Its impossible Papa. Many have attempted to silence Padre and have failed. Willy always has the last word and will die to stay on the Dominican website speaking of his obession of Obama and politics. Willies rules never apply to Willy

* News
* Science
* Animal behaviour

Chimpanzees expand their territory by attacking and killing neighbours


A study has proved for the first time that groups of aggressive chimpanzees invade the territory of their neighbours in order to acquire more resources or mates



* guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 June 2010 17.03 BST
* Article history

A group of chimpanzees Chimpanzees cooperate to acquire new territory, killing individuals from rival groups. Photograph: Michael S. Lewis/Corbis

Gangs of chimpanzees carry out violent attacks on individuals from rival groups in order to secure more resources or mates, a 10-year study in Uganda has found.

During that time scientists recorded 18 attacks and found signs of three others carried out by a large, male-dominated community of chimpanzees at Ngogo in Kibale National Park.

In summer last year, the aggressor chimpanzees finally began to occupy the area where two-thirds of their attacks had occurred, expanding their territory by more than a fifth.

According to the scientists, led by John Mitani, a primate behavioural ecologist at the University of Michigan, the chimps then travelled, socialised and ate in the new territory.

"When they started to move into this area, it didn't take much time to realise that they had killed a lot of other chimpanzees there," said Mitani. "Our observations help to resolve long-standing questions about the function of lethal intergroup aggression in chimpanzees."

The findings are published today in the journal Current Biology.

Anthropologists have long suspected that chimpanzees, humans' closest living relatives, kill neighbours for land, but they have lacked any hard evidence until now.

Sylvia Amsler, an anthropologist at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and a member of the research team, said that the attacks usually occured when the chimpanzees were on routine boundary patrols in neighbouring teritory. In one attack that she witnessed, 27 adult and adolescent males and one adult female had been on patrol outside their territory for more than two hours when they surprised a small group of females from a nearby community.

"Almost immediately upon making contact, the adult males in the patrol party began attacking the unknown females, two of whom were carrying dependent infants," she said.

The Ngogo party quickly killed one of the infants and fought for 30 minutes to wrest the other from its mother, but were unsuccessful. After an hour-long break, during which time they held the female and her infant captive, they carried on with their attack. "Though they were never successful in grabbing the infant from its mother, the infant was obviously very badly injured, and we don't believe it could have survived," said Amsler.

Despite their decade of observations, the researchers said they were still not sure if the objective of the attacks had been more resources or more mates.

Mitani warns against using the research to draw conclusions about warfare among humans, instead arguing that his study provides insights into primate teamwork. "Warfare in the human sense occurs for lots of different reasons. I'm just not convinced we're talking about the same thing."

He added: "What we've done at the end of our paper is to turn the issue on its head by suggesting our results might provide some insight into why we as a species are so unusually cooperative. The lethal intergroup aggression that we have witnessed is cooperative in nature, insofar as it involves coalitions of males attacking others. In the process, our chimpanzees have acquired more land and resources that are then redistributed to others in the group."

New View of How Humans Moved Away From Apes

By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: March 10, 2011



Anthropologists studying living hunter-gatherers have radically revised their view of how early human societies were structured, a shift that yields new insights into how humans evolved away from apes.

RSS Get Science News From The New York Times »

Early human groups, according to the new view, would have been more cooperative and willing to learn from one another than the chimpanzees from which human ancestors split about five million years ago. The advantages of cooperation and social learning then propelled the incipient human groups along a different evolutionary path.

Anthropologists have assumed until now that hunter-gatherer bands consist of people fairly closely related to one another, much as chimpanzee groups do, and that kinship is a main motive for cooperation within the group. Natural selection, which usually promotes only selfish behavior, can reward this kind of cooperative behavior, called kin selection, because relatives contain many of the same genes.

