THEY patrol social gatherings, maintaining order through a show of power and the implicit threat of violence. They are the pigtail-macaque police, and you’d better not mess with them.
But that’s exactly what Jessica Flack and her colleagues did. The researchers, from the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, temporarily removed three of four dominant males from a group of 84 macaques at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center near Lawrenceville, Georgia. They found that just as a human society becomes more chaotic without policing, so did that of the macaques.
Without monkey cops, group cohesion rapidly disintegrated. Feudal cliques…
