Female monkeys use wile to rally troops | Hacker News Reader

Female monkeys use wile to rally troops

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122 pointsJerry2138 comments

Humans do this too, on occasion. Apart from the obvious but difficult-to-verify night club anecdotes, here's a well-known historical example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather#World_War_I

On the other side of the coin, there's the fictionalized story of Lysistrata.

No need for fiction Colin, I'm sure you've heard of the Sabine women:

"[They], from the outrage on whom the war originated, with hair dishevelled and garments rent, the timidity of their sex being overcome by such dreadful scenes, had the courage to throw themselves amid the flying weapons, and making a rush across, to part the incensed armies, and assuage their fury; imploring their fathers on the one side, their husbands on the other, 'that as fathers-in-law and sons-in-law they would not contaminate each other with impious blood, nor stain their offspring with parricide, the one their grandchildren, the other their children. If you are dissatisfied with the affinity between you, if with our marriages, turn your resentment against us; we are the cause of war, we of wounds and of bloodshed to our husbands and parents. It were better that we perish than live widowed or fatherless without one or other of you.' "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Sabine_Women

That's a story of women as peacemakers, to be sure (although I'm not entirely sure how much of it is history and how much is legend). Unlike the Greek story (which is not necessarily entirely fictional) the Sabine women weren't specifically using sex as a weapon of peace, though.

Wow, in essence this means:

"Dear husband, please take that chance to die. Love you, honey"

Not dear husband.

Many of those "men" were teens.

Harassing 15 year olds was not uncommon.

Harassing WWI veterans not in uniform was very common.

It's really just staggering how little anybody understood about what they were really getting themselves into with WW1. All of the horrors of modern, industrial warfare unleashing themselves on a culture still steeped in Victorian attitudes, and general staffs that had absorbed the lessons of Sedan, rather than Petersburg or Mukden.

And yet 20 years later, the same but with much better technology.

One example:

> (...) once again stated that she was related to the two boys simultaneously and that at one point she told the murderer that his sexual performance was inferior to that of the victim.

If you can read portuguese, or is willing to try some online translation, you can go to:

http://g1.globo.com/sp/santos-regiao/noticia/2016/10/pivo-da...

They're both examples of social pressure, but the vervet monkeys presumably weren't subject to propaganda from military leaders, and the human woman certainly didn't have any kind of feather-presenting instinct.

I think the gender angle is not as interesting as the cultural one.

This is anecdotal: girl I know had a guy push her after a bad joke in a group while everyone was drinking. I don't think the guy meant any harm by it, he didn't cause her any harm. He should keep his hands to himself but it was clearly not done with ill intent nor was it hard enough to hurt her.

She later said that was 'violent,' then it turned into, that was 'rape.' Really.

She tried badmouthing about that guy to some other drunk guys at a bar to do her bidding to get revenge. Nothing came of it, except some mean comments towards that guy.

The next day I asked her about it and she was quite belligerent in discussing it. So I didn't continue. When getting up to leave she was joking about how in the past at a night club she had gotten two guys to beat up another guy because she didn't like that guy.

Anyways, I feel like this might happen a lot more than is reported. The guy who this happened to said he 'just didn't want any more trouble' so he wasn't going to follow up on it and report her or do anything else.

That girl even made some comment about how 'guys are rapists.' WTF

...and crows can push cats into a fight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WANZBs8Za0Q, which I find more spectacular. (There are more such videos, it's not a singular case.)

And on both cases those species are somehow close to ours in brain usage.

If crows ever get the ability to use firearms, humanity is done for...

The level of machiavellian intelligence these animals have is scary.

These crows go so far as to poke these cats mid-fight so as to entice them...

Willingness to fight seems to be a successful genetic trait for them. If you don't fight, your troop starves. I don't think "manipulation" has anything to do with it... if the troop doesn't pass on successful genes, the troop dies. So of course the fighters are the ones that mate!

Well, shunning fighting is also a successful trait or else the male monkeys wouldn't be doing it. A good strategy for them is perhaps to appears as if they are a great fighters but in reality back down from most dangerous fights.

