The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist

by Franz De Waal

  But coming between an ape and his or her work can be dangerous! There are many stories of apes vehemently objecting to interruptions before they have finished their paintings. For example, Bella, a chimpanzee at the Amsterdam Zoo, painted with great concentration and was generally extremely peaceful until she lost her temper one day-with dire consequences for the keeper who tried to remove her materials in the midst of artistic activity. Morris also reported that Congo became greatly annoyed if he saw that a painting on which he was still working was about to be removed; nor did Congo like to be urged to continue once he had put down his brush, indicating that he was done. One day, Morris managed to take away a painting of an incomplete fan shape. When Congo got it back a while later, he simply continued where he had left off, carefully finishing the pattern.

  A telling experience is that of Lucien Tessarolo, a French painter, who used to work side by side with a female chim panzee, Kunda, on a canvas that both of them would sign at the end-Tessarolo with a signature, Kunda with a handprint. Tessarolo was impressed by Kunda's precision and harmonious choice of colors. The figurative elements that he added to their work were not always appreciated by the ape, however. Sometimes she reacted enthusiastically, but on occasion she rubbed Tessarolo's contributions out and waited to continue painting until he had come up with something else.

  That doesn't sound like an ape seeking to disrupt order. Underlying Kunda's behavior must have been a sense of how the completed product should look. I ain not saying that the product represents much value to the ape once it has been brought about, or that destructive tendencies never occur. Indeed, as soon as the production phase is over, apes have been known to tear their works to shreds. On other occasions, they have exhibited an indifference to their finished paintings that humans find hard to understand. In this regard, the apes are very different from human artists: their goal is not to create an enduring visual image that will please, inspire, provoke, shock, or produce whatever effect it is that the human painter seeks to achieve.

  The evidence, then, is that painting apes have a sense of both balance and completeness, enjoy the visual effect of what they do, and create regularities and patterns, but are not out to produce a lasting product. As far as they are concerned the product can be thrown away once they are done with it. So, even though their painting activity is best described as the deliberate creation of visually pleasing patterns, rather than as a form of disruption, it differs from our artistic activity in that it does not appear to be a means to an end. 110

  The Germ of Aesthetics

  Some people feel that calling what apes produce "art" mocks human achievements. Indeed, the use of primates as caricatures of ourselves has a long history, including an entire genre of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art depicting capuchins or macaques sitting behind an easel, paintbrush at the ready, staring at a female nude or still life just as a human painter would. Whether those paintings were a commentary on the slavish copying by some human artists, or self-mockery by the painters, the underlying message was one of opposition between animal and art. If art is by definition a human domain, a monkey with a paintbrush can only be a joke.

  The age-old "monkey artist" theme had to pop up, of course, when ape paintings became an issue in the 1950s. One famous chimpanzee, Baltimore Betsy, was customarily photographed in front of her work with captions such as "Just a little something I dashed off, but not bad." Such catering to the general public's sense of humor undermined any attempt to explain what is interesting about ape paintings.

  Moreover, apes came in handy in a cultural war zone of the time concerning gestural art and action painting characterized by vigorous, dynamic brush strokes and random effects of spilling and dripping. Since ape art looks similar, it became a weapon against these schools, with critics expostulating that if an ape can do what certain human artists are doing, the humans must be operating at a rather primitive level. Salvador Dali, for example, couldn't resist making the following calculated jab at another painter: "The hand of the chimpanzee is quasi-human, the hand of Jackson Pollock is almost animal."121

  People accused Morris of trying to ridicule modern art, but that was never his goal. If people get over their giggles and consider the issue at hand, they will see that there is a serious question behind it. Why do the members of our species all over the world produce art? What is it that drives them? Why waste time and energy on this sort of activity? Is it a form of play, a form of exploration, a mental game, a way of impressing others? Morris simply wanted to show that we are not the only species to take pleasure in self-created visual effects, hence that the aesthetic sense probably has older roots than is often assumed.

  But where does ape art end and human art begin? The main dividing line seems to be representation. In spite of isolated claims of apes producing recognizable images (for example, Koko, the gorilla, is said to have painted a bird, a dog, and a toy dinosaur), I have never been able to recognize the purported images in their paintings. Human art seems to me unique in its depiction of reality. Observing that the human child moves on to representations after an abstract phase, Morris and his wife, Ramona, concluded in Men and Apes that "unhappily this is the point at which the apes get stuck."

  Yet even if substantial differences between human and ape art remain, they should not distract us from the undeniable common ground. Obviously, we feel that there is more to our art than enjoyment of visual effects: the human artist imagines and strives for an end product. Human art is a conscious act of creation. On the other hand, without satisfaction derived from intermediate stages-from the activity itself and its immediate results-we might never have reached this point. It is in this regard that ape art, rather than insulting our ego, provides a glimpse of the wellspring of the universal human artistic impulse.

