Showing posts with label Macaques. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Macaques. Show all posts

Take Care Of Your Ys Guys


A very long time ago, about 200 million years, our ancestor’s chromosomes had developed the X and Y types that stand us in good stead today. We share a lot of our DNA with other primate species as the species diverged about 25 million years ago.

Us males are very dependent on our Y-chromosomes; especially the male specific part and over the years there has been a lot of fraying around the edges so that we only have about 3% of the original version from 200 million years ago. We have known about this for some time and there has been some concern that men may be getting perilously close to their “sell by date.”

The X and Ys started out with about the same number of genes. Currently the X has around 800 while the Y is down to its last 78. This represents about 3% of what it started out with, hence the tendency for us to start biting our fingernails.

To put our minds at rest (or worry us some more) Hughes et al have sequenced the macaque genome to see if they have suffered a similar loss (1,2). These monkey’s ancestors diverged from ours about 25 million years ago as noted above.

The good news is that since the great divergence from the monkeys, we’ve only lost one gene to bring us down from 79 and we’ve been keeping a firm grip on those 78 for the past 5 million years so our male specific part of our Y-chromosome is in good hands.

Recall that the chimpanzees went off on their own about six million years ago and it was in Hughes et al’s letter to Nature (3) comparing the chimpanzees Ys with ours that started us worrying back in 2005.

  1. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10843.html
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17127617
  3. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7055/full/nature04101.html


Website @ http://jimgoodwinbooks.com/

One Good Turn...


Yesterday’s post was about cooperation, but there is another form of working together in a social situation that is based on social interaction as opposed to cooperation. For example, we teach our children early on to “play nice” and to take turns.  We accept this behavior as good manners when we get older.

Politely waiting for your turn may appear to be the case when we see young lions waiting for the alpha male to eat his fill, but this is different, it is fear of the consequences of challenging the ‘old man’ and has nothing to do with politely taking turns.

So the question arises are humans the only species with good manners – at least sometimes? Falcone et al from Sapienza U has answered this question for us as they just happened to have a couple of Macaques on hand and a couple of humans with time on theirs. They published their findings in this week’s PLoSone (1).

The Macaques had the usual computer screen beloved of experimentalists in front of them. The job they had to do was to press a white spot and hold it as a gray bar appeared flanked by a red dot and either a cross or a blue dot. Once the gray bar vanished they had to hit the cross or the blue dot to complete the cycle. Being immune to praise, the Macaques were rewarded with a few drops of a syrupy liquid.

By changing the cross for an occasional blue dot, the Macaques had to stay sharp, but now came the real tests. They had a human in to play too. The different color dots and crosses came up in random order and each task had to be different from the previous one. There wasn’t a lot of time to think about it of course so macaque and human had to stay sharp.

Periodically the human would stick his hand in to take a turn, or maybe two or even three or four turns, and then stop to let the Macaque back into the game. With a very high success rate the monkeys continued the sequence and didn’t repeat the last button hit.

 The Macaques had clearly picked up the idea of the game and were very polite about playing. If the human hand moved towards the screen, they waited their turn, but immediately resumed when the fickle finger was pulled back – no fuss, no bother.

At first they got their sticky treat as long as the task was successful. No bad words were uttered if the human got it wrong. To make it challenging, another round was played where if the human played, the monkey got nothing. Again, no squabbling, no pushing “me first, me, me, me,” But just good manners waiting their turn. Clearly, manners maketh the macaque!

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0032209

Website @ http://jimgoodwinbooks.com/

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

Synaptic Tactics


Our old friend the Macaque, so often used for cognitive studies, has come through yet again. IBM has just announced the manufacture of a pair of “neurosynaptic computing chips”, their SyNAPSE system is to be funded by DARPA (that is the US tax payer of course) to the tune of $21M (1).

What’s DARPA got to do with Macaques I hear you ask, well, nothing, but IBM have been probing Macaques neural networks for some time. I rush to say that’s not equating their customers with Macaques, but due to the recognition that to take computing to a new level, building in the plasticity of the brain can make cognitive computing possible.

Last year, Modha and Singh of IBM have published their work on tracing a unique network of the Macaque brain using the public domain database CoCoMac (2).  This enabled them to sort out the structure of the network. They demonstrated that the brain network was not uniform like a 3D fishing net, but has increasing complexity as it went to specific functional regions, more like a group of trees growing from common roots. This means that the complex networks feed information down to simpler sub-nets.

Why is this important? Because it like a funnel concentrating the information while processing it down to the nub of the matter. This is a good model for a cognitive system to work efficiently.

Brains are nicely plastic in that the network is modified by the information it is handling, that is it is making new connections. Ultimately this also provides a route for repair of the network. Making new connections on a chip is currently not possible on the fly, but the SyNAPSE system can apparently modulate the signal so it can effectively switch connections on and off. Well almost, it’s more like turning down the signal so it lost in the background and turning the one you want up so you’re not trying to process everything with everything, as I understand it. IBM could put it much better but they aren’t saying too much at present.

