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Proof That Nature Hates A Fraud
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 ..."
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.
...but the plain bellied sneeches had none upon thars.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Coming soon to ESPN2: Extreme Wasp Fighting!
"It's a wonderful idea. But it doesn't work." -- Tad Danielewski
Cool. Does this mean we'll be rid of Dubya before 2008?
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!)
Body weight and strength have a lot to do with how well you HAVE TO fight.
Putting "kick me" signs on animals backs.
Duh. Yes, a person's weight and strength directly impact his/her effectiveness as a fighter. This is precisely why boxers, wrestlers, and other martial artists compete against people in their weight class. All other things being equal, if you put a bantamweight boxer in the ring with a heavyweight boxer, 99.9% (pulling this stat from a place where the sun doesn't shine) of the time the heavyweight will win (the other .1% involves a heart attack). Sure, a 97 pound weakling with a black belt might be able to beat the fat kid that everyone remembers from high school (or is that the average /. reader, is there a diff?). That does not justify your statement that weight/strength "has very little do with how well you fight." If everything other than wtrength/weight is equal, strength/weight plays a direct role in how dangerous a person is. There's a reason you gave your lunch money to the bigger kids -- they were bigger and more dangerous! Catch a clue.
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.
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
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?
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
Staging wasp fights? I can't believe that's legal.
:D
;)
I mean... they banned cock fighting, bear baiting and dog fights years ago! How come wasps don't get protection?.
Ah well... I guess even entomologists need the excitement of work place betting occasionally.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
C'mon people, its GIANT insects (zoomed in) FIGHTING!
This beats rubber monster movies, wrestling, and mechs fighting anyday.
Completely wrong. As with ev erything else in life, skill and will are what determine the winers of fights, not size/mass. If size and weight were the determining factors of fights, boxers would never actually need to box. They would just weigh in and the heavier person would win. Instead of staying in shape our boxers would look like sumo wrestlers. This isn't to say that a larger person dosen't have an advantage, but that advantage is easily countered with training and skill. As a martial arts instructor and a 15-year student of martial arts I can tell you that with propper training someone my size (130Lbs, 5'-9") can easily beat someone much larger than myself. (Have been in a few fights with people who exceeded 200+lbs 6'-6"+ and easily won.) I've also been beaten by people who were 50 years my senior. It's all in the skill. And no, I never gave up my lunch money.
--Forest C. Adcock--
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?
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
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 move at least as fast as his. My clothes snap just as much as his does when we punch or kick.
Second, he had to charge at me when he wanted to attack. This left plenty of time for me to get in a defensive posture, or to prepare to sidestep and counterattack. Or, I could attack him during his charge.
Third, the sheer mass of my body left his attacks wanting. My forearm weighed enough that I could stop his strongest kicks before they reached my body. My attacks could not be repelled. When I put my weight behind an attack, his only option was to dodge it. Sure, he was fast, but not that fast. And one good knock and he would've been done.
Now, I'm going to tell you a secret about big guys. In genereal, they are really docile and kind, and really like to avoid fighting or any kind of physical confrontation. Little guys have to be punks in order to get respect. They have to go 100% full strength into any physical confrontation if they expect to survive. Big guys generally start off about half strength and only notch it up to full strength when they are seriously threatened.
I'll tell you why this is. I can't tell you how many times I have hurt people accidentally, just screwing around. Ever since elementary school, I had to be very careful about how I used my size and weight. My friends who were little knew that they could go full-strength on my and I wouldn't get hurt.
Now that I am full grown and have children and a wife, I have to be very very careful not to hurt them. Imagine what would happen if I accidentally knocked one of them - either I didn't see them or I tripped and fell into them. I could easily send them to the hospital.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Master Yoda has the Force, you should doubt it not.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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.
Table-ized A.I.
You deliberately mischaracterize what I wrote. I never claimed that strength/weight were the only determinative factors. I stated that strength/weight had a direct relationship to a person's effectiveness as a fighter. If a 97 pound weaking with no training, and a 197 pound strongman with no training were involved in a fight, you can say goodbye to the 97 pound weakling. You indicate that you have been in, and won, fights with people significantly larger than yourself. You never indicate if these people have the same training you do. As I stated in my original post, all other things being equal, strength/weight directly impact how well a person fights. Bigger people hit harder. Bigger people can take more physical abuse. On the con side, bigger people get tired faster (it takes a lot more energy to fight when you are big). Answer me this, if strength/weight do not matter, why is it that women are abused by men much more often than vice versa. Strength/weight do matter. So does training. So does natural aptitude.
No, the people who I have had to fight did npt have my level of training. If they had, I'd have shot them and saved myself the trouble. I've never once met anyone who has told me that they were beatten up by a blackbelt when they didn't start the fight themselves. I know that there are bad apples among us, but it's a rarity. Virtually all of the blackbelts that I've met have been extremely non-violent people.
--Forest C. Adcock--
But all other things can't be equal if strength/weight differ. For instance, it's reasonable to assume that the lighter of two trained fighters would be more agile. This isn't going to help him much in the boxing ring, but does help quite a bit in most of the realistic places an average person is likely to get in a fight.
Boxing works as a sport delimited by weight class precisely because all other variables are the same. The ring is always the same size, the same shape, etc.
