12. Myowa-Yamakoshi and Matsuzawa (1999).
13. Tomasello (1999).
14. The accrual of behavioral modifications toward ever greater complexity has been observed, for example, in the potato washing and wheat sluicing of Japanese macaques on Koshima Island, suggesting that if one follows cultural learning long enough ratcheting can be found in animals as well (Watanabe 1994).
15. Savage-Rumbaugh and Lewin (1994).
1. The Whole Animal: Childhood Talismans and Excessive Fear of Anthropomorphism
16. Cenami Spada (1997).
17. De Waal and Berger (2000) demonstrated that brown capuchin monkeys share more food with a partner who has helped them secure the food by pulling a heavy tray than with partners whose help was unneeded. This experiment was part of a series on social reciprocity, or tit for tat, and mental record keeping of given and received favors in chimpanzees and capuchins. Ultimately, it relates to the cooperative hunting observed in both of these primates in the field. In the hunt, several partners work together but only one captures the prey. Willingness of this individual to share with its helpers may be a prerequisite for continued cooperation.
18. The discovery of the pecking order and other historical details related here come from an interview by John Price with Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe, the sixty-year-old son of Thorleif, published in 1995 in the Human Ethology Bulletin 10 (1): 1-6.
19. Freud (1913).
20. Shepard (1996, p. 88).
21. A recent example is Budiansky (1998), who denies animals even the most basic forms of cognition, arguing-in so many words-that people are so smart they fail to grasp how dumb animals are. He bases this dualism on the absence of language in animals ("We have a terrific piece of software that they simply do not"). Given that neuroscientists believe core consciousness to be entirely nonverbal (Damasio, 1999), it is doubtful, however, that language is the key issue when comparing human and animal minds.
22. The prize for the most amusing cultural reflection of this kind goes to Bertrand Russell (1927), who commented that animals display the national characteristics of the observer: "Animals studied by Americans rush about frantically, with an incredible display of hustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired result by chance. Animals observed by Germans sit still and think, and at last evolve the solution out of their inner consciousness. "
23. Lorenz (1981).
24. Moore and Stuttard (1979).
25. Quoted in Bailey (1986).
26. Garcia et al. (1966).
27. The idea that brains become merely bigger and faster in the course of evolution is still surprisingly widespread despite evidence for substantial structural variation. We know now, for example, that humans and apes possess particular spindle-shaped brain cells in the anterior cingulate cortex that are not found in any other animals. These neurons have been implied in higher cognitive functions typical of humans and apes (Nimchinsky et al. 11999).
28. Hollard and Delius (1982) and Balda and Kamil (1989).
29. Gallup (1970).
30. The original pigeon "self-recognition" study was conducted by Epstein et al. (1981). Ironically, the failure of attempts at replication led to the reproach that the wrong strain of pigeon had been used. Coming from the same scientists who consider entire animal families interchangeable, this was a peculiar complaint. In any case, also when the very same strain of pigeon and an exact copy of the test chamber were used, the team of replicators never got their birds to peck at themselves in front of a mirror (Thompson and Contie, 1994).
31. Heyes (1995) and Povinelli (1997).
32. Serpell (1996).
33. The Athens-Pittsburgh Symposium in the History & Philosophy of Science & Technology, entitled The Problem of Anthropomorphism in Science and Philosophy, was held in May, 1996, in Delphi, Greece.
34. Morgan (1894).
35. Lloyd Morgan's rider went as follows: "To this, however, it should be added, lest the range of the principle be misunderstood, that the canon by no means excludes the interpretation of a particular activity in terms of the higher processes if we already have independent evidence of the occurrences of these higher processes in the animal under observation" (Morgan 1903). For the view that Morgan in fact had nothing against anthropomorphism, see Thomas (1998) and Sober (1998).
36. Kennedy (1992). For an antidote see the volume by Mitchell et al. (1997).
37. This position draws upon the familiar homology argument. Crossspecific similarities in behavior are either "analogies" (independently derived) or "homologies" (owing to shared descent), and the latter is more likely the more closely related the species are. De Waal (1991) discusses evolutionary (as opposed to cognitive) parsimony.