This is potentially a huge step forward towards cognitive computing. The next step beyond this is for our computers to start being intuitive. I hope they don’t start showing too much initiative though.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14574747
  2. http://www.pnas.org/content/107/30/13485.full

A Numbers Game


What is the numerical competence of monkeys? This is a matter that we must all wonder about from time to time. As I miscount the change that I’m proffering when purchasing a non-fat latte with one raw sugar, and not forgetting the cinnamon sprinkle, I sometimes wish that I had a numerically competent one handy, when feeling embarrassed as I get the extra coins back. One would prove even more useful when there are several of us trying to work out shares of a lunch bill.

Some primates, such as Lowland Gorillas have been shown to perform well at low levels, as would be appropriate to the species. Along with cats, dogs, chicks and mosquitofish as it turns out. However, Schmitt and Fischer of U of Göttingen have given a bunch of baboons and macaques their final term papers and have published the results yesterday (1).

If offered a choice of plates with different numbers of peanuts, or in other experiments, raisins, there was a little ambivalence, and their eagerness to eat overcame their abstract reasoning abilities. The baboons soon tired of peanuts and had to be tempted just with raisins. The real tests came when black pebbles were substituted for raisins. One raisin per pebble was given on their choice.

The results? The two types of monkeys did very well in working out if there were more pebbles in one dish that the other. They did care if there was only one pebble difference but cared a lot more if there was two or more different. With scores of 84%, they received a B+ grade. They did not like to be short changed any more than the rest of us.
  

1 . Schmitt V., & Fischer J., Nat. Commun. 2:257 doi: 10.1038/ncomms1262 (2011).

Don't I Know You from Somewhere?


Learning about group dynamics is always interesting, especially for the small groups like those that we interact with daily. A key prerequisite is that we have to know who is in our ‘gang’ and who isn’t, so learning to “never forget a face” is an early occupation.  Schell et al in Animal Cognition (1) looked at the ability of Barbary macaques to pick out bad guys from mug shots. My first unworthy thought from my snobbish primate stance was that one macaque looks very much like another. Not correct of course. A well brought up macaque can tell the good, the bad and the ugly at a glance.

The youngsters in the troops being interrogated were not very discriminating though, but they did like looking at the pictures. Their prejudices increase with age and their moms and dads got much more interested in looking at pictures of strangers than their snaps of their friends. Know your enemy has clearly been well understood by the time they reach their majority.

The authors report on a rather touching piece of work carried out by Hoesch fifty years ago with baboons, or one in particular, who had been trained to look after a herd of goats. This chappie could recognize the individual goats. However, he was paricularly adept as a goatherd because he could recognize the bleat of a separated kid and return it to its mother. That would be way above my paygrade, and suggests that maybe our industry barons should rethink their push towards robotics as there are a lot of potential workers out there who would be happy to work for peanuts.



1. http://www.springerlink.com/content/40485378447740j7/fulltext.pdf

Monkey Business


Another interesting paper from the AAAs meeting was given by Dr. Smith, SUNY at Buffalo. In this case the subjects were monkeys, both Old World and New World, namely Macaques and Capuchins respectively. They were playing a computer game for goodies. The task was simple enough for me to carry out. It consisted of assessing the density of a screen image as either sparse and clicking ‘S’ or dense and clicking ‘D’. Easy!

 The kicker was if they got it wrong, the computer hung and they were wasting gaming time. Now in this day and age, instant gratification taking to long, a fact that we are made maddeningly aware every time we reboot our computers. Well, in true game show fashion, Dr. Smith gave our primate friends a pass option button, ‘?’. Hitting this moved the game rapidly forward with no loss in goodie-getting time.

The Macaques made good use of this option indicating that they were sometimes victims of self doubt and unable to make a choice, reminiscent of most of us as we stare at our tax forms and wondering where to start. Wouldn’t we all welcome a pass option on those questions? Capuchins, however, never doubted their choice. In their case, there were only known knowns, that they knew they knew even when they didn’t, unlike the Macaques who also had known unknowns when they knew they didn’t know. I guess worrying about unknown unknowns is something reserved for other primate species.

It isn’t only monkeys that rival us in decision-making. Prof. Morton of U of Cambridge has been watching sheep which were visiting from the Welsh mountains, make executive decisions. Food was used as the training tool, just as it is used for monkeys, mice and us men. Colored buckets and colored shapes were used in the sheep’s mid-term tests.

Other exciting sheep information noted was that sheep can find their way home as they know where they’ve been and that they can recognize other sheep just by looking at mug shots. Not only do sheep not all look the same to each other, but neither do humans all look the same. They know who they’re looking at and if your expression is nice or nasty. We would be in trouble if they were enfranchised.