Tuesday, April 13, 2004

First Kill All the Lawyers

imageWell, not really the lawyers. I believe the idea would actually be to kill all the aggressive asswipes.

I was reading a fascinating article today in the NY Times (sorry, reg required) called No Time for Bullies: Baboons Retool Their Culture by Natalie Angier. It details observations of a tribe of baboons that lost its most aggressive members to hepatitis. It found that over subsequent generations, without the warring and snarly influence of the formerly dominant males, the culture of the tribe became more calm. The naturalists even took blood samples and showed that the tribe was generally less stressed.

“And if baboons can do it,” said 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, “why not us? The bad news is that you might have to first knock out all the most aggressive males to get there.”

Of course the one notable thing about this tribe that even though some years had passed since those large aggressive males had died, the females still outnumbered the males, which indicates a primal shift of power.

Just something interesting to ponder. You can go ahead and make the connections of this post with anything else you want that’s going on in human culture at the moment.

POSTED BY Cybele AT 2:44 pm    

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During November it's all about me writing a novel. Sometimes it's about whalewatching. You know, and then there's other stuff.