I'm not sure that I really agree with J's own self criticism; that guy wasn't actually the weak one. People who have trouble in a seminar and suffer in silence are weak. People who constantly disrupt an environment, causing difficulty for others around them, are showing a kind of aggression.

One questions, then, whether or not the target cichlids are causing another kind of disruption, and the "king" is actually being a kind of "watchman."

Kids, of course, are monsters and have been known to dismember and devour each other without warning.

Not that the participants don't have some responsibility in the matter, but in a workshop or a seminar, there's a teacher or two whose job it is to keep things civilized.

That child should have been reprimanded by an adult with "That's not funny - that's cichlid."

I was never very good at letting the school's other fish establish dominance over me. For one thing, I fought back. For another, I was socially so clueless that I didn't realize that dominance was what was going on.

In elementary school, I was new and therefore not allowed to be part of the girls' group (dominant girls appeared very early in this class). I ended up (1) ignoring attempts to dominate me and (2) socializing with the boys up through 6th grade.

I also left that school system and eventually learned to socialize with female humans. I'd like to think I'm not too bad at it anymore.

As I learned more about primate social behaviors, I realized that primates share a lot with us. In macaques for example, all the females in the troop are related. Young males are related, and then they leave the troop when they start puberty, and join an all-male troop. They fight their way up the hierarchy and then join some family troop as the alpha (or not). This means that females don't have a social repertoire for dealing with strangers, and males do. Now contrast that with the points made by Elayne Boosler: men will hang out at the basketball court with other guys and never know much more than first names. Women will never go shopping with a bunch of stranger females. It's an exaggeration, of course, but it's based on observation of human behavior.

(She also pointed out that men have the "jump up and hit the awning" gene, whereas women have the "buy more than one in the same color" gene.)

Primates have elaborate sets of social behaviors. Rhesus will engage each other with facial movements and body postures, which can resolve "fights" without fighting*. With a little study, anyone can figure this out and see which monkeys get along and which ones don't. Males tend to fight and be done; females tend not to fight very often, but when they do, it is much more serious and can lead to deaths. This does depend on the species -- Patas monkeys cannot handle a lot of social stress and crowding them leads to a lot of health problems. Rhesus males fight pretty nastily; I've sewn up enough of them.

(*Cats do too, but they pretend they're not very social. They've fooled a lot of people.)

Ginger... The "jump up and hit the awning" gene?

Being on a bus that suddenly fills up with teenagers who just ended a school day is a... ah... fascinating situation, especially seeing the boys one-up each other verbally and physically, probably to impress the girls.

Ginger @ #5: I don't know how plausible it is to someone who actually knows the field, but Diane Duane's description of cat social jockeying tickles me (she posits an incredibly complex game called "hauissh" which is based on placing oneself in a position to see other cats without being seen). They just LOOK like they're lying around all day.

One day I just snapped. I turned to him and took a piece right out of him. And then I realized that I was being just like the king cichlid, pickin’ on the weaker guy. That these patterns of behavior repeat, from the littlest creatures right on up to us humans.”

We may all have the capacity for being king cichlid, but expressing in words how one feels emotionally isn't that.

Humans have a tendancy to suppress emotions and are generally very bad at expressing them.

"all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." -- Declaration of Independence

I think the only way to get good at expressing emotions is to keep doing it, practice, screw up, etc.

I love this blog. One of the many things that makes it great is that there aren't any king cichlids. In the virtual fishtank of the internet, it's a rare refuge. Civility, WOOT!

Parenting is an evergreen topic with me. New York City playgrounds can be a very confusing place to raise a kid. The different parenting philosophies really rub up against each other. Some parents believe in letting kids settle disputes with little intervention, others get right in there and try to help resolve disputes and instruct the kids about how to play nicely with no snatching of toys or hitting.

The latter are sometimes accused of being 'helicopter parents' for hovering too much, the former are called 'neglectful' and lazy. Most parents just find ways to work it out, but now and then the different camps form like two groups of cichlids.

I'll soon (July 26th) be moving to Japan with my five year old and I'll get to see how dynamics are different with the Japanese, and as a foreigner. I'm looking forward to it.

Anyway, great post! Have a good holiday weekend, everyone.

she posits an incredibly complex game called "hauissh" which is based on placing oneself in a position to see other cats without being seen

The thing is, if you watch them, you realize they do it with humans too. How many times has your cat settled down for an evening's TV watching in a spot where you can't see it without turning your head?

Also see this incident: Students vote boy out of class.

Serge @ #6: The "jump up and hit the awning" gene?

If I'm interpreting correctly, that would be the gene that produces an inability to walk under an awning without jumping up and touching it.

I don't think I have that one, myself. (I might have the "buy more than one in the same colour" gene - again, if I'm interpreting correctly.)

#6 and 12

I know that one as 'jump and hit whatever's available' - in my neighborhood, it was leaves hanging down from trees, and even the girls did it. (Awnings were in short supply.)
But we were a strange kind of place.

"Buy more than one in the same colour" gene? My shopping frenzies (online or off) tended more toward "buy it in much of its spectrum of colors." The silk shirts from the Eighties are now beginning to fall apart, but the tank tops with inbuilt shelf bras are newer and still very convenient.

Ginger @5 - wow, my daughter's going through that. We've homeschooled for years, but this year (8th grade) she went to school. In a very conservative city (Ponce, Puerto Rico), among very socially stratified people, with a year everybody recognizes as being particularly ... what? Cliquish?

Of course, it doesn't help that she's brilliant. The school desperately wants her to stay, but she's decided she'd rather homeschool again next year. She doesn't like being held back academically by a bunch of hooligans.

She's always been so quiet that the glint of venom in her eye when she defends her decision is a little scary.