  If culture is the transmission of habits and information by social means, it is widespread in nature. Animals may have no language or symbols; but they develop new technologies, food preferences, communication gestures, and other habits that the young learn from the old (or the other way around). As a result, one group may behave quite differently from another, and culture can no longer be claimed as an exclusively human domain.

  Despite abundant evidence for this idea, there exists enormous opposition to it. Counterclaims focus on the learning process, which most of the time seems rather simple compared to human cultural transmission, or on the peak achievements of human civilization, with the remark that nothing of the kind is within the ape's reach. Animal culture is further more denied the survival value of human culture. Research carried out over the last few decades suggests, however, that the survival of many animals in the wild hinges on what they learn from others. They take advantage of accumulated knowledge, and in this sense are as reliant on culture as we are. Underlying the learning process is the same desire to belong and fit in that we recognize in our own cultures. And as with human culture, the variations brought about are not indefinite; they are built around the shared heritage of the species.

  "A scientist is a man who by his observations and experiments, by the literature he reads and even by the company he keeps, is putting himself in the way of winning a prize; he has made himself discovery prone."

  Peter Medawar, 1984

  "Instinct is an inherited behavior and thus is something opposite to culture, which represents acquired behavior. If it is dogmatic to regard all animal behavior as instinctive, it is equally dogmatic to regard all human behavior as cultural."

  Kinji Inianishi, 1952122

  Japanese scientist hikes around central Honshu and .suddenly, high up in the sky, sees something that looks like a shinnnering mountaintop. If it is indeed a mountain, most of it remains invisible, and an hour later the top has vanished behind the clouds. Can a mountain walk away?

  The next day, he sees the entire Mount Fuji. With its 3,776 meters, it is Japan's highest peak, dwarfing everything around it. The scientist devotes his life to describing the mountain and its unparalleled steepness and p
erfectly symmetrical cone shape, photographing it from different angles in a fashion similar to Katsushika Hokusai's famous nineteenth-century print series Thirty-six Sites in Edo Overlooking Mount Fuji. The sacred volcano is there to be admired and worshipped. Surrounded by temples and shrines, it is a place of pilgrimage for millions of Japanese.

  For the Western scientist the mountain conies equally unexpected, yet he finds this a bit disturbing. Shouldn't he have known that this thing could be here? The scientist proceeds to study plate tectonics, volcanic eruptions, magma viscosity, and so on. After much reading and exploration, Mount Fuji appears logical, almost inevitable. The scientist is satisfied that this mountain's dazzling appearance high above the landscape is not nearly as surprising as it seemed at first. Instead of offering different views of the mountain, he publishes a thorough treatise about the origins of volcanoes. His theories have led him to believe that eruptions are predictable, and to prove his point he explains how he set foot on Honshu expecting a large volcano somewhere in the vicinity of Tokyo. Lo and behold, about 100 kilometers west of the city he found the pre dicted mountain. This verification is a testimony to his superior science.

  But isn't this scientist cheating? Didn't he see the mountain first? Yes, but this is a customary way of presenting evidence. Facts somehow look better if anticipated, and scientists sometimes achieve this result by formulating rules that fit the facts that helped them develop the rules.

  Such is the baffling, circular state of affairs in the behavioral sciences. For example, an American primatologist, Jeffrey Kurland, once set out to test kin selection theory, which predicts friendly and supportive relations among close relatives.123 His 1977 monograph on the behavior of Japanese macaques opens with purely theoretical considerations, such as evolution by natural selection, the transmission of DNA, and the sharing of genes between relatives. Equipped with a set of logically compelling predictions, Kurland seems to be entering a new area of investigation. Would he prove the theory right? The reader can't wait to hear the results, sure that they will resolve many burning issues.

  The only flaw in this presentation is that the study required a troop of monkeys with known genealogical relations, which means that all individuals were known and that careful records had been kept, year after year, about who gave birth to whom. But why in the world would anyone ignorant of the role of kinship have taken such trouble? Kurland found his troop at Ryozenyama, in the Suzuka mountains, where Japanese scien tists had such records going back to the 1950s. They had started this project well before William Hamilton's classic paper on kin selection, which appeared in 1964, knowing that kinship in macaques dictates social rank and bonding. Kurland did an excellent job documenting the close relations among kin, and in doing so produced a more detailed picture than existed before, but he could only conduct his study because what he set out to demonstrate was already largely known.

  The urge of behavioral scientists to proceed in a straight line from theory to data, hence presenting themselves as more naive to the truth than they actually are, derives from a desire to be like physics, a science that has reached the lofty stage of armchair prediction. Soon after a new theoretical insight has been achieved-that there must be quarks, or that the collision between a meson and a proton should produce a lambda-hordes of scientists set out to verify its predictions in the enormous accelerators and bubble chambers of CERN, near Geneva, or Fermilab, near Chicago.

  It is unclear whether the behavioral sciences will ever reach the point when logically derived predictions drive progress. Behavior is more variable than the dance of photons, and its explanation involves multiple layers, from the physiological to the mental. We cannot afford to look through a single pair of glasses; we need lots of different glasses to see reality. Theories do assist in this effort, by guiding our attention and making large amounts of data graspable, but they also induce selective blindness.

