<http://themoviemash.com/2010/11/netflix-this-national-geographic-stress-portrait-of-a-killer/>National
Geo channel had a couple of interesting shows on last night, one called
_/Stress: Portrait of a Killer./_ I was reminded of our discussions
calling for co-operatives. This research suggests that involving every
employee in all of the decisions is key to reducing work place stress
due to hierarchical inequities.
The work of neuroendocrinologist Dr. Robert Sapolsky was featured. He
centered his research on a group of baboons in Kenya, to observe and
record stress levels amongst the different levels in their alpha
male-dominant society. As might be anticipated, the lowest stress was
enjoyed by the alpha male, then down the line to the very youngest most
vulnerable infants.
Sadly, when the group discovered a nearby dump, where there was
discarded meat laced with bovine TB, the Alpha males were the first to
die off due to their attempts to consume and control the new stash
within a battle amongst neighbouring alphas. All within one generation,
there was an amazing cultural change for the better.
As stated in the film, if a group of baboons can do it in one
generation, why can't we be as brave ?
Other research by Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, who discovered the molecular
nature of telomeres, was also featured. Telomeres serve as the
protective cap on the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes, helping to
preserve info. found in genes. Blackburn discovered that telomere length
plays a crucial role in the life of a cell, and that their abnormalities
contribute to cancer. Chronic stress, for whatever reason, shortens
their length, and we die sooner. I couldn't dig up the right articles on
this Nobel prize winner's contributions to the documentary, but her work
is all over the internet. She's famous for being fired by Bush in 2004,
when she was head of a national stem cell research division. She had
other data on fat distribution of the chronically stressed who are
typically lower in the hierarchical order, and was able to show this
occurs in all animals. Those feeling most oppressed tend to carry fat in
the abdomen, rather than developing a more even distribution. Conditions
like diabetes are related to these findings, but I was pretty sleepy at
this point, so you can Google that if interested.
Natalia
No Time for Bullies:
Baboons Retool Their Culture
*By NATALIE ANGIER *
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.
In a study appearing today in the journal /PloS Biology/ (online at
www.plosbiology.org), 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.
"We don't yet understand the mechanism of transmittal," said Dr. Robert
M. Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford, "but the
jerky new guys are obviously learning, `We don't do things like that
around here.' " Dr. Sapolsky wrote the report with his colleague and
wife, Dr. Lisa J. Share.
Dr. Sapolsky, who is renowned for his study of the physiology of stress,
said that the Forest Troop baboons probably felt as good as they acted.
Hormone samples from the monkeys showed far less evidence of stress in
even the lowest-ranking individuals, when contrasted with baboons living
in more rancorous societies.
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.
"It's a really fine, thorough piece of work, with the sort of
methodology and lucky data sets that you can only get from doing
long-term field research," said Dr. Duane Quiatt, a primatologist at the
University of Colorado at Denver and a co-author with Vernon Reynolds of
the 1993 book "Primate Behaviour: Information, Social Knowledge and the
Evolution of Culture."
The new work vividly demonstrates that, Putumayo records
notwithstanding, humans hold no patent on multiculturalism. As a growing
body of research indicates, many social animals learn from one another
and cultivate regional variants in skills, conventions and fashions.
Some chimpanzees crack open their nuts with a stone hammer on a stone
anvil; others prefer wood hammers on wood anvils. The chimpanzees of the
Tai forest rain-dance; those of the Gombe tickle themselves. Dr. Jane
Goodall reported a fad in one chimpanzee group: a young female started
wiggling her hands, and before long, every teen chimp was doing likewise.
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."
The report also offers real-world proof of a principle first
demonstrated in captive populations of monkeys: that with the right
upbringing, diplomacy is infectious. Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal, the
director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate
Research Center of Emory University in Atlanta, has shown that if the
normally pugilistic rhesus monkeys are reared with the more conciliatory
stumptailed monkeys, the rhesus monkeys learn the value of tolerance,
peacemaking and mutual hip-hugging.
Dr. de Waal, who wrote an essay to accompany the new baboon study, said
in a telephone interview, "The good news for humans is that it looks
like peaceful conditions, once established, can be maintained," he said.
"And if baboons can do it," he said, "why not us? The bad news is that
you might have to first knock out all the most aggressive males to get
there."
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.
The new-fashioned Forest Troop is no United Nations, or even the average
frat house. Its citizens remain highly aggressive and argumentative, and
the males still obsess over hierarchy. "We're talking about baboons
here," said Dr. Sapolsky.
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.
Interestingly, the male faces in the Forest Troop may have changed over
time, but the relative numbers have not. Ever since the tuberculosis
epidemic killed half the adult males, the ratio has remained skewed,
with twice as many females as males. Yet the researchers have
demonstrated that the troop's sexual complexion alone cannot explain its
character. Examining other troops with a similar preponderance of
females, the Stanford scientists saw no evidence of the Forest Troop's
relative amity.
Dr. Sapolsky has no idea how long the good times will last. "I confess
I'm rooting for the troop to stay like this forever, but I worry about
how vulnerable they may be," he said. "All it would take is two or three
jerky adolescent males entering at the same time to tilt the balance and
destroy the culture."
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