Speaking of which -- another question for the Making Light Brain Trust (tm): what science-fiction books would the assembly recommend for getting a good picture of alternate ecologies? A little perspective: we've just read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (aside: holy schemoley, what a great set of books!) and the alternate world with the wheeled creatures definitely caught her fancy.

I searched through the boxes, and came up with Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, Niven's Protector, Rainbow Mars, and Smoke Ring, Brin and Benford's Heart of the Comet, Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio, Forward's Flight of the Dragonfly, Orson Scott Card's Wyrms, and Brin's Glory Season. What am I not thinking of? This wasn't intended to be a survey of biologically-oriented SF, but there's got to be others. I didn't give her Dune, I suppose.

Greg @8:
We may all have the capacity for being king cichlid, but expressing in words how one feels emotionally isn't that.

Words can be tools of dominance as easily as any other means of human interaction, from physical violence to money. He may have been spurred to speak by exasperation, but that doesn't mean that all he did was express that exasperation. I have no idea what he did. If J says that he was acting like a king cichlid. I believe him. He was there, and we weren't.

Sean Sakomoto @9:
This adventure playground is in the Netherlands, where my Scottish-born kids are assimilating into a very different child-rearing culture.

Children are given a lot more independence here than in the US or the UK. The four older ones (aged 4, 5, 7 and 8) were out of our sight for most of the time, and the adventure playground is an open, busy public place with several ways in and out.

Children are raised to trust the adults around them, even strangers. That permeates the culture—I have never found myself in difficulties without someone coming up to offer assistance. Strangers pick kids up when they fall off their bikes. I push other people's children on the swings.

The children are also expected to settle their own disputes and run their own social lives, although adults will step in to offer (generally very impartial) guidance if they fail. This means, for instance, that parents are not expected to stay around and shepherd their kids at birthday parties (a custom I encountered in the UK).

I will be very interested to hear how things go in Japan. You have my very best wishes on the move, which sounds even more of a culture shift than I've just undergone.

I think I'm missing the jump-at-the-awning gene, and the buy-many-copies-in-one-color gene, and the buy-many-copies-covering-the-full-spectrum gene. I seem to have the German-engineer gene, considering how I overbuild things - my computer programmers never(*) break, and it'd probably take a pickup truck to tear down any garage shelves built by yours truly.

(*) well, hardly ever.

Serge @17:

You just haven't met the right tester.

Alternate ecologies: Janet Kagan's Hellspark and Mirabile, of course.

Jump-up-and-hit-whatever? Me, not so much: short legs, and muscles that are good for stamina but not for sudden delivery, make this an exercise in frustration. Buy-more-than-one-of-the-same-colour when I finally find something that fits and looks okay at a reasonable price? Well, yes; who knows how long it'll be before I get lucky again?

Buy-more-than-one-of-the-same-colour: but that's just common sense, no? It takes a fair bit of work to find a pair of pants that fits comfortably and looks okay. If I've found one that meets the criteria, I'd be crazy to just buy one pair. Most women's clothing I find is made to fall apart after one season. Buying two pairs of something that really fits is only sensible.

I also buy identical shirts in different colors, although there I sometimes buy the first item, wear it a few times, and then go back to buy the other colors later if I like the shirt well enough.

I can't imagine how much more time shopping would take if all of my clothing had to be *different*.

Buy in many colors, not so much. Buy in small variations... yes.

The best example I can think of is things like cameras. There are a lot of people (though it is canonically more a male habit) who go hog wild buying lenses, many of which overlap.

Got the f1.8 50mm. but it's not fast enough... gotta get the f1.4 and then the f1.2.

Sheesh... the speed differences aren't so great as to justify getting all three, but I know a lot of people who did.

Or who have a bunch of (comparable) long lenses.

It's not that I don't have a lot of glass (and some of it overlaps), but I don't seem to have the trait (and not with cutlery, or knives, two other bits of equipment which tend to collecting variations).

Maybe I need more disposable income, but mostly I have what I need. I lust for some long, fast, glass. I also lust for some wide glass, but I can make do without (and dropping $3,500 for a piece of used glass, which I'm not going to be making a lot of money with, right away, seems a bit extravagant... for a new body; painful, but not out of line... sadly the new body I want is five grand, not three).

Sean Sakamoto: We don't have king chiclids because we work at it. I sat on a comment I was going to make on the subject because it felt as if I was going to be pulling a borderline case of it; which recursion was interetsing, but probably not productive. It may be a function of size (there's the recursion) and we are too large (and moderated) to support the kind of bullying which lets that dynamic take over.

I do think it's a combination of the two, and Teresa is fighting the sense that she's the Big Boss on BoingBoing, where some people either see her as the King, or resent that they don't get to play the role.

Interesting watching over there.

abi: I wonder how much of the child-rearing is because of the polder culture you were describing; that the expectations of happy-medium are so ingrained the adults assume (and apparently with some reason) that things will be worked out, to a general satisfaction of the participants.

abi @ 17... You just haven't met the right tester.

You mean, like this one, or THIS one?

abi: I note that Serge said his programmers don't break.

G. Jules: To a lot of guys, your clothes are all different. They find a style of pants they like, and by several pairs, all the same color.

Shirts might have a little more variety, but it's the same idea. One style, two-three colors (so people will now it's not the same shirt three days running).

Since the styles don't change much, shopping for new clothes usually has the longest parts in getting to the shop, and waiting to pay.

Me.... not so much. I am slight, I have to search like blazes to find things which (mostly) fit. Then I have to try them on (because even the smallest I can find are usually too large, and I have to look for the cutter who was working at the small end of the pattern).

It takes hours, and (barring 501s, in a large shop) I usually don't find more than one, or at most two, pair of pants in a session.

The only comparable experience I've had is going bra-shopping with people.