38. Hume (1739, p. 226).
39. Vicchio (1986).
40. Quotes are from Roberts (1996). The author's idea that the horse's chewing movements refer to grazing is not far removed from the ethological concept of ritualization. Evolution has turned many an instrumental act (such as preening or feeding) into a communication signal through exaggeration and increased stereotypy.
41. Nagel (1974).
42. Vermeij (1996), a blind biologist, writes: "If I had difficulty adjusting to blindness, the memory has faded. Almost immediately ... I discovered the value of echoes for telling me where I was. Sounds bouncing off obstructions provided cues to the size of the room, the position of a tree, the speed of a car, the presence of a person, whether a door was open or closed, and much more. " Atkins (1996) exposes the limitations of Nagel's (1974) question.
43. Similarly, Batson et al. (1990) investigated human response patterns associated with two kinds of empathy: one based on imagining how you would feel in the other person's situation, the other based on imagining how the other feels.
44. Burghardt (1985).
45. A videotape of the incident (and a series of stills in Stem, September 5, 1996) shows Binti sitting down upright on a log in a stream while correctly positioning the unconscious boy, cradling him in her lap. It seems as if she is trying to put him on his feet. The Brookfield gorillas might not have reacted the same to an adult person (i. e. , they probably recognized the boy as a youngster), and they certainly would not have reacted this way to a sack of flour. They would probably have been afraid of the sack at first, but then have opened it, causing a mess (Jay Peterson, curator at the Brookfield Zoo, personal communication).
46. Systematic data on the consolation of distressed individuals by chimpanzees has been provided by de Waal and Aureli (1996). For other accounts of empathy by apes, see de Waal (1996a). For example, in the Arnhem chimpanzee colony a mother put the normal preference for her younger offspring aside when her older offspring was seriously hurt in a scuffle. Ignoring the noisy protests of her infant, she took tender care of this juvenile for weeks until his injuries had healed.
47. Arnhart (1998) explains that Aristotle knew about apes-he had dissected primates and believed that they represented an intermediate form between man and the quadrupeds. One prominent biologist, J. A. Moore (1993), has declared all of biology a footnote to Aristotle.
48. The distinction goes back to the old one between Natunvissenschaften (natural sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (sciences of the mind and human spirit), with psychology increasingly adopting the methods and rigor of the first but tracing its intellectual history to the second.
49. Van lersel was another Dutch ethologist. What Baerends calls "irrelevant behavior" is a humorous reference to so-called displacement activities (such as scratching one's head), which ethologists interpret as a sign of contradictory motivations. The quotation is from Baerends' unpublished lecture at the 1989 International Ethological Conference in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
50. Hodos and Campbell (1969) and Beach (1950).
51. Greenberg and Haraway (1998).
52. Hence Wilson's (1998) offhand comment: "Sociobiology (or Darwinian anthropology, or evolutionary psychology, or whatever more politically acceptable term one chooses to call it) offers a key l
ink in the attempt to explain the biological foundation of human nature. " The reason I stubbornly keep calling myself an ethologist/zoologist despite the many name changes is that I consider the groundbreaking theoretical developments of the 1960s and 1970s a logical continuation of the original ethological agenda, spelled out in Tinbergen's (1963) four research aims: causation, ontogeny, adaptive value, and evolution.
2. The Fate of Gurus When Silverbacks Become Stumbling Blocks
53. My translation from Zimen, a Lorenz follower and wolf expert well known in Germany (Erik Zimen erzahlt ... , Wildlife Observer 12/1999: 93-95).
54. Matricide may be less common in science, but anthropologists dealing with the legacy of Margaret Mead are coming close (e. g. , Freeman, 1983).
55. For the assault on Gould, see The New York Review of Books, June 12, June 26, and August 14, 1997, and Dawkins (1998), Alcock (1998), and Wright (1999).
56. Watson (1925).
57. Lorenz (1952, p. 146).
58. Manning (1996).
59. Bischof (1991), for example, has written a Lorenz "psychogram" that reads like a psychoanalysis of the author's own father complex vis-a-vis the intimidating Austrian ethologist.
