Similarly, viewed from the towering cultural heights achieved by the human race in art, cuisine, science, and political institutions, other animals seem nowhere in sight. But what if we change perspective, and don't measure them by our standards? This is what Kinji Imanishi proposed in the early 1950s by defining culture, not by technical achievements or value systems, but simply as a form of behavioral transmission that doesn't rest on genetics.149
We can also turn the question around, and ask how smart animals with a development that takes about five years, such as most monkeys, or up to twelve years in the apes, and even longer in elephants and whales, could possibly not transmit information across generations? How could they not pick up habits and social skills in those many years of interaction with their elders? In short, how could they not develop some sort of culture? The presence of culture, as defined by Imanishi, is nothing surprising. Sure, we can have long debates about how the information is transmitted, how similar or different it is to the human way, but that it occurs is entirely predictable.
Curiously, anthropologists have hardly contested the idea of culture in animals even though culture used to be the central concept of their discipline. This lack of territoriality is due to their own ferocious internal battles combined with postmodernist nihilism: culture has become a politically loaded, relativistic, messy concept that anthropologists have turned away
In the old days, however, there was no reluctance to declare culture a uniquely human domain. The most influential early definition, provided by Edward Tylor in 1871, went as follows: "[Culture is] that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."151 A century later, anthropologists placed culture on a pedestal. After all, Emile Durkheim had managed to seal the social domain off from biology, saying that only the social can explain the social, whereas both Sigmund Freud and Claude Levi-Strauss had declared culture a victory over nature. The routine summary line then, and still today, is that culture is what makes us human. Thus, in a book ironically entitled The Evolution of Culture (1959), Leslie White simply declared: "Man and culture originated simultaneously; this by
With views such as these dominating one discipline, sparks should have flown when another claimed culture in animals. Yet, as said, cultural anthropologists are nowhere in sight in this debate. The chief critics are learning psychologists who, natural enough for them, have given center stage to the question of how cultural transmission takes place. They argue that culture requires imitation, teaching, and language, hence that the concept cannot possibly apply to other species.
To a biologist, this definition sounds contrived, however, because it puts the mechanism-the way things work-first. It is like defining an automobile as being fueled by gasoline, thus excluding electric cars. This is not the way things are normally defined in the life sciences. Respiration, for example, is de fined as an exchange of gas molecules between the organism and its environment without specifying whether the process takes place through skin, lungs, or gills. And locomotion is defined as self-propelled movement, regardless of whether it involves legs, fins, wings, slithering body movements, or jet propulsion. Given this entirely functional outlook, biologists are perfectly comfortable with a definition of cultural propagation that remains agnostic about how it is accomplished.'53
Nevertheless, the debate about whether animals possess culture now revolves largely around the question of what they learn from each other, and how. To what degree does it resemble the way we learn from each other, and are other animals as dependent on this process as we are? While keeping the last question for the next chapter, I intend here to show that, even though social transmission in animals is imperfectly understood, the process is highly variable and sometimes quite sophisticated. I will also propose a new way of looking at the motivation behind it, which has its roots in social emotions and conformist desires rather than reward and punishment. In the same way that the sushi master apprentice is said to absorb information without any reward for years, animals watch others and copy their behavior just so that they fit in and act like the rest.
Do Apes Ape?
In our chimpanzee colony at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, Georgia, infants sometimes get a finger stuck in the compound's fence. Their finger has been hooked the wrong way into the mesh and cannot be extracted by force. The adults have learned not to pull at the infant; victims always manage to free themselves eventually. In the meantime, however, the entire colony has become agitated: this is a dramatic event analogous to a wild chimpanzee getting caught in a poacher snare.
On several occasions, we have seen other apes mimic the victim's desperate situation. The last time, for example, I approached to assist but received threat barks from both the mother and the alpha male. As a result, I just stood next to the fence watching. One older juvenile came over to reconstruct the event. Looking me in the eyes, she inserted her finger into the mesh, slowly and deliberately hooking it around, and then pulling as if she, too, had gotten caught. Then two other juveniles did the same at a different location, pushing each other aside to get their fingers in the same tight spot they had selected for this game. These juveniles themselves may, long ago, have experienced the situation for real, but here their charade was prompted by what had happened to the infant.
I wonder where this behavior would fall under the usual classifications of imitation: no problem was being solved, no goal was being copied, and no reward was procured. The juveniles seemed fascinated by the infant's predicament, and their imitation seemed emotionally charged. It had an element of identification, of empathy and closeness, rather than the cool evaluation of goals and methods that the scientific literature proposes as the hallmark of imitation.
An (admittedly rather Dutch) example of the latter would be that I show an ape how to fix the inner tube on a bicycle after which the ape, given a bike, a tube, and the required tools, would do the same. But why would he? Consider the conditions that would need to be in place.
