The Primate Police

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.'"

Comments

Fox Hit Pay Dirt!

[grogdamighty]

Finally Fox can combine some of their best programming: Cops and When Animals Attack!

Unforgiven

[eldavojohn]

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.

Proof of instinct for government?

[MikeRT]

Well, I guess this proves that there may not be a "state of nature" in the old philosophical sense. We naturally organize ourselves. Katrina was one of my examples, when people naturally formed hierarchical groups for survival and promotion of order. The question now is, do we recognize that there is a compelling argument now to question the extent and nature of government, since if evolution be true, it is organized more out of a primal fear than an enlightened attitude toward social interaction?

It certainly does help prove a point on why governments have often be so brutal toward their own people.

That's surreal...

[eth4n0L]

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.

Monkeys and middle-schoolers

[Lonesome Squash]

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.

Re:there's something now

[misleb]

just more proof that we're related to our simian cousins -- even in our society, certain monkeys decide to become cops.

And sometimes even president!

-matthew