A team of anthropologists led by Kim R. Hill of Arizona State University and Robert S. Walker of the University of Missouri analyzed data from 32 living hunter-gatherer peoples and found that the members of a band are not highly related. Fewer than 10 percent of people in a typical band are close relatives, meaning parents, children or siblings, they report in Friday’s issue of Science.

Michael Tomasello, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, said the survey provided a strong foundation for the view that cooperative behavior, as distinct from the fierce aggression between chimp groups, was the turning point that shaped human evolution. If kin selection was much weaker than thought, Dr. Tomasello said, “then other factors like reciprocity and safeguarding one’s reputation have to be stronger to make cooperation work.”

The finding corroborates an influential new view of early human origins advanced by Bernard Chapais, a primatologist at the University of Montreal, in his book “Primeval Kinship” (2008). Dr. Chapais showed how a simple development, the emergence of a pair bond between male and female, would have allowed people to recognize their relatives, something chimps can do only to a limited extent. When family members dispersed to other bands, they would be recognized and neighboring bands would cooperate instead of fighting to the death as chimp groups do.

In chimpanzee societies, males stay where they are born and females disperse at puberty to neighboring groups, thus avoiding incest. The males, with many male relatives in their group, have a strong interest in cooperating within the group because they are defending both their own children and those of their brothers and other relatives.

Human hunter-gatherer societies have been assumed to follow much the same pattern, with female dispersal being the general, though not universal, rule and with members of bands therefore being closely related to one another. But Dr. Hill and Dr. Walker find that though it is the daughters who move in many hunter-gatherer societies, the sons leave the home community in many others. In fact, the human pattern of residency is so variable that it counts as a pattern in itself, one that the researchers say is not known for any species of ape or monkey. Dr. Chapais calls this social pattern “bilocality.”

Modern humans have lived as hunter-gatherers for more than 90 percent of their existence as a species. If living hunter-gatherers are typical of ancient ones, the new data about their social pattern has considerable bearing on early human evolution.

On a genetic level, the finding that members of a band are not highly interrelated means that “inclusive fitness cannot explain extensive cooperation in hunter-gatherer bands,” the researchers write. Some evolutionary biologists believe that natural selection can favor groups of people, not just individuals, but the idea is hotly disputed.

Dr. Hill said group selection, too, could not operate on hunter-gatherer bands because individuals move too often between them, which undoes any selective effect. But hunter-gatherers probably lived as tribes split into many small bands of 30 or so people. Group selection could possibly act at the level of the tribe, Dr. Hill said, meaning that tribes with highly cooperative members would prevail over those that were less cohesive, thus promoting genes for cooperation.

The new data on early human social structure furnishes the context in which two distinctive human behaviors emerged, those of cooperation and social learning, Dr. Hill said. A male chimp may know in his lifetime just 12 other males, all from his own group. But a hunter-gatherer, because of cooperation between bands, may interact with a thousand individuals in his tribe. Because humans are unusually adept at social learning, including copying useful activities from others, a large social network is particularly effective at spreading and accumulating knowledge.

Knowledge can in fact be lost by hunter-gatherers if a social network gets too small. One group of the Ache people of Paraguay, cut off from its home territory, had lost use of fire when first contacted. Tasmanians apparently forgot various fishing techniques after rising sea levels broke their contact with the Australian mainland 10,000 years ago.

Dr. Chapais said that the new findings “validate and enrich” the model of human social evolution proposed in his book. “If you take the promiscuity that is the main feature of chimp society, and replace it with pair bonding, you get many of the most important features of human society,” he said.

Recognition of relatives promoted cooperation between neighboring bands, in his view, allowing people to move freely from one to another. Both sons and daughters could disperse from the home group, unlike chimp society, where only females can disperse. But this cooperation did not mean that everything was peaceful. The bands were just components of tribes, between which warfare may have been intense. “Males could remain as competitive and xenophobic as before at the between-tribe level,” Dr. Chapais writes.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 11, 2011

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect middle initial for the Arizona State University anthropologist who helped lead the hunter-gatherer study published in Science. He is Kim R. Hill, not Kim S.

