(Press-News.org) "We were able to show that the benefit of social bonding accrues through 'the manipulation of ones' own and others' social relationships,' which is one definition of politics," said Oliver Schülke of Georg August University Göttingen in Germany. "The bond does not directly affect access to desirable resources but helps males to climb up the social ladder and to stay up there at the cost of other males that lose their status."
Earlier evidence had shown that female animals live longer and have more offspring when they form strong bonds with other females. The benefit of friendship in the case of females is usually explained by greater access to food and safety. But, given the strong competition among males for access to mates, scientists had generally expected that evolutionary forces would work against male bonding, particularly in groups like those of the macaques, in which male members typically aren't close kin.
In the current study, Schülke and his colleague Julia Ostner focused on wild male Assamese macaques living in their natural environment in Thailand. They found that males do maintain social relationships with other males in which both members spend time together and groom one another. Those bonds aren't confined to potential kin.
Males with stronger bonds to other males tended to form coalitions, and those coalitions predicted future social dominance, the researchers report. The strength of males' social bonds was directly linked to the number of offspring they sired.
"We have shown for the first time that having close friends makes males more successful in terms of social status and paternity," Ostner said.
The researchers added that they are "quite confident" that it is not the other way around—that successful males attract more friends. "The effect of friendship on success materializes in the future," they said. "Success does not make for future friendships."
Schülke and Ostner said that earlier work in chimpanzees starting with Jane Goodall had shown that strong bonds among males promote alliance formation in conflicts over status. But, they said, chimps are different from macaques in that they stay in their natal groups all their lives, often bonding with brothers or at least with other males that they are sure to live with for long periods of time. On the other hand, male macaques all leave the groups they are born into sooner or later, resulting in a male society that is much more fluid.
The researchers expect that their findings will apply to other species, in cases in which males live in large groups with many males for long enough to develop bonds and benefit from them. The findings in primates may also provide insight into our own social lives.
"Our results suggest that the universal tendency of humans to form close social ties has evolutionary roots outside the extended family," the researchers said. "This long evolutionary history of a fundamental social trait may also explain why the loss of friendship or social integration has severe consequences for human mental and physical health."
###
The primary author for this research is Oliver Schülke, Georg August University.
In additional to Schülke, this paper was co authored by:
Jyotsna Bhagavatula, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Linda Vigilant, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Julia Ostner, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Georg August University
END
TAAD causes thousands of deaths in the United States each year. Although timely surgical repair of aneurysms can prevent death, thoracic aneurysms are often asymptomatic until dissection (tearing of the vessel wall), and there are few recognized risk factors that can be used for screening. "Prospective identification of patients at risk for TAAD using a genetic strategy will be critical to prevent sudden deaths from this treatable disease," explains senior study author Dr. John W. Belmont from Baylor College of Medicine.
To begin to unravel the genetic origins of TAAD, ...
DURHAM, N.C. -- The review process being used by the Food and Drug Administration to assess the safety of a faster-growing transgenic salmon fails to weigh the full effects of the fish's widespread production, according to analysis by a Duke University-led team in this week's Science.
The salmon, whose genome contains inserted genes from two other fish species, could become the first genetically modified animal approved for human consumption in the United States.
The FDA held two days of hearings in September to assess the fish's human and environmental health risks. ...
The pathogen Shigella flexneri invades the cells that line the gut and causes Shigellosis, a disorder characterized by diarrhea and sometimes even death in humans. S. flexneri subverts the normal immune response of the host by interfering with the ability of the infected cell to secrete chemicals called chemokines that stimulate inflammation. Inflammation is a complex response to pathogens that attracts white blood cells to destroy the bacteria. Despite the documented ability of S. flexneri to suppress inflammation in infected cells, intestinal cells do secrete large amounts ...
Researchers have uncovered a fundamental link between the two defining properties of quantum physics. Stephanie Wehner of Singapore's Centre for Quantum Technologies and the National University of Singapore and Jonathan Oppenheim of the United Kingdom's University of Cambridge published their work today in the latest edition of the journal Science.
The result is being heralded as a dramatic breakthrough in our basic understanding of quantum mechanics and provides new clues to researchers seeking to understand the foundations of quantum theory. The result addresses the ...
Panama Canal, PanNew data suggest that the Limon and Pedro Miguel faults in Central Panama have ruptured both independently and in unison over the past 1400 years, indicating a significant seismic risk for Panama City and the Panama Canal, according to research published today by the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA).
The Panama Canal is undergoing expansion to allow for greater traffic of larger ships, scheduled for completion by 2014. As part of a seismic hazard characterization for the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) expansion project, Rockwell, ...
Over the last 15 years, astronomers have detected nearly 500 planets orbiting stars in our cosmic neighbourhood, but none outside our Milky Way has been confirmed [1]. Now, however, a planet with a minimum mass 1.25 times that of Jupiter [2] has been discovered orbiting a star of extragalactic origin, even though the star now finds itself within our own galaxy. It is part of the so-called Helmi stream — a group of stars that originally belonged to a dwarf galaxy that was devoured by our galaxy, the Milky Way, in an act of galactic cannibalism about six to nine billion years ...
Understanding the evolution of life-threatening viruses like influenza, Ebola and dengue fever, could help us to minimize their impact. New research points the way to a fossil record of viruses that have insinuated themselves into the genomes of insects and other animals, providing clues about their evolutionary history. The findings, published online on November 18 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics, could enable scientists to elucidate general principles in virus evolution from their genetic "fossils", which in turn could inform approaches for controlling disease.
Robert ...
LA JOLLA, CA – November 16, 2010 – A team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has solved the structure of one of the receptors that responds to the neurotransmitter dopamine. Although dopamine transmission is essential to normal brain functioning, the biological assembly of the molecules involved in this crucial neuronal interplay had not been known—until now.
The work was reported in the November 19, 2010, issue of the journal Science.
In the new study, whose authors included collaborators from Weill Cornell Medical College, Receptos, the National Institute ...
As experts gather in St Petersburg, Russia for next week's Tiger Summit, fewer than 3,200 tigers survive in the wild worldwide. More than half live in India, where they are spread over a vast area (100,000 sq km) of forest.
According to Dr Yadvendradev Jhala of the Wildlife Institute of India, lead author of the new study: "Tigers are cryptic, nocturnal and occur at low densities so they are extremely difficult to monitor. Unless we know how many tigers are left in the wild, and whether their numbers are increasing or decreasing, we will not be able to conserve them."
Until ...
Cough medicine could be used as way of predicting how well individual patients metabolise tamoxifen used in the treatment of their breast cancer, according to new research presented at the 22nd EORTC-NCI-AACR [1] Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics in Berlin today (Friday).
The findings suggest that it could be possible to use cough suppressant syrup as a probe, which would enable doctors to identify patients with altered metabolism and use this information to improve individual treatment, making it more effective and reducing the chances of side-effects. ...
