The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist

by Franz De Waal

  All of this research serves to produce evidence for or against certain assumptions. At the same time that I am committed to data collection, however, I argue for breathing space in relation to cognitive interpretations, don't mind drawing comparisons with human behavior, and wonder how and why anthropomorphism got such a bad name. Anthropomorphism has proven its value in the service of good, solid science. The widely applied vocabulary of animal behavior, such as "aggression," "fear," "dominance," "courtship," "play," "alarm," and "bonding," has been borrowed straight from language intended for human behavior. It is doubtful that scientists from outer space, with no shared background to guide their thinking, would ever have come up with such a rich and useful array of concepts to understand animals. To recognize these functional categories is the part of our job that comes without training and usually builds upon long-standing familiarity with pets, farm animals, birds, bugs, and other creatures.

  In my own case it began with a love for aquatic life.

  Zigzag through the Polder

  Almost every Saturday when I was a boy, I jumped on my bike to go to the polder, a Dutch word for low-lying land reclaimed from the water. Bordering the Maas River, our polder was dissected by freshwater ditches full of salamanders, frogs, stickleback fish, young eels, and water insects. Carrying a crudely constructed net-a charcoal sieve attached to a broomstick-I would jump over ditches, occasionally sliding into them, to get to the best spots to catch what I wanted. I returned in a perilous zigzag, balancing a heavy bucket of water and animals in one hand while steering my bike with the other. Back home, I would release my booty in glass containers and tanks, adding plants and food, such as water fleas caught with a net made out of one of my mother's old stockings.

  Initially, the mortality in my little underwater worlds was nothing to brag about. I learned only gradually that salamanders don't eat things that don't move, that big fish shouldn't be kept with little ones, and that overfeeding does more harm than good. I also became aware of the ferocious, sneaky predation by dragonfly larvae. My animals started to live longer. Then one day-I must have been around twelve-I noticed a dramatic color change in one of my sticklebacks in a neglected tank with unchecked algae growth. Within days, the fish turned from silvery to sky blue with a fiery red underbelly. A plain little fish had metamorphosed into a dazzling peacock! I was astonished and spent every free minute staring into the aquarium, which I didn't clean on the assumption that perhaps the fish liked it better that way.

  This is how I first saw the famous courtship behavior of the three-spined stickleback. The two females in the tank grew heavy bellies full of roe, while the male built a nest out of plant material in the sand. He repeatedly interrupted his hard work by performing a little dance aimed at the females, which took place closer to the nest site each time. I did not understand everything that was going on, but I did notice that the females suddenly lost their eggs, whereupon the male started moving his fins rapidly (I later learned that his fanning served to create a current to send additional oxygen over the eggs). I ended up with a tank full of fry. It was an exhilarating experience, but one that I had to enjoy all by myself. Although my family tolerated my interests, they simply could not get excited about a bunch of tiny fish in one of my tanks.

  I had a similar experience years later, when I was a biology student at the University of Nijmegen. In a welcome departure from the usual emphasis on physiology and molecular biology, one professor gave a lecture on ethology-the naturalistic study of animal behavior-featuring detailed drawings of the so-called zigzag dance of the stickleback. Because of the work of Niko Tinbergen, a Dutch zoologist, the stickleback's display had become a textbook example. The drawings of my professor were wonderful, showing the male pushing out his red belly, with spines pointing outward, then leading the female to the nest while performing abrupt back-and-forth movements in front of her. When I nudged my fellow students, excitedly telling them that I knew all this, that anyone could see it in a small aquarium at home, once again I met with blank stares. Why should they believe me, and what was the big deal about fish behavior, anyway? Didn't I know the future was in biochemistry?

  A few years later, Tinbergen received a Nobel Prize: the stickleback had won! By that time, however, I had already moved to Groningen, a university where ethology was taken more seriously. I now study the behavior of monkeys and apes. This may seem incongruent given my early interests, but I have never had a fixation on a particular animal group. There simply weren't too many chimpanzees in the polder; otherwise I would have brought them home as well.

  One thing bothered me as a student. In the 1960s, human behavior was totally off limits for the biologist. There was animal behavior, then there was a long time nothing, after which came human behavior as a totally separate category best left to a different group of scientists. This way we kept the peace, because the other scientists were-to borrow a concept from animal behavior-pretty territorial. Popular books by Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape) and Lorenz (On Aggression) were extremely controversial because they voiced continuity between human and animal behavior. If young students of animal behavior now look down upon these authors, seeing themselves as far more sophisticated, they forget how much they owe them for knocking down the walls well before the sociobiological revolution came along. I wasn't able to judge the scientific merit of their work then, but something about these ethologists felt absolutely right: they saw humans as animals. It is only in reading them that I real ized that this was the way I had felt for as long as I could remember.

