The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist

by Franz De Waal

  Lorenz Today

  One of Lorenz's former co-workers, Norbert Bischof, recently lamented that "It has become silent around Konrad Lorenz." It may be worse: Lorenz is increasingly disrespected. Even his compatriots have begun to minimize his contributions, as if all he did was tell amusing stories. Here is a condescending observation by Austrian philosopher and cultural commentator Konrad Liessmann:

  What is admirable about him-of whom it is said that he would have preferred to be a greylag goose-is his empathy with the animal, his singular gift for observation, his talent to communicate with animals.... He may not survive as ground-breaking biologist, even less as cultural critic, but rather as author of enthralling animal tales. Perhaps they have given Konrad Lorenz the wrong Nobel Prize.73

  Ever since reductionism gained the upper hand in my field, there has been great eagerness to dismiss Lorenz, and with him the holistic approach he called the Ganzheitsbetrachtung, or contemplation of the whole. Many consider him out of date, almost irrelevant. But those who present Lorenz's evolutionary ideas as the pinnacle of foolishness usually fail to add that he was by no means alone in adhering to a naive functionalism that emphasized phylogeny rather than natural selection. Yes, these views have been left behind, and rightly so, but if we were to dismiss every scientist who held views that are no longer accepted, the only remaining category would be us: those brilliant minds of the here and now.

  The sharpest criticism of Lorenz has traditionally come from scientists who trace their background to Tinbergen. Yet, even though I greatly admire Tinbergen and consider myself his intellectual kin through the Dutch ethological family tree, the absolute reign of behaviorism would never have been broken by this gentle, thoughtful man on his own. He needed a warrior by his side, someone unafraid to call nonsense "non sense." The case for animal behavior as a product of evolution was presented by Lorenz with such authority and conviction that no one could ever again look at a Skinner box without asking what lever pressing had to do with survival. While Tinbergen sought to convince audiences with well-designed experiments, Lorenz blew them away by the sheer force of his personality and the directness of his knowledge. Someone who swims with the geese and climbs onto roofs wearing a mask to fool the birds may indeed be wearing King Solomon's ring. No one who read or heard him doubted for a moment that Lorenz knew his animals inside out.

  Edward Wilson was greatly affected. Even though he went to see both Tinbergen and Lorenz when they came to lecture at Harvard in 1953, it was Lorenz who made by far the deeper impression. Wilson describes him as "a prophet of the dais, passionate, angry, and importunate." Lorenz challenged prevailing views, saying that the role of learning was grossly overestimated, and that the answers to animal behavior were to be found in evolutionary biology. The young Wilson happily concluded that "Lorenz has returned animal behavior to natural history. My domain."74

  This is not a contribution to be sneezed at. To throw an inextricable wrench into the wheels of behaviorism, to pave the way for the evolutionary study of behavior, and to conceive of the mind as a knowledge-acquisition device shaped by evolution are major accomplishments that reverberate to this day. Lorenz greatly influenced scientists of his time, pushing them to conduct ever more sophisticated research. A British contemporary, William Thorpe, rightly observed that "the very fact that Lorenz's early papers appear now so outdated is a tribute to their effectiveness."

  How painful that a man of such obvious qualities, with such a profound understanding of animals, will forever have a cloud hanging over his head. His racist writings bother me far more than whatever brand of evolutionary ideas he held. Why is it that love for animals doesn't always translate into love for people? Lorenz saw civilization, like domestication, as a corruption of nature. And in the end, he helped fuel the fire that dealt civilization one of its biggest blows.

  Since it is impossible to separate Lorenz the man from Lorenz the scientist, I may never be able to shake off my mixed feelings. On the other hand, there is absolutely no reason to doubt his contributions to the field of animal behavior: they have been profound and deserve our continuing respect and gratitude.

  Kinji Imanishi and the Rabid Englishman

  "In my Western way, I came to Kyoto, the home of Imanishi and his School seeking the man and his ideas, but I came as an avowed opponent."