Live to multiply another day

Fonzie was famous for (almost) never fighting while cultivating a reputation for a fierce fighter. Throughout the show, almost without exception, people would simply back down. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A-DCWlLfOQ

Male monkeys manipulate females into lavishing them with attention by fighting.

Sounds like a win-win to me.

Yeah, it's more a simple preference, not manipulation.

"The riskiest group activity of all is warfare, and few animals other than humans and monkeys engage in it."

"... few animals other than humans and monkeys engage in it"

Birds, ants, killer-whales are but a few I can immediately think of.

Birds? I don't think so.

There's fighting to survive against a predator, there's fighting competitors for mating access, and then there's fighting between groups of the same animals.

They mean that it's the third option that is rare among animals.

"then there's fighting between groups of the same animals."

have you not seen same animals fighting in groups against each other? Take your point though.

Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), Narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), Psychopathy (the lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in the suffering of others)

Dark tetrad?

And i thought that the alpha monkey gets to do all the mating. The linked article implies that this is not the case. Are monkeys more egalitarian than apes?

Does this mean gay monkeys are more likely to be non-violent?

I don't particularly like the PC hype these days, but I think this could be a way to separate this from the gender domain and map it on the scarcity domain...

This is just another way of securing the best genes for the next generation. Perhaps a much more sophisticate one.

Males have evolved to extract resources from the environment.

Females have evolved to extract resources from males.

I think by removing the word "monkey" you have opened yourself up to a charge of inaccuracy. After all, I'm going to hazard a guess that this is not true of all males of all species.

Now some cynical people might think that you removed the word monkey in order to map this research onto humans, in order to make a point. While I'm sure that's not the case, I think it's worthwhile to recall many other evolved qualities human beings have, such as:

cannibalism

child molestation

incest

murder

organised genocide

disorganised genocide

So I think we can all agree that our ability, however occasional, to transcend our evolved behaviours is a positive and that people who advocate for further improvements are to be respected.

you don't get this joke, do you (yes, it's mostly for guys but not only, and no it's not completely hypothetical)

I'd be very interested in your explanation of the joke. Please elaborate in as much detail as you can.

The joke is we're primates too, and human females do this all of the time, you can see this in the motif of two heros(one "good" and the other "bad") fighting for a female, "golddigger" being most of the time attributed to the female, to the psychological game called "Rapo" where a female entices a particular male's attention so that another male would fight the first male, and so an and so on. The joke is believing all of the "Women are wonderful" effect, that there's a "rape culture", vilifying men and pedestalizing women, and all of the PC crap that dictates males and females think/feel and behave the same way and disregarding all of the obvious evolutionary and logical conclusions that males are predisposed to violence and females to manipulation in order to get what they want.

You don't have to believe all women are "wonderful" in order to find distasteful the notion that women evolved to manipulate men.

Why not "men evolved to be dumb as rocks on the topic of what they put their penises into?" Equally applicable and evidence backed, no? Equally irrelevant to the topic at hand?

But instead men are simultaneously superior and somehow at the mercy of these "manipulative women."

I would say that "dumb" has nothing to do about the topic in question since reproduction is probably one of the first goals of a male (non-human) and they will do whatever is needed to reach that goal. It isn't practically a choice for them.

Yeah, we got that part from the original. To qualify as a joke I would have thought there needs to be a punchline that allows it to transcend lazy stereotyping. "Ha he means gold diggers" isn't adding that.

You know I could be tricksy but I'll answer you straight. Even if I thoroughly believed the rather reductive propositions you make about male/female biology, I would still disagree with your conclusions.

You seem to want it both ways: you assert men are naturally violent, women are naturally manipulative, therefore we should accept this state of affairs and not be dishonest about it. At the same time you want us to reject the idea of rape culture, even though inherent in your assessment of men is an acceptance of exactly that.

Has it ever occurred to you that Political Correctness acts as training wheels for people who are exhibiting bad natural behaviours? And that this might be a good thing? We teach our children to have good manners, to share and to curb their violence. Of course, no adult wants to be treated as a child, but if there is a social consensus that somebody is infantile, then it seems appropriate to have a mechanism to put manners on them. That consensus is far from punitive. For the most part it doesn't restrict individual liberty.

