The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist

by Franz De Waal

  This brings us back to Abraham Maslow and his ideas about self-actualization. Had he paid attention to all of the interdependencies among the primates that he studied, he might have developed a different view. Evaluation of the self does not take place in a vacuum; it requires continuous interaction with others. Absent the esteem of others, self-esteem is hollow. By translating what is essentially a social process into an internal experience based on personal ability, Maslow deftly upheld the taboo on power. This taboo concerns how power affects others, how it constrains and directs the behavior of others. No one will deny that some people exert more influence than others, but people do not wish to hear anyone express an actual desire to do so. Such a desire would fly in the face of democratic ideals.

  This must be the reason why social psychology textbooks hardly ever refer to concepts such as "dominance" or "power." It is almost as if the decision has been made that by not mentioning one of the strongest driving forces of the human species, it will go away. Everywhere around us we see status hierarchies-at school, in church, in the military, in businessbut as an area of research it is barely developed. And so we continue to juggle the hot potato of power. It is the sort of collective lie that Niccolo Machiavelli broke with-an audacity that failed to do his reputation much good.

  I am just grateful that I study social inequality in creatures who express their needs and wants blatantly, without coverups. Language is a fine human attribute, but it distracts almost as often as it informs. When watching political leaders on television, especially when they are under pressure or in debate, I sometimes mute the sound so as to focus better on the eye contact, body postures, gestures, and so on. I see the way they grow in size when they have dealt a verbal blow, or how they shut off unpleasant information by closing their eyes a fraction of a second too long. What is going on is immediately familiar

  Watching adults is a favorite activity of young chimpanzees. This way, they pick up knowledge about sources of food and feeding techniques, such as this female's way of picking grubs out of rotten wood. (Arnhem Zoo, photo by author). Below, a status ritual between two adult male chimpanzees. The male on the left has his hair up and walks bipedally, brandishing a piece of wood in his right hand, while the male on the right avoids with pant-grunts, which is this species' recognition of another's high rank. (Arnhem Zoo, photo by author).

  Chimpanzees and bonobos are readily distinguishable by both sound (the bonobo's voice is much higher pitched) and sight. Here, an adolescent male chimpanzee, above, and a same-aged male bonobo, below. Note the elegant build of the bonobo, with fine facial features, narrow shoulders, small ears, and reduced eyebrow ridges. (Yerkes Primate Center and San Diego Zoo, photos by author).

  An adolescent male bonobo grooms an adult female. Hand-clap grooming is a unique tradition among the San Diego bonobos, in which the grooming individual interrupts its activities to clap its hands (or feet) together, making for an audible performance. (San Diego Zoo, photos by author).

  A group of chimpanzees has gathered at the cracking site in the forest of Bossou, Guinea. Two adult females use hammer and anvil stones to open palm nuts, while an infant follows its mother's movements. The infant will occasionally get a kernel, and will soon reach the age to begin experimenting with stones and nuts, years before it will have the force and coordination to actually crack anything. (Photo by Tetsuro Matsuzawa, with kind permission).

  A bonobo male plays blind-man's bluff, a game developed by his older female playmates. The females would completely blind themselves by poking both thumbs in their eyes, whereas this male occasionally sneaks a view of the climbing frame from underneath his arm. (San Diego Zoo, photo by author).

  Top, Kinji Imanishi, the father of Japanese primatology, photographed in 1958 at the age of 56. (Photo by Jun'ichiro Itani, with kind permission of the Imanishi family). Bottom, Konrad Lorenz, the Austrian Nobel-Prize winner famous for his work on imprinting, surrounded by his favorite birds, in 1936, at the age of 33. (Photo by Alfred Seitz, with kind permission of the Lorenz family).

  Animals sometimes make great sacrifices by simply following their maternal instincts, which evolved for the sole purpose of raising their own young. Here a mother dog which raised three tiger cubs at a zoo, steps without fear over the head of one, who could easily devour her. (Lop Buri, Thailand, photo by author).

  With the Welcome Tree, a national symbol of hospitality, in the background, a chain is weighed down by locks, all hanging in pairs. The locks belong to Chinese lovers and newlyweds. After having placed them on the chain, they throw the keys down the mountain. (Huang Shan, China, photo by author).

  to someone who has seen chimpanzees strive for dominance. Instead of trying to change their self-perception-which they could do equally well at home or with the help of a therapist-these politicians are working hard on gaining the upper hand in the eyes of the millions watching them. They are playing for an audience, promising, explaining, pleading, and lying. They know better than anyone else that power is not personal but interpersonal. 232

  Had Maslow looked beyond the contrasting demeanors of his dominant and subordinate monkeys, and focused on the social matrix in which both are firmly embedded, we might now have a more socially grounded theory of motivation, one more in tune with the human soap operas that we call our lives. The dominance drive is unabashedly aimed at subjugating others and exerting one's will. It is not a nice, cozy, feelgood drive, but the product of a long heritage of resource competition in which some parties fare better than others. Whereas the pursuit of power can be fully conscious, the oneupmanship and manipulations we see around us are often no more conscious than those among chimpanzees. Put a bunch of left-leaning professors with an egalitarian ethos together in a room-a situation not unfamiliar to me-and one will still see a power structure emerging. It is automatic.233

  No Simple Lessons

  The moral of the story is that animals can be used to confirm ideas that apply neither to them nor to the species for which the ideas are ultimately intended. We tend to draw on nature to make our case no matter what the case may be.