60. The Russian manuscript (1944-1948) was published as Die Naturwissenschaft vom Menschen (Munich: Piper, 1992). The original manuscript consisted of 750 pages written in diluted ink with quills and steel pens. Lorenz often traded his meager food rations for writing materials. At the worst moment during his stay in Russia, he weighed 55 kg.
61. For sources of the quotations provided here, and documentation of Lorenz's activities before and during World War II, see Deichmann (1996).
62. Kalikow (1980).
63. In a televised interview in 1981, Lorenz explained: "That they meant murder when they said 'elimination' or 'selection' was something I really did not believe at the time. This is how naive, how stupid, how gullible-call it what you will-I was back then" (Deichmann, 1996).
64. Lorenz was mentioned as ehrenamtliche as opposed to hauptamtliche Mitarbeiter.
65. The eugenics movement was founded by Francis Dalton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, and further developed by Karl Pearson in the beginning of the twentieth century at the University College, London. Pearson felt that "superior" races must supplant "inferior" ones. Not surprisingly, the term "eugenics" became common fare in Hitler's propaganda. Further see Gould (1981).
66. Defenders of Lorenz note the absence of blatant racism, saying that he had too many Jewish friends to be anti-Semitic, and that at the most he opposed racial mixing (Bischof, 1991). Pessimism about racial mixing continues, albeit in a different form, in the writings of a well-known Lorenz student: Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1994) has argued that human xenophobic tendencies prevent a fully integrated multiethnic society.
67. Quoted in Deichmann (1996, p. 179).
68. Robert Hinde, personal communication.
69. Lorenz (1985).
70. From a letter to Margaret Nice, reproduced in full in Deichmann (1996). Dated June 23, 1945, this letter was written immediately after the liberation of the Netherlands, at a time when Lorenz was still imprisoned.
71. For example, Maarten 't Hart, a Dutch ethologist and novelist, acidly commented in a review of a book by Lorenz: "I still see before me (it was clearly visible on television) how, during the award ceremony of the Nobel Prize, he came forward with all those medals and orders pinned to his chest. How many distinctions from between 1933 and 1942 did these include? And if he had left those off-which I hope-why did he need to wear the others?" (NRC Handelsblad, March 14, 1989).
72. For a recent example, see the last chapter of Ridley's (1996) The Origins of Virtue. Ridley explores the common ground between genecentric evolutionary biology and a conservative political agenda, quoting Margaret Thatcher: "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. "
73. Liessmann (1996).
74. Wilson (1995).
75. L. B. Halstead (1984), Kinji Imanishi: The View from the Mountain Top. Unpublished English manuscript in the Kyoto University Library, later published in Japanese.
76. As noted by Inoue and Anderson (1988), Halstead stayed a little too long because "in the book he passes from fresh first impressions to oversimplistic theories about the nature of Japan. His final view, that Imanishi's theory has been popular because it offers a dream world of harmony to the cruel reality of modern Japan, is naive. "
77. The book was published in a long tradition of translated works that confirm to the Japanese how hard it is for outsiders to understand them. The book probably amused as much as it insulted.
78. Halstead (1985).
79. Yoshimi (1998).
80. This is not to say that there exists consensus among ecologists about the role of competition between species in population dynamics and speciation (e. g. , Sinclair, 1986).
81. See Asquith (1991) and Sakura (1998).
82. In 1958, the Japan Monkey Center sent two scientists to Africa, Imanishi and his student, Itani. They saw gorillas at the Virunga Mountains, but only heard chimpanzees in Cameroon. On the second trip, Itani went on his own all across Africa, where-as was typical for his combined interest in primatology and ethnography-he looked for both apes and human pygmies. Ignoring Leakey's prohibition, he also stopped by Jane Goodall's camp, which she had started only two months earlier. In 1961, the first Japanese studies of chimpanzee behavior began at various field sites in Tanzania, resulting in the establishment of the Mahala Mountains project in 1965. This influential project is still in operation today, headed by Toshisada Nishida, one of Itani's most prominent students of ape behavior. Another well-known Itani student is Takayoshi Kano, who, in 1973, set up the only long-term field project on the elusive bonobo, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The use of stone tools by chimpanzees was first described by Yukimaru Sugiyama (see Chapter 7, "The Nutcracker Suite").