Many contrarians and "rugged individualists" I know seem to fear that we will fall into a kind of group-think if we allow PC ideas to develop. This it seems to me is just the despair of autocrats. It's our social consensus. We get to form it together. But just saying "PC Crap" doesn't work. We live in a big complex society. It's going to just get more complex.

Many smart people are bored and repelled by these arbitrary social rules - I get that. But your natural repulsion is overcoming your judgement. These are systems. They can work well or badly. Contribute to them to support your values.

> Has it ever occurred to you that Political Correctness acts as training wheels for people who are exhibiting bad natural behaviours?

I get your points, but I disagree on this one. How people adapt to be perceived by others on the surface - I couldn't care less about that. When they are rotten deep inside, broken and shattered to pieces - no matter how many correctness masks they put on, they are still same piece of s__t. I'll rather know straight upfront who I am dealing with, life is much easier.

So yeah, PC is evil for me. Noble goals for sure, worst possible implementation how to get there.

Well I don't want to sound more cynical than the OP, but the surface is actually what matters in the broader social context. Without shame, human society would be a violent anarchy. Some people have relatively good natures, but many do not. That is not even a criticism. After all, one cannot be ashamed of nature - only of the inability to control it.

Absence of shame is like power: it corrupts.

So whatever we call PC, we need something like it. That is my view.

Good trap. He totally fell for it!

Please don't post like this here. There's no information or substance about it—just flame fodder. We don't want that on HN.

I think this is a reductionist point of view. There are bazillions of cases in which is not true. Female lions for example.

I think he means restricted to humans.

In the animal kingdom you have uncommon scenarios such as seahorses where the male caries the fertilized eggs or spiders where many times the male is just eaten by the female.

How do you mean "restricted to humans"? What exact cases do you have in mind?

What the hell is going on here? Why are you being downvoted for politely asking for clarification?

Because the question is extremely stupid, he should take an extra 10 seconds and it should be obvious

In which sense is this "obvious", hubert123? I am really interested in what the comment meant by "restricted to humans". Try to be explicit in explaining.

This breaks the HN guidelines about civility. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do it.

You should also have better manners than to presuppose "he" when speaking of a fellow user.

I made the original comment in this thread, let me attempt to clarify.

The person you replied to thought that I was referring to humans exclusively (Close enough, I had not only humans but most primates in mind), while a comment above that level the person thought that I was referring very broadly to animal kingdom.

If he means that human females evolved to extract resources from males it is also reductionist. Females were not hunters, but they were harvesters and growers. I think he is implying that females could not get resources because they took care of the offspring and the male got them. This is also wrong, evidence of early human settlements point that females took care of the offspring while harvesting and growing crops.

True but the vast majority of protein intake was provided by males.

They also performed the most dangerous activities because women are reproductively far more "valuable".

You are implying that we mostly evolved eating meat, which is wrong. We evolved being omnivores and we ate everything we could get, mussels, large insects, fruit, tubercules... Make no mistake, humans were hunters but that was only one part of the picture.

I think you are mixing two different (although very related) terms.

We did evolve by eating meat. The archeological and even biological evidence for that is quite strong. Eating meat (more specifically fish) allowed for the necessary proteins for brain increase.

But we seem to have evolved to eat as much as possible, thereby, we evolved to be omnivorous.

The difference here is between by what diet we did evolve and to what diet we evolved to. But the by part is purely biological in nature, the to part is also a sociologic one, since it depends, amongst other factors, on the use of fire to cook.

"By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher." --Socrates

Spoken like a true footballer.

Second comment from the top, "Women are gold diggers."

Screencapping this for when HN's users claim they don't make the tech space awful for women.

Be sure to also screencap the hundreds of statements made against males in order to keep your perspective accurate.

Please link a few of these hundreds of statements made against males on HN in order to provide accurate evidence for your claim.

You can do the work for yourself and search HN. I'm not going to sift through it all. If you're actually interested in knowing, take a few minutes.

