Mice are social animals and like many species, they show dominance hierarchies. When they first meet, they'll often fight each other. The winner gets to be Mr (or Mrs) Big, and they enjoy first pick of the food, mating opportunities, etc - for as long as they can remain dominant.But what determines which mice become top dog... ? Feder et al show that it's partially under genetic control. They took a normal population of laboratory mice, paired them up, and made them battle for supremacy in a simple set-up in which only one mouse can get access to a central food supply:
At first, only about 30% of pairs developed clear dominance/submission relationships, but the ones that did were selectively bred: dominant males mated with dominant females, and submissive males with submissive females. The offspring were put through the same process, and it was repeated.The results were dramatic: After 4 generations of successive selection, 80% of the pairs showed clear dominance and submission behaviour. And with each generation of breeding, the dominance relationships appeared faster, and stronger: at first the winners only got slightly more access to the food, but by the 4th generation, they almost completely monopolized it. As expected the mice bred to be dominant were overwhelmingly more likely to end up on top. The differences were not due to general differences in activity levels or anxiety.
But the naturally timid mice could be made to fight for their rights by treating them with antidepressants - after a month of imipramine, they were taking crap from no-one.Feder et al say that previous studies have also shown anti-submissive effects of antidepressants, while drugs used to treat mania reduce dominance. Anyone who's experienced a mood disorder will probably be able to relate to this: depressed people tend to feel like they belong at the bottom of the pecking order of life, while mania is classically associated with believing you're the greatest person in history.
So dominance and submission could provide a useful way of testing the effects of drugs on mood. If so, it would be useful, because current animal models of depression and antidepressants etc. mostly rely on putting animals in a glass of water and seeing how long they take to stop struggling...
Feder, Y., Nesher, E., Ogran, A., Kreinin, A., Malatynska, E., Yadid, G., & Pinhasov, A. (2010). Selective breeding for dominant and submissive behavior in Sabra mice Journal of Affective Disorders DOI: 10.1016/j.jad.2010.03.018
10 comments:
Reminds me of this:
http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_4.html#haidt
FASTER EVOLUTION MEANS MORE ETHNIC DIFFERENCES
Russian scientists showed in the 1990s that a strong selection pressure (picking out and breeding only the tamest fox pups in each generation) created what was — in behavior as well as body — essentially a new species in just 30 generations. That would correspond to about 750 years for humans. Humans may never have experienced such a strong selection pressure for such a long period, but they surely experienced many weaker selection pressures that lasted far longer, and for which some heritable personality traits were more adaptive than others.
LOL. Thank goodness humans have advanced belief systems, and are able to abandon the concept of hierarchies, based on physical (or other), supremacy!
Matt
I should probably just read the paper, but it's plausible that this is due to serotonin. Paired monkeys have been shown to lose their dominant behavior when injected with serotonin over long periods (or when injected with an inhibitor - I forget!). Antidepressents strongly effect serotonin, so that could be the mechanism behind all this.
@Radgast
Sadly, I doubt it. At least even a lot of really smart 'ethical' people are still anthropocentric in their conduct.
As we all learnt yesterday, Africans are the only undiluted Homo sapiens, take that 'white power'! Or is crossbreeding all at once a desirable trait for racists?
If you don't know what I'm talking about:
"I, for one, welcome my Neandertal ancestry. It may not sound like a lot -- between 1 and 4 percent."
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/neandertals-live-genome-sequencing-2010.html
"Those of us who live outside Africa carry a little Neandertal DNA in us,"
http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDocumentation/documentation/pressReleases/2010/pressRelease20100430/
Anyway, it wasn't my intention to get off-topic. I just linked to something that other people will think about while reading this. And if you follow the link, you'll see there is nothing with racist tendencies there but merely the consideration of the impact of possible future scientific findings.
P.S.
The knee-jerk reaction to anything involving ethnic differences is really sad.
adam: Yes, it could well be to do with serotonin. Imipramine is a strong serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Still, it has lots of other effects too, like noradrenaline reuptake inhibition, so we don't really know - you'd need to test lots of different drugs with different actions...
XiXiDu wrote:
"Sadly, I doubt it. At least even a lot of really smart 'ethical' people are still anthropocentric in their conduct..."
[shrug] Most "smart 'ethical' people" have levered themselves into a prominent position in society, and are busy defending that position against allcomers.
I'm not sure, but I think the question's redundant, anyway. That is, I've more or less satisfied myself that everybody on the planet has an almost identical intellectual capacity, although even that level of equality appears to be being refuted, at every level.
Matt
@Radagast
It is important that it is being refuted. If you base your ethical conduct on intellectual capacity or merely on being human, your morals are prone to fail. Often the whole argument for atrocity and abuse is the refusal of human nature or the denial of intellectual capacity.
"Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality...
Boundless compassion for all living things is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one..." -- Arthur Schopenhauer
I for myself try to embrace into my circle of compassion as much as possible. I think it is easier to incorporate differences, gender, race, intelligence - may they exist or not. It's surely more promising than just ignoring or denying such possibilities than learning one day, while having your ethics build upon uniformity, that after all there are objective difference. That could cause a backlash against those who are different.
"What is it that should trace the insuperable line? ...The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" -- Jeremy Bentham
Even suffering though, isn't enough for me. If possible I include art, knowledge and sheer data and grant such objects the right to survive, not to be wiped out.
I have wrote a bit about ethics here:
http://spacecollective.org/XiXiDu/5758/Ethics-in-the-light-of-godly-beings
P.S.
It's just the humble opinion of somebody with no formal education who's trying to come up with his own solutions on the journey towards a more informed worldview.
XiXiDu wrote:
"...Often the whole argument for atrocity and abuse is the refusal of human nature or the denial of intellectual capacity..."
Ah, yes: if one is able to dehumanize one's foe, then one is able not to treat them as though they were human, whatever "human" may mean - not as equals, anyway. At which point, any level of depravity is acceptable.
I suppose, if one cared to, one would need to devise a system whereby it was understood that if one diminished another person, then one diminished oneself. Not in some kind of vague, theological way, but in reality. Put another way: there are 6.4 billion people on the planet; if one is a white supremacist, one may view as equal just 15% of that number (and that's before one starts excluding others, for whatever reasons one may have). So, out of the universe of alternative experience (ie, alternative to one's own), one has excluded at least 85% of all human possibility - we're talking strict mathematics, now.
Hmmm. I quite like the plausibility of that idea... White supremacists must have a very limited scope for their imaginations - in other words, they'll reject as invalid vast swathes of input that comes from non-white sources, thus limiting the variety of the output. The very definition of the word "boring," in other words.
Matt
It's starting to be widely accepted that dominant and submissive behaviors don't exist in dogs and wolves, except as a reaction to stress.
http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/my-puppy-my-self/200904/is-your-dog-dominant-part-i
http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/my-puppy-my-self/200904/is-your-dog-dominant-part-ii
http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/my-puppy-my-self/200904/is-your-dog-dominant-part-iii-conclusion
http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/my-puppy-my-self/200905/pack-leader-or-predator
Yes, humans and other primates form hierarchies, but my question is why do "scientists" still formulate studies based around this false paradigm as if it were a given?
LCK
http://www.LeeCharlesKelley.com
The Psychological Diversity of Mankind http://lesswrong.com/lw/28k/the_psychological_diversity_of_mankind/
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