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Of monkeys, stargazing and
autism
Posted Jan. 31, 2005
Special to World Science
Obsession with celebrities may have a distinguished evolutionary pedigree, and investigating its roots could shed light on autism, a study suggests.
Researchers found that rhesus monkeys, when shown photos of other monkeys in their social group, prefer to look at the pictures of monkeys higher up on their group’s pecking order. They monkeys would even give up a bit of
cherry juice they liked, to see these higher-status images—whereas they had to be “paid” in juice to view the faces of low-status individuals.
This suggests monkeys place a premium on information about powerful members of their group, added the researcher, with Duke University Medical Center.
This may be similar to the “stargazing” that humans do, the researchers added. When we buy magazines such as the National Inquirer and gossip columns, we pay for information and photos about celebrities, whether from the movies, television, fashion, or sports.
Monkeys may value information about high-status individuals because this is useful in guiding their decisions, the researchers remarked. Our own stargazing, while probably not of much direct use to us today, may be a holdover from a time when our social groups were smaller and such information was serviceable.
“Humans and rhesus monkeys have social systems that differ in many important ways… but there are important similarities too,” wrote Duke’s Robert O. Deaner, one of the researchers in the study, in a recent email. “One of the crucial similarities is that in both human and rhesus monkey societies, individuals vary in their influence and reproductive potential,” i.e. mating success, he added.
Evolutionary theory postulates that the genes of everything alive today, are the genes of their ancestors who were best at surviving and mating, and thus spreading their genes. For humans and rhesus monkeys, the individuals best able to get and use social information would have had the best chance to spread their genes, he added. Thus evolution would favor those who valued information according to its social relevance, placing a premium on information from high-status individuals.
“Today we can obtain visual information about countless numbers of individuals, as opposed to perhaps the few hundred we would have regularly interacted with during most of our evolutionary history,” he wrote.
“But many people clearly value looking at magazines or internet sites featuring stars (entertainers, athletes, models),” he added. “The value we place on this type of information is understandable from the perspective of our evolutionary history.
The question, he added, is whether “star-gazing” is still today “adaptive” for us, that is, whether it serves a useful evolutionary function.
“Star-gazing isn’t adaptive in the sense that valuing information about people you and your acquaintances never interact with can’t directly improve your reproductive fitness,” he wrote.
In fact, stargazing might even harm a person by undermining self-confidence: “It makes no sense to compare yourself to Brad Pitt because your girlfriend doesn’t have the option of dating him anyway,” he observed.
“On the other hand, star-gazing could be adaptive in other ways. For instance, gaining visual information may be rewarding in its own right and this may have indirect benefits by lowering your stress levels (e.g. relax and watch a movie.) Another potential benefit of star-gazing is that it yields cultural capital (e.g. being able to talk knowledgeably about current events may enhance your reputation as a “with-it” person and this may ultimately improve one’s fitness).”
The study is published in an advance online edition of the research journal Current
Biology.
For some people, celebrity obsession reaches heights that others consider laughable. But there are also people on the other extreme. These, the researchers said, may be those who suffer from autism, a brain disorder brought to wide public attention, perhaps aptly enough, in the Dustin Hoffmann movie “Rain Man.”
If the researchers are correct, autism might be considered a sort of extreme inability to stargaze. Whereas stargazers are unable to take their eyes off anyone powerful or successful, autistic people look at hardly anyone. They are unwilling or unable to acquire social information, and thus they interact very little.
"They don't find it very motivating to look at other individuals," said Michael Platt, another of the researchers, in a press release from the university. "And even when they do, they can't seem to assess information about that individual's importance, intentions or expressions.
"So, what we now have with these monkeys is an excellent model for how social motivation for looking is processed in normal individuals.” This model can be used to explore the brain mechanisms underlying these motivations, he added. For instance, researchers can use drugs that affect specific brain process to explore “whether we can mimic some of the deficits found in autism in these animals."
On a more crude note, some of the findings might also shed light on humans’ taste for pornography: male monkeys in the study also willingly “paid” to see females’ rear ends.
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