The male Augrabies Flat Lizard is a highly territorial animal: fully grown adult males dominate their territories, which contain multiple females - harems - by attacking and driving off younger males.

The adult males are highly coloured whereas females are a dull brown colour. A team of South African and Australian researchers has discovered that some young male lizards protect themselves from older males by pretending to be females, gaining access both to a territory and its resident females, where they are probably a lot more welcome than the Count and his men were.

As juveniles, all males look like females before gradually developing their extravagant adult male coloration at the onset of sexual maturity. Young males are most vulnerable to aggressive adult male rivals when these first signs of masculinity develop. Experienced males will chase and bite their young rivals.

"Young males purposefully only develop colours on their belly, so they reach sexual maturity by still looking like a female," says co-author Associate Professor Scott Keogh, of the School of Biological Sciences at the Australian National University. Professor Keogh says that the young transvestite males appear to have a dual advantage: “They can avoid potentially dangerous bouts with dominant males and still have access to normally inaccessible females.”

“By delaying the onset of colour to a more convenient period, these males (termed she-males) are making the best of a bad situation,” said team member Associate Professor Martin Whiting of the University of the Witwatersrand. An immediate advantage of this phenomenon is freedom of movement in the normally treacherous zones which make up the territories of highly aggressive males that already have fighting experience. At the same time, the female mimics are able to court the myriad of females that share the territorial male’s residence.

The researchers also tested whether she-males are able to mimic the chemical ‘signature’ of females. In a clever experiment performed in the wild, they removed all pheromones and skin lipids that might signal gender and relabelled a group of females and she-males with either male or female scent, before presenting them to typical adult males. Males use their tongues to sample chemical scent and responded by courting she-males labelled as females, but not she-males labelled as males. “Males are fooled by looks, but not by scent” said researcher Dr Jonathan Webb of the University of Sydney. “She-males are able to maintain this deception by staying one step ahead of a prying male, and thereby avoiding a nosey tongue that might give the game away.”

Question: at what level do the young transvestite males 'know' that they are deceiving the older males? Clearly a lizard can tell a male from a female both by sight and by smell. A she-male is aware at some level that it doesn't look like an older male - it has to, or its behaviour would be a give-away on the older male's territory. It has to walk and behave like a female, or it would immediately be spotted and attacked by the reisdent tyrant male. The lizard is not 'conscious' of course, in the sense of being self-aware in the way that humans are. But some part of its brain knows that it looks like a girl. An early component of intentionality.

The team used rules to exclude effects that might have resulted from sex, hierarchy, age, and friendship: "Everything I could come up with," Gomes says. She concludes that the only way to explain the symmetry of grooming exchanges between pairs over time is through reciprocity. "If you don't have a set price, then you're susceptible to being cheated and cooperation would probably break down."

So far, so good, and so classical, but Gomes goes on to say that the accuracy of the exchanges is more likely to be driven by an emotional agenda than a cognitive social calculus. "It does not necessarily have to be a cognitive process," she says, "it could be emotional." Gomes hypothesizes that chimpanzees - and by extension, humans - use fine adjustments to levels of endorphins to associate particular levels of generosity or meanness with individuals, and it's then hormonal motivation that causes the tit-for-tat behaviour.

While not excluding a major affective element in relationships, which indisputably exists, this view seems to deny the very adaptive advance which made human group social life possible, that being the evolution of a cognitively and cortically based social calculus. The vast enlargement of the neo-cortex in primates and then in humans cannot be adequately accounted for other than by the need to store enormous volumes of data about the historical relationships between members of the group, and as much between other members of the group as about one's own relationships. Think soap operas. Your endorphins may help you assess the state of things between you and your mates, but they won't help you much when it comes to understanding why Joe dumped Jane in favour of Chardonnay.

As well as enabling the matrix of extended group relationships, cognitive reciprocity led to exchange in goods, ie trade, the other key building block, after the group itself, of the society of which we are all members. The notions of fairness, value and trust that originally developed and expressed themselves through behaviours such as grooming and food-sharing underlie all types of trading activity: it seems intuitively implausible, even unworkable, that they could be successfully underpinned by a hormonal mechanism rather than a cognitive one.

The research, by graduate student Michael Sheehan and assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology Elizabeth Tibbetts, suggests that the wasps' social interactions are based on memories of past encounters rather than on rote adherence to simple rules.

Until now it was assumed that all social insects had very limited memories. Honeybees can remember where they've found nectar, "But those memories are pretty fleeting," Sheehan said. "There seems to be a limit to the number of things they can juggle in their head at one time."

Tibbetts had previously showed that the wasps recognize individuals by variations in their facial markings and that they behave more aggressively toward wasps with unfamiliar faces. In the new research, Sheehan measured aggression between 50 wasp queens in four different encounters over eight days. On the first day, two wasps that never had met were placed in an observation chamber for a day and their initial interactions videotaped. Then the pair was separated, and each wasp was put in a communal cage with 10 other wasps. A week later, the pair met again, and again their behavior was videotaped.

It was clear from teh results that the wasps treated each other better during their second encounter than when they were strangers, suggesting they remembered each other. "Instead of trying to bite each other and really have a rough-and-tumble encounter, they just sort of hung out next to each other when they met the second time," Sheehan said.

