Imo and Frans Wrote a Book A review of: De Waal, F. (2001) The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist. NY: Basic Books. 433 pp., $26 list. James Brody, Ph.D. Editor, Evolutionary Psychology & Clinical Sociobiologyhttp://www.behavior.net/forums/evolutionary

We each build our own nest with our lives, one that suits us and no one else. The Ape and the Sushi Master is part of de Waal's nest, another expression of his fascination with kindness, cooperation, and the emergence of social order in primates and other species, a vital exploration of our sameness with other life.

He challenges the distinction between "human" and "animal" and develops his case through finding human traits that occur in animals. Some of our most cherished ones such as culture, kindness, and even art are material in de Waal's case. De Waal anchors his case with biographies that both demonstrate the polarities that concern him and make his story easier to enjoy and to remember.

Culture, instinct, and imitation

De Waal introduces us to Kinji Imanishi and the Japanese traditions that expect continuity and cooperation between living forms. Japanese scientists give apes and monkeys individual names and study their social context; westerners missed those things in wild chimpanzees when we looked for abstractions such as dominance. That same difference in tradition opened Japanese minds to the phenomenon of cultural transmission.

We meet Imo, the first known creature to be both a potato washer and a rhesus. She touches the future through a wonderfully Lamarckian trick, the transmission of an acquired characteristic across generations but within kinship lines. As de Waal puts it: "...the Lamarckian idea that acquired characteristics can be inherited has found its realization not in the physical characteristics he was thinking of, but in behavior. Genetic predispositions feed into culture, culture affects survival, and survival and reproduction determine which genotypes (and cultural tricks, JB) spread in the population. Order emerges more quickly than genes can arrange." De Waal and Imo accomplish the same thing, Imo by teaching her kin how to wash potatoes and de Waal by writing a memorable book.

Seven chimpanzee sites have been studied for a total of 151 years (See Whiten, et al., 1999). Each site has its own tools and some of the Lamarckian chimp tricks are: nut cracking (younger chimpanzees train for years with no evident rewards), grooming methods, louse removal (a skill that varies with family), and even self medication. In their interface with humans, apes have posed with books in their laps, brushed their teeth, used saws, hammers and nails, strung hammocks, and put on T-shirts. We got a verb, "to ape," from their skills: the ethologists have shown us the survival value of imitation, that imitation and culture finish the work started in utero, that of adjusting individuals and niches to each other.

The non primates are also pretty busy adjusting their worlds. Even Skinner (1966) talked about a bird, the African honey guide, in a manner that suggests cultural transmission for the cooperative gambits between it and humans. House cats open doors, blue tits teach each other how to remove bottle caps from milk containers, and bears teach each other that windshields and doors from some tourist vehicles are easy to pop open by bouncing on the roof. Much as chimps crack nuts, both species want to get at the meats inside. (The concepts of "in" and "out" must be very old.)

"The fact that primates sometimes duplicate behavior, such as the rubbing together of stones or a special drinking technique, that confers zero advantages is extremely telling. It teaches us that cultural learning is not about rewards, but about fitting in (emphasis added, JB)...We can now assume these tendencies, which underlie all forms of cultural transmission, to be far older than our own tenure on the planet." (p 238.)*

De Waal briefly discusses BIOL (bonding and identification-based observational learning) but also echoes Matt Ridley's arguments (Ridley 2000) against cultural determinism :"In the minds of many people, culture is associated with freedom.... But doesn't culture restrict our freedom as much (or as little) as biology? And where do our cultural capacities come from? Don't they spring from the same source as the so-called instincts?"
(p. 236). De Waal, thus, endorses the idea of a culture that is generated by nature.

Kindness and selfishness:

De Waal reinforces several recent, popular books on animal compassion (von Kriesler, 2001; Linden, 1999) and extends his earlier ones, Good Natured (De Waal, 1996) and Peace Making Among Primates (De Waal, 1989). For example, female dogs will nurse and rear tiger cubs, later dwelling safely in the cage with their adult adoptees who stalk humans. Blue jays give alarm calls, the famous gorilla, Binti Jua, returned a human child to its mother, dolphins drive sharks away from humans in the sea, lady bats serve as midwives for their conspecifics, and rescue dogs need to find a living human among the dead. Otherwise, the dogs fade into apathy and depression. Even our brats pick up kindness as if it were an adaptation, in Geoff Miller's words, "easy to learn, often fun to do, and seen in every normal individual (Miller, 1999)."

De Waal does not postulate a noble savage but starts with Edward Westermarck, who introduced social science to Darwinism while arguing, in Kropotkin's tradition, for a "natural good" in us animals. Westermarck was immediately discredited by Freud and by Levi-Strauss who needed incest as a prime example of human culture's overcoming human nature. If we're naturally good, why do we need either Freud or a super ego?

