The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist

by Franz De Waal

  214. Chapais (1988).

  215. De Waal (1996b).

  216. This is a realistic example. Under crowded conditions, rhesus monkeys groom and reconcile more outside their own matrilines. Possibly, they are trying to prevent strained relations between matrilines. If the tendency to seek contact outside the family is transmitted from mother to offspring, crowding can be said to induce fundamental changes in rhesus social culture (Call et al., 1996).

  217. I prefer the term "cultural natural" to "cultural universal," which is found in the anthropological literature. The latter term maintains a separation between culture and nature, as if patterns found in all cultures are likely to be independent of human biology.

  218. Kummer (1995, p. 12?).

  219. De Waal and Johanowicz (1993).

  220. See also Chapter 11 ("Down with Dualism").

  221. Small (1988). See also Hrdy (1999).

  9. Apes with Self-Esteem Abraham Maslow and the Taboo on Power

  222. Maslow (1936).

  223. See also Noso on Koshima Island, who was in a similar "propped up" position as Spickles (Chapter 5, "Predicting Mount Fuji").

  224. Cullen (1997).

  225. See Chapter 1 ("The Whole Animal").

  226. De Waal (1982). For comparable political strategies in wild chimpanzees, see especially Nishida and Hosaka (1996).

  227. Woodward and Bernstein (1976).

  228. The incident in Arnhem has been described in detail in de Waal (1986). For the parallel incident at Gombe, see Goodall (1992).

  229. As argued in Chimpanzee Politics, alliances among male chimpanzees are not based on friendship or personal liking; they are entirely strategic. Hence, with the disappearance of their common rival, Nikkie, the reason for the Yeroen-Dandy alliance evaporated.

  230. Mulder (1979).

  231. Barkow (1975).

  232. For systematic research on human reactions to the nonverbal displays of political leaders, see Masters (1989). In relation to turning off the sound of my TV, the following observation by neurologist Oliver Sacks (1985) is of interest. He describes a group of patients in the aphasia ward convulsed with laughter during a televised speech by their nation's president (characterized by Sacks as "the old Charmer" and "the Actor"). Incapable of understanding words as such, aphasia patients nevertheless follow much of what is being said by means of the facial expressions and other body language accompanying speech. They are so good at processing nonverbal clues that they have the reputation that one cannot lie to them: they see right through lies. Sacks concluded about the president's speech, which seemed perfectly normal to the nonpatients present, that it "so cunningly combined deceptive word-use with deceptive tone, that only the brain-damaged remained intact, undeceived. "

  233. Even the most egalitarian human societies don't manage to get rid of the dominance drive. Instead, Boehm (1999) speaks of "leveling mechanisms," meaning that status differences are actively suppressed. In these societies, men trying to wield power risk ridicule and ultimately resentment.

  10. Survival of the Kindest Of Selfish Genes and Unselfish Dogs

  234. In the 1975 Christmas season, millions of Americans spent five dollars each to purchase ordinary rocks as pets. The rocks were sold in boxes with air holes and came with a manual explaining how to train the rock to roll over, to play dead, and to protect its owner. Tamagotchi is a popular Japanese electronic gadget that mimics a chick. It eats, sleeps, defecates, gets cranky, and beeps for attention. If the owner does not take care of it, Tamagotchi dies.

  235. Wrangham and Peterson (1996). Playing with "dolls" is not unusual in nonhuman primates. I have seen young chimpanzees in captivity act the same as Kakama with a piece of cloth or a broom. A wild mountain gorilla was seen to pull up a mass of soft moss, which she carried and held like an infant under her chest, cuddling and "nursing" it (Byrne, 1995).

  236. Darwin (1859).

  237. Quoted from an interview by Roes (1998).

  238. Also, let us not forget that many people volunteer to adopt children-some even kidnap newborns from the maternity ward-following urges that evidently transcend genetic self-interest.

  239. See Chapter I ("The Whole Animal").

  240. Reported in The Jerusalem Post, July 26, 1996.

  241. De Waal and Aureli (1996).

  242. Ladygina-Kohts (in press).

  243. Kunz and Allgaier (1994).

  244. Jewell (1997).

  245. Whittemore and Hebard (1995).

  246. Whittemore and Hebard (1995).

  11. Down with Dualism! Two Millennia of Debate About Human Goodness

  247. Westermarck (1912).

  248. De Waal and Luttrell (1988) and Aureli et al. (1992).

  249. For recent debate about evolutionary ethics, see the Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 7 (1-2), edited by L. D. Katz (2000).