Identification: The ape would need to know me and care about me as a person, because otherwise why should he pay attention? Apes are hostile to, or at least uncomfortable with, strangers. They pay attention to them only with apprehension and suspicion, not with much desire to mimic them.
Understand the goal: The ape would need to know what a bicycle is and what it is good for. He also would need to know how hard it is to ride one with a flat tire.
Background knowledge: The ape would need to understand each manipulation, such as detecting the hole in the tube, using scissors to cut a patch, gluing the patch in place, pumping up the tube, listening for escaping air, and so on. Can one understand the workings of scissors or a pump without ever having handled them?
It has taken science a long time to realize that imitation is actually very complex. I remember the days when humanlike behavior of apes, including their use of tools, hand gestures, and facial expressions, was dismissed as mere imitation. "They act so much like us," people would say, "because they mimic everything we do. None of this is their own idea." We know now that, if this notion were true, if they could really adopt all of our facial expressions at will just from watching us, this would be spectacular! Imitation is seen as one of the highest cognitive feats. Think about it: how does one get from watching another individual's actions to performing the same actions for the same purpose? Imitation requires that visual input is converted into motor output, telling the body to reenact what the eyes saw.
Dogs or cats don't strike us as great imitators even though they are continuously exposed to our behavior. To understand what we are doing and what our reasons are is mostly beyond their abilities except when it comes to emotions. Thus, they seem to understand if we're alarmed by a noise at night (most likely they heard it before us), or when we're angry or anxious, but that we want to keep the house clean is-as they demonstrate every day-beyond their comprehension. Apes are lightyears ahead of the average domest
ic pet in this regard, but even they generally don't grasp the exact reasons behind our actions. They often copy human actions without understanding. Cleaning the house is a case in point, as in the following account by Nadie Ladygina-Kohts of her adoptive chimpanzee, Yoni:
Left to his own devices, Yoni often takes a broom or brush and tries to sweep the floor, raking the trash into a pile. However, he does it so awkwardly and inefficiently, due to a lack of direction, that he rather spreads the trash over the floor than gather it, and the floor is never clean as a result of that. Yoni even moves the furniture, as is done during a clean-up, although he often does not sweep the floor at the freed spot.154
There are many such examples, all of which concern apes who love to be with people, following their every move. For example, Anne Russon recently reviewed instances of imitation of typical human behavior by rehabilitant orangutans in Borneo's Tanjung Putting National Park, including sawing wood, hammering nails, putting on a T-shirt, shading the eyes with a hand, and stringing up a hammock. Here is an example of personal hygiene copied from people:
Davida, an adolescent female rehabilitant, came to the bunk house porch one morning about the time when people came out to wash. A visitor gave her a toothbrush with toothpaste on it. Davida and others had in the past stolen toothbrushes and toothpaste but rarely both together. She put the brush in her mouth, nibbled the paste, then brushed: with the brush in her fist, she inserted its bristle end in one side of her mouth, closed her lips around it and scrubbed the bristles back and forth. When she finished brushing, she climbed onto the porch railing, spit the used toothpaste over the railing onto the ground, then moved off. Her technique of brushing, including spitting used toothpaste over the rail onto the ground, was identical to the standardized technique used by camp visitors at that
Whether Davida had any idea why people brush their teeth remains unclear, but there can be no question that, like Yoni, she was an excellent observer and copier. Despite the overwhelming anecdotal evidence that it is not for nothing that the word "ape" has in many languages inspired a verb meaning "to imitate," scientists have not always been successful getting apes to ape in the laboratory. The typical approach has been to let them watch a simple task demonstrated by a white-coated, barely familiar human experimenter, who operates with neutral composure. Experimenters aren't supposed to influence their subjects, hence schmoozing, petting, or other niceties are discouraged. But since to influence the subject is the whole point of these experiments, one could argue that these procedures violate the most basic requirement for imitation, which is that the ape feels close to the model and identifies with him or her. Moreover, the outcome is customarily compared to tests in which human children get exactly the same treatment. But children are human, which means that the experimenter belongs to their own species, acting in a way perfectly comfortable to the child. No wonder children do better.
There is an old rule in science according to which absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. Yet some scientists have gotten great mileage out of negative evidence, taking the "failure" of apes in these kinds of comparisons with children to mean that imitation is restricted to our species. Before drawing any such conclusions, however, shouldn't we level the playing field by either giving children the same species barrier faced by the apes, or else removing it for the apes? One could, for example, test children with ape models to see whether they would still be better imitators. Another possibility would be to present apes with a model of their own kind to see how they compare to children following a human model. Finally, one could present a human model to apes who are completely and fully familiar with our species.
Prince Chim, a young bonobo, adopts the poise of a serious student. Even though imitation in animals has become a controversial topic, there can be little doubt that apes spontaneously copy whatever they see others do. Robert Yerkes wrote that again and again Chim was seen to take a book and turn the pages carefully and neatly one by one, as if he wanted to discover what humans found so interesting about this activity. (Photograph by Robert Yerkes, taken in 1923, with permission of the Yerkes Primate Center).