De Waal sketches a tradition from Thom Huxley and Thomas Hobbes and through Freud to modern characters such as George Williams, Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley or Bob Wright: we are naturally bad and we overcome our nature by our willful spinning of culture and kindness. Most of these people, however, are more complex than the caricature that de Waal draws on top of them. Bob Wright, for example, is a moralist by family history and career and possibly a gene. His most recent book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, (Wright 2000) traces for cultures the cooperative ventures that de Waal finds for individuals.

Gossip

We remember gossip better than data (Sugiyama, 2001; Dunbar, 1994) and de Waal gives us balanced morality tales about arrogance and humility, persistence and wisdom. There is also death in de Waal's stories: oblivion IS a form of dying, often arranged by ridicule or silence whether towards Lorenz or towards Gould, whether by school girls or by the next generation of ethologists, and whether on the playground or in conferences.

Similar plots occur in Greek drama, Kabuki, American westerns, and Star Trek. Kirk and Spock are replaced by Lorenz, Tinbergen, Carpenter, Halstead, Imanishi, Gould, Skinner, Dawkins, Thom Huxley, George Williams, Westermarck, and even cameos filled by Matt Ridley, Bob Wright, and one anonymous behaviorist. (No women!) Robert Ardrey is credited with the hypothesis of language's replacing grooming. (Dunbar who wrote a book on this theme doesn't mention Ardrey and de Waal doesn't mention Dunbar!)
Thanks to de Waal my list of heroes is reordered and expanded.

Lorenz and Tinbergen

The younger de Waal fed on Lorenz' irrepressible ideas and style; the older de Waal recognized that his hero was swept, as energetic people often can be, into applications of untested ideas about human evolution, group selection, and sacrificing individuals for group benefit. Thus, Lorenz joined the faculty at the University of Konigsberg and became an active participant in the scientific publicity of the Third Reich. He contrasts Lorenz the dynamo who saved ethology from behaviorism with Lorenz the contributor to Nazi social agendas.

Niko Tinbergen eventually shared the Nobel Prize with Lorenz and von Frisch in 1973. Tinbergen was methodical and worked by systematic replication, a collaborator with Lorenz before and after the wary but a contrast and complement to him both in war record and scientific style. During the war Lorenz and Tinbergen sought and found different niches and responded to different audiences, becoming more like their respective audiences and less like each other. Reunited after the war, they inspired and magnified each other, neither would have accomplished quite so much if alone.

If imitation is about fitting in then an unappreciated reciprocity gambit, raise the stakes, (Roberts & Sherrat, 1998) can make it dangerous. That is, open small and if matched, increase your next bet. It works in conversations and it works in computer simulations, easily beating tit-for-tat and similar strategies. RTS is sometimes dangerous because it is a positive feedback system that makes small agreements, agreements either to love or to hate, large to the point of addiction or intolerance. RTS describes the resonance between Lorenz and his wartime audiences and, ironically, contemporary reactions either to Lorenz or to Gould. Dopamine circuits show similar multiplier effects (see Waelti, et al, 2001).

Music and painting

We learn about animal music and art. No surprise, many dogs and birds don't like Schoenberg and prefer slower compositions to those of Frans Liszt. Conversely, we write poems about bird songs and the melody for one of Mozart's compositions was taken from his pet starling. (Were Audrey and Dunbar wrong? Did language emerge not from grooming but from singing and mate recruiting? After all, some dogs howl when their owners sing. Pain or mating? See Miller, 2000.)

Pigeons can sort art by artist and by school: train them to choose Renoir and they generalize to other impressionists and can identify paintings by a individual artist with greater accuracy than most humans. (Humans prefer symmetry in their partners. Does a female pigeon prefer symmetry in a male pigeon? Can pigeons sort humans by symmetry?) Chimpanzees are persistent with their painted compositions, produce orderly work, and reach a stage of completion, firmly resisting editors and their corrections.

Summary

De Waal missed a couple of opportunities. First, humans are not the only species to terraform (Brody, 2000). From lugworms, crickets, and coral to New York architects---organisms pick, modify, and construct environments. They not only use tools to extend opportunities, to widen their environment in a particular setting, but to stabilize it. This phenomenon, that environments statistically compete to be selected, cuts at 180 degrees to standard neoDarwinism. Turner (2000) has magnificent engineering data and species-niche products that make this point (See also Lewontin, 2000.)

Second, I would have enjoyed his giving us a chapter on religion. If there is continuity between us and other species in all things, then religion will not be peculiar to humans. The same views and arguments that apply to art, goodness, and culture surely could inform us about elephant, dolphin, or chimpanzee superstitions and animism. (De Waal spooked two of the Arnheim chimps into resurrecting their old alliance: he showed them a film clip of their former, long dead, nemesis. One chimp immediately ran to the lap of the other. If the movie and some ground shaking were associated with a specific section of the enclosure, would the chimps systematically avoid it? Would they convince other chimps to do likewise? Would they start to leave food?

