The Sleeper Agent Baboon

File under Meet Yourself

“You interview really, really well for your pre-school, and as a result you get into a good school and a good high school and you study hard and you get a good GPA and you get into a good Grad School then you get a good job and eventually you get into the nursing home of your choice.” – Primatologist Robert Sapolsky

Has it been hot the past couple of days or is it just me?

OK, in all seriousness, it has been ridiculously hot. To quote the movie Biloxi Blues, “It’s hot. It’s like Africa hot.” I’m looking forward to Tuesday in the mid-Atlantic when the temp will plummet to 90 degrees.

But speaking of Africa (like that segue?), I recently read a report in Science magazine on the hierarchy of African Baboons that directly relates to the Antidote.

Source

A report published this week by Lawrence Gesquiere of Princeton University, and others, details the stress levels among natural populations of savannah baboons. Not surprisingly, the Alpha baboons enjoy the highest level of testosterone, and the lowest baboons have high levels of stress, exhibited by glucocorticoid levels (in case you cared), but what is surprising is that the Alpha baboons had higher levels of stress than the beta, or second-ranking baboons. Apparently maintaining their position in the hierarchy and the activities associated with that create stress. Equally as stress-inducing is the struggle for limited resources that the lower level baboons deal with. However, the beta male baboons enjoy a sweet spot of lower-stress and ample resources. Gesquiere notes that “being at the top may be more costly than previously thought.”

Noted Primatologist/Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University noted that the results “should not be construed as supporting the supposed existence of the ‘executive stress syndrome’”, but that the results are definitely interesting. In any case, the implications of the stress of being the best are directly relevant to human activities.

What are the stresses of being the best that you see?

On a side note, below is a talk by Robert Sapolsky on the uniqueness of humans. I first only wanted to show this because he is Zach Galafiankis and Weird Al Yankovic rolled into one; but this talk is actually really interesting. It’s long, but really well done.

http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_sapolsky_the_uniqueness_of_humans.html


Song of the Day
In honor of baboons, and a song having nothing to do with baboons, the song of the day is Sleeper Agent’s “Get it Daddy”.