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Meerkat clans perform a 'war dance' to frighten opponents and protect their territory, according to a new UCL and University of Cambridge study.
Published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, this is the first empirical study to reveal intergroup aggression.
[...] The study reveals that in more than half of interactions (64.7%) meerkat clans' exhibit aggression by either chasing or doing a 'war dance', where a meerkat displays an erect tail and puffed-out fur, possibly to make the group appear larger than its size.
[...] Dr. Dyble concluded: "If we want to fully understand violence in human societies, we need to understand its evolutionary roots. This requires us to understand why other animal groups fight, and what do they gain or lose from doing so. We show that although aggression only occasionally results in an individual being killed, winning fights with neighbouring groups is critical to maintaining a territory. In the harsh semi-desert of the Kalahari, a good quality territory is critical to a group's survival and long-term success."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20 2019, @02:15PM
Do you have an alternative theory that explains the patterns we see in biology as well as evolution?
For instance, can your theory explain why whales have rear leg bones, despite having no rear legs? If you happen to be an IDer, that design doesn't sound very intelligent. On the other hand, if you consider that whales might be hippos (at least cousins to hippos) that gave up the land, the fact that they still have some leg bones doesn't seem nearly so odd.
As a programmer, I heard it put this way, which makes sense to me. If you were saddled with the job of creating a system with nearly infinite diversity, would you start designing everything, or would you design a system that would do the work for you.