  Beverly Halstead, 198475

  In 1984, an eccentric Englishman, who couldn't resist comparing himself to a nineteenth-century explorer, landed on an Eastern shore. As if possessed, he hammered away day and night on an old typewriter until he had a rather disorganized product in his hands: a volume of over two hundred pages. Along with naive comments on a society that he didn't seem to like, the rambling text defended Darwin against the dominant Japanese scientist of the day, Kinji Imanishi. All of this was accornplished in a one-month period, thus defying the old saw that in order to write about Japan one needs to stay either three weeks or thirty years.76

  Beverly Halstead's colonial attitude was complete: a heavy load of prejudice about the country he was visiting, absence of knowledge about his adversary (all of Imanishi's important works are in Japanese, a language Halstead admitted not knowing), manipulation by the locals (the author had been invited to Japan by left-wing professors out to undermine Imanishi without getting their hands dirty), and earthshaking cultural discoveries, such as that the Japanese are more individualistic than one might think.

  It is impossible for a Westerner to read Halstead's manuscript-dug up from a Kyoto library-without feeling one's toes curling in embarrassment, especially when one realizes that the text subsequently appeared in Japanese.77 The Englishman didn't waste time on politeness. At one point, he managed to meet Imanishi in person, an opportunity he used to lecture the eighty-two-year-old emeritus professor. After having handed the father of Japanese primatology a gift-a bottle of whisky-he confronted him with a carefully translated document that included statements such as "Imanishi's evolution theory is Japanese in its unreality" and "You see the wood, but the trees are not in focus." No wonder Halstead describes Imanishi's facial expression on this occasion as one of profound regret at having agreed to the encounter.

  What could possibly have compelled Halstead to be so rude? Why, upon return to his homeland, did he write an article that trashed not only Imanishi's views but an entire culture? How did Nature even dare to run it with a patronizing opening line like: "The popularity of Kinji Imanishi's writings in Japan gives an interesting insight into Japanese society"?78 If the whole affair provides any insight at all, it is into Halstead's personality.

  The late Beverly Halstead, from the University of Reading in Great Britain, was by training a geologist and paleontologist. Known for communist sympathies in his early years, he later became a flag bearer for Darwinism. Once described as "Darwin's Terrier" (in a play on T. H. Huxley as "Darwin's Bulldog"), Halstead had a professional life peppered with spectacular quarrels. An obituary in The Independent of May 3, 1991, highlights the nature of his combative attitude: "[He] was never the rebel but the supporter of traditional orthodoxy against what he saw as misplaced enthusiasm for the new." I guess he was the kind of person who sought security in doctrine-any doctrine. We all know the kind: the former Marxist who turns devout Catholic, or the people who escape the grasp of a sect only to become born-again Christians. Halstead was definitely not Christian ("Darwin rendered the entire edi fice of Christianity redundant," he wrote), but he clearly thirsted for dogma.

  To him, Imanishi's disagreement with Darwin was blasphemy. He came to set the old man straight, and with him an entire nation that, in his words, was engaged in a peculiar conspiracy to mislead everyone about themselves. The emphasis in Japan on social harmony is pure self-deception, Halstead concluded, because we all know that underneath there must exist incredible competition. Coming from a former communist, this was an interesting thought.

  Imanishi as Founder

  For Imanishi harmony was not an illusion, but at the core of all that
lives. After having talked with dozens of Japanese colleagues about this man, not only in Kyoto, but all over the country, I began to joke that there were about one thousand different opinions out there. No two people thought the same about him. At one extreme, there was Jun'ichiro Itani, Imanishi's most influential student, whom I met over a delicious lunch at which the jumbo shrimps were so fresh that one literally jumped off the plate. The seventy-two-year-old Itani remains a great admirer of his late teacher. At the other extreme was the younger generation, especially Mariko Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, who believe Imanishi set back Japanese ecology and primatology for at least one, perhaps two decades by opposing the sociobiological revolution. Itani and Hiraiwa Hasegawa, each in their own way, have followed in Imanishi's footsteps by bringing biology to the masses. Both have written best-sellers, and both are well-known public figures in Japan.

