The Orchid and the Dandelion by W. Thomas Boyce MD

Author:W. Thomas Boyce MD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

Who Gets the Bananas?

Even where bullying and marginalization are rare, however, there is still an underlying predisposition that Homo sapiens—even diminutive Homo sapiens children—seem to have: to create ordered social relationships along a gradient from dominant to subordinate, bigwig to earwig, top dog to underdog, big cheese to cheeseball. This will likely remind you of the allegedly more primitive world of the animal kingdom, in which there are no hospitals, therapists, or parent-teacher conferences. In fact, the behavior of animals, much like that of children, reveals a vivid picture of who we are and where we’ve come from, even as we resist our call of the wild.

During my year working with and observing monkeys at the NIH, I received an object lesson that I was able to apply across species. Through that most coveted of things—food—we ascertained where individual monkeys lay on this continuum in a very simple but effective and quite visible way. We loaded a couple of full branches of ripe bananas into a wheelbarrow, transported them down to the natural habitat where the troop of thirty to forty animals lived, and chucked the bananas over the enclosure fence. What happened next was a vivid illustration of how social hierarchies work in monkey societies. The number one, alpha male, to whom everyone else deferred, would casually saunter over to where the banana branch had landed, the very picture of nonchalance. He would then sit down and proceed to gorge himself on as many bananas as his ample belly could hold. Sometimes this number was twenty or thirty bananas, creating a scene not unlike Paul Newman’s bet in Cool Hand Luke that he could eat fifty hard-boiled eggs in an hour. Once sated, the alpha male would produce a noisy belch, defecate impressively, and sleepily sashay away from the site, whereupon the number two monkey would get his or her turn. This continued, one monkey at a time, in an absolutely orderly fashion, until the last, omega monkey got what was left, which was often not much. Being among the low-status animals also didn’t just assign you to a life of leftover bananas. In the day-to-day activities of being a monkey, these were the ones who were last into the shelter during a rainstorm, the least desirable playmates, the last male to leave the natal troop during adolescence, and the most unlikely to have access to “reproductive opportunities.”

The animals at the top of the pack were not necessarily the biggest or the meanest. When it came to acquiring status in a rhesus monkey society, it was not so much how fierce you could be, but rather whom you knew and how effectively you led. Having the right mother, making the right alliances with your peers, and using the right swagger as you cruised the compound on Friday nights were all more important than size or ferocity. And though an individual monkey’s status was largely stable over time, the hierarchy could change in certain opportunistic circumstances. Primatologist and molecular

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.