Oh, I don't know? The third guy from the right resembles a certain Hoteliere we all know minus the goofy colored scuba gear.

...and the six pack abs. Although I think that is still too evolved. Go left a guy or two.

1) One scientific article at a time would be nice, no?? It makes it much easier to have focused discussion.
2) As always, fossils are only good for indicating certain things about an organism that lived in the past. Seeing what appears to be left behind and seeing it at that time are two different things completely.
3) I would not be surprised if what is sometimes viewed as a fossil showing 'evolutionary' changes is simply another species altogether.

22 March 2011 Last updated at 01:47 ET


Quantum computing device hints at powerful future





Four-qubit quantum device (E Lucero) Although comparatively small, the system's "scalable" architecture speaks to a bigger future

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News, Dallas

Quantum computer slips onto chips
Limits of quantum world stretched

One of the most complex efforts toward a quantum computer has been shown off at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas in the US.

It uses the strange "quantum states" of matter to perform calculations in a way that, if scaled up, could vastly outperform conventional computers.

The 6cm-by-6cm chip holds nine quantum devices, among them four "quantum bits" that do the calculations.

The team said further scaling up to 10 qubits should be possible this year.

Rather than the ones and zeroes of digital computing, quantum computers deal in what are known as superpositions - states of matter that can be thought of as both one and zero at once.

In a sense, quantum computing's one trick is to perform calculations on all superposition states at once. With one quantum bit, or qubit, the difference is not great, but the effect scales rapidly as the number of qubits rises.

The figure often touted as the number of qubits that would bring quantum computing into a competitive regime is about 100, so each jump in the race is a significant one.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

We're right at the bleeding edge of actually having a quantum processor”

Erik Lucero University of California, Santa Barbara

"It's pretty exciting we're now at a point that we can start talking about what the architecture is we're going to use if we make a quantum processor," Erik Lucero of the University of California, Santa Barbara told the conference.

The team's key innovation was to find a way to completely disconnect - or "decouple" - interactions between the elements of their quantum circuit.

The delicate quantum states that they create must be manipulated, moved, and stored without destroying them.

"It's a problem I've been thinking about for three or four years now, how to turn off the interactions," UCSB's John Martinis, who led the research," told BBC News.

"Now we've solved it, and that's great - but there's many other things we have to do."
Qubits and pieces

The solution came in the form of what the team has termed the RezQu architecture. It is basically a blueprint for a quantum computer, and several presentations at the conference focused on how to make use of it.

"For me this is kind of nice, I know how I'm going to put them together," said Professor Martinis.

"I now know how to design it globally and I can go back and try to optimise all the parts."

RezQu seems to have an edge in one crucial arena - scalability - that makes it a good candidate for the far more complex circuits that would constitute a quantum computer proper.

"There are competing architectures, like ion traps - trapping ions with lasers, but the complexity there is that you have to have a huge room full of PhDs just to run your lasers," Mr Lucero told BBC News.
Quantum bit and resonator on a chip (E Lucero) The team has been steadily increasing the complexity of their quantum devices

"There's already promise to show how this architecture could scale, and we've created custom electronics based on cellphone technology which has driven the cost down a lot.

"We're right at the bleeding edge of actually having a quantum processor," he said. "It's been years that a whole community has blossomed just looking at the idea of, once we have a quantum computer, what are we going to do with it?"

Britton Plourde, a quantum computing researcher from the University of Syracuse, said that the field has progressed markedly in recent years.

The metric of interest to quantum computing is how long the delicate quantum states can be preserved, and Dr Plourde noted that time had increased a thousand fold since the field's inception.

"The world of superconducting quantum bits didn't even exist 10 years ago, and now they can control [these states] to almost arbitrary precision," he told BBC News.

"We're still a long way from a large-scale quantum computer but it's really in my eyes rapid progress."