  Imanishi was an extraordinarily prolific, widely known author in the life sciences: the Stephen Jay Gould of Japan. He started out as an entomologist, but he was also an ecologist, anthropologist, primatologist, mountaineer, and philosopher. He received an official faculty position-in the humanities, not the sciences-only after he was about fifty. Coming from a wealthy family, he could do whatever he wanted without the obligations that come with salary. He had only one room at Kyoto University with no furniture other than a low desk at which he wrote his books sitting in lotus position on a tatami: an ascetic, cultured man of immense influence. Later in life, he would say that he was not a scientist, that his thinking was rather that of a poet.

  Apart from being a pioneering Himalayas climber, Imanishi had two main interests. The first was the interconnectedness among all living things and the environments in which they are found. Even though he rarely mentioned those who influenced him, he was widely read, and elements of his approach are traceable to outside influences, ranging from Jacob von Uexkull to Petr Kropotkin, and perhaps most of all Kitaro Nishida, founder of a school of philosophy that was particularly influential in the 1930s and 40s. I cannot judge this for myself, as my information comes from secondary sources, but Imanishi's emphasis on intuition and perception of the whole, his dislike of reductionism, and his view that the individual is secondary to the society probably derived from Nishida, the Kyoto philosopher of "nothingness," who used to think deep thoughts while strolling along a rustic little river lined by cherry trees-still known as the philosopher's way-that runs past the university campus.79

  Imanishi may have gotten wet in the same stream, although he did most of his research on mayfly larvae in the much larger and faster Kamogawa River, which runs through Kyoto's heart. His work on aquatic life led him to develop the idea of habitat segregation, meaning that different but related species select their own distinct lifestyles and micro habitats, which allows them to coexist harmoniously in the same environment. An associated idea was that organisms possess a species identity and form a species-level society, called specia, that controls individual behavior. When one species evolves into another, for example, the specia en masse opts for a different lifestyle. Hence the oft-repeated slogan of Imanishiism: "When the time comes, every individual will change simultaneously."

  To my ears these are murky ideas. Species-level control over individuals? My first thought would be that it is the individual members of a species that optimize their life in a particular habitat, and that the success of a species follows from how well its members fare. As for habitat segregation, if two related organisms live peacefully side by side in different ecological niches, this doesn't necessarily mean that their initial parting of ways wasn't based on competition. Imanishi was vehe niently opposed, however, to explanations that involved strife, and didn't seek to explain how segregation might have come about. Instead, he focused on the end result.80

  Imanishi's second interest, and lasting legacy, is easier for me to judge, as it concerns the study of primate behavior. Here his approach was very innovative, thanks to the absence of humananimal dualism. Being the product of a culture that doesn't set the human species apart as the only one with a soul, Imanishi had trouble with neither the idea of evolution nor that of humans as descendants of apes. To the Buddhist and Confucian mind, both ideas are eminently plausible, even likely, and there is nothing insulting about them.81 The smooth reception of this part of evolutionary theory-the continuity among all life forms-meant that questions about animal behavior were from the start uncontaminated by feelings of superiority and aversion to the attribution of emotions and intentions that paralyzed Western science. Thus, the Japanese did not hesitate to give each animal a name or to assume that each had a different identity and personality. Neither did they feel a need to avoid topics such as animal mental life and culture. Imanishi's students moved ahead rapidly with a distinctly anthropological agenda: by studying other primates, they sought to understand the origins of the human family and society. The presence of monkeys on their soil only helped, of course.