The latter is the most practical alternative, and as soon as it is implemented the differences between apes and children vanish. In one such comparison, by psychologist Michael Tomasello and co-workers, apes raised like human children in a language laboratory turned out to be as good at imitating people as two-year-old children, whereas apes raised by their own kind did rather poorly.
The surprise here is how the investigators interpreted this result. Instead of concluding that apes are a match for young children when both are equally familiar with the model, they conclude that human-reared apes are special. They consider these apes enculturated, meaning that the enriching, stimulating context of the human environment has brought out capacities that these animals normally don't have. By claiming that apes can't imitate unless they have benefited from humanity's shining light, they leave the human-ape divide intact. 116
But why should apes have evolved a cognitive potential that they don't use or need in their natural life? Evolution is rarely wasteful. I prefer the simpler view that apes are born imitators, that this talent serves them in their natural social life, but that they prefer to imitate the species that has raised them. Under most circumstances this will be their own kind, but if reared by another species, they will imitate that one as well. 1 57
Language-trained apes often give the impression that they regard themselves as almost human, such as when, while sorting pictures of humans from those of other animals, they put their own portrait on the human pile. They obviously sympa thize with the people that surround them: they want to fit in, and to be like them.158 Being raised by another species creates familiarity with its communication and interest in its actions. As a result, rather than having been lifted to unprecedented cognitive levels, apes raised by people have become ideal test subjects simply because they are willing to pay attention to psychologists. Their humanlike ways remind lne of an example by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, which-even if unconfirmed-creates an irresistible image of one species struggling to be like another: "[T]here is reason to believe that puppies nursed by cats sometimes learn to lick their feet and thus to clean their faces."159
The Urge to Be Like Others
In the minds of some scientists, "monkey see, monkey do" has been transformed from something obvious, almost stupid, to a miraculous achievement: the Holy Grail of our magnificent cultural abilities. But, as we have seen, the way imitation is being defined and evaluated disadvantages apes who fail to pay attention to the species that does the testing.
I am not saying that apes are capable of copying as complex a series of manipulations as repairing a bicycle. I used this example precisely because what may seem simple to us is often far too complex for the ape. Generally, imitation concerns novel acts or solutions that the animal is on the brink of discovering on its own; seeing someone else do it is the last push they need. Hence, imitation matters especially in domains in which the animals are already strong. From watching another, an ape may learn the use of a twig or stone to obtain food, or the correct way of holding a newborn. Those are the sorts of things they are interested in. Most human actions, in contrast, mean nothing to them and stay forever incomprehensible.
There is a veritable war going on in academia about imitation, with definitions up for grabs, and new levels, from the simplest to the smartest, being introduced on a daily basis. One scientist's "imitation" is another's "emulation," and a third's "facilitation." 160 The central idea remains that one individual adopts another's behavior, which it most likely would never have done without exposure to the other. Apart from this common ground, there is precious little agreement about the hows and whys of the process.
What I see in the daily life of chimpanzees is a tendency for youngsters, especially, to act like others in the group, namely, their elders. For example, our dominant male, Socko, makes a spectacular charging display, sl
apping the ground loudly with his hands, kicking a few empty barrels, and throwing a piece of wood around. He may do so for ten minutes, during which the entire group watches him with apprehension, while some of the other adult males perform their own displays at a safe distance. When everything has calmed down, often many minutes later, a young male, only three or four years old, will put up his hair and charge at one of the barrels, kicking it in the same way as the boss had done.
As another example, one of the chimpanzees has an injured finger, and walks around leaning on a bent wrist instead of his knuckles. During the same period that he's hobbling around in this odd way, all youngsters in the group walk around on their wrists, too. They don't necessarily do so when the injured male is around; they do it everywhere and all the time. It has become a fashion. Sometimes they follow the target of their imitation. At the Arnhem Zoo, we had a female named Krom (meaning "crooked") because of her hunched-up walk, who was often followed by a line of juveniles with the same pathetic carriage.
The word "fashion" was first used in relation to chimpanzees by Wolfgang Kohler (1925), whose apes invented new games all the time. The following account gives an impression of how group-oriented and act-like-others a species they are:
The whole group of chimpanzees sometimes combined in elaborate motion patterns. For instance, two would wrestle and tumble about playing near some post; soon their movements would become more regular and tend to describe a circle round the post as a center. One after another, the rest of the group would approach, join the two, and finally they march in orderly fashion in single file round and round the post. The character of their movements changes; they no longer walk, they trot, and as rule with special emphasis on one foot, while the other steps lightly; thus a rough approximate rhythm develops, and they tend to "keep time" with one another. They wag their heads in time to the steps of their "dance" and appear full of eager enjoyment of their primitive game.'6'
The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist Page 17