Law and Order


Community living requires each individual to merge into to general dynamics of the group. Although each community will develop its own characteristics, common problems exist and often common solutions result. Conflict resolution is one such problem. Animal models, especially primate groups are frequently used to study social dynamics and today’s post starts with the study of a group of 48 macaques by Krakauer et al that has just become available in the Public Library of Science (1).

What makes this a particularly notable publication is that it uses a mathematical model based on the dynamics of our immune system to investigate the likely end results of aggressive conflict within a group such as the macaques. The analogy is that aggression is like a pathogen invading the body with infected cells spreading the contagion to each other.

Our immune system has T-cells that can neutralize the infected cell with the analogy being an individual takes it on itself to pacify the aggressor and keep him/her calm.  Alternatively, our B-cells sequester the antigen and T-helper-cells induce them to generate antibodies which remove the problem. The analogy here is policeman stepping in to resolve the dispute and send the two individuals on their way. 

For the community to live in harmony, policing works well with fewer individuals paying a social cost of reducing aggression than if random individuals have to end up acting as pacifiers. Our macaques had worked this out intuitively and had three policemen to handle a population of 48. This is one stable equilibrium state of the mathematical model where a small number of police can keep aggression at a low constant level.

If there are no police, the population has to do the job so that there becomes a group of aggressors with an equally large group of pacifiers having to handle them. That dynamic can reach a stable equilibrium but the social cost is high as a lot of conflict is endemic.  

Another interesting result occurs as a consequence of the modeling condition that policing fails through police waiting for other police to step in. The result is that either the population descends into a chronic and ubiquitously violent state, or that other individuals start to take up policing and all these vigilantes end up with a form of police state. So, in essence, you’ll be screwed if you do or screwed if you don’t.

The conclusion? A sufficient but low level of an incorruptible police force to keep the dorks in line.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0022709

Great Escapes


In the idyllic Bavarian countryside with the sun shining down on pastureland and forest, a deadly game is being played out. Yvonne is in hiding. The local authorities gave carte blanche for a shoot to kill policy, but this has been challenged in the courts and an injunction has been issued. The tension mounts. The injunction runs out on Sunday. There is hope that it will be extended, so all is not lost.

She has a price on her head. It currently stands at €10k, but she must be brought in alive according to the article in the guardian (1). You see, Yvonne is a dairy cow who at only six-years old has been judged more suited to the production of Hamburgers than Obatzda and has had her contract terminated. She went on the down low back in May and dodged in and out of the forest to avoid the hunters with their guns at the ready.

She has become a cause célébre with well-wishers from all over the world. Her protector is now an Austrian who paid the farmer €600 to take her into his sanctuary. Up to now, psychics and telepathics have failed to make contact with anything but her cowpies, although she has reputedly stared down one hunter.

So far she has been insensitive to the blandishment of Ernst, a local stud, the report says and now they are twisting her son Friesi’s tail to help trap his Mom' end her free-wheeling lifestyle and help her settle down to  a sedate lifestyle in her place in the retirement home that is now waiting for her.

This is reminiscent of the valiant efforts of the Tamworth Two, the pair of ginger pigs that back in 1998 escaped from a UK slaughterhouse by swimming a river and heading off into dense cover. Like Yvonne, their notoriety ended with the offer of an easy life in a retirement home, this time courtesy of a UK tabloid in return for their story. Sadly, the boar died in May this year, just days after Yvonne got successfully away. His sister had died in October last year.

In 2003, the BBC produced an hour-long TV drama called “The Legend Of The Tamworth Two” (2). Will Yvonne be catapulted to TV stardom by Deutsche Welle I wonder?

  1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/24/yvonne-run-cowpat-clue-hide
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/03_march/31/tamworth_two.shtml

Acting Our Age?


One prerequisite for a good nights sleep for adults is some healthy exercise during the day. At least that seems to be in the direction where most of the evidence is pointing. We like to make sure our children are well exercised too and we often express the sentiment after a hectic day out that “they’ll certainly sleep well tonight.”

But will they? A study by Pesonen et al on 275 8-year olds puts this old wisdom in doubt (1). They strapped accelerometers onto the wrists of their young subjects to measure activity and followed the group for a week to measure their sleep patterns.

Shock horror! Contrary to legend and their own hypothesis, lots of exercise did not improve the sleep patterns. The duration and quantity of sleep were both reduced in response to moderate or vigorous activity compared to more couch-potato days.

Why would that be they wondered, as do we all? They suggest that the body response of their youngsters to high physical activity is to increase their cortisol levels and this stress hormone could be keeping them on high alert. Surprisingly, the problem with vigorous activity was not related to the time of day, so even if it was avoided in the evening, the sleep patterns were still disrupted.

