> Keith Henson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
<snippage>
> Of course, battered wife is an arrested or
> recirculating (trapped) version
> of the capture-bonding sequence. Capture-bonding in
> the human "wild state"
> was a one time event, applied to captives for about
> the time hazing is today.
>
> There is a bit of a precursor to this trait in
> chimpanzees. Males are
> fairly brutal at first to females they take out of
> the group into remote
> areas during "consortships." I would not say female
> chimpanzees bond with
> males who take them on consortships, but they do
> quit trying to escape after a few beatings.
Also in baboons, where males regularly smack the
females about. An intriguing paper reports on how
this behavior was greatly diminished in a baboon troop
whose alpha males were killed off by tuberculosis; now
males tend to fight others of their own rank, and
indulge in more mutual grooming:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/13BABO.html?ex=1085284800&en=2cc8aafc0e63c9b1&ei=5070
(our login/password: brinl/brinl)
http://makeashorterlink.com/?T27513D58
"Sometimes it takes the great Dustbuster of fate to
clear the room of bullies and bad habits. Freak
cyclones helped destroy Kublai Khan's brutal Mongolian
empire, for example, while the Black Death of the 14th
century capsized the medieval theocracy and gave the
Renaissance a chance to shine.
Among a troop of savanna baboons in Kenya, a terrible
outbreak of tuberculosis 20 years ago selectively
killed off the biggest, nastiest and most despotic
males, setting the stage for a social and behavioral
transformation unlike any seen in this notoriously
truculent primate...
...researchers describe the drastic temperamental and
tonal shift that occurred in a troop of 62 baboons
when its most belligerent members vanished from the
scene. The victims were all dominant adult males that
had been strong and snarly enough to fight with a
neighboring baboon troop over the spoils at a tourist
lodge garbage dump, and were exposed there to meat
tainted with bovine tuberculosis, which soon killed
them. Left behind in the troop, designated the Forest
Troop, were the 50 percent of males that had been too
subordinate to try dump brawling, as well as all the
females and their young. With that change in
demographics came a cultural swing toward pacifism, a
relaxing of the usually parlous baboon hierarchy, and
a willingness to use affection and mutual grooming
rather than threats, swipes and bites to foster a
patriotic spirit.
Remarkably, the Forest Troop has maintained its genial
style over two decades, even though the male survivors
of the epidemic have since died or disappeared and
been replaced by males from the outside. (As is the
case for most primates, baboon females spend their
lives in their natal home, while the males leave at
puberty to seek their fortunes elsewhere.) The
persistence of communal comity suggests that the
resident baboons must somehow be instructing the
immigrants in the unusual customs of the tribe...
...The researchers were able to compare the behavior
and physiology of the contemporary Forest Troop
primates to two control groups: a similar-size baboon
congregation living nearby, called the Talek Troop,
and the Forest Troop itself from 1979 through 1982,
the era that might be called Before Alpha Die-off, or
B.A.D...
...But in the baboon study, the culture being conveyed
is less a specific behavior or skill than a global
code of conduct. "You can more accurately describe it
as the social ethos of group," said Dr. Andrew Whiten,
a professor of evolutionary and developmental
psychology at the University of St. Andrews in
Scotland who has studied chimpanzee culture. "It's an
attitude that's being transmitted..."
...Jerkiness or worse certainly seems to be a job
description for ordinary male baboons. The average
young male, after wheedling his way into a new troop
at around age 7, spends his prime years seeking to
fang his way up the hierarchy; and once he's gained
some status, he devotes many a leisure hour to
whimsical displays of power at scant personal cost. He
harasses and attacks females, which weigh half his
hundred pounds and lack his thumb-thick canines, or he
terrorizes the low-ranking males he knows cannot
retaliate.
Dr. Barbara Smuts, a primatologist at the University
of Michigan who wrote the 1985 book "Sex and
Friendship in Baboons," said that the females in the
troop she studied received a serious bite from a male
annually, maybe losing a strip of flesh or part of an
ear in the process. As they age and lose their
strength, however, males may calm down and adopt a new
approach to group living, affiliating with females so
devotedly that they keep their reproductive
opportunities going even as their ranking in the male
hierarchy plunges.
For their part, female baboons, which live up to 25
years — compared with the male's 18 — inherit their
rank in the gynocracy from their mothers and so spend
less time fighting for dominance. They do, however,
readily battle females from outside the fold, for
they, not the males, are the keepers of turf and
dynasty...
...What most distinguishes this congregation from
others is that the males resist taking out their bad
moods on females and underlings. When a dominant male
wants to pick a fight, he finds someone his own size
and rank. As a result, a greater percentage of
male-male conflicts in the Forest Troop occur between
closely ranked individuals than is seen in the control
populations, where the bullies seek easier pickings.
Moreover, Forest Troop males of all ranks spend more
time grooming and being groomed, and just generally
huddling close to troop mates, than do their
counterpart males in the study..."
Reduction in stress hormones was also seen in those
Russian foxes who were selected for 'tameness,' and in
~36 generations did indeed become tamer, with more
puppy-like behavior and even changes in coat color.
Debbi
Knock Out The Holnists Maru
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