Toda y's Dispatches

• Conflict Resolution in Nature
  
• Predicting the Next Big One

by Mary K. Miller

Chimps may have something to teach humans about letting go of grudges and making up after a fight. Dr. Frans De Waal, a primate behaviorist from Emory University, looks at the social relationships of chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys after a conflict. Fights over food and territory happen between the closest of friends, it's what the fighters do after the fur flies that's important. Within ten minutes, one chimp will reach out its hand to other combatant, which quickly leads to an embrace and a kiss and all is forgotten. The more important the relationship, between related males for instance, the faster they kiss and make up. Dr. de Waal says the European community is based on a similar concept: the closer the economic and strategic ties, the more motivation there is to preserve good relations between countries.

The ability to reconcile is something that intelligent social creatures must learn, as any mother of a young child knows. In a novel experiment, de Waal put juvenile rhesus monkeys, which are particularly aggressive primates, together with older, gentler stumptail monkeys. After five months, the rhesus monkeys had learned, apparently by example, how to deal more effectively with aggressive outbursts and they made up after fights faster and more often than rhesus monkeys that didn't live with the diplomatic stumptails. "We created a new and improved rhesus monkey," de Waal says. "This research is changing our view of what aggression means to society and the best ways to deal with it."

	Dr. Frans de Waal illustrates how survival pressures can give rise to seemingly altruistic behaviors like reconciliation.
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Predicting the Next Big One

by Mary K. Miller

Scientists have failed so far to successfully predict earthquakes in California, Ross Stein of the U.S. Geologic Survey said in a AAAS press conference on Sunday, for two main reasons. First, we don't know exactly what events along a fault line lead to earthquakes and, even if we did know, we don't have the proper instruments in place to detect these earthquake precursors. The U.S.G.S. is just starting to kick around a proposal to set up a $125 million network of instruments to monitor the entire fault system in California which would go a long way to tackling both the prediction and the detection problems, says Dr. Stein.

But prediction is not the only problem that people in earthquake-prone areas have with violent temblors. The ways that buildings, roads, and bridges perform in the largest earthquakes is still unknown--a potential catastrophe for which we are "woefully unprepared," says Tom Heaton an earthquake engineering expert from the California Institute of Technology. "Just because many buildings in Kobe and Northridge survived the moderate earthquakes there," he says, "doesn't mean we know what will happen to them in a large earthquake." The 1906 San Francisco quake, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake that moved the ground 15 feet, is very different from the Northridge event, with only two feet of movement. These big quakes happen about once every 100 years, not often enough to test whether modern earthquake engineering is adequate. If we put all our energy and resources into earthquake prediction, says Dr. Heaton, it sends the false message that earthquake prediction is our only problem. We should also be preparing for what happens when the next big one hits.

© 1999 The Exploratorium