This difference between young and adult experience, perhaps, points to a different way that vigorous activity is felt. As we get older, maybe we don’t get so excited and just plow on trying to get through it and back to our armchairs, whilst our youngsters are fully mentally engaged, so their excitation level is high. Does this mean that we oldies have forgotten how to enjoy life like the youngsters?

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0022958

Wastepaper


Whether your writing that difficult term paper or starting that new novel, think as you crumple up those sheets of paper and toss them around the room missing that wastepaper basket that your roommate has placed just out of reach. Even your cat has tired of chasing those golf ball sized hard spheres of paper.

But wait, all is not lost. Those little balls of paper are of great interest to those of the physics persuasion. Cambou and Menon of U Mass have published a study of the little paper balls on their office floor in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (1).

The observation was that they are crumpled up until they get hard to crumple up any more in spite of the frustration of the contents of the page being unsatisfactory. The actual amount of the volume of the spheres (physicists like spheres) that is paper is very small. So the BIG question is why are they so strong?

That big equipment grant can now be put to good use. The authors of the study X-rayed the paper balls, layer by layer so that they could describe the structure. Remember if you can describe it, then maybe you can explain it’s properties, if you can’t describe it, you’ve no chance in developing a theory and may as well go to the local hostelry.

The result of the structural study is that the compression has produced a somewhat even structure with many of the folds lining up parallel to each other in such a way as to resist further compression. So in essence it self-regulates in that the disorderly crumpling continues until it has enough internal supports to give a strong structure which your cat can then chase around the floor.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/15/1019192108.abstract

When Is A Lifeboat An Oxymoron?


Plagues of locusts are one of the more unwelcome visitors that arrive on our doorsteps, and they have been arriving unbidden for a very long time. Luckily they don’t do this every year, but occasionally is certainly often enough. Of course, if they were regular visitor, we would have started an industry in processed locust burgers or some such wondrous delicacy.

It is rather interesting to get down and dirty amongst the locusts, though. What happens is that times look good and they start on a population boom.  That becomes too much of a good thing and the food supply runs short. Hungry juveniles won’t put up with that and off they go in search of a good meal.

So far so good but they are in a “lifeboat situation” as Hansen et al refer to their predicament in the journal of Behavioral Ecology and Social Biology (1).  The moving mass gobbles all the food available and the juveniles are still hungry. They are short of protein and salt.

Back to the lifeboat analogy. What is one to do in a lifeboat when one is short of good protein and one is sitting surrounded by the same? Exactly, and that’s what the locust do. The hungriest ones do more walking than flying and are targeted by their erstwhile friends and are sacrificed to the general good.

The cannibalistic youngster can now fly more and further and drive the finding of new food sources, that is, they control the flow of insects. So sacrificing some bodies for the general good ensures success of the remaining individuals in reaching greater heights of success and contentment.

This sounds rather like the current advice that consultants are giving to many large corporations these days, although they don’t actually mention the lifeboats.

  1. http://www.springerlink.com/content/q255814671k6k148/

Reckless Youth


A common feeling of insecurity is down to the acceleration of technological advances. It seems such a short time ago that your new computer was going to be at the cutting edge for three years and now it’s just twelve months, if you’re lucky and don’t come across the tech reviews. But this feeling is just for us old fogies who are 30-years plus in age.

Of course, we humans are growing up more quickly. Our obsolescence, thank goodness, is still hotly debated. Fortunately the rate of change is much slower than with technology. The decrease in the age at which girls are sexually mature has been spoken about many times, but little attention has been applied to boys. Goldstein from the Max Planck in Rostock has studied the records of the past 200 years (1).

The fascinating part of this study is that Goldstein used the period of social sexual maturity as the marker. That is the age of the peak in the accident hump that you find when you plot mortality rate with age. The mortality curve is very interesting. For both sexes, the mortality rate falls rapidly with age to a minimum and then climbs slowly and steadily as old age is occurring. But with boys there is an increase giving a hump in the curve just past the minimum which lasts just a few years.

This accident hump is when our testosterone has done its job, we start to think we’re invincible and we indulge in reckless behaviors such as trying extreme sports, leading gangs or serial dating. Fortunately it only lasts for six or seven years.

Just so that we don’t think we’re unique with this behavior, non-human primate males also have this accident hump as they try out their strength and good looks amongst the their group and get into serious fights.

Coming back to us humans, we see that peak of our male accident hump has dropped from almost 23-years old to a few months under 18-years old now. The decrease in age is linear which means we are hitting our peak in reckless behavior one week earlier each year!

Let’s keep in mind that the end of our accident hump is the border of our personal age of reason and is close to the start of our fogeyism. Hence the graduation to fogeyship must also occur a week sooner each year.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0014826