http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/science/22angi.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin
The New York Times
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January 22, 2008
Basics
Political Animals (Yes, Animals)
By NATALIE ANGIER
As the candidates have shown us in the succulent telenovela that is the
2008 presidential race, there are many ways to parry for political power.
You can go tough and steely in an orange hunter
s jacket, or touchy-feely with a Kleenex packet. You can ally yourself
with an alpha male like Chuck Norris, befriend an alpha female like Oprah
Winfrey or split the difference and campaign with your mother. You can
seek the measured endorsement of the town elders or the restless energy of
the young, showily handle strange infants or furtively slam your
opponents.
Just as there are myriad strategies open to the human political animal
with White House ambitions, so there are a number of nonhuman animals that
behave like textbook politicians. Researchers who study highly gregarious
and relatively brainy species like rhesus monkeys, baboons, dolphins,
sperm whales, elephants and wolves have lately uncovered evidence that the
creatures engage in extraordinarily sophisticated forms of politicking,
often across large and far-flung social networks.
Male dolphins, for example, organize themselves into at least three nested
tiers of friends and accomplices, said Richard C. Connor of the University
of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, rather like the way human societies are
constructed of small kin groups allied into larger tribes allied into
still larger nation-states. The dolphins maintain their alliances through
elaborately synchronized twists, leaps and spins like Blue Angel pilots
blazing their acrobatic fraternity on high.
Among elephants, it is the females who are the born politicians,
cultivating robust and lifelong social ties with at least 100 other
elephants, a task made easier by their power to communicate infrasonically
across miles of savanna floor. Wolves, it seems, leaven their otherwise
strongly hierarchical society with occasional displays of populist
umbrage, and if a pack leader proves a too-snappish tyrant, subordinate
wolves will collude to overthrow the top cur.
Wherever animals must pool their talents and numbers into cohesive social
groups, scientists said, the better to protect against predators, defend
or enlarge choice real estate or acquire mates, the stage will be set for
the appearance of political skills
the ability to please and placate, manipulate and intimidate, trade
favors and scratch backs or, better yet, pluck those backs free of
botflies and ticks.
Over time, the demands of a social animal
s social life may come to swamp all other selective pressures in the
environment, possibly serving as the dominant spur for the evolution of
ever-bigger vote-tracking brains. And though we humans may vaguely
disapprove of our political impulses and harbor
Fountainhead
fantasies of pulling free in full glory from the nattering tribe, in fact
for us and other highly social species there is no turning back. A lone
wolf is a weak wolf, a failure, with no chance it will thrive.
Dario Maestripieri, a primatologist at the University of Chicago, has
observed a similar dilemma in humans and the rhesus monkeys he studies.
The paradox of a highly social species like rhesus monkeys and humans is
that our complex sociality is the reason for our success, but it
s also the source of our greatest troubles,
he said.
Throughout human history, you see that the worst problems for people
almost always come from other people, and it
s the same for the monkeys. You can put them anywhere, but their main
problem is always going to be other rhesus monkeys.
As Dr. Maestripieri sees it, rhesus monkeys embody the concept
Machiavellian
(and he accordingly named his recent popular book about the macaques
Macachiavellian Intelligence
).
Individuals don
t fight for food, space or resources,
Dr. Maestripieri explained.
They fight for power.
With power and status, he added,
they
ll have control over everything else.
Rhesus monkeys, midsize omnivores with ruddy brown fur, long bearded faces
and disturbingly humanlike ears, are found throughout Asia, including in
many cities, where they, like everybody else, enjoy harassing the
tourists. The monkeys typically live in groups of 30 or so, a majority of
them genetically related females and their dependent offspring.
A female monkey
s status is usually determined by her mother
s status. Male adults, as the ones who enter the group from the outside,
must establish their social positions from scratch, bite, baring of
canines and, most importantly, rallying their bases.
Fighting is never something that occurs between two individuals,
Dr. Maestripieri said.
Others get involved all the time, and your chances of success depend on
how many allies you have, how wide is your network of support.
Monkeys cultivate relationships by sitting close to their friends,
grooming them at every possible opportunity and going to their aid
at least, when the photo op is right.
Rhesus males are quintessential opportunists,
Dr. Maestripieri said.
They pretend they
re helping others, but they only help adults, not infants. They only help
those who are higher in rank than they are, not lower. They intervene in
fights where they know they
re going to win anyway and where the risk of being injured is small.
In sum, he said,
they try to gain maximal benefits at minimal cost, and that
s a strategy that seems to work
in advancing status.
Not all male primates pursue power by appealing to the gents. Among olive
baboons, for example, a young male adult who has left his natal home and
seeks to be elected into a new baboon group begins by making friendly
overtures toward a resident female who is not in estrous at the moment and
hence not being contested by other males of the troop.
If the male is successful in forming a friendship with a female, that
gives him an opening with her relatives and allows him to work his way
into the whole female network,
said Barbara Smuts, a biologist at the University of Michigan.
In olive baboons, friendships with females can be much more important than
political alliances with other males.
Because males are often the so-called dispersing sex, while females stay
behind in the support network of their female kin, females form the
political backbone among many social mammals; the longer-lived the
species, the denser and more richly articulated that backbone is likely to
be.
With life spans rivaling ours, elephants are proving to possess some of
the most elaborate social networks yet observed, and their memories for
far-flung friends and relations are well in line with the species
reputation. Elephant society is organized as a matriarchy, said George
Wittemyer, an elephant expert at the University of California, Berkeley,
with a given core group of maybe 10 elephants led by the eldest resident
female. That core group is together virtually all the time, traveling over
considerable distances, stopping to dig water holes, looking for fresh
foliage to uproot and devour.
They
re constantly making decisions, debating among themselves, over food,
water and security,
Dr. Wittemyer said.
You can see it in the field. You can hear them vocally disagree.
Typically, the matriarch has the final say, and the others abide by her
decision. If a faction disagrees strongly enough and wants to try a
different approach,
the group will split up and meet back again later,
said Dr. Wittemyer.
Age has its privileges, he said, and the older females, even if they are
not the biggest, will often get the best spots to sleep and the best food
to eat. But it also has its responsibilities, and a matriarch is often the
one to lead the charge in the face of conflicts with other elephants or
predatory threats, sometimes to lethal effect.
Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University and his colleagues have found
surprising parallels between the elephant and another mammoth mammal, the
sperm whale, possessor of the largest brain, in absolute terms, that the
world has ever known. As with elephants, sperm whale society is sexually
segregated, the females clustering in oceanic neighborhoods 40 degrees
north or south of the Equator, and the males preferring waters around the
poles.
As with elephants, the core social unit is a clan of some 10 or 12 females
and their offspring. Sperm whales also are highly vocal. They communicate
with one another using a Morse code-like pattern of clicks. Each clan, Dr.
Whitehead said, has a distinctive click dialect that the members use to
identify one another and that adults pass to the young. In other words, he
said,
It looks like they have a form of culture.
Nobody knows what the whales may have to click and clack about, but it
could be a form of voting
time to stop here and synchronously dive down in search of deep water
squid, now time to resurface, move on, dive again. Clans also seem to
caucus on which males they like and will mate with more or less as a group
and which ones they will collectively spurn. By all appearances, female
sperm whales are terrible size queens. Over the generations, they have
consistently voted in favor of enhanced male mass. Their dream candidate
nowadays is some fellow named Moby, and he
s three times their size.