  250. Wolf (1995). Others before him studied marriages in Israeli kibbutzim and found that children do not have sexual intercourse, let alone marry unrelated children of the opposite sex with whom they have grown up in the same peer group (reviewed by Wolf, 1995).

  251. Tokuda (1961-62).

  252. Huxley (1894).

  253. Desmond (1994).

  254. Freud (1913, 1930).

  255. De Waal (1996a). See also Flack and de Waal (2000).

  256. Williams quoted in Roes (1998), Dawkins in Times Literary Supplement (November 29, 1996), and Dawkins in another interview by Roes (1997). The profound irony, of course, is that contrary to Dawkins's warning against a Darwinian world, such a world is eminently more livable than a Huxleyan one, which is devoid of natural moral tendencies. Dawkins seems almost a reincarnation of Huxley in terms of both combativeness (e. g. , Dawkins, 1998) and his departure from Darwinism. Such notions as that we are survival machines, that we are born selfish and need to be taught kindness, and especially that morality and biology are miles apart were alien to Darwin yet typical of Huxley. Darwin never looked at any life form as a machine. He had a Lorenz-like rapport with animals and didn't shy away from attributing intentions and emotions to them. Crist (1999) discusses at length Darwin's anthropomorphism, which has irritated some scholars, but confirms that those with an integrated view of nature don't necessarily have a problem with it (see also Chapter 1, "The Whole Animal"). Given their differences of opinion, Darwin couldn't resist referring, in his final letter to Huxley, to the latter's depiction of all living things (including humans) as machines: "I wish to God there were more automata in the world like you. (Cited in Grist, 1999).

  257. In view of their cynical positions, the titles of the books by Wright (The Moral Animal) and Ridley (The Origins of Virtue) don't exactly cover their message (Wright, 1994; Ridley, 1996).

  258. Wright (1994).

  259. Sober and Wilson (1998) write about this accusation: "We feel we should address a criticism that is often leveled at advocates of altruism in psychology and group selection in biology. It is frequently said that people endorse such hypotheses because they want the world to be a friendly and hospitable place. The defenders of egoism and individualism who advance this criticism thereby pay themselves a compliment; they pat themselves on the back for staring reality squarely in the face. Egoists and individualists are objective, they suggest, whereas proponents of altruism and group selection are trapped by a comforting illusion. "

  260. Ideas about the subconscious and its evolutionary raison d'etre have been around since Badcock (1986) and Alexander (1987). The first explicitly sought to provide Freudian-Darwinian solutions to the "problem" of altruism.

  261. Mayr (1997).

  262. Damasio (1994).

  263. Aureli and de Waal (2000).

  264. Westermarck lists moral approval as a kind of retributive kindly emotion, hence as a component of reciprocal altruism. These views antedate discussions about "indirect reciprocity" and reputation building in the modern literature on evolutionary ethics (e. g. , Alexander, 1987).

  265. Smith (1759).

  26
6. These reflections by Westermarck parallel Smith's (1759) idea of an "impartial spectator. "

  267. Darwin (1871).

  268. Reviewed by Preston and de Waal (in press).

  269. Darwin (1871).

  270. This makes Mencius a contemporary of Aristotle-born 384 B.C. in Greece-the first and foremost Western philosopher to root morality in human biology (Arnhart, 1998).

  271. All quotations are from Mencius (372-289 B.C.), The Works of Mencius.

  272. See Chapter 10 ("Survival of the Kindest"), which also contains the full quotation from Smith.

  273. Killen and de Waal (2000).

  Epilogue

  274. The puffer fish has an extremely toxic liver, which, if not appropriately removed, causes paralysis and certain death (not surprisingly, preparing this fish for fugu requires a special license in Japan). The risky consumption of this delicacy is comparable to the bitter-pith chewing of wild chimpanzees, in which the apes seem to have learned to avoid the toxic parts of a particular plant (Huffman, 1997).