Recognition matters to the wasps because Polistes fuscatus females often share nests, so that it is adaptive for them to be able to recognize nest-partners. Most social insects use smell to identify nest-partners; separate research by Wulfila Gronenberg, associate professor of neurobiology and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, and who had previously worked with Tibbetts, has shown that in the paper wasp, the antennal lobe (used for smell recognition) is smaller than in other wasps, while the so-called mushroom body subcompartments, which integrate information from the senses and help control learning and memory, were not any larger than usual.

Sheehan points out that the findings of the Michigan research challenge assumptions about social cognition, which is generally thought to require a large and advanced brain.

Primatologists Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny of the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, asked six adult chimpanzees to link pictures of male and female chimpanzee behinds with photos of their comrades' faces. The chimpanzees scored well above chance, but only if they knew the individuals concerned - that's not too surprising, though.

The researchers say the test shows that chimpanzees use a 'whole body' method of storage and recognition, something that has been also demonstrated in humans (and in my office game).

In a further test, the researchers established that chimpanzees could identify the sex of a chimp face (no lipstick, promise!), but again only if they knew the individual, which shows, de Waal speculates, that the chimps recognise the sex of other chimps based, not just on physical attributes, but on other information from their previous experience with those individuals, such as their roles in the larger group.

If you think about how you identify the males and females you come across in non-gender-specific situations, I think you'll agree that we are not so different. Well, how would we be different?

Now for the interesting part: recognition of conspecifics should surely have origins way back in the phylogenetic tree? But how far back? Presumably recognition of known individuals is a given in any group setting. Dogs, birds, whales, for a start. Would they not then use the 'whole body' method? What about cockroaches? Intuitively you'll say not; but cockroaches have been shown to exhibit group behaviour. A cockroach has to be able to identify another one, and can presumably tell a male from a female - or is it done by pheronomes? Perhaps it's both - cockroaches live in the dark, a lot.

There are not many answers to be had. But time and time again it turns out that an ability we thought was special to us can in fact be demonstrated in quite remote species. 'Whole body' recognition is perhaps just such a case.

But the argument between the 'likes' and the 'unlikes' (I almost want to call them dualists) will not go away, and is well illustrated by two pieces of research which were published this week.

'What is it that distinguishes humans from other mammals? The answer to this question lies in the neocortex – the part of the brain responsible for sensory perceptions, conscious thought, and language. Humans have a considerably larger neocortex than other mammals, making it an ideal subject for the research of higher cognition.' Thus speaks a dualist in Science Daily, reporting on research on the functioning of cortical 'chandelier' cells (Molnár G, Oláh S, Komlósi G, Füle M, Szabadics J, et al. (2008) Complex events initiated by individual spikes in the human cerebral cortex. PLoS Biol 6(9): e222. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060222).

The authors triggered specific chandelier cells, causing a sequence of electrical events in the neocortex. They found that the synaptic pathways between chandeliers and pyramidal cells are extremely strong – much stronger than has been recorded previously in other mammals. This, say the authors, suggests that humans do possess different types of cells, and that our higher cognition isn't due to having larger cells.

Meanwhile, at the Great Ape Trust, a peer-reviewed paper by Janni Pedersen, an Iowa State University Ph.D. candidate from Denmark, analyzed a videotaped conversation between the bonobo Panbanisha and Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, now a scientist with special standing at Great Ape Trust, but a researcher at Georgia State University's Language Research Center when the video was made about 15 years ago.

Language-competent bonobos use lexigrams, which are made up of arbitrary symbols that represent words, as the basis for conversations with humans. In the video, Panbanisha was in the forest with Savage-Rumbaugh and an assistant, who had a dog in tow that Panbanisha didn't like. Panbanisha repeatedly used the lexigrams to ask to be carried by the assistant. Savage-Rumbaugh offered other resolutions, but Panbanisha remained firm.

Pedersen said linguistic aspects of the conversation included turn taking, negotiation, pauses and repetition, and went far beyond information sharing made possible through the use of lexigrams symbols. "She was using language to get at what she wanted," Pedersen said. "She is very, very clever and is fully capable of following the conversation the same way a human does. This tells me that Panbanisha's knowledge of language is far beyond understanding the words, to understanding how to use them in a conversation to get what she wants."

William M. Fields, director of bonobo research at Great Ape Trust, says the publication opens an important new chapter in the debate about the linguistic capabilities of apes. "The resistance to this in the scientific community is enormous," he said. "For the first time, we have a student who is using linguistic tools that have normally been applied to humans now being applied to non-humans. This is a move toward using the kinds of methodology that are appropriate in ape language, based on Savage-Rumbaugh's 1993 monograph, Language Comprehension in Ape and Child."

"One of the things Janni has affirmed, and affirmed in a way the lay person can understand, is the aspect of turn-taking. If there is anything universal in human language, it's turn of talk," Fields said. "The fact that Panbanisha has done this, and it's accessible even to an untrained reviewer, I think is an important aspect of her paper. She has looked at the whole social action, and the meaning. Ideational flow – going back and forth – is obvious.

"Originally, repetition was thought of as something that happens normally in human language," he said. "Traditionally, repetition in ape communicative behaviors is assumed to be proof that they don't have language. It's a kind of dichotomy or unfairness."

I'd like to know about Panbanisha's chandelier cells . . .