Terry @21:

You are of course right; we don't have king cichlids on Making Light because we work at it.

Speaking as a moderator, I have to say that it doesn't feel like work. This is probably because we, as a community, have momentum in the right direction. Watching Teresa spin up a community on BoingBoing is an education and an intimidation all in one.

Our momentum expresses itself when people sit on comments that they considered posting (not everything I write goes past the preview stage). It expresses itself when I can make a very gentle comment about the tone of someone's discussion, and have them gracefully reconsider. It's what causes us to value egoboo (eg the versifiers and the punsters) over ego-trips.

The impulse to be king cichlid is universal. The decision to express it, and to have a community that permits its expression, is not.

This is a very long-winded way to say thank you for considering what you post. I think sometimes that you worry too much, but I don't actually know what gets abandoned at preview. Nor should I; that is a matter between you and your browser.

With regard to the child-rearing here, yes, it is a product of (and productive of) the polder model of collaboration.

abi: What doesn't get posted is usually the subtle stuff (I can be really quietly nasty; for examples look at how my phrases, and allusions change when we get really obnoxious proslytisers), the things which sting, but don't take chunks out, the bits which would probably make other people start to second guess themselves more.

That, it seems to me isn't cricket. Being able to spout off is important.

I also find I bide my time more when threads are young; to see if I was the only one who wanted to say something, because I can have my head in dark places with the best of 'em, and having a (hard though it seems to me) a heavy hitter say one has done wrong can be chilling.

If I worry too much, well that's a flattering faith you have in me, and I'm touched.

abi: re culture

I figured it had to be recursive. One can't do what one doesn't see, and telling people to, "wait until you're older" to take part in decision making is a bad idea; the decisions won't be thought out; beacause the consequences aren't plain.

To quote A. E. Houseman, "First a little, thence to more."

The idea in that poem applies to lots of things, even if the specific context of the quotation seems inapposite.

I think I shall now climb on my bicycle and investigate getting out of the house for a spot of brekkie.

Michael, #15: Definitely give her Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity, and if she likes that, some of the same characters also appear in Star Light. James Schmitz has several short stories and books with ecological themes -- and you can hardly go wrong with anything by Schmitz, so just give her the books and let her find the relevant stuff. James Blish's "Adapted Men" stories are good too.

I haven't bought any clothes (except socks) in over a year. Well, maybe some workout t-shirts.

I deeply hate shopping for clothes. If I've gone to the effort and stress of finding something that fits (and I almost always have to get the legs taken up, because I'm build like the Michelin Man only SHORT), I buy several of them so I don't have to go shopping again for the longest possible period.

Now that no one in my life cares what I look like (my friends like me for me, strangers aren't "in my life," and I'm not looking for a new Mr. Right or even a Mr. Right Now yet), I'm going with worn, raggedy, and slovenly. It's relaxing, in a way.

And for the office, I have three pairs of acceptable pants and five acceptable shirts. I wear them all every week, and wash them all every weekend. No one cares; my job is such that whole days go by without anyone at the office so much as looking at me. Eventually some of these clothes will wear out and I'll be forced to go to the gods damned frakking MALL again and replace them with more zero-care-because-who-cares acceptable business casual clothes.

Wow. This is much more depressing than I thought it was when I started writing about it. When I was thinking of having my then-boyfriend (a true clothes horse, size EXTRA small; he shops in the boys' department) move in, I figured if he only brought half his clothes, I could fit them in my closet after I threw away all the clothes that are in there now—which I should do anyway, since I never wear them.

Xopher: How did he pull that trick off? I tried (because with 27 inch waist, and a 36 inch chest the numbers looked right) but the shirts were too short in the waist, and the rise was too small on the trousers.

I so wanted it to work, because not only would they be cheaper, but they's fit. Probably wouldn't wear as well (clothes for kids tend to be more cheaply made, since they aren't expected to last), so on balance I might have been paying more... but they would have fit.

Sigh, it's hard to explain how frustating being slight can be; since I get lots of, "what... you want sympathy for not being fat," which, of course, isn't my complaint. I want (sort of) sympathy for being an outlier, who sometimes feels the pain of market force discrimination... I'll never see a, "normal/thin store" the way I see, "Big and Tall,", nor will I be likely to be able to look sharp without visits to my tailor.

That's probably part of why I like doing faires, and wearing a dress uniform/tails. I look sharp in those clothes, and it's about the only time I get to play peacock.

Regarding Pink Floyd recursion - there's a funny here (scroll down a bit).

Terry 29: He's also 5'4" and not very muscular. And I guess he doesn't mind if his pants are tight in the one place where he's, shall we say, full size.

I think I remember reading once that there is a species of cichlid that has a jaw adapted for biting scales off of the left side of other fish, and another species with a right-handed jaw.

Don't they have two pairs of jaws one behind the other or something?

By the way the Egyptian mouth-brooder (seen on the wikipedia page op cit) is mentioned in Illuminatus.

Michael at 15: How about The Dispossessed? It's not so much an alternate ecology -- though there's some of that -- as an alternate way of relating to the environment. Worth reading for multiple reasons.

Terry Karney @ 23... Oops. That was me without cafeine. It wasn't a freudian slip. Really. Honest.

The more I look at all-of-us (not just us-here), the more I'm dissatisfied with social models that overemphasize the dominance axis. If troupes of adolescents are especially revealing of how our part of the primate family self-organizes, then there are other roles that cross that king-subject/boss-lackey/bully-victim divide. Isn't there more than simple dominance operating in the beauty queen role? And class clown (my own intended destination fifty years ago) has some interesting possibilities. An all-licensed fool is a useful social tool. (There's some verse lurking in there.) And the tech nerd--where does the A/V guy fit in?