  Aisner, R., and Terkel, J. (1992). Ontogeny of pine-cone opening behaviour in the black rat (Rattus rattus). Animal Behaviour 44: 327-336.

  Alcock, J. (1998). Unpunctuated equilibrium in the Natural History essays of Stephen Jay Gould. Evolution and Human Behavior 19: 321-336.

  Alexander, R. A. (1987). The Biology of Moral Systems. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

  Allen, B. (1997). The chimpanzee's tool. Common Knowledge 6: 34-51.

  Alp, R. (1997). "Stepping-sticks" and "seat-sticks": New types of tools used by wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in Sierra Leone. American Journal of Primatology 41: 45-52.

  Amudson, R. (1985). The hundredth monkey phenomenon. The Skeptical Enquirer 9: 348-356.

  Arnhart, L. (1998). Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

  Asquith, P. J. (1986). Anthropomorphism and the Japanese and Western traditions in primatology. In J. G. Else and P. C. Lee (eds.), Primate Ontogeny, Cognition, and Social Behavior, pp. 61-71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Asquith, P. J. (1989). Provisioning and the study of free-ranging primates: History, effects, and prospects. Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 32: 129-158.

  Asquith, P. J. (1991). Primate research groups in Japan: Orientations and East-West differences. In L. Fedigan, and P. Asquith (eds.), The Monkeys of Arashiyama: Thirty-five Years of Research in Japan and the West, pp. 81-98. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

  Atkins, K. A. (1996). A bat without qualities? In M. Bekoff and D. Jamieson (eds.), Readings in Animal Cognition, pp. 345-358. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  Aureli, F., Cozzolino, R., Cordischi, C., and Scucchi, S. (1992). Kin-oriented redirection among Japanese macaques: An expression of a revenge system? Animal Behaviour 44: 283-291.

  Aureli, F., and de Waal, F. B. M. (2000). Natural Conflict Resolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  Austin, W. A. (1974). The First Fifty Years: An Informal History of the Detroit Zoological Park and the Detroit Zoological Society. Detroit: The Detroit Zoological Society.

  Badcock, C. R. (1986). The Problem of Altruism: Freudian-Darwinian Solutions. Oxford: Blackwell.

  Bagemihl, B. (1999). Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. New York: St. Martin's.

  Bailey, M. B. (1986). Every animal is the smartest: Intelligence and the ecological niche. In R. Hoage and L. Goldman (eds. ), Animal Intelligence, pp. 105-113. Washington, D. C. : Smithsonian Institution Press.

  Balda, R. P., and Kamil, A. C. (1989). A comparative study of cache recovery by three corvid species. Animal Behaviour 38: 486-495.

  Barkow, J. H. (1975). Prestige and culture: A biosocial interpretation. Current Anthropology 16: 553-572.

  Batson, C. D., Early, S., and Salvarani, G. (1990). Perspective taking: Imagining how another feels versus imagining how you would feel. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 23: 751-758.

  Beach, F. A. (1950). The snark was a boojum. American Psychologist 5: 115-124.

  Beatty, H. (1951). A note on the behavior of the chimpanzee. Journal of Mammalogy 32: 118.

  Beck, B. B. (1980). Animal Tool Behavior: The Use and Manufacture of Tools by Animals. New York: Garland.

  Bischof, N. (1991). Gescheiter als alle die Laffen. Hamburg: Rasch & Rohring.

  Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  Boesch, C. (1991). Teaching in wild chimpanzees. Animal Behaviour 41: 530-32.

  Boesch, C., and Boesch, H. (1983). Optimization of nut-cracking with natural hammers by wild chimpanzees. Behaviour 83: 265-286.

  Boesch, C., and Boesch, H. (1984). Possible causes of sex differences in the use of natural hammers by wild chimpanzees. Journal of Human Evolution 13: 415-440.

  Boesch, C., and Boesch-Ackermann, H. (1991). Dingy forest, bright chimps. Natural History 9/91: 50-56.

  Boesch, C., and Tomasello, M. (1998). Chimpanzee and human cultures. Current Anthropology 39: 591-614.

  Bonner, J. T. (1980). The Evolution of Culture in Animals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  Boyd, R., and Richerson, P. J. (1985). Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Budiansky, S. (1998). If a Lion Could Talk. New York: Free Press.