You do it. You're the one making the claim. I've been on HN like 8 years and I'm wondering what you mean too.

As someone who has actually been here for like 8 years, I know better than to be baited into doing basic legwork research for the uninitiated.

He won't. He is very afraid that his perception is indeed skewed and that he may actually learn something. Just like some other commenters in this branch.

I think the vernacular is "It's not my job to educate you"

I guess you don't feel that strongly about the matter. Why bother posting then?

Males also have evolved to extract resources from tech males, though sacrificing some self-safety in war ops, etc. Maybe because geeks always make fun of them in tech field. "Oh, those strong males are so stupid, they can only take taxes and play with their tanks." They have no chance to get smart and enter the club.

In order for you to make such a statement, you have to believe what the parent said was completely false or that it is true but shouldn't be said.

If number one: Human evolution did not start 50 years ago. How do you think humans used to live for thousands of years, or how primitive tribes live right now? (Spoiler: it is not a feminist's dream) Are human males not more capable of gathering resources due to their inherent traits? Does evolution not select those most capable of reproduction? It does not take a degree in anthropology to put two and two together.

If number two: If basic evolutionary biology is too hurtful, perhaps it is time to consider whether the ideology that led you to feel inadequate is the social construct that needs to be done away with, rather than commonly agreed upon facts.

That's pure sample bias. You can support anything that way.

Which is not to say that this thread isn't bullshit.

When individual comments on Reddit or HN get voted up, they cease to be sample bias and become a reflection of the community's opinion. That's what these sites do.

I guarantee you'd never see a comment like that voted up on r/2xc.

It's a clear indication of a problem with the community, and there's no way you don't see that...?

Sorry I was late to seeing this.

That's still sample bias: plenty of such comments also get downvoted, and plenty of opposite comments also get upvoted. Drawing general conclusions about the community in this way is projection.

I'll refer you to this book by a female writer, it is a light read and she presents the point that I made far more eloquently and persuasively than I could in the limited space of a HN comment: https://dontmarry.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/the_manipulate...

It might be pithy but nature is full of counter-examples.

Come on, now!

Loool ok, not that for the longest time society has dictated that women shouldn't work outside of the home and should be housewives that depend on their husbands.

That's a ridiculous oversimplification.

Low-substance comments about inflammatory topics, like this one, end up triggering flamewars, like this one. We're trying to avoid those on HN. They're boring—alternately flippant and nasty—and if the term 'stupid' has a local definition, this would be it.

There are other places on the internet where you can ply that art if you want to. If you want to continue to post to HN, please behold the damage you wrought and refrain from doing it again here.

I thought HN welcomed diversity of opinion.

Starting flamewars was not my intention.

When I posted the comment the title of this posting was quite different and it made more sense in that context.

If you wished to ask me to substantiate the comment - you could have done exactly that, no need for threats.

EDIT: I've read the thread in it's entirety.

You're right, it's not the level of discussion I had hoped for.

But I will still maintain that I acted with intellectual integrity and if people have collectively steered towards the lowest common denominator - that is just the way people are.

A sign of times perhaps, but so was this US presidential election. I subscribe to Marcus Aurelius' philosophy of stoicism: "All men are made one for another: either then teach them better, or bear with them."

> I've been on HN like 8 years

curious because your profile says

> created: 16 days ago

Thank you for confirming you are using a sock-puppet account!

(Edit: While apparently using your main account to down-vote. Classy!)

'Apparently' how? Because you're being downvoted? I doubt, even if it is a sockpuppet account (which incidentally has amassed four times the karma you have), that they are the only one downvoting you.

He's saying that because the person who says they've been here for 8 years registered 16 days ago. As if, in 8 years of Inflammatory HN commentary, only just now did they decide to stop lurking. And only just now did they become so vocal about what matters to them.

That's my interpretation. It could also mean the more obvious, "I've been here for 8 years but under a different name."

I specifically did not deny it was a sockpuppet. That was not my point.

> It could also mean the more obvious, "I've been here for 8 years but under a different name."

Bingo. Why didn't you start with the more obvious interpretation?