  Pecking Orders in Oslo

  It is hard to name a single discovery in animal behavior that has had a greater impact and enjoys wider name recognition than the "pecking order." Even if pecking is not exactly a human behavior, the term is ubiquitous in modern society. In speaking of the corporate pecking order, or the pecking order at the Vatican (with "primates" on top!), we acknowledge both inequalities and their ancient origins. We also slightly mock the structure, hinting that we, sophisticated human beings that we are, share a few things with domestic fowl.

  The momentous discovery of rank orders in nature was made at the beginning of the twentieth century by a Norwegian boy, Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, who fell in love with chickens at the tender age of six.18 He was so enthralled by these sociable birds that his mother bought him his own flock at a rented house outside of Oslo. Soon each bird had a name. By the age of ten, Thorleif was keeping detailed notebooks, which he maintained for many years. Apart from keeping track of how many eggs his chickens laid, and who pecked whom, he was particularly interested in exceptions to the hierarchy, so called "triangles," in which hen A is master over B, and B over C, but C over A. So, from the start, like a real scientist, he was interested in not only the regularities but also the irregularities of the rank order. The social organization that he discovered is now so obvious to us that we cannot imagine how anyone could have missed it, but no one had described it before.

  The rest is history, as they say, but not a particularly pretty one. The irony is that the discoverer of the pecking order was himself a henpecked man. Thorleif the boy had a very domineering mother, and later in life he ran into major trouble with the very first woman professor of Norway. She supported him initially, but as an anatomist she had no real interest in his work.

  After Schjelderup-Ebbe received a degree in zoology, he published the chicken observations of his youth while coining the term Hackordnung, German for pecking order. His classic paper, which appeared in 1922, describes dominants as "despots" and demonstrates the elegance of hierarchical arrangements in which every individual has its place. Knowing the rank order among 12 hens, one knows the dominance relation in all 66 possible pairs of individuals. It is easy to see the incredible economy of description, and to understand the discoverer's obsession with triangles, which compromise this economy.

  At about the time that the young zoologist wanted to continue his studies, however, a malicious but well-written piece in a student paper mad
e fun of his professor. An enemy then spread the rumor that the anonymous piece had been written by Schjelderup-Ebbe, who was indeed a gifted writer. Even though the piece was actually written by Sigurd Hoel, later to become one of Norway's foremost novelists, irreparable damage had been done to the relationship with his professor. She withdrew all support and became an active foe. As a result of lifelong intrigues against him, Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe never obtained a Norwegian doctorate, and never received the recognition he deserved.

  Regardless of this sad ending, the beginning of the story goes to show how a child who takes animals seriously, who considers them worthy of individual recognition, and who assumes that they are not randomly running around but, like us, lead orderly lives, can discover things that the greatest scientists have missed. This quality of the child, of unhesitatingly accepting kinship with animals, was remarked upon by Sigmund Freud:

  Children show no trace of the arrogance which urges adult civilized men to draw a hard-and-fast line between their own nature and that of all other animals. Children have no scruples over allowing animals to rank as their full equals. Uninhibited as they are in the avowal of their bodily needs, they no doubt feel themselves more akin to animals than to their elders, who may well be a puzzle to them.19

  The intuitive connection children feel with animals can be a tremendous source of joy. The unconditional love received from pets, and the lack of artifice in the relationship, contrast sharply with the much trickier dealings with members of their own species. I had an animal friend like this when I was young; I still think fondly of the neighbors' big dog, who was often by my side, showing interest in everything I did or said. The child's closeness to animals is fed by adults with anthropomorphic animal stories, fairy tales, and animated movies. Thus, a bond is fostered with all living things that is critically examined only later in life. As explained by the late Paul Shepard, who like no one else reflected on humanity's place in nature:

  Especially at the end of puberty, the end of innocence, we begin a lifelong work of differentiating ourselves from them [animals]. But this grows from an earlier, unbreakable foundation of contiguity. Alternatively, a rigorous insistence of ourselves simply as different denies the shared underpinnings and destroys a deeper sense of cohesion that sustains our sanity and keeps our world from disintegrating. Anthropomorphism binds our continuity with the rest of the natural world. It generates our desire to identify with them and learn their natural history, even though it is motivated by a fantasy that they are no different from ourselves.20

  In this last sentence, Shepard hints at a more mature anthropomorphism in which the human viewpoint is replaced, however imperfectly, by the animal's. As we shall see, it is precisely this "animalcentric" anthropomorphism that is not only acceptable but of great value in science.

  Uninfluenced by Actual Behavior

  Continuity between childhood and adult interests is by no means universal. One category of scientists has for professional reasons thrown up a barrier between themselves and the animals they study. Fouts must have thought of them when formulating his "first commandment," and indeed he had a supervisor who zapped his chimpanzees with a cattle prod. Rather than with such cruelty-which, fortunately, is rare-I am more concerned here with closeness versus distance.

  Psychologists of the so-called behaviorist school are against the attribution of mental states to animals and hence have traditionally objected to any kind of anthropomorphism. This stance is somewhat puzzling, since this school, founded in the 1920s, initially strove for a unified theory in which human and animal behavior were subject to exactly the same principles. All behavior was explained by conditioning, that is, as stimulated or inhibited by positive or negative outcomes. The behaviorists' goal of applying a single explanatory scheme to all organisms was laudable, and its rigorous experimental procedures remain useful today.

