POSTED January 05, 2010

The Atlantic Online | December 2009 | The Science of Success | David Dobbs

There’s lots of great stuff in this very long article.  The gist of it is that there are two different types of children; dandelions and orchids.  Dandelions have genes which aren’t strongly effected by their environment, and will thrive no matter what but aren’t especially spectacular.  Orchids have genes which are very temperamental, won’t do well in bad environments but can bloom in good environments.

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“About 15 years ago,” he said, “Carol Berman, a monkey researcher at SUNY-Buffalo, spent a lot of time watching a large rhesus-monkey colony that lives on an island in Puerto Rico. She wanted to see what happened as the groups changed size over time. They’d start at about 30 or 40 individuals—a group that had split off from another—and then expand. At a certain point, often somewhere near a hundred, the group would reach its limit, and it, too, would split into smaller troops.”

Such size limits, which vary among social species, are sometimes called “Dunbar numbers,” after Robin Dunbar, a British evolutionary psychologist who argues that a species’ group limit reflects how many social relationships its individuals can manage cognitively. Berman’s observations suggested that the Dunbar number of a species reflects not just its cognitive powers but its temperamental and behavioral range as well.

Berman saw that when rhesus troops are small, the mothers can let their young play freely, because strangers rarely approach. But as a troop grows and the number of family groups rises, strangers or semi-strangers more often come near. The adult females become more vigilant, defensive, and aggressive. The kids and adult males follow suit. More and more monkeys receive upbringings that draw out the less sociable sides of their behavioral potentials; fights grow more common; rivalries grow more tense. Things finally get so bad that the troop must split. “And that’s what happened here,” Suomi said. “It’s a very extensive feedback system. What happens at the dyadic level, between mother and infant, ultimately affects the very nature and survival of the larger social group.”

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