Social Dynamics: Knowledgeable Lemurs Gain Status

Female Dominanceand Social Structure in Alaotrangentle Lemurs

Lemur social systems have the striking social feature, that adult females consistently evoke submissive behaviour of adult males. In the Alaotran gentle lemur, Hapalemur griseus alaotrensis, however, female dominance has not been studied yet. Here we conŽ rm female dominance over males on the basis of a 5-month Ž eld study of the social behaviour of four groups, in the Lake Alaotra marshland of...

Dynamics of Status Symbols & Social Complexity

In this paper, a symbolic version of the Simmel effect has been explored via computer simulation. By Simmel effect, we mean the dynamics of status symbols in hiearchically ordered societies. This phenomemon was highligthed by the sociologist Georg Simmel (1895), when he attempted to explain the rapid diffusion and decline of fashion. Simmel, hypothesised that the instability of fashion results ...

Dynamics of Status Symbols and Social Complexity

Lemurs

What’s next for you? We have quite an exciting new project on elephant matriarchs under way — comparing social knowledge in natural family groups in Kenya, where the matriarch is the oldest in a group of female relatives, with more artificial groups in South Africa formed by translocation in of elephants (often young individuals) from outside. In the longer term we will be examining how age and...

Knowledgeable Schema

Discovering appropriate information from a huge and complex information base is a non-trivial task. In order to make a database a good description of the world it is intended to model, meaning of data in the application environment should be captured more precisely and formally. Researchers are turning to biological systems to learn from them. `How the brain works' is still an open question and...