  There was a fundamental problem, however: people untrained in the behaviorist doctrine were prepared to buy its premises in relation to animals but most definitely not in relation to themselves. Early behaviorists considered emotions mere illusions, and mental states as residing inaccessibly in a "black box." It was therefore considered softheaded to even mention these phenomena. There was an appealing logic and consistency to dealing purely with behavior, and nothing else, except that no sane person was willing to accept the irrelevancy of feelings and thoughts for the production of human behavior. This forced a strategic withdrawal: behaviorists maintained their radical position with regard to animals only. Although never admitting it in so many words, in effect they abandoned their unified theory and increasingly began to treat animals and people as different. Whereas the human species was granted a mental life (although one not nearly as influential as most of us think it is), animals were kept at the level of stimulus-response machines.21

  It is perhaps no accident that behaviorism is an American school, whereas ethology, with its emphasis on biology and instinct, is European. The first school has an optimistic, transformational streak (we can learn to become anything we want to be), whereas the second school assumes a measure of predestination.22 For ethologists, every species arrives on this earth with a number of inborn behavior patterns that undergo little modification by the environment. Thus, the spider does not need to learn how to construct a web. She is born with a battery of spinnerets (spinning tubes connected to silk glands) as well as a behavioral program that "instructs" her how to weave threads together.

  Because of their simplicity, both views of behavior had tremendous appeal, and obviously both touched on the truth. At the time, however, this was not fully recognized because many scholars felt that nature and nurture were to be chosen between rather than combined. Yet, even if there is much less polarization now, one fundamental difference remains. Ethologists and naturalists are interested in animals for their own sake, whereas behaviorists mostly focus on a few domesticated animals, such as rats and pigeons, as "models" of the species that we belong to. Thus, one school sees animals as an end in themselves, and the other rather as a means to an end, positioned somewhere along a linear progression from "lower" to "higher" forms.

  Even if many modern behaviorists have adopted a more cognitive and evolutionary perspective, I have run into the attitudes just described often enough to have developed a serious allergy to them. One example from my own experience is the reaction to the first hints of peacemaking among primates.

  In the mid 1970s, I discovered that chimpanzees kiss and embrace after a fight, and dubbed these encounters reconciliations. When a new student joined my team, I proposed that she collect information on this phenomenon. There was a small problem, however. Whereas I was affiliated with Utrecht University, the student came from Amsterdam, and all of her professors were psychologists in the behaviorist tradition.

  My supervisor, Jan van Hooff, and I went to Amsterdam to meet them. There we discovered that the entire committee was convinced that such a thing as reconciliation could never exist in animals. They knew only rodents, and in my inno cence I was surprised that they even had an opinion about primates. That they didn't take me seriously was one thing-I was young-but they also ignored Jan, an international expert on chimpanzees. We figured that perhaps we could change their minds by inviting them to the Arnhem Zoo, where our chimpanzees lived: seeing apes up close might be an eyeopener. To this proposal, however, they replied in a way that baffles me to this day: "What good would it do to see the animals? It will be much easier to stay objective if we are not influenced by that"

  Reconciliations are common and conspicuous in chimpanzees. In the top frame, a young female, on the right, is getting too close to the newborn of a high-ranking female. After the mother has slapped her away, the young female is screaming at a distance, hitting herself in frustration. In the bottom frame, she has returned to the mother and receives a kiss on her nose. After this, she is tolerated at close range again. Conflict resolution has been demonstrated in a host of primates. (Drawing by the author, first published i
n 1979).

  True, the discovery at stake was not nearly as momentous as that of the earth revolving around the sun, but the reaction nevertheless reminded me of that of the seventeenth-century church fathers who refused to look through Galileo's telescope. Who knows what they would have been forced to admit! It is said that the ancient King of Sardis complained that "men's ears are less credulous than their eyes." Only here it was reversed: these people feared that their eyes might tell them something they didn't want to hear.

  And so, what Shepard saw as the "deeper sense of cohesion that sustains our sanity" has been lost in certain areas of science. Apparently, the human mind-and the behaviorist tradition with it-is so vulnerable to anthropomorphism that seeing, hearing, and smelling actual animals is to be avoided except when we know what to expect. Needless to say, the favoring of a theoretical doctrine over firsthand encounters with the organism does not develop naturally out of childhood cu riosity: it represents a rupture, a throwing away of what Wilson called his talisman.

  The "Which Is Which?" Approach

  Like every biologist, I learned that one needs to build up an extensive background knowledge before one can even begin to address detailed questions. As Lorenz put it, one needs to grasp the whole before one tries to grasp its parts:

  One cannot master set research tasks if one makes a single part the focus of interest. One must, rather, continuously dart from one part to another-in a way that appears extremely flighty and unscientific to some thinkers who place value on strictly logical sequences-and one's knowledge of each of the parts must advance at the same pace."