What is the meaning of 'one'?(Their scheme centers on charts that sepa...)

Date:11/9/2009

>Their scheme centers on charts that separate living things into four groups, based on observed levels of cooperation and conflict. "One thing I think is really important about the paper, and it's fairly simple, is the idea that the opposite of high cooperation is not conflict. It's absence of cooperation," said Strassmann. "That allows us to put conflict on a different axis from cooperation, and divide the social space into organisms, societies, competitors and simple groups."

Queller and Strassmann analyze dozens of species in three distinct classes of groups to determine where they land on the organismal charts, based on their levels of cooperation and conflict.

On the cellular level, whales, mice, redwoods, the malarial parasite Plasmodium in mosquitoes and Dictyostelium rank high on the organismality scale for their levels of cooperation with little conflict.

Humans are obviously organismal, Queller and Strassmann agree. All the body parts, from the macro level (arms and legs) to the micro (cells) work nicely together with very little conflict. But unlike the honeybee colony, a city is not organismal. Though the human colony requires a great deal of cooperation to keep it running, it is, they said, "far too full of conflicts."

On the level of groups of multicellular individuals, the Portuguese man-of-war is a paragon of organismality. Technically a colony of sea-going polyps, each polyp seems to know its place, taking on a specialized duty that contributes to the survival of the whole. "The cooperators have become so close as to blur their boundaries," they wrote.

In the third grouping of two-species pairings that may seem simply symbiotic, they find close cooperation without conflict is often necessary for the survival of both parties. The relationship between mitochondria and the host cells they power is one example; bobtail squid and the bacteria that allow them to light up in return for sustenance is another. T
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Contact: David Ruth druth@rice.edu 713-348-6327 Rice University Source:Eurekalert

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