  In a different, more recent example, Judith Harris, in The Nurture Assumption (1998), uses animal examples, specifically chimpanzees, to show how development is determined as much by nature as nurture, and as much by the peer group as the immediate family. In doing so she challenges a whole generation of scholars who have claimed that child development is an entirely cultural, educational affair, steered mostly by the parents. Who is right or wrong is not the issue here. The point is that the animal evidence is adjusted by both sides to fit their respective views.

  Those who believe that human childrearing is uniquely cultural, and that other species merely sharpen their instincts, forget about the lengthy development of many animals. Given that chimpanzees are considered fully adult only at the age of sixteen, their youth is one long learning experience. And if there is one species in which parental influences should not be underestimated, it is also the chimpanzee. Youngsters travel with their mother and other dependent siblings for the first eight years of their life, with only intermittent contact with the rest of the community. The mother's behavior and temperament can therefore be expected to have a tremendous impact, much greater than that of the peer group. In short, chimpanzee development seems to support neither the we-are-uniquely-cultural nor the parents-don'tmatter school of thought.

  There are plenty of assumptions about animal behavior in the social sciences; some right, but many wrong. This situation will not change so long as behavioral research on people is largely divorced from that on other animals. Those who like to reach into the grab-bag of nature whenever convenient need to understand that there are no simple lessons. Just as our own kind is both noble and evil, both selfish and altruistic, both slave of and master over its instincts, the animal world shows the same contradictions. Scholars will continue to compare and contrast human and animal behavior, but hopefully less in order to support preconceived notions than to uncover the
far more complex, diverse, and multilayered reality that nature holds in store.

  "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it."

  Adam Smith, 1759

  "Altruism may arise in the chimpanzee, in some modest degree, where there has been no training in generosity. On any reasonable view, this requires reinterpretation of the traditional hedonistic, law-of-effect view of human nature and human motivation."

  Donald Hebb, 1971

  he most absurd animal exhibit I have ever seen was at a small zoo in Lop Burl, Thailand. Two medium-sized dogs shared a cage with three full-grown tigers. While the tigers cooled their bodies in dirty water, the dogs moved around, hopping unconcernedly over the huge striped heads that rested on the concrete rim of the pool. The dogs were walking snacks, but the tigers evidently failed to perceive them as such.

  I learned that one of the dogs had raised the tiger cubs along with her own puppy, and that the whole family had happily stayed together. The mother was said to be top dog over everyone else.

  The tigers were no pushovers, though. They silently stalked the three-year old son of my hosts when he strolled by the cage, their yellow eyes glued to the boy, ready to pounce if some miracle removed the bars holding them back. In the forest, a member of the same species once roared at the boy's father, a tall German primatologist, making his blood curdle, and permanently changing his perspective on the risk factors of his job.

  A couple of meters from this exhibit stood a statue depicting combat between a tiger and an eagle, both of them larger than life. The eagle seemed to be trying to scratch out the tiger's eyes with its talons, an implausible encounter because the two animals normally don't get in each other's way. But it was a dramatic rendition of the ubiquitous struggle for existence, the cutthroat competition between organisms over limited resources, or, as Tennyson immortalized it, "nature, red in tooth and claw."

  Both the statue and the cage with tigers and dogs presented artificial situations, but with conflicting messages. While the animals demonstrated how well teeth and claws can be held under control, the statue arrogantly declared: "Who cares what you actually see in nature? This is how it works!" Unintentionally, the zoo thus offered grounds for reflection on observed versus theorized nature.

  The incredible sacrifice of the mother dog in rearing three tigers falls under the biological definition of altruism-that is, she incurred a serious cost for the benefit of others. She didn't do it for herself, her family, or even her species, so why did she do it? What energy she must have put into raising three giant animals so totally unlike herself! The difference in size was every bit as large as that between, say, a tiny hedge sparrow and the enormous cuckoo nestling she is raising. But the hedge sparrow had been tricked by an egg similar to her own, whereas it is hard to imagine that a dog is unable to tell a tiger cub from a puppy by sight, let alone smell.

  Biologists often explain altruism by so-called kin selection. Kindness towards one's kin is viewed as a genetic investment, a way of spreading genes similar to one's own. Assisting kin thus comes close to helping oneself. Sacrifices on behalf of kin are pervasive, from honey bees that die for their colony by stinging intruders to birds-such as scrub jays-that help their parents raise a nest full of young. Humans show the same bias toward kin, giving rise to expressions such as "Blood is thicker than water." No wonder awards for heroism are rarely bestowed on those who have saved members of their own family.

