And animals too can be a crooked, conniving bunch sometimes - enjoy!:
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