  In all of this, Imanishi was well ahead of the celebrated paleontologist Louis Leakey, who developed a similar agenda. Leakey sent Jane Goodall and other primatologists out to study great apes in the wild in the belief that these animals could inform us about the earliest stages of human evolution. But by the time he did so, in the 1960s, the questions and techniques that would prove useful in this sort of endeavor had already been developed by Japanese primatologists, who had individually identified their monkeys and followed them long enough to understand the importance of kinship, the unexpected complexity of primate society, and the degree to which every group was different. Most importantly, as I discuss in Chapter 5, Imanishi had formulated the question of animal culture in a way that invited further study.

  When Japanese primatologists went to Africa to observe great apes in their natural habitat, they arrived with excellent training and their hallmark approach of persistent, long-term data gathering that was to become the standard. Like Goodall, they habituated the objects of their study to human presence through food provisioning. Major discoveries were made by these scientists, such as that chimpanzees live in well-delineated groups, and that they use lithic tools that, had they been associated with people, would have qualified them for the Stone Age.82

  But instead of comparing Imanishi with Leakey, the more appropriate parallel is with Ray Carpenter, the American primatological pioneer. Because Carpenter made no spectacular discoveries and wrote no popular hooks, he is now all but forgotten. Many, though, consider him the founder of Western primatology, together with experimental psychologists such as Wolfgang Kohler and Robert Yerkes. Carpenter was a trained physiologist, but also a first-rate behavioral scientist who preferred the field over the laboratory. He worked on rhesus macaques released on the Caribbean island of Cayo Santiago as well as on wild howler monkeys and gibbons. He was interested in social relationships and drew sociograms that mapped group structure. He didn't go nearly so far in this as the Japanese primatologists, who were able to tell over a hundred monkeys apart and trace their family ties over generations, but Carpenter shared with them a distinctly sociological outlook.

  Carpenter identified individuals by means of tattoos, hence with an initial underestimation-typical for Western science of those days-of their individuality. It would be a bit like me going to a party and putting colored dots on everyone's foreheads saying that otherwise I couldn't tell these people apart. The party goers would be insulted, and rightly so. But in reading Carpenter, it is obvious that he was a most perceptive observer. Not surprisingly, when he first heard of the Japanese studies, he didn't share the skepticism of so many of his colleagues, who reacted with disbelief that monkeys could be distinguished by sight. They regarded all this naming of individuals as hopelessly anthropomorphic. Weren't the Japanese grossly overestimating the social lives of their monkeys, and who said that monkeys could tell each other apart even if human observers said they could?

  Being perhaps the only one to fully appreciate the task Imanishi and his followers had set themselves, Carpenter became a big fa
n of their work. The older generation of Japanese scientists remember this gentle man with fondness and are puzzled why he never achieved fame in the West equivalent to Imanishi's fame in Japan.

  The Tibetan macaque is with over 20 kg the heaviest member of its genus, which also includes the better-known rhesus monkey and Japanese "snow" monkey. Tibetan macaques dwell in mountainous regions of China. Since Buddha is thought to have been a king monkey, the macaques are greatly respected. Here an adult male with an expressive bearded face. (Huang Shan, China, photo by author).

  Male Tibetan macaques have such large testicles that sperm competition may have taken over from actual combat over mating rights (left). This could explain the relatively relaxed relations among males: they do occasionally fight and obey a strict hierarchy, but males of this species are also unusually close. The grin of the male above signals submission to a higher ranking male. Two males on the right scream with excitement while mounting each other: a common bonding ritual. (Huang Shan, China, photos by author).

  Fifty years after the potato washing habit spread among Japanese monkeys on Koshima, they are still doing it. This is remarkable because for the last quarter century, they have received potatoes only a few times a year, and the current population has never known the innovator. How such habits spread is a point of debate. It is logical to expect that the infant clinging to its mother will learn to associate potatoes with the ocean simply by picking up dropped pieces. (Photo by author).