I've been here in my estimation for 7-8 years, with maybe the first 2 years of that being lurking. Check that 4 year old 'ledge' account too and you'll see that all the facts and stylometric features line up.

When the 'submitting too fast' limitation (which ironically is because you people were downvoting me) is lifted on my current account, I'll be happy to angrily post from there again too.

And I'm not using any of these other accounts to downvote anyone, or do anything deceptive. But how else could I prove that my current account being 16 days old is meaningless? I have made probably 30+ accounts on HN, and I wish I could find one of the 5-6 year old ones and log into it to really drive it home that you're wrong.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13021773 and marked it off-topic.

And this is the current top comment. Welcome to Hacker News.

(my reply gets MRA-downvoted in 3.. 2.. 1..)

Please resist making comments about being downvoted. It never does any good, and makes boring reading. Also, avoid baiting users by announcing that you expect to be downvoted.

Please resist trying to teach other users.

This is completely off the subject but are you trying to indicate that he is somehow "man-splaining".

Educating readers as to the code of conduct of the site is required otherwise you would be downvoted without understanding why and just blaming it on "them bloody MRA's".

This is also completely off the subject, but I expect that in few minutes all my comments disappear as [flagged]. I am -20 from my score before the few comments in this thread now.

The OP's strongly offensive statement is still one of the top comments for this article.

Maybe there is something in here to "learn" for you guys.

Complaining about downvoting is never productive. They are just internet points.

Internet points that prove the point. And, as predicted, most of my comments are [flagged] now. Do you see the little story this tells?

Don't worry tomorrow it will be forgotten and we'll have another thread lamenting that the main problem of today's society is the evil tech giants that promote opinion bubbles.

That making a big stink about getting downvoted is a good way to get downvoted more?

He's just stating common HN etiquette.

The rules of engagement so to speak.

You're going to be downvoted for a troll-y, baiting post that has no content. Being downvoted will not validate your hypothesis.

I made a statement about HN's worrying MRA hive that doesn't appear to see any problem with this top comment, but with mine (btw, you prove my point too).

I'm sure there's quite a few people who think the OP is terribly offensive, and are appalled at the insinuation it wouldn't be downvoted or moderated.

Edit: The fact that your post got flagged faster than the OP on the other hand does reinforce your point and reflects very badly on HN.

I know that plenty of these people exist. But the anti-fem crowd outweighs them right now, once more. At least when looking at these votes. This is worrying since, after all, this shapes the discussion, the atmosphere here and the minds of people with yet to stabilize opinions.

I edited my post. You were, however unfortunately, completely right.

I, probably like a lot of others, took this post as a tongue-in-cheek joke. I think we're all mature enough to handle it, as the humour comes from how offensive the joke is and not from some universal truth behind the statement.

If it actually was meant as a serious comment and is being upvoted, then that's truly fucked up and would make me seriously question this forum. But I'm giving benefit of the doubt.

Take a look at the posting history of OP to get an idea.

If you have a problem with the post, state what it is. Bashing HN for whatever "hive" you see it containing is baiting.

It's a factual statement, not baiting, to observe that her comment was [flagged] instantly for containing a passing "downvoting" remark, while the original comment is still one of the highest voted comments in this thread.

This confirms that, indeed, the HN audience does not see any serious problems with the statement: "Females have evolved to extract resources from males.", which is exemplified by your request to state what the problem with it is.

The HN audience likely sees a number of potential readings in context and is interested in which particular one you and GP have chosen to reify. It's unlikely (as shown by negative comments) that the community approves or agrees with all of them.

> which is exemplified by your request

I requested nothing. If you care to offer you opinions do so, but do just that rather than speculate - the lack of down-votes for the above post confirms nothing, you are speculating; whereas challenging the content of the post directly might reveal more.

That comment was directly at odds with HN's guidelines:

"Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

And when Colin Percival, a widely respected member of community quoted exactly that excerpt, that person got combative and doubled down, throwing baseless accusations of some kind of MRA conspiracy.

Frankly, I am disturbed by a display of such callousness, not giving people the benefit of the doubt.