Lizzy L @ 33 - I was thinking of Left Hand of Darkness as another almost-fit, so I think the group mind has found a mine of alternate viewpoints in Le Guin.

Michael @ 15, how about Niven and Pournelle's Mote in God's Eye?

Serge #17: But you do have the Gilbert & Sullivan gene, it seems.

For some very strange ecologies, consider:

The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring, by Larry Niven (ecology without a planet).

Fragano @ 37... Were I to attempt singing anything by Gilbert & Sullivan, I'd reveal a musical 'talent' which has more to do with that of Assurancetourix.

One gene I do have is the buy-one-and-run-it-into-the-ground gene.

If a cichlid had tentacles on its face, would it be a chthichlid?

If a cichlid had tentacles on its face, would it be a chthichlid?

Re: Michael Roberts at 15

Try Elizabeth Bear's Dust. The writing style didn't really do it for me but the ecology involved was so fascinating I read to the end anyway.

Also, Heinlein's Red Planet. I always found his Martians interesting and I think this one shows them off the best.

Good luck to your daughter - I had similar reactions and experiences as a kid and the adults were much less receptive. Things get much, much better in college and at least in my experience continue to improve from there.

Michael Roberts @15,abi@38

For ecology without a planet, how about Fred Hoyle's 'The Black Cloud'?

Sean Sakamoto, 9,

I'll soon (July 26th) be moving to Japan with my five year old and I'll get to see how dynamics are different with the Japanese, and as a foreigner. I'm looking forward to it.

Ah! You might find this interesting then: Japanese Lessons: A Year in a Japanese School through the Eyes of an American Anthropologist and Her Children . I found it very readable, and it may address exactly that question (how are those dynamics different). That's a google books link, btw, which at first glance looks like you can read the whole thing under the "preview this book" tab.

Anyway, I've read your other stuff on here and I'd love to find out how much her observations map on to your reality ;)

space ecology: It occurs to me that space colonization might not be doable by humans because they'd have to be continuously alive during the long voyage, reproducing in a continuously habitable habitat for several generations, but if you sent insect eggs and seeds, along with some sort of computer to shepherd them, that might work.

Has anyone written anything along those lines?

Higgledy-piggledy
Ovoviviparous
Creatures must live where it's steadily warm
But in wintry environments
Egg-laying animals
And plants with seeds live in transitional form.

Erik Nelson @46-- In Vernor Vinge's collection of short stories there's one with a similar scenario, but with fertilized human eggs in stasis. Interesting plot twists. It's told from the POV of the shepherding computer/ship.

abi @24: we don't have king cichlids on Making Light because we work at it -- also because they have trouble keeping keyboards working underwater.

Michael Roberts @15: Door Into Ocean, by Joan Slonczewski? It was written partly as a response to the ecology of Dune, and she's a professional biologist, so she does know her stuff.

Debbie @47, Erik Nelson @46: One flaw with the seeder starship concept (via stored eggs or DNA samples) that had occurred to me, is that it isn't enough to have elephant DNA; you'd also need an elephant womb. Repeat for each species that requires gestation. A difficult engineering problem? I don't think this has been addressed (yet I'd have to say I'd be surprised if it hadn't).

Speaking as one who has kept cichlids in the past, I must say I never really noticed this behaviour pattern. But then, there are many species of cichlidae and I only tried a few of them.

Michael Roberts #48:

Appropriate tools would help, but it's the one fin typing that'll slow them down.

Warren Zevon had the "buy more than one in the same color" gene, but in his case it was OCD. When he died, dozens of identical grey Calvin Klein tees, still wrapped, were distributed to his friends.

Serge #39: Moi aussi. But I was referring to your 'never...hardly ever' trope.

Fragano @ 54... Oh, I knew that. It's just that my singing any G&S more elaborate than that exchange isn't something you'd want to hear.

Arthur C. Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth is about the culture clash when a slowship using hibernation reaches a colony established by a seedship bearing embryos. The slowship is dropping by to pick up more water to replace its ice shield, which ablates away as the ship impacts on interstellar dust at about 10% of C.

As I recall, it makes appropriate gestures toward the idea that the ship will have to gestate the embryos and then raise the infant animals and humans until they reach the point of self-sufficiency.

One of the conceits of the novel was that the humans in the seedship had been given an edited version of human history. The humans from old earth had a list of subjects not to mention to the colonists - I believe war and religion were on the list.

Tying this into the cichlid discussion: given a tabula rasa, would it be possible to raise human beings with less cichlid quotient? And would it be ethical to withhold information from humans to try and make them better people?

Russell Letson @#35: Indeed, dominance isn't the whole story, but it is a big part, and it's what kicks in when you throw together a bunch of people who don't have a natural community. (Notice how that includes modern schools (especially with busing), many offices, and of course a goodly number of Internet forums.

The other half of the picture is relationship, which provides "horizontal" connections which interweave with the "vertical" patterns of dominance. It's people's interpersonal relationships that bind together a community, and moderate the effects of power imbalances.

The ultimate reason we don't have bullying here on ML, is because the people who "own the territory" -- Teresa and Patrick -- have the inclination, strength, and ability to exclude the bullies. The effects of relationship are less obvious, because they're aligned with those of dominance. That is, many of the "old-timers" and the most prolific posters have connections to the moderators, forming an alliance group. With less enlightened leaders, that could easily be a nightmare -- but "first-class people pick other first-class people". So the "ruling clique" here chooses to enforce higher principles than mere personal power... and only the trolls get the nightmares.

Rob Rusick @#50 et prev.: Most SF has historically assumed that artificial wombs would be "just an engineering problem". The trouble is, the more we learn about gestation, the tougher that trick looks! By now it's clear that ex utero gestation for mammals is a Very Hard Problem -- indeed, it might be biology's equivalent of "AI-completeness".

