ABS

So, the conference. First of all, let me say, it was exhausting. I didn't really know anyone, and I'd paid good money for it, so I figured that I'd try to attend as much as possible. I learned a lot, but experienced a bit of burnout in the process. Anyway, I've always been interested in animal behavior and comparative psychology, and this was a good intro to the field because, 1. there were talks about a variety of things, so I gained a broad knowledge of the field, and 2. it's a good intro to the type of research being done currently. So, the moral of this tangent is if you have an interest in a related field, attend a conference of theirs. Anyway, on to the good stuff.

Clutton-Brock gave the first plenary on social mammals, specifically a cooperative breeding species of meerkats in Africa. He basically talked about the costs and benefits of such a structure, where there's one dominant F who does most of the breeding (and will practice infanticide if a subdominant F tries to breed), and a bunch of helpers raising the offspring. Why help? Collective benefits (a larger group size of more helpers means more food and better defense against other groups), inclusive fitness benefits, reciprocal exchange, and coercion from other members. Anyway, it was just a general review of costs of doing this, incidence (relatively low) of cheating, etc. The crazy part was at the end of the talk, this dude jumped up and despite claiming amicable intentions, proceeded to tear him apart because he "did a disservice" by not including info from the "vast and growing literature" on group selection, or "multi-level selection." Any guesses on who this person was? David Sloan Wilson. (whose BBS paper on the benefits of group selection I recently downloaded. Has anyone read it? Anything to it?) Anyway, he so accosted him, Clutton-Brock was left speechless and they had to move on to the next question. I t was really awkward and uncomfortable. And sadly, after Trivers's talk the next day, Jeff Galef from McMaster (who was hosting the conference) had to preface the Q& A period with, "And with a group this large, there are bound to be people who disagree with something Bob's said, but please keep those questions for discussion with him individually afterwards." It was crazy. D. S. Wilson even gave a talk titled, "Individual differences in humans" a few days later, which was actually not on individual differences in humans generally, but only on one measure--prosociality. What's his deal?


Okay, so I'm going to keep it relatively brief from here on out. Trivers gave the plenary the next day, and I'm gonna go ahead and suggest it was probably very similar to his HBES plenary the year before, but I'm not certain because it was so early in the morning I don't remember much from it! But generally he talked more about genomic imprinting, and made it relevant to animal behavior. Some of the bigger points: he suggested we use the study of animal behavior to better understand current events (he drew a parallel to the Israel/Hezbollah conflict, highlighting the relationship between religion and inbreeding importance as potential insights into the conflict), and also suggested its relevance to evolutionary biology. I only grasped the largest point from this, but it went like this: junk/fossil DNA are selfish elements no longer used (just replicated), which generally just increase the genome (and cell) size, which is bad for the organism. He illustrated this with the example of amphibians, who generally have a large genome size, and as a genome size increases, the brain cell (neuron) size increases, but with a cranial space that hasn't increased accordingly, this means there are fewer brain cells, fewer connections = dumb. Or, apparently as they say in their circles, "why salamanders are so dumb." And, the only other impressions that I walked away with were that, 1. He is TOTALLY Lewis Black. His delivery style, hand gestures, voice, everything. (although Trivers, unlike Black, was named one of Time Magazine's most 100 influential people of the 20th century. Pretty cool.) And 2. Given my own weakness for Q&A, it was somewhat heartening to hear him bow-out from a few questions (granted, he's dealing with genetics which is a little trickier ;).

The third plenary was from Carl Gehrhardt, and I must say that I really zoned out during that one. It had to do with acoustic communication. (Sorry)

As for the remaining general insights:

The conference was dominated by predator prey mechanism and sexual selection sessions (though there were some on communication and cognition and a few others). The sexual selection talks were clearly (mostly--the ones on sexual cannibalism not so much) relevant for humans, but much less work has been done (that I'm familiar with) in humans on predator prey mechanisms. I should probably read Clark Barrett's chapter on in the EP handbook. Also, the vast majority of the studies were experiments, which was interesting, too. You can't really give bees a pencil and paper survey, so you have to do something a little wackier to determine what's going on. Also, life history theory was big, too. A lot of energetic/metabolic cost studies, from measuring the cost of male sexual ornamentation to energy expenditure on selecting mates. And I've never seen so many different taxonomies in so few days; I guess that's necessary when you're attending a conference where so many different animals are studied, but their approaches were really comparative (and made for strong arguments). Also, something else that made for a good talk: if you're talking about something that exhibits ecological variation, it's particularly effective to show a chart/map illustrating the distribution of that particular threat or expected selection pressure, then show how your evolved response overlaps. (again, more difficult with mobile humans, but still effective). Also, nearly everyone there had NSF funding they had to acknowledge, and I attended a workshop on how to get an NSF DDIG (dissertation improvement grant) funded. Most of it was similar to what we heard in Laursen's professional development class, but it was striking to realize that so many of them get funded; we should too because we do the exact same thing on humans! Also, I learned that there's an NSF section that funds travel for these studies, so if you're thinking you may have to go somewhere (like I might for anthro, or if any of you want to do field work too), then it's a good idea to try for a grant from them.

A few interesting results:

A study of "egg competition" (like sperm comp--get it? ha-ha) in a sex role reversed species (so males invest, although still have smaller gamete)

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh (of Kanzi fame) talked, but didn't really have anything interesting to say. Just thought I'd add that.

I also already mentioned another study I thought was interesting: just as animals adjust vocal signals according to aural noise, so might they adjust visual signals, and they found this to be true of male lizard mate attraction demonstrations relative to a busy background (waving branches).

An experiment with birds that manipulated social status and investigated phenotypic expression of dominant traits like plumage and bill coloration, as well as an increase in androgens. (Another example of the relevance of relativity. It'd be interesting to manipulate this in humans and see if you get changes in non-verbal behavior and if there are any mediating hormones.)

A very well done study by a guy at FIU, investigating trade-offs in an electric fish between mating signals and predator eavesdropping of these signals. The fish vary signal production to when mating is most likely.

A study indicating that rats were able to differentiate familial odors from non-familial (by habituation). The rats also differentiated between more closely related family and less closely related. (sort-of. the results weren't resounding, but they were very suggestive.) So they're suggesting that at the general genotypic level (as opposed to the MHC level-they didn't look at that, although they're surely related, right?) there are differences in odor production. I've forgotten if this has already been investigated in the incest avoidance literature, but there it is anyway.

A mostly theoretical discussion of if humans are "obligate brood reducers" (as are species of sharks, birds, some mammals, etc.), in that they have some kids as backup, then get rid of them if they turn out not to be necessary. No, this is not a study of infanticide at birth, but one about twinning, showing that older mothers have more dizygotic twinning fertilizations (as insurance against embryo quality decline), and that twin conceptions are most likely to occur when they're least likely to survive.

A test of a life history theory prediction suggesting that older mothers invest more in offspring (to compensate for a declining reproductive value), and found this to be true in a mammalian species (squirrels), not from direct investment (mass of mother, litter at birth etc), but through behavioral/indirect investment (attempt to have 2nd round of breeding during season, bequeathing of territory to offspring, etc.).

Okay, that's way to much info. Hopefully there was something of interest to you guys in there.

Over 'n out,

Emily