  Burghardt, G. M. (1985). Animal awareness: Current perceptions and historical perspective. American Psychologist 40: 905-919.

  Busch, H., and Silver, B. (1994). Why Cats Paint: A Theory of Feline Aesthetics. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed.

  Byrne, R. W. (1995). The Thinking Ape. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Byrne, R. W., and Russon, A. E. (1998). Learning by imitation: A hierarchical approach. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21: 667-721.

  Call, J., Judge, P. G., and de Waal, F. B. M. (1996). Influence of kinship and spatial density on reconciliation and grooming in rhesus monkeys. American Journal of Primatology 39: 35-45.

  Cenami Spada, E. (1997). Amorphism, mechanomorphism, and anthropomorphism. In R. W. Mitchell, N. S. Thompson, and H. L. Miles (eds. ), Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals, pp. 37-49. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

  Chapais, B. (1988). Rank maintenance in female Japanese macaques: Experimental evidence for social dependency. Behaviour 104: 41-59.

  Chelser, P. (1969). Maternal influence in learning by observation in kittens. Science 166: 901-903.

  Cheney, D. L., and Seyfarth, R. M. (1990). How Monkeys See the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Corbey, R. (November 8, 1997). Beschaving is meer dan mes en work. NRC Handelsblad.

  Crist, E. (1999). Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

  Cullen, D. (1997). Maslow, monkeys, and motivation theory. Organization 4: 3 5 5-373.

  Curio, E. (1978). Cultural transmission of enemy recognition: One function of mobbing. Science 202: 899-901.

  Custance, D. M., Whiten, A., and Bard, K. A. (1995). Can young chimpanzees imitate arhitrary actions? Hayes and Hayes (1952) revisited. Behaviour 132: 839-858.

  Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam.

  Damasio, A. R. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens. New York: Harcourt.

  Darwin, C. (1964 [1859]). On the Origin of Species. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  Darwin, C. (1981 [1871]). The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  Darwin, C. (1998 [1872]). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Third Edition. New York: Oxford University Press.

  Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Dawkins, R. (1998). Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

  Deacon, J. (1999). South African rock art. Evolutionary Anthropology 8: 48-63.

  Deichmann, U. (1996). Biologists
under Hitler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 179-205.

  Desmond, A. (1994). Huxley: From Devil's Disciple to Evolution's High Priest. New York: Perseus.

  Diamond, M. (1990). Selected cross-generational sexual behavior in traditional Hawaii: A sexological ethnography. In J. R. Feierman (ed. ), Pedophilia: Biosocial Dimensions, pp. 378-393. New York: Springer.

  Drea, C. M., and Wallen, K. (1999). Low status monkeys "play dumb" when learning in mixed social groups. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96: 12965-12969.

  Ducros, A., Ducros, J., and Joulian, F. (1998). La Culture est-elle Naturelle? Paris: Errance.

  Durham, W. H. (1991). Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

  Ehrenreich, B. (1999). The real truth about the female body. Time, March 8: 57-65.

  Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (1994). Wider die Mi/3trauensgesellschaft. Munich: Piper.

  Epstein, R., Lanza, R. P., and Skinner, B. F. (1981). "Self-awareness" in the pigeon. Science 212: 695-696.

  Flack, J. C., and de Waal, F. B. M. (2000). "Any animal whatever": Darwinian building blocks of morality in monkeys and apes. Journal of Consciousness Studies 7 (1-2): 1-29.

  Fouts, R. (1997). Next of Kin. New York: Morrow.

  Freeman, D. (1983). Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  French, M. (1985). Beyond Power. New York: Ballantine.

  Freud, S. (1989 [1913]). Totem and Taboo. New York: Norton.

  Freud, S. (1989 [1930]). Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton.

  Galef, B. G. (1982). Studies of social learning in Norway rats: A brief review. Developmental Psychobiology 15: 279-295.

  Galef, B. G. (1990). The question of animal culture. Human Nature 3: 157-178.

  Gallup, G. G. (1970). Self-awareness in primates. Science 67: 417-421.

  Gallup, G. G. (1982). Self-awareness and the emergence of mind in primates. American Journal of Primatology 2: 237-248.