Freestyle fights are difficult to call because there are so many variables one must account for in any given conflict.
I'd have to agree that boxers pitted against each other from a different weight class in a standard boxing ring would often see the heavy-weight winning.
Outside of that though, environment can play a big role, as can technique.
At first glance, I thought exactly the same thing. One of the advantages of martial arts training is its ability to compensate for things like size and weight. I've known girls who were half my weight that I wouldn't mess with.
But as I was thinking about it, I realized that there were other things to be considered. One is speed, which I think should be included with s&w as a critical component. Also, martial arts is a compensation for lack of some or all of those three factors. This is what equalizes the physical differences between people when they're fighting.
The parent poster is right, though, in thinking that this is much like boxing. Or perhaps, in a more limited context, martial arts competitions. There are rules in place to prevent unexpected or unorthodox maneouvers, and the combatants are (one hopes) roughly similar in skill level. And let me tell you, if two opponents are identical in any three of skill, size, weight, or speed, the fourth factor will cast the deciding vote in the victory*. If I'm told I'm going to fight a guy who's as skilled in karate, as fast, and as heavy as I am, but I have a choice whether he's 6'6" (2m) or 5'4" (1.63m), I am certainly going to choose the smaller guy, because I will have an obvious advantage.
Tying this all back to the bees... The bees only know a couple of moves. They're like boxers in that they have a limited number of things they are capable of doing. Wasps can't learn tae kwon do or judo. (If they could, we'd all be in trouble.) And they have relatively similar skills with their limited abilities. So this means that speed, size, and weight are major components in their battles, and more often than not, the bigger guy is going to win.
Now what would be really interesting would be to take a wasp who has legitimate leader markings from a colony of wasps bred to be much smaller than their normal cousins, and put him in a fight with a non-leader from a colony that's been modified to be bigger than normal. Or vice versa - take a runt from the big tribe, paint him as a leader, and let him loose on the smaller tribe. There may be more to this than markings...
*There are other factors which can decide the outcome, such as determination or desperation, but they are not as quantifiable and are therefore harder to evaluate. They can compensate somewhat, but only to a point.
"'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.'
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I agree, environment has a significant impact on the outcome of a fight. The extreme example would be in a body of water -- the better swimmer has an enormous advantage. But, you should watch more boxing. There is no standard ring size. The size of the ring is typically a big item in negotiations in headline fights. Brawlers typically want small rings, whereas boxers prefer large rings. You are also right that there are innumerable variables that go into a person's effectiveness in fighting. However, if you remove all of the variable except strength and weight, then you are left with the inevitable conclusion that size/weight have a direct correlation to a person's effectiveness in a fight. I wrestled in h.s. and college (once again, very set rules and environment). I sometimes defeated people bigger than me. Occasionally I lost to people smaller. But I generally had more success against people smaller than me and less success than people bigger than me. I've never had to use my training in a real world situation, for which I am very thankful. Whenever two grown men are involved in a fight, someone will be hurt.
Yep, it looks like this site was tested on IE only.
I officially don't like that site now.
We must drive a sword through any hypothesis that is not strictly necessary.
...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...
Do 'leader' wasps that are painted to look weak still get respect?
as always, google has more info
No, the people who I have had to fight did npt have my level of training. If they had, I'd have shot them and saved myself the trouble.
:)
Ehum? Am I the only one who thinks this is ironic? You've spent how many years training, and when you finally have a fair fight you'd shoot them? Where's your sense of pride?!
(Okay, so you might be intelligent and I would've probably done the same thing, but that's a whole other issue...)
I've never once met anyone who has told me that they were beatten up by a blackbelt when they didn't start the fight themselves. I know that there are bad apples among us, but it's a rarity. Virtually all of the blackbelts that I've met have been extremely non-violent people.
And this is another argument for the parents, if you walk around with a fake blackbelt and without the training, and someone decides to try to beat you up. Who would win?
It's up to the fighters, but if one of them really had a blackbelt (and your level of training), I'd sure as hell know who I'd bet on!
This is news? Bumfights proved this same theory a year or so ago... and it was MUCH more entertaining.
- LoserMLW
--
"Common sense is not so common." - Voltaire
In a real fight most people end up injured. While I only have 2years of training in KENPO I have "owned" people with far more training that where either smaller than my 6'2'' or slower than I am. I have fast reflexes and tend to go with the flow in battle, which helps, but all fights lead to injury. Which is the best reason to avoid fighting, sure I can win the average bar fight hands down but a little bad luck and we all go down. Hell I remember one linebacker who only landed one jab to my ribs (seemed like a good idea to get him over extended and I 'knew" it would be ok.) but damm that hurt for days.
PS: Ok yea once I got in a huge argument with a friend of my and he end up pulling out a sword and threatening me so I felt the need to umm aggressively defend my self while humiliating him. Neither of us got hurt but I did restrain him on the floor in such a manor that I could snap his neck had I so chosen. But that's my point once you can demonstrate you are someone not to be fucked with there is little point in beating some one up for the hell of it.
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 insects that mimic other species, because that species is poisonous? EX: Coral snake and a Milk snake, the latter is non-venomous, but keeps from bieng eaten by animals and other snakes because it mimics a poisonous snake. Seems to me that is more than prospering from cheating.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!