Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
puzzles in video surveillance by allowing inference of the sex of an unmarked
individual.
SEQUENCES THROUGH THE MIST
All animals are social, even if only to the extent of engaging in sexual repro-
duction and otherwise avoiding each other. Understanding the rules that gov-
ern social dynamics in general is a step to understanding our own lives (Axel-
rod 1984). Everything happens in context, so it is unsurprising that we
advocate a contextual approach to studying society. Social relationships are the
consequences of entwining sets of events and states, and our aim has been to
explore how these may be disentangled through analyzing sequences of
changes in time and space. Although some of these analytical approaches may
seem daunting through their unfamiliarity, they concern a phenomenon—
sequentiality—that not only is at the root of life in the patterning of nucleic
acids, but also suffuses every aspect of our daily experience in strings of words
and sentences and stories. One story can be told in different ways for different
purposes, just as an individual butterfly is expressed differently as larva, pupa,
and imago. A metamorphosis in storytelling shows how the perceptions of
Robert Henryson, a fifteenth-century Scottish poet, might, for the purposes of
measuring the dynamics of mammalian society, be stripped to their essentials.
In his
Moral Fables,
Henryson penned these words:
This country mouse lay flattened on the ground, fearing every minute that
she would be killed; for her heart was pounding with strokes of fear, and
feverishly she trembled hand and foot. And when her sister found her in
such straits, for the sake of pity first she grieved a bit, then comforted her
with words as sweet as honey.
It is common for stories to be peppered with anthropomorphism, and one
class of these, akin to mock anthropomorphism (Kennedy 1986), enriches
prose with insight. Certainly, understanding is not the sole prerogative of those
who wield the colorless pen of late-twentieth-century science. On the other
hand, another class of anthropomorphism is blind to life's processes and, in its
fancifulness, more often than not corrupts literature by diminishing under-
standing. Stripping out these distractions is a step toward understanding, and
interpretation of the essence that remains hinges on the meaning of sequences,
whether they be words or behaviors. In the contextual study of animal behav-
ior the narration that precedes or succeeds a given action has equal weight to