National Geographic had a cover photograph of Koko, a gorilla, cradling a black and gray, tiger-striped kitten. She asked for it with sign language and gave it a name, "All Ball." Any reasonable person could accept the photograph and the story as final proof our similarity to Koko. The Ape and the Sushi Master is also for reasonable people, the one-third who already accept the idea and the second third that are open to thinking about it. In this sense, de Waal preaches to the choir and we are lucky to be in it.

His conviction is that kindness is as much a part of our nature as selfishness. I agree and find The Ape and the Sushi Master a magnificent argument. He tells us to lighten up a bit, we're not so special and other creatures are more creative and "moral" than we credit them. His closing words before the Epilogue, p 357:

"...the child is not going against its own nature by developing a caring, moral attitude, and civil society is not like an out-of-control garden subdued by a sweating gardener. We are merely following evolved tendencies. How refreshingly simple!"

One must imagine de Waal happy.

Note * We think and move within physical as well as biological nature: dichotomies are part of us perhaps for statistical reasons and two millennia later, we may have enough data to become Pythagoreans (See Sole and Goodwin, 2001; Ball, 1999; Kauffman, 1995). Computer simulations suggest that order (cooperation and kindness?) can evolve from chaos (selfish autonomy?), that chaos can evolve from order (Kauffman, 1995). By apparent logical necessity evolution must work in a "phase transition" between the two just as every one of us operates in a phase transition when we float in a pool of water or travel in the first feet of earth's atmosphere.

We should not be surprised if genes also follow statistical payoffs, our problem is in identifying the conditions for those payoffs. Imitation may someday be shown to have statistical benefits that are more rapid but similar to those achieved from mutation and natural selection. Our sense of kindness and cooperation might do for social order what electron bonds do for atoms.

If so, then genes are our navigators, kindness our sensed appreciation of making order, and approach-avoidance conflict our anchor, one that keeps us near our sense of "maybe." Selfishness points us one direction, guilt and kindness in the opposite; sexual and natural selection are their oars and rudders (Brody, in press). Thus, neither de Waal nor anyone else will eliminate dichotomies. Nonetheless, he and others might increase our awareness of how narrow our distinctions and how short our yardsticks as we negotiate other life both for life and for wisdom.

References

Ball, P. (1999) Transitions still to be made. Nature, 402: 73-76.

Brody, J. (2000) Active Darwinism offsets mismatch. Paper given at the annual meeting, Human Behavior & Evolution Society, Amherst, MA, 6/8/00.

---------- (in press) From Physics and Evolutionary Neuroscience to Psychotherapy: Phase Transitions and Adaptations, Diagnosis and Treatment. In G. Cory & R. Gardner (Eds.) Frontiers and Convergence: The Neuroethology of Paul MacLean. Praeger-Greenwood.

Dunbar, R. 1996) Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.

Kauffman, S. (1995) At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self Organization and Complexity. NY: Oxford.

von Kriesler, K. (2001) Beauty in the Heart: Stories of Animals Who Choose to Do Good. NY: Putnam.

Lewontin, R. (1998/2000) Triple helix: Gene, organism, environment. Cambridge, MA, Harvard

Linden, E. (1999) The Parrot's Lament and Other Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence, and Ingenuity. NY: Dutton.

Miller, G. (1999) "Human Language and Intelligence as Sexually Selected Fitness Indicators" Paper given at the Hunter School of Social Work, 4/14/99.

---------- (2000) The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. NY: Doubleday.

Ridley, M. (2000) Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. NY: Harper Collins

Roberts, G. & Sherratt, T. (1998) Development of cooperative relationships through increasing investment. Nature, 394: 175-179.

Skinner, B. F. (1966) The phylogeny and ontogeny of behavior. Science, 153: 1205-1213.

Sole, R., & Goodwin, B. (2000) Signs of Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology. NY: Basic.

Sugiyama, M. S. (2001) Food, foragers, and folklore: the role of narrative in human subsistence. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22: 221-240.

Turner, J. Scott (2000) The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

de Waal, F. (1996) Good Natured: The Evolution of Right & Wrong in Humans and other Animals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ Press.

---------- (1989) Peacemaking Among Primates. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

---------- (1997) Bonobos: The Forgotten Ape, with photographs by F. Lanting. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Waelti, P., Dickinson, A, & Schultz, W. (2001) Dopamine responses comply with basic assumptions of formal learning theory. Nature, 412: 43-48.

Whiten, A., Goodall, J., McGrew, W., Nishida, T., Reynolds, V., Sugiyama, Y., Tutin, C., Wrangham, R., & Boesch, C. (1999) Cultures in chimpanzees. Nature, 399: 682-685.

Published   2001.09.05