Baboon Study Shows Benefits for Nice Guys, Who Finish 2nd
At last, good news for the beta male.
From the wild to Wall Street, as everyone knows, the alpha male runs the show, enjoying power over other males and, as a field biologist might put it, the best access to mating opportunities.
The beta is No. 2 in the wolf pack or the baboon troop, not such a bad position. But conversationally, the term has become an almost derisive label for the nice guy, the good boy all grown up, the husband women look for after the fling with Russell Crowe.
It may now be time to take a step back from alpha worship. Field biologists, the people who gave the culture the alpha/beta trope in the first place, have found there can be a big downside to being No. 1.
Laurence R. Gesquiere, a research associate in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, and colleagues report in the journal Science that in five troops of wild baboons in Kenya studied over nine years, alpha males showed very high stress levels, as high as those of the lowest-ranking males.
The stress, they suggested, was probably because of the demands of fighting off challengers and guarding access to fertile females. Beta males, who fought less and had considerably less mate guarding to do, had much lower stress levels. They had fewer mating opportunities than the alphas, but they did get some mating in, more than any lower-ranking males. After all, when the alpha gets in another baboon bar fight, who's going to take the girl home?
Behavioral researchers have not ignored the female baboons: other studies have shown that the females have a whole different system of rank, which is inherited from the mother and rarely subject to challenge, so that is one kind of stress they do not have.
The study is both impressive and surprising, said Robert Sapolsky of Stanford, a neurobiologist who did groundbreaking studies on stress in baboons and was not involved in the new study. "What's cool about this paper is that being an alpha and being a beta are very different experiences physiologically," Dr. Sapolsky said.
Robert M. Seyfarth of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies baboon and other primate behavior, said, "I think it’s a great paper."
"It's a wonderful sample size over many, many years," said Dr. Seyfarth, who was not part of the new research, and it shows that "the males at the top are under a lot of stress, and there’s a cost."
Earlier work by Dr. Sapolsky showed that in baboons, the lower the social rank, the greater the stress. The one exception was during periods of instability, when top males faced many challenges and their stress increased. It was good to be king, he found, but a lot better when the realm was quiet.
The new study showed that top-ranking males had higher levels of stress whether the social structure of their group was stable or in tumult. Researchers collected fecal samples to measure levels of stress hormones called glucocorticoids.
Levels of stress are important partly because of the health effects of stress hormones. In the short term, in immediate fight-or-flight situations, the hormones work to energize the individual. Long-term stress levels are a different matter. “In the long term, you fall apart, or are subject to diseases,” said Jeanne Altmann, an emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, and senior author of the new report.
The health effects are unclear for the subjects of the new study. "Wild baboons are getting lots of exercise and not getting cardiovascular disease," Dr. Altmann said. And baboons do not stay at the top very long.
For humans, chronic long-term high levels of stress hormones can increase the risks of disease or worsen existing diseases. Dr. Sapolsky argued, in a major review paper in 2005 in Science, that socioeconomic status in humans, the best equivalent to social rank in other primates, affected health not just because of access to medical care, but because low status meant more chronic stress.
That does not mean that the new findings can be used to draw conclusions about the health of vice presidents and lieutenant governors compared with that of their bosses. “We’re not sort of a strict dominance hierarchy species,” Dr. Sapolsky said. Humans pick and choose among many hierarchies. A low-ranking employee, for instance, might run a youth baseball league, or be the top skydiver in his local club.
While the new study does not have a direct application to human health or social structure, Dr. Sapolsky and Dr. Seyfarth said, it certainly raises questions about possible unstudied costs of being at the top.
And it does suggest some reproductive strategies among baboons that may be worth thinking about for the majority of men who plan for the future, worry about gas mileage and slip out the back when the fighting starts.
What if, Dr. Seyfarth said, the beta males are hanging around and doing "pretty well for a long time, rather than very well for a short time?"
America's National Bird
Benjamin Franklin disliked the choice of the bald eagle as the national bird, and it was in a letter to his daughter, in 1784, that he proposed putting the turkey in its place. The eagle, Franklin points out, is "a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly. . . . He watches the labor of the fishing hawk; and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him, and takes it from him." Truly, a one-per-cent kind of bird. The turkey, however, represented to Franklin the best of bourgeois Philadelphia values. The turkey is not only a native; "He is besides, though a little vain and silly, a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on."
That was not a finger-on-the-nose bit of Old Ben playfulness. Earlier in the turkey letter, Franklin is arguing hard about whether there ought to be hereditary legacies in American life, and he makes the keen point that there are two kinds of honor in the world: the Old World’s "descending honor," in which people pass on their goods and their status to their children, and the New World’s "ascending honor," in which children strive to impress their parents by moving up in society on their own. For Franklin, ascending honor - what we would now call meritocratic advancement - is the American goal, and descending honor the American danger. The eagle is to him an avian example of descending honor in action: looking classy but swooping down to feed on the helpless. The turkey is the bird of ascending honor: silly and vain, pluming itself too much on the small stuff but sharing the feed with the other birds in the yard and ready to give hell to anyone who tries to make trouble.
