the class. If the dominant figures are nice, then the class tends to be nice. If they are miserable, the class tends to be miserable. But when they were absent, it caused anxiety and uncertainty that led to a loss of minimal standards of social behavior.

    *sigh* So we're monkeys. At least we don't throw excrement at each other. Mostly.

  • "Watch out for Sherriff Bonobo and his Deputy Rhesus. They are deadly shots with their poo!"
    • I understand bonobos [dannyreviews.com] have more appealing methods of conflict resolution, maybe assisted by not having attained a population density where STDs became a selection factor.

  • Not just with monkeys -- dogs too. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @05:06PM (#14572541) Journal
    You'll see the same kind of behaviour with dogs at a dog park. If two dogs get into a fight, other dogs often try to 'break it up'. The peacemakers aren't necessarily the alphas either -- more often they're the betas.

    I think it has something to do with an innate instinct to protect the pack, sort of like: "don't hurt each other -- we're a pack and we need everybody, and besides, there are no veterinarians out here." Well not really, but you know what I mean.
  • sumary: without domination and coercion, individuals go and do thier own thing.

    Sounds like a rationale for the Stalinism.
  • I was more amused by another story [livescience.com] on the same site. It has been noted that monkeys also use chemicals for pleasure [barbelith.com].

    Given this, the question is "do the monkey police have a vice squad?"

    • Given this, the question is "do the monkey police have a vice squad?"

      We'll know the answer once reports of monkey's in Armani pastel jackets over white t-shirts have been corroberated.

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