The scientists think that their findings could teach us something about human sexuality. I don't know about that, but I do know that it can teach us something about US politicians.
...
Some lizards use a brute-force approach. Those lizards tend to have orange bellies. Some use deception; they tend to have yellow bellies. Others band together and use cooperation. They have white bellies.
This is explained in a Live Science article:
Lizard love triangles exposed!
Researchers speculate rock-paper-scissors games might be commonplace
By Charles Q. Choi
Updated: 10:37 a.m. MT Oct 4, 2007
A three-way sex struggle resembling the game rock-paper-scissors may have existed for 175 million years or more in lizards, research now suggests.
The reptilian triads may be far more common than previously recognized — and may even shape the way humans behave, the scientists said...
Orange-bellied males are brutes that invade other lizards' territories to mate with any female they can hold. But while they're gone, yellow-bellied males sneak deceptively onto the vacant territory and mate with undefended females. White-bellied males guard their mates closely and ally with other white-bellied lizards to keep the yellows at bay. Thus the analogy to rock-paper-scissors — orange force defeats white cooperation, cooperation defeats yellow deception and deception defeats force...
There are some interesting points here. It turns out that no one strategy is clearly best. There is a dynamic cycle that affects the relative preponderance of the three varieties. The tendency is for one strategy to predominate for 1-2 years, but then the natural vulnerability associated with that strategy loses its effectiveness as others learn to exploit the vulnerability. Then another strategy will prevail for 1-2 years.
In practice, this game of sex leads to a steady cycling of which lizard color type is prevalent every four to eight years. For instance, orange aggressors may be dominant for a year or two, followed by yellow deceivers, succeeded by white cooperators and then back to orange as the cycle starts anew.
There are interesting lessons here, for students of evolution and animal behavior. And who knows, we might learn something about human sexual behavior along the way. But I still think the more important lesson is the application to politics.
When George W. Bush was first elected, he clearly was a yellow-bellied deceiver: the "uniter not a divider, education president" line. He then transformed into an orange-bellied aggressor.
What this tells us, is that now, the time is right for a cooperator. Which of the candidates best fits that bill?
Maybe in the next debates, we should have them all lift up their shirts to show us what they are made of.
Comments
The more well studied example is the Common Side-Blotched Lizard, which is exactly as this one apparently, except that cooperators are blue instead of white.
I wrote about them to try to explain different mating strategies in humans, particularly why pretty boys do well (they're like the yellow ones):
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/09/popularity-of-pretty-boys-and-frequency.php
There are links in that post to more extensive writing on the Common lizard. It's really fascinating stuff.
Posted by: agnostic | October 9, 2007 12:37 PM