Alternate ecologies? Add in David Gerrold's Chtorr series. The Earth is invaded by a more competitive ecology--no intelligent aliens appear but Earth gets munched on. It builds slowly but is intricate and exciting.

Outside of sf, Edward O. Wilson's autobiography 'Naturalist' is a fascinating read. He's one of the last generation of discovery naturalists. He wandered across the world discovering new species of insects, birds, and mammals right and left as the first or one of the first naturalists to explore several regions. It reads like an adventure story.

Ecological SF: Robert Charles Wilson has Darwinia and Bios, both with ecological elements, though they also have mystical "twists".

SF Ecologies:

Greg Bear's Legacy where he pushes the definitions of both ecology and evolution rather hard; they almost fall over, but not quite. My personal favorite of Hal Clement's world-building novels is Cycle of Fire, which I also like because it is the closest he came to writing a classic tragedy.

Alien ecologies on Earth... Thomas Disch's Genocide.

Bob Rusick @ 50

An excellent point; in fact we don't really have any idea how to engineer artificial gestation, because the womb does a lot more than hold and nurture an embryo; it's partly responsible for morphogenic development during the early stages of cell division, before the original cell line starts to differentiate into stem lines.

No hard sf writer who wants to write about biology should miss reading Jack Cohen's* work, fiction and non-fiction. He's a reproductive biologist, an SF writer, and, in collaboration with Ian Stewart he writes about theoretical biology and the mathematics and philosophy of life. Head-stretching stuff; one of his books is where I read the, obvious in retrospect, point that wombs and embryos have co-evolved over a very long time, and really don't work independently in the way a human engineer might design them.

* No relation

Fungi @#56: ...given a tabula rasa, would it be possible to raise human beings with less cichlid quotient? And would it be ethical to withhold information from humans to try and make them better people?

That first question seems a little ambiguous, but in any case, "civilized" behavior is a superstructure over our primate behavior and psychology, which is built through heavy socialization in childhood and onward. Trying to raise a human "away from evil society" will just produce a poorly-socialized hominid.

It might well be possible to "engineer" the socialization process, but even before we reach "how do we get there", we'd have to cross the battleground over just what results are "better". (Hint: Low aggression among your populace is very convenient for tyrants.)

For the second question, any such attempt founders on the fallacy that "if they don't hear about it, they won't do it". In practice, if they don't hear about it, they can't learn from the experiences of their predecessors, so they'll repeat all the same mistakes.

Serge @ 61

Yeah, The Genocides gets my vote as one of the top ten most depressing endings of all time; if we didn't include the last sentence in that list of great end lines a year or two ago, then we missed one of the greatest.

While ML is a splendid place, I feel like it's incumbent on someone to toss in a memento mori every once in awhile... :)

As for ecologies, I actually really liked Doc Smith's stuff from the Lensmen books. A Venus-like planet with insane temperature gradients and tons of water, where every day was a hurricane... What lived there? Plants that shot up in the few calm hours of noon and aerodynamic turtle-ish critters. The gutters of torture chambers had worms living in them. The aliens had billboard-equivalent advertising they ignored. He really thought things through, but doesn't let it get in the way of a rollicking story... And this was all lifetimes ago before thinking of things as systems was a major thing.

I second the cheer for the ecology of _Dust_, and note that it's qualified for the Hugos next year...

Bruce Cohen @ 64... What was that last line again? I remember how Genocide ends, but not that last line. I read it way back when, in college. (That was so long ago that I think Abi had gotten out of the Terrible Twos that year.)

Serge @ 6: Well, it's hard to simplify a sketch into a sentence. It's also too bad that Elayne Boosler isn't doing standup on a regular basis (if at all) anymore. All I can say is, when she mentioned the shopping gene, and then said all the guys in the audience were turning to their wives, my housemates (male) turned and look at me.

Jumping up and hitting something up high seems to track in the boys and athletic girls; my son is constantly doing it and I did it too. However, I learned to shop properly and not miss out on clothing that I liked, so now I, too, buy more than one pair of those black pants.

Lila @ 7: I've read that too, and it amuses me greatly. She's definitely paid attention to cats when they didn't realize a human could see them. Male cats have a range of social behaviors and will meet on neutral territory. Females are very territorial and will not interact positively with strangers except when in heat.

I have a cat who is an urban commando. You can't see him right in front of you, unless he moves. Every other cat I've had did not display this talent.

Sweetie, my first Maine Coon, displayed more of the king cichlid behaviors. She was a very dominant personality, and trained her humans to give her not just food but also tea. In fact, I came home from college one day, and heard my father say "Oh, Sweetie wants some tea".

Human behaviors cover a wide range of possibilities, and these depend not just on the innate personality (which interacts with and depends to some extend on experiences), but also the environment in which the person sits. Some people -- like some dogs and cats -- will always be the subordinate and their body language says it quite clearly. Others will always be the king cichlid, and their body language is just as clear. I think most of us fall in the middle of the bell curve, and our dominance/subordinate behaviors will vary, but that's just IMHO.

Folks here are a self-selected group of thinkers, intellectuals, reflective by nature and prone to poetry as well as puns. It's easier to get along in this kind of environment. Baen's Bar used to be like this too, when Jim Baen was moderating the conferences (and there were fewer conferences to read). We all got along really well despite our religious and political differences.

I'm really glad ML exists. It feels like another home.

Ginger @ 67... I learned to shop properly and not miss out on clothing that I liked, so now I, too, buy more than one pair of those black pants

...thus did you resolve the debate of Nature vs Nature. Me, I own 3 copies of the same pants that I like, but mostly because my wife has the shopping gene.