Bowerbird Artists
Right from its entrance, Disneyland is designed to cast an illusion upon its visitors. The first area – Main Street – seems to stretch for miles towards the towering castle in the distance. All of this relies on visual trickery. The castle’s upper bricks and the upper levels of Main Street’s buildings are much smaller than their ground-level counterparts, making everything seem taller. The buildings are also angled towards the castle, which makes Main Street seem longer, building the anticipation of guests.
These techniques are examples of forced perspective, a trick of the eye that makes objects seem bigger or smaller, further or closer than they actually are. These illusions were used by classical architects to make their buildings seem grander, by filmmakers to make humans look like hobbits, and by photographers to create amusing shots. But humans aren’t the only animals to use forced perspective. In the forests of Australia, the male great bowerbird uses the same effect to woo his mate.
Bowerbirds are relatives of crows and jays that live in Australian and New Guinea. There are 20 or so species. In most of them, the male attracts mates by building an intricate structure called a bower, which he decorates with specially chosen objects. Some species favour blue trinkets; others collect a mishmash of flowers, fruits, insect shells and more. Surrounded by these knick-knacks, the artistic male performs an elaborate display. The females judge him on his skill as a performer, builder and decorator.
The great bowerbird’s taste for interior design seems quite Spartan compared to his relatives. He creates an avenue of sticks, around 60 centimetres long, leading up to a courtyard. The courts are decorated with gesso – a collection of gray and white objects including shells, bones and pebbles.
The male performs in this messy courtyard. He struts. He sings. He tosses brightly coloured objects about. All the while, the female watches from the lined avenue. Her point of view is fixed and narrow, and according to John Endler, the male knows how to exploit that.
In 2010, Endler showed that the males place the largest objects towards the rear of the courtyard and the smallest objects in the front near the avenue. This creates forced perspective. From the female’s point of view, it looks like the bigger objects, which are further away, are the same size as the smaller objects, which are close by. If bowerbird vision is anything like humans, the courtyard as a whole looks smaller to a watching female. It’s the opposite effect to the one that Disney visitors experience.
By analysing 19 different bowers across Queensland, Endler showed that the arrangement of objects in the courtyards were far from random. When he messed up the careful gradients by reversing the large and small trinkets, the males were quick to put things right. Within three days, the illusions had been restored. Now, Endler has shown why the bowerbirds are so fussy. With his colleague Laura Kelley, he has found that the males who create the strongest illusions get the most mates. From the female’s point of view, the courts with the strongest forced perspective and the most even patterns earned their owners the most sex. "To my knowledge no other animals make constructions which produce perspective," says Endler.
Perspective has been a familiar element of Western art since the Renaissance, and Endler describes the great bowerbird’s courtyards as 'bowerbird art'. Others would agree. In this clip David Attenborough compares the work of a Macgregor’s bowerbird to a sculpture by British artist Andy Goldsworthy and asks why one might be considered art and the other not. Defining art is a tricky business, but Endler thinks of it as one individual creating a visual pattern in the outside world to influence the behaviour of others. "Influencing behaviour can range from attraction to and voluntary viewing of the art by others to viewers mating with the artist, which is what bowerbirds do," he says.
The bowers might be art, but are they actually illusions? It’s not clear. Despite Kelley and Endler’s new study, we’re no closer to knowing exactly why the bower gradients work. Perhaps more regular pattern on the court, as seen from the avenue, could make the male more conspicuous or easier to see. The same applies to the object that he waves about – perhaps it stands out more against such a regular background, or seems bigger.
Endler notes that from the female’s perspective, the male’s display items are often slightly larger than the ones in the gesso. This could trigger the ‘Ebbinghaus illusion’, where objects seem bigger if they’re next to smaller ones than next to larger ones.
But there are explanations that could account for the male’s habits without having to invoke any illusions. Perhaps it’s simply that the female likes a more uniform texture. Maybe she recognises that males who can produce regular patterns might be mentally sharper, better at stealing the right objects from other bowerbirds, better at resisting such acts of thievery, or better at choosing building sites with lots of varied objects to choose from.
In a related editorial, Barton Anderson from the University of Sydney writes that we still don’t know if the bowerbirds are actually crafting illusions for their mates. He says, "Kelley and Endler’s data suggest that male bowerbirds appear to consider the viewpoint of their potential mates when constructing their bower courtyards, and the ones who do this best are rewarded with a higher rate of mating success. Just what matters, and why it matters, remain open and intriguing questions."
There’s plenty of time to answer them. After all, the bowerbird’s behaviour has only just been discovered. Back in 2010, Endler says that he still needs to do the “critical experiments” to see how much brainpower the birds need to pull off their illusions. That’s still the case in 2012.
The most extreme explanation is that they have a sense of perspective (insert joke about humans here) and know that they should put small objects near the avenue and bigger objects further away. But Endler says, “The very simplest hypothesis is that the birds make the gradients by trial and error.” They spend around 80% of their time at the bower on moving objects within the courts, checking the view from the avenue, and moving things again.
"They could just be doing that until the view of the court from inside the avenue looks ‘good’," says Endler. "A slightly more complex behaviour might be needed if they had an inherited or learned decision rule which made them put smaller objects closer to the avenue entrance and increasingly larger objects further away." Neither technique would be unexpected, given that bowerbirds are closely related to some of the smartest of all birds – crows, ravens, jays and their kin.