The problem is obvious and needs no explanation. The post in question extrapolates that all women are gold diggers from a single study that purports to have found manipulative behavior in a few groups of monkeys.

Yes, it was a bad comment with predictable effects. Still, breaking the site guidelines further is not a good way to reply. This comment (and others you posted) broke the site guidelines by being unsubstantive, calling names, complaining about downvoting, and baiting users into downvoting you. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Any large, optionally anonymous forum such as HN will include comments that hit any reader unpleasantly (it certainly does me) as well as genuinely nasty stuff. Any trend that exists in society at large is going to show up here. Or rather, societies, since many participate and their values don't all agree. That is a major factor here and perhaps the least understood.

If you generalize about HN based on the worst that stands out, in effect you contribute to worsening it, since it contributes to a view of the site as dominated by the long tail of shit, when this is not true. What's true is that HN is divided on controversial issues, just like the rest of the world is. But the vast majority of the userbase is here for civil, substantive discussion and hates this sort of trainwreck as much as you do and we do.

It takes time for the system to correct itself: flamewars flare up, and abusive commments pile up, very quickly. The counterweights—downvotes and flags by thoughtful users, and moderator intervention—take longer. There's not much we can do about this time discrepancy, because reflexive behaviors are always quicker than reflective ones.

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13020973.)

Nice article but the changed title is a bit linkbait.

> Female vervet monkeys manipulate males into fighting battles by lavishing attention on brave soldiers while giving noncombatants the cold shoulder, researchers said on Wednesday.

Title is basically the first sentence of the article.

Is this really manipulation or is it just sexual selection for bravery/aggression/dominance? Are the female monkeys being disingenuous with their attentions or are they sincere? When I read some of the criteria for manipulation on Wikipedia [0] it seems to me like a pretty high bar to show these sorts of behaviours in monkeys.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_manipulation

That's the defintion for Psychological manipulation, not manipulation such as the physical grooming.

Manipulation is changing other's behavior, especially against their own self-interest.

But if the change in behaviour results in reproductive success, can it really be argued that it is against the being's self-interest?

Yes. It may be good for the species, but very bad for the individual monkey that loses the fight.

Species and individual are human classifications; they have no ultimate biological significance. If I reproduce successfully, then my genes benefit by becoming more common. If I die before reproducing successfully but manage to assist those who are closely related to me in reproduction, I still score a partial victory by having my genes become more common. The only way in which I truly lose is when my whole tribe gets wiped out.

Just by being more common in the short term doesn't mean success in the long term, though.

It's funny to even try and think what success means, given that success only has meaning in the future. I sometimes think of life as a very long proposed logical proof where each step depends on a a step later then it by one tick of the clock. And as time goes by it's continually reduced, a step at time, and eventually we will come to reveal its basis, somewhere out in the future, which is probably is logical false, and will unravel the original proposition, like it never existed in the first place (ie we all die in the end).

Maybe that's all we are, anyway, pieces of a logical computation, which trying to determine something, some solution to a problem that was proposed at the beginning of life on this planet...

> Is this really manipulation or is it just sexual selection for bravery/aggression/dominance?

What's the difference?

Maybe it's a way to deny them agency and therefore moral responsibility for the results of their actions?

Do monkeys have morals? (Legitimate question.)

Well, they do show in-group preference.

Does that count?

I'd say yes.

Sexual selection for traits that otherwise have no discernible survival benefit or even harm survival happens all over the animal kingdom. Selection for bravery/aggression/dominance at least has the potential benefit of defense. Calling this sort of selection 'manipulation' on the part of female monkeys is making an unwarranted and human biased value judgement.

Or could the females just be tending to wounds suffered by the most aggressive monkeys?

Three monkeys walked into a bar... I mean humans.

I think a big difference between the sexes in humans is male aggression has the potential for violence while female aggression usually doesn't.

So female aggression is more likely a social aggression, a more civilized agression that is also perhaps sometimes expressed into violence via their male counterparts.

But this seems to be rare as humans females across the world are in general not aggressive. On the contrary they have been victims of extreme male aggression for thousands of years. Human males are extremely aggressive and violent towards others males, females and the world.

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