David Harmon @ 63

I agree with all your points, and would stress the ethical questions even more*. The point I made before about wombs applies here too, I think: humans and their culture have been co-evolving for a very long time; it's not really meaningful to talk about either one independent of the other, any more than you can consider human digestion independent of gut bacteria.

* Fungi, the question reminds me of the suggestions made in the wake of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that it would be an interesting experiment to raise children completely removed from the experience of language to see what ur-language they would develop. Luckily, the experiment was never performed intentionally, though we have enough well-documented examples of human children raised without language to be fairly sure that what happens is that they live past the point at which language acquisition becomes possible, and so miss out on an essential part of being human.

Argh.... Nature vs Nurture.

Alternate ecologies:
James White's Sector General series - full of linked stories dealing with triage, transportation, and care of sick and/or injured non-human species (other than that everyone uses the term "human" for themselves)and the places they were discovered - planet surfaces, habitats, space...humorous, compassionate, insightful.

Serge @ 66

From imperfect memory; my copy seems to have gone AWOL some time back: "Fbzr fcrpvrf jbhyq fheivir, ohg abg, ubjrire, Zna."

Now I am reminded how someone quoted in Great Mambo Chicken and The Transhuman Condition (a book about people who were into cryonics, space colonization and whatnot) looked at all those people with all the wild ideas and had the idea that the motivation for it all was uterus envy.

Bruce Cohen @ 72... Ah, the SF of the late 1960s and of the early 1970s...

Bruce Cohen at 69

Just a small pet peeve, but the children you're referring to demonstrate, at best, what happens when a child is socially isolated past a certain age. Language isolation is just a side-effect and we can't really draw conclusions about language development based on this.

A better example what's gone on with the development of Nicaraguan sign language. It's almost an ethical version of the forbidden experiment, there are a few flaws with it (on the experimental side, not the ethical bits) and the results are robust enough to be considered near definitive.

Quick references for the curious:
Genie the most famous of the feral children talked about these days.
Nicaraguan Sign Language.

Serge @ 70: According to my EENT, I was the very embodiment of the Nature v Nurture debate. When I was a child, I was academically talented; since I was also severely hard of hearing, no one would have guessed that I'd be ahead of my grade level. The "normal" level for a child with a similar hearing defect was around three grades behind age-mates. He always held me up as an example of the "conflict", as I'd overcome nature by virtue of nuture..sorry. I seem to be infected with G&S virus.

Anyway, yes. My partner actually shops. I usually hunt for the appropriate clothing and make good notes about what to buy, then buy what I need. I've overcome my natural dislike of shopping, but she still doesn't like to shop with me. I move too fast through the store. ;-)

Now, where's that overhead -- I need to jump and hit it.

Don,
Thanks for the link. That book looks interesting.

abi,interesting observations regarding playground culture. I think some of the so-called 'mommy wars' in the US were imported from the UK. They had a few books like "I Don't Know How She Does It." I never read it, but I understand it was an opening salvo in the career mom vs. stay at home mom contentiousness that's been a huge feature of the parenting discussions recently.

xopher,
I can relate to your clothes depressions. I do these yo-yo diets where I finally become svelte, then I buy four pairs of the same pants. Then I gain 15 pounds and never wear any of them, but instead wear the one pair of jeans that fit me.

# 15 - Michael Roberts
try "Demon Breed" by schmidt

Tangentially related to SF ecology: Dance of the Tiger (Den Svarta Tigern) by Bjorn Kurten is excellent; the author is a paleontologist, but also quite a good novelist. I like his ideas about what happened to the Neanderthals. (Warning: there are spoilers all over the web--be careful about searching for reviews.)

I keep wanting to write a story about genetic material being sent to other planets to be reconstructed there, and then generations later the people on Earth and the reconstituted people on another planet get in contact with one another somehow and discover to their mutual horror that neither resembles the other's idea of them.

I'm sure that the vagueness of that sentence makes it plain why this story has never gotten farther than the "keep wanting to write" stage.

(The SF I write definitely tends towards the unfashionably not-hard kind, so the scientific specifics of how, exactly, do they reconstitute people and how, exactly, do planets many light years apart find a method of two-way communication aren't a major concern, but there's still enough to work out with this concept that my mind starts to reel before I even start thinking about what the horrifying differences between the Earth people and the other people might be.)

Michael Roberts #15:

What about Ian Mcdonald's "CHAGA": alien life-form lands in Africa, runs rampant.

ethan @ #80: "how, exactly, do planets many light years apart find a method of two-way communication."

Really really long telephone cords?

(I just opened a desk drawer and discovered about 8 of those things, including one that's either 50' or 100' long.)

Said alien life being some sort of weird plant-like growth that engulfs and co-opts Earth organisms. Battling ecologies.

Linkmeister #82: Ah! Perfect! And the reason it takes generations to get communications up is that once the reconstituted humans are settled on the new planet, they have to send a ship back to thread the damn things. Once that's done, they're all set.

ethan #84:

All conversational threads lead to string theory.

Soon Lee@ 85: Drat! You beat me to it. I could knot resist the temptation, but I was too slow to the thread. Ethan, I think you've got a good yarn there.

Carrie S., #10, that only happens here when Spirit and Shiva sit on the top of the back of the recliner, and eventually, Shiva dangles a leg to be petted and Spirit will make a little sigh so I'll pet her.

Joel, #19, back before I got sick I found heeled boots that were narrow enough so my feet didn't slide around in them. I bought two pair. The first pair got used quite a bit before I got sick, but the second pair went to a charity shop last year.

Ginger @ 76... I pull my metaphorical hat to you. As for your hearing problem, was it somehow resolved, or compensated for?

Another alien ecology is Hal Clement's The Nitrogen Fix. Not one of his better efforts IMHO, but O2 + N2 is not in the lowest energy state ....

