|
I wanted to write about this study but didn't get a chance. So check out this story on ScienceNOW's site, by Gisela Telis, instead: Alliances, deceptions, and even some shoving: It could be reality television, or it could be insect expert Laurent Keller's lab at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Keller and his interdisciplinary team of researchers have condensed thousands of years of evolution into a weeklong battle of the bots that demonstrates for the first time how social creatures evolve to communicate--and how, in a pinch, they evolve to deceive as well. Experts disagree over exactly when and how communication arose among social animals. Evolutionary biologists suspect that early communication may have developed as a way for closely related individuals to boost each other's chances for survival. Studying such evolution in the lab is practically impossible, however, because most socially sophisticated creatures, such as bees or monkeys, can take hundreds of generations to show substantial behavioral changes....
Read the rest on ScienceNOW.
|