  The bitch of our story qualifies as a heroine, though, since she gave tender loving care and nourishing milk to individuals that could not possibly be her relatives. Kin selection, therefore, cannot explain her behavior. The alternative hypothesis is the "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" argument, where the help is directed to someone willing to repay the service. In my own work, I have tested this idea by recording grooming sessions among chimpanzees at the Yerkes Primate Center's Field Station, near Atlanta, after which I watched food sharing among the same apes. I found that if chimpanzee A had groomed B in the morning, A's chances of getting food from B in the afternoon were greatly improved. All parties stand to gain in such an economy of exchange.

  Could this account for the dog's behavior? It might be argued that the cats repaid her by not devouring her, but such altruism-by-omission is a bit of a stretch. It certainly doesn't explain the mother's generosity. Had she simply rejected the cubs, she would not have had to contend with them as dangerous adults to begin with. Clearly, she got little or nothing out of the whole deal.

  Does this mean that the evolutionary paradigm is fundamentally flawed? The answer depends on how broad or narrow a vision of evolution one embraces. The above theories explain cooperation reasonably well, but they do not applyand do not need to apply-to each and every single instance. The beauty of unnatural arrangements, such as placing tiger cubs on a dog's nipples, is that they expose the disjunction between motive and function. The original function of maternal care is obviously to raise one's own offspring, but the motivation to provide such care reaches beyond that function. The motivation has become strong and flexible enough to reach out to other young, even those of other species, regardless of what is in it for the mother. Motives often acquire lives of their own. As a result, they do not always neatly fit biology's dominant metaphors, which emphasize ruthless competition.

  The Spider and the Fly

  Anyone who has seen the film Il Postino (The Postman) realizes the extraordinary lure of the metaphor. The apprentice poet of the movie learns to offer a fresh look at the world through carefully selected analogies. Shy at first, he soon relishes the poet's proverbial "license" to transform reality, which helps him greatly in wooing the opposite sex.

  People are animists by nature, always interpreting reality in their own image. It starts early when children freely ascribe inner lives to clouds, trees, dolls, and other objects. This tendency is commercially exploited with pet rocks, chia pets, and Tamagotchi, which show remarkably little resemblance to the usual recipients of human love.234 The phenomenon is not even limited to our species; chimpanzees, too, care for imaginary young. Richard Wrangham observed a six-year-old juve nile, Kakama, carry and cradle a small wooden log as if it were a newborn. Kakama did so for hours on end, one time even building a nest in a tree and putting the log into it on its own. Kakama's mother was pregnant at the time. The field-worker notes: "My intuition suggested a possibility that I was reluctant, as a professional skeptical scientist, to accept on the basis of a single observation: that I had just watched a young male chimpanzee invent and then play with a doll in possible anticipation of his mother giving birth."235

  Scientists are not immune to the urge to project needs and desires onto inanimate objects. Unfortunately for us, however, we lack the license of the poet and the innocence of the child. Metaphors are used in science to great effect and advantage, but also at great peril. Taken literally, they often obscure the truth. This lot befell the well-known "struggle for existence" view of the natural world. It kept generations of biologists from recognizing the shared interests among individuals and species even though Charles Darwin-always wiser than his followers-had warned in The Origin of Species: "I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on another."236

  In chemistry and physics, metaphors are common, as when we say that elements are "attracted" to each other (not to mention that they "like" each other), or when we use concepts such as "force" and "resistance." Anthropomorphic interpretations are attempts to make sense of the world around us. In modern biology, this has led to the characterization of genes as "selfish" and of organisms as "adapting" to their environment. Genes are said to be our rulers, and to strive for their own replication. But really, all that is going on is that genes, a mere batch of DNA molecules, replicate at different rates dep
ending on the success of the traits that they produce. Rather than doing the selecting themselves, genes are being selected. Adaptation, too, is a blind and passive process resulting from the elimination of less successful forms. All of this is known to every biologist, but we are unable to resist infusing evolution with direction and intent.

  It is only a small step from calling genes selfish to slapping the same label onto the carriers of those genes: plants, animals, and people. Thus, according to George Williams, one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists, "natural selection maximizes short-sighted selfishness."237 He thus extends the utilitarian language of his discipline to the domain of motivation. This is a slippery extrapolation, because the selfishness of genes is entirely metaphorical-genes have no self, hence cannot possibly be selfish-whereas animals and people do qualify for the literal application.

  Thus, the concept of "selfishness" has been plucked from the English language, robbed of its vernacular meaning, and applied outside of the psychological domain where it used to belong. It is now often used as if it were a synonym for "selfserving," which of course it is not. Selfishness implies the intention to serve oneself, hence knowledge of what one stands to gain. Without such knowledge, selfishness is a much more problematic concept than many evolutionary thinkers realize. A vine may serve its own interests by overgrowing and suffocating a tree, but since plants lack intentions and knowledge they cannot possibly be selfish except in a rather meaningless sense.