Bruce @69: any more than you can consider human digestion independent of gut bacteria. And yet, and yet... My daughter (yes, same one) has Crohn's Disease. And we've had astoundingly good success for this allegedly uncurable disease by entirely ignoring the well-meant advice of her pediatric gastroenterologist, instead focusing on nurture of her gastrointestinal flora (a la David Klein and Elaine Gottschall, for anyone who's interested.) No symptoms since last summer, and that's without medication.

The gastroenterologist, however, insists that diet has no effect on Crohn's.

The fascinating thing is that after she was diagnosed, and we thought it was highly unlikely that both our children should have unrelated uncurable diseases, we've been making progress with our son's kidney disease as well. Which is a damned good thing, since he has an idiosyncratic reaction to steroids.

So yeah. Intestinal ecology is a topic of interest in our household. (And we're getting quite good at making good yogurt.)

Everybody: Thanks for all the suggestions for books! Some of these I've never heard of, and some I should have but don't seem to (Heinlein's Red Planet, for instance; I can even see the cover art in my mind's eye, but it doesn't seem to be in the boxes.) A couple I've read and didn't care for, but my daughter may have a different notion. We're going to Borders tomorrow (our reward for making it through an entire school year for the first time since ... hmm ... seven years now. First time ever for our son.) I'll see what's on the shelves. Unfortunately, Puerto Rico isn't all too well-equipped when it comes to bookstores (let's not even discuss libraries, because I get all choked up.) If she makes it through the stack already on her desk, maybe it's time to hit Amazon.

Re: Cat behavior

When we had but few cats, there was Manx/Tonk who had grown up alone with an owner who doted on him. Iko-Iko had the most amazing vocabulary, with at least 7 sounds that consistently meant the same thing. "I", "want", "food", "petting", "holding", "no!", "angry". He could string two or three together to make "sentences" of simple but consistent value. He used them only with us, and not on the other cats. He understood at least 20 words of English. Together with his natural feline non-verbal language (which we learned), he could communicate very complex desires and opinions on the restrictions we placed on him. As we got more kittehs over the next few years, and he spent the majority of his time interacting with them, he lost a lot of the variety of his "language," but still could make his opinion plain to us. I once wrote a term paper of the phenomenon for an Interpersonal Communications class.

Another of our original cats could lie to us, but I have seen many other claims so this seems not so unique.

By the time we had eight cats in the house (all indoor, all with claws), we had our own pride of lions. Three males and five females (all fixed) all interacted the way lions in Africa do, almost to a T. We watched nature specials and read volumes about lion behavior and the map to our "pride" was almost perfect. The only differences were the social workarounds they developed to account for Mel and myself. They had their own Alphas, but I was recognized as an Uber-Alpha. Mel sometimes had trouble getting the males to follow orders, but on the whole they obeyed better when they were in the pride structure than the times before and after when we had fewer cats and no recognizable "pride."

#69 --

The story goes that Once Upon A Time, a king decided to see what the "original language of mankind" was, by having a group of infants raised without ever hearing spoken language.

After six years or so, all of the children were fluent in sign language.

It's harder than it looks to separate genetics from culture, and it doesn't look easy.

Serge @ 88: I have these magical things called hearing aids. What they really are is volume control. ;-)

Ginger @86 -
Soon Lee@ 85: Drat! You beat me to it. I could knot resist the temptation, but I was too slow to the thread. Ethan, I think you've got a good yarn there.

No. No way. I refuse to get roped into another one of these durn pun chains....

Ginger @ 93... I'm glad to hear that the problem wasn't so severe that aids wouldn't do the trick.

Scott Taylor #94: Opposed to being tied into the puntificatory crowd are you?

Ginger: I've have people compare me to both foxes, and cats. I can see the cat now. I tend to be very quiet, and; apparently, relaxed.

But I also sit where I can see everyone, and when it's time to move, I'm gone. My mother says it was interesting to watch me as a child, because I was always like that. All stillness, or all motion.

Fragano @ 96: He's got to draw the line somewhere, eh? Otherwise - before you know it - he's three sheets to the wind, and there's no staying anyone.

ecology in sf: I just remembered that War of the Worlds embodies the principle that invasive species either take over or die out.

ecology in sf: I just remembered that War of the Worlds embodies the principle that invasive species either take over or die out.

I'm sure I only hit the "post" button once this time! Is the bug on the other end?

Ginger #98: No doubt he thinks we're all at sea. And I am off to the arms of Morpheus, before my beloved thinks of some suitable punishment.

Ginger: Sayl, I knew I like the cut of your jib, you have sprit, and watch what you say, hawse the weather where you are.

Terry Karney @ 21: "It may be a function of size (there's the recursion) and we are too large (and moderated) to support the kind of bullying which lets that dynamic take over."

That was the only part of the cichlid example that sounded off to me: anti-social behavior gets worse as size decreases? That's never been my experience. Generally, the larger the community, the worse the anti-social behavior gets. (I think that once the numbers get large enough that community members can't remember all the other members from day to day, a space develops where people aren't held accountable for their poor behavior--and then behaving badly (stealing. etc.) becomes a viable strategy. It seems to me that government is all basically a way of getting communities to work at sizes larger than that.)

The cichlid example is interesting--I wouldn't have guessed that social behavior would have that dramatic of a discontinuity. It sounds like a pair of alternate survival strategies, triggered by population density--EITHER work to leverage numbers for safety OR protect your territory from competitors.

Michael Roberts @ 15: "what science-fiction books would the assembly recommend for getting a good picture of alternate ecologies?"

It's not sf, but for my money you can't beat 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus for a look at alternate (human-included) ecologies. Actually, the best part is that they aren't sf--they all actually existed.

