But the lesson of the crickets is that a simple behavior pattern repeated many times can give shape to a society. The modestly cannibalistic crickets vector towards each other because they identify each other as a potential food source, but that also gives them a "schooling" advantage versus predators and probably greater fecundity as finding a mate is not hard. Other invertebrates combine sex drive and cannibalism. So long as the cannibalistic urge makes reproduction more and not less likely, it will evolve into the species.
Humans do not make war for the express purpose of stealing, but so long as making war was about stealing, humans were better off grouping together because, through war, the tribe could "downsize" in the event of a shortage. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depends) war is now so economically costly that there is no way to "downsize" effectively.
In some sense, the Marxian stagist idea is just another way of saying that humans are evolving from a social-but-cannibalistic species into a social species.
Boddi
On 12/15/06, Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com> wrote:
> I present the following as an example of a certain kind of collective
> behavior. I do not mean to comment on either Mormons or the state of
> Capitalist society. I just find it curious.
>
> But remember, in such situations, if you leave the swarm you get eaten, if
> you stay in the swarm every other "swarmer" tries to eat you while you are
> trying to eat the swarmer ahead of you. It's a rather "perfect" society,
> when you come to think of it. Maybe it is in fact a utopian goal of some of
> our more vicious rulers. Of course, as long at they themselves can be
> insulated from swarm behavior. Swarm behavior is meant only for the mob,
> and not for the truly intelligent people. But once a swarm gets started, it
> is not possible to control it.
>
> Jerry Monaco
>
>
> Iain Couzin: We studied swarming crickets in the southern United States
> called the Mormon cricket, and these Mormon crickets are large, black
> creatures that form really dense swarms, marching along the ground, it's a
> fantastic sight. And they can even form slicks on roads because their
> density is so high, so they are dangerous to drivers in the area. And what
> we were interested in is why are these insects doing this? It looks like a
> strongly coordinated behaviour, that they're all in agreement that they
> should be moving in one direction. But again, our knowledge of collective
> behaviour means we have to always look a bit deeper, and there can sometimes
> be intriguing and simpler explanations. In this case that's exactly what we
> found. Going out there to Utah, looking at these crickets we found that they
> would eat road kills, for example, rabbits. They'd been gnawing the ears
> down, crawling in through the mouth, crawling in through the eyes and eating
> the brain, really remarkable stuff. So these vegetarian crickets seem to
> have a strong fondness for food.
>
> Stephen Simpson at Sydney University has developed artificial diets with
> protein and carbohydrate and so on, so we could begin questions about...now,
> what do you really like to eat? We found that they strongly preferred
> protein to carbohydrate and they really liked salt concentrations at exactly
> that concentration of their own blood. ___So what we found that instead of
> this being some collective, cooperative behaviour, what we have in fact is a
> forced march. Every cricket is trying to eat the one ahead and prevent
> itself from being eaten from behind. We found that they were very aggressive
> with each other, attacking an immobile insect within 17 seconds and really
> jumping on it and biting it. So one may then ask questions; why, if it's so
> dangerous to be in a swarm, why don't they leave? But another colleague at
> the University of Sydney, Greg Sword, using tiny little radio transmitters
> on these crickets found that it's even more dangerous to leave the group
> because they get eaten by predators. So really they're making the best of a
> rather bad situation.___From "The Science Show" @
> http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2006/1788158.htm
>
> Ian Couzin's webpage
> http://www.princeton.edu/~icouzin/
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>