  Theories are often formalized, but there is no reason to deny the relevance of general expectations. Without openness to the idea of animal culture, for example, the potato washing by monkeys on Koshima Island might never have attracted any attention. What's the big deal of monkeys running to the ocean to dip spuds into it? Once the question of animal culture was formulated by Japanese primatologists, however, this simple behavior took on enormous significance, inspiring them to take careful notes for decades.

  The question at hand, then, is what people see, or do not see, as a result of preconceived notions. Instead of predicting new events with great precision, or explaining what has already been found, a great deal of scientific progress is linked to what is deemed possible and likely. Expectations, however vague and intuitive, lay the groundwork for discovery: every new insight slowly grows under the surface of human consciousness before it bursts into the open. If no one had formulated a broad concept of culture, it is unlikely anyone would have been looking for culture in animals.

  Respect for the Unexpected

  When people still believed that the earth was flat, they overlooked or explained away signs, such as the presence of a horizon, that might have told them otherwise. The unexpected often escapes attention. Similarly, lots of young animals were killed by their own kind, on farms and under the eyes of natu ralists, before someone dared to call infanticide a pattern. The behavior fills us with horror, and it flies in the face of the idea that organisms do their utmost to survive and reproduce. Killing of new life didn't make sense, and consequently didn't register.

  In reality, infanticide is not that unusual. In 1967, Japanese primatologist Yukimaru Sugiyama reported how male langur monkeys in India, when taking over a harem of females by ousting the old leader, customarily kill all infants in the troop. They snatch them from their mothers' bellies, mauling them with their sharp canines.124 The very first presentation of these findings for an international audience met with a deafening silence, followed by dubious praise from the chairman that "Dr. Sugiyama has offered us some intriguing examples of behavioral pathology." But the investigator himself never spoke of pathology, and to this day says he has no idea what it means. Animals respond in various ways to various conditions; it doesn't help in any way to call one way normal and another abnormal.

  The discovery was ignored for about a decade, after which other reports of infanticide surfaced, first in other primates and eventually in many other animals-from lions and prairie dogs to dolphins and birds. I have never witnessed such turmoil at primatological conferences as in the days when infanticide became a growing topic. Reports provoked shouting matches, accusations of inadequate evidence (most of it was postmortem), and utter disbelief that the same theories that speak of reproductive success could be enlisted to account for the annihilation of newborns.

  But this is exactly what happened, beginning with Sugiyama's own suggestion that the loss of an infant induces a female to be ready to mate sooner than otherwise possible, and that this might be good for the male. Thus, not only did the investigator report a disgusting phenomenon, but he had the temerity to suggest that it might exist for a reason. This idea was followed by formulations that stressed how a male, by removing the progeny of another male and mating with the female, may increase his own reproductive output. If so, the infanticidal tendency will be passed on to his sons. Based on almost twenty years of data from wild langurs, there is now indeed excellent support for the idea that infant killing represents a male reproductive strategy.'25 Infanticide is increasingly regarded as a key factor in social evolution, pitting male against male and male against female. Females have nothing to gain: the loss of an infant is a tremendous waste of maternal investment in gestation and lactation.'26

  Given that the unexpected is inherently more exciting than the expected, the high status of theory testing remains a bit of a puzzle. The discovery of infanticide, and our slow realization of its implications, goes to show how the greatest advances in science occur when precooked ideas fall short, forcing us to come up with a fresh perspective. As explained by Ernst Mayr:
"In biology, concepts play a far greater role in theory formation than do laws. Two major contributors to a new theory in the life sciences are the discovery of new facts and the devel opment of new

  If perceptivity and curiosity are indeed critical for scientific progress, why don't we in the behavioral sciences teach our students to keep their eyes peeled? Instead, we urge them to develop hypotheses, list them faithfully in the introductions to their theses and papers, then devote the rest of their work to a demonstration of the correctness or incorrectness of their predictions. Not surprisingly, students develop a knack of writing introductions that make them look prescient: it is often hard to tell whether their predictions fit the facts or the other way around.

  There is really not much against such neat presentations so long as we realize that they are only that-a way of organizing and presenting our work. The structure of papers is not to be confused with the actual process of science, with its detours, surprises, and frustrations. Lewis Wolpert, in The Unnatural Nature of Science, calls the scientific paper "a kind of fraud," but I rather see it as a collective lie: we all know how things really work.121

  The student who sets out to test a single idea is bound to return either disappointed-the behavior may not occur often enough, or the idea may prove naive or wrong-or without having learned much due to an excessively narrow focus. For example, an aspiring field-worker may follow elephants for years to prove that cows mate with the largest bull, but if all she learns is related to who mates with whom, she will never amount to much of a scientist. A much broader orientation is expected, an appreciation of the elephant's ecology and social organization, leading to new observations and new ideas inspired by what these animals actually do rather than what they are supposed to do.