FungiFromYuggoth @ 56: "Tying this into the cichlid discussion: given a tabula rasa, would it be possible to raise human beings with less cichlid quotient? And would it be ethical to withhold information from humans to try and make them better people?"

I think this question is based on a false assumption: that it is even possible to make people better by teaching them less. I think David Harmon @ 63 says it well: "any such attempt founders on the fallacy that "if they don't hear about it, they won't do it". In practice, if they don't hear about it, they can't learn from the experiences of their predecessors, so they'll repeat all the same mistakes." Progress happens when you learn from the past, not when you ignore it.

on alternative ecologies: Molly Gloss' _The Dazzle of Day_ takes place on a ship that is its own eco-system, run by Quakers on their way to settle a new world. I found it lovely

Terry @103
I'm sure Ginger will have a crafty reply which will leave the group in her wake.

Eric @ 100: By invasive species, do you mean introduced species? If it's literally invasive, then it doesn't die out unless it exhausts the food supply completely; it just crowds native species in the same niche, until they're marginalized or extinct.

It's even too much of a generalization to say that introduced species either become invasive or die out. Two local (Austin TX) examples: Pyracantha bush, introduced by landscapers, has escaped to the wild around Austin, but you don't see them often or in huge stands. And the Mediterranean gecko has become common around here in the last 15 or 20 years. They *are* common . . . step outside in the summer, shine a light under the eaves of your house, and lookit all the geckos! But, though they have proliferated, they don't seem to be a problem, possibly because the niche "noctural climbing insectivore" was empty locally. There's lots for them to eat, but lots of things eat them, too, so they don't seem to be a problem. Certainly there are plenty of bugs left over for the local climbing lizard, the Carolina anole, who works the day shift.

As to cichlids - Yes, I've kept cichlids of several types for many years (and my first job was in an aquarium store) and the behavior described at the start of the thread is new to me. Cichlids are a huge family, taking in the slow-moving and elegant angelfish and discus, the hyperactive African lake cichlids, and the tilapia, who you may never have seen in an aquarium but has likely graced your plate at a restaurant.

Cichlids can be aggressive, but disagreements are usually caused either by mating squabbles or by too *large* a population, especially among highly territorial species like the African cichlids. If every fish has its own hole in the rocks, well and good. If there's one too few hiding place, drama will ensue.

The only time I have seen anything like the behavior described was interspecific. Two little convict cichlids in a store tank paired off and, in hyperaggressive protect-the-eggs mode, claimed half the tank for themselves. The 20 or so larger cichlids in the tank - Jack Dempseys, which are normally thought of as roughnecks - all decided that they really preferred the *other* half of the ten-gallon tank. But this was accomplished through threat displays and the occasional nip; there were no murders.

anaea @ 75

I think I agree with you; at least, I don't believe you can separate socialization from language and say much about them separately. That's the whole problem with Sapir-Whorf: it tries to find a simple causation (language creates world-view) in what's really a tangle of recursion, feedback, and co-evolution. The only thing I might say differently from what you said is that I don't think we can say which is the side-effect and which the cause; in fact I'd argue the distinction isn't very meaningful.

#107: "step outside in the summer, shine a light under the eaves of your house, and lookit all the geckos!"

So long as they're not selling car insurance.

Alternative ecologies: Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal trilogy -- Hominids, Humans, Hybrids -- takes place partly in an alternate-Earth timeline in which the Neanderthals came to dominance. Their social structures are very different from ours (though no less technologically advanced, and in some ways more so; for example, it is their device that breaches the timeline barrier), and as a result their ecology still includes a number of species that we drove to extinction.

Ginger @ 76

The "normal" level for a child with a similar hearing defect was around three grades behind age-mates.

Sadly, the reason behind this statistic has far too often been that children with hearing problems were diagnosed as developmentally-delayed (or more usually and barbarically, "retarded") because no one noticed they were having trouble hearing the teacher. Some of those kids were finally diagnosed when they were sent to special ed classes, where teachers had figured out the problem; but in the days of "mainstreaming", a lot of them were missed for so long that the learning deficit never was made up.

Happier subject: aren't hearing aids wonderful? I finally saved up enough to buy a state of the art pair (well, state of the art when I bought them), about the cost of a really good laptop each, and I can hear music again!

Steve Jackson #107:
That was my experience too, with a pair of mating Jewel Cichlids getting belligerent in a community aquarium. The rest of the time, they coexisted just fine with the other fishes (once I worked out that the other fish needed to be larger than a certain size; too small and they get eaten).

But it was a long time ago & given the variation within the large cichlid family, I just assumed that that sort of behaviour was from cichlid species I wasn't aware of.

#15 - Alternate Ecologies -

James P Hogan, Code of the Lifemaker -- really fascinating development of a very unlikely ecology...

Fungi@56: would it be possible to raise human beings with less cichlid quotient?

I think that the drive behind cichlid behaviour is probably a drive called "agency", the state of being in action or of exerting power. And I don't think agency is bad, I think it is counterbalanced by something one might describe as empathy.

I'd say the tyrants and serial kilers of the world aren't so much an outcome of having too much agency as probably having zero empathy.

On the other hand, I see a lot of what I would call healthy people (who have both agency and empathy) who suppress their agency, because they think it's bad. And often, they think it's bad because they've been told it's bad, often by their parents when they're children.

Children should be seen and not heard. Don't talk back to your parents. Do what you're told. insert obligatory child abuse story. insert obligatory child-bully (the epitome of agency and no empathy) story.

The result is that the drive of agency is suppressed by the individual because they've been conditioned to not express it. If they did, they often suffered negative consequences as a child.

But that means as an adult, these individuals often end up getting steam-rolled by others who have agency and are willing to express it.

In this situation, the solution isn't to reduce the agency in other people, but to get the individual to start expressing their own agency. And this usually immediately brings