83. Goodall (1990) reveals a glimpse of the initial Western resistance to the application of ethnographic methods to animals, relating how one respected scientist told her that even if all individuals were different it would still be best to sweep this fact under the carpet. Editors of journals objected to her grammar: "The editorial comments on the first paper that I wrote for publication demanded that every he or she be replaced with it, and every who be replaced with which.
84. Inoue and Anderson (1988).
85. Quoted from an unpublished lecture by Mariko Hiraiwa-Hasegawa at the Department of Biology, Princeton University, February 26, 1992: "Sociobiology and Japanese Primatology: A Case of Struggle for Survival in a Conformist Society. "
86. I closely followed the response to sociobiology in the Netherlands, and even edited a Dutch volume about it. Whereas the popular media and social sciences showed strong resistance, its reception in the scientific community was uneventful. After all, Dutch ethology had produced Niko 'rinbergen, who exported the evolutionary study of animal behavior to Oxford, where it became a cornerstone of the British contribution to the so ciohiological revolution. Thus, Dutch ethologists recognized continuity between their own tradition and the "new" synthesis.
3. Bonobos and Fig Leaves Primate Hippies in a Puritan Landscape
87. In one such study, on our favorite chimpanzee group at the Yerkes Field Station, we had an average of only one or two spontaneous aggressive conflicts per day. This meant that the student collecting the data, Xin Wang, would sit on an observation tower in the hot Georgia sun for entire days, and collect information on anywhere from zero to perhaps five fights a day. Our interest was to see what happened afterward-did the chimpanzees reconcile with a kiss or grooming, or not?-but such a study requires at least a couple of hunderd instances. When the data are summarized in a nice, colorful graph, no one realizes how much time went into obtaining them.
88. 1 am referring to the Monica Lewinsky affair of 1998-99, during which U. S. President Clinton's political adversaries were perplexed by the lack of moral outrage in their country
. This entire scandal, including the media feeding frenzy on sexual innuendo, illustrated what Charles Dickens termed the "attraction of repulsion. " That is, the only way sex can be openly debated in a puritanical society is within the context of concern and disapproval.
89. The male body is subject to even greater taboos than the female body. In the United States one will not see the tiny swimming trunks of many European men-which reveal and even accentuate what's inside-nor unclad male statues, such as "Manneke Pis," the proud symbol of Brussels. Even a life-sized sculpture of an elephant, donated by African governments to the United Nations, had to be surrounded in a hurry by potted plants and shrubs so as to block a side view of an animal that was so undeniably male. It had never crossed the mind of the Bulgarian-born artist, Mihail, that an anatomically correct animal could stir up controversy in New York. Given that the elephant was to represent environmental awareness, he commented: "This is exactly the problem between people and wildlife, people cannot face nature. " From CNN on the Internet: "U. N. Elephant Statue Draws Guffaws for Being Too Long on Realism" (November 18, 1998).
90. Ehrenreich (1999).
91. The editorial note appeared in Time of March 29, 1999. Protest against the androgynous photos was published in Time of April 5, 1999. A physician from the country of Peter Paul Rubens called the defeminized bodies in the magazine "anatomical heresy. "
92. Diamond (1990).
93. Animals may show homosexual behavior but are generally not homosexual in the sense of having an exclusive or predominant orientation toward same-sex partners.
94. Parish (1993).
95. Kano (1998).
96. Bagemihl (1999, p. 117).
97. Stanford (1998). In the most detailed comparison to date, I observed the sexual behavior of bonobos at the San Diego Zoo and that of chimpanzees at the Field Station of the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta. The average adult bonobo initiated sex once every 65 minutes, in contrast to once every 6 hours for the average chimpanzee under similar conditions (de Waal, 1995). Even if these rates show that bonobos have sex far more often than chimpanzees, it is also evident that they are not doing it all the time. I must admit, though, that once when I tried to make this point by explaining that bonobos had sex only once every hour, an editor wrote in the margin of my manuscript that this sounded very much like all the time to her.
The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist Page 28