Living Links Center Blog2008-10-14T01:28:18ZLiving Links Center for the Advanced Study of Ape and Human EvolutionCopyright 2008, Living Links Center for the Advanced Study of Ape and Human EvolutionSPHPBLOGNew Location of the LLC blog Thanks.
David Broder in the Washington Post of September 28, 2008, writes an opinion piece entitled "McCain as the Alpha Male."
Since the term "alpha male" comes out of primatology, and I have known many males who qualify, I feel like commenting on Broder's observation
"... an imbalance in the deference quotient between the younger man and the veteran senator -- an impression reinforced by Obama's frequent glances in McCain's direction and McCain's studied indifference to his rival."
Looking at the body language of the candidates, however, I did not come away with the same impression. A confident alpha male chimpanzee would never show studied indifference. I have seen such behavior only in males who were terrified of their challenger. Chimpanzees provoke higher-ups by making impressive displays in their vicinity, hooting loudly in their direction, and sometimes lobbing objects at them to see what happens. Will the other startle or will he return the challenge? It's a war of nerves.
A self-confident alpha male just approaches his challenger and sets him straight, either by attacking him or performing a spectacular display of his own. No avoidance of eye contact: he takes the bull by the horns.
It rather is the hesitant or fearful alpha male who avoids looking straight at the other, sidesteps him as if nothing happened, ducks when objects fly, and just hopes that the other will give up and go away. This may work, but also signals weakness. One day, the challenger will pick up courage and do something more drastic, such as hitting the old guy's back. If the latter still tries to ignore his challenger after this, he's toast.
I read the body language between McCain and Obama as that between a senior male being challenged by a remarkably confident junior one. The senior didn't know exactly what to do. He avoided eye contact and body orientation, probably realizing that a direct confrontation might not go his way.
If McCain was an alpha male, it was an incredibly insecure one.
In another primatological reflection, a year ago I wrote about Hillary Clinton as alpha female, stating that only post-reproductive females will likely be successful securing massive support, since they pose no sexual competition to other females. McCain's choice of a female running mate of reproductive age obviously violated this rule, and it doesn't surprise me that she now has more support among men than women. In fact, the logic of sexual competition would predict that the former support will erode the latter.
Seeing an older male paired with a much younger female sets off red flags in the heads of many women, so that for McCain and Palin to appear side-by-side may be problematic. This is another major drawback to his choice of running mate, since appearing together is a critical part of political communication. It show others who your coalition partners are. Male chimps who are united groom each other, walk together, display in synchrony, all of which tells everybody else "we stick together, don't mess with us." This is relatively easily done between males, and such bonding has indeed been on display between Obama and Biden, two differently aged males with mutually understanding smiles and back slaps. Following the debate, Biden was on TV to praise Obama's performance (not unlike the way chimps hoot along with their heroes from a distance to signal support), whereas Palin was nowhere in sight.
It may be hard for McCain to avoid the appearance of being a loner.
For a recent interview (8 September, 2008) about the comparisons between primate and human politics listen to CBC's "The Current" (scroll down to Part 3: Political Primatologist).
--Frans de Waal]]>http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/blog/index.php?entry=entry080929-0942092008-09-29T00:00:00Z2008-09-29T00:00:00ZOn baboon radio-collaringhere. Recently, BRU has been met with complaints regarding their use of radio-tracking collars. I would like to weight in on this discussion with my personal observations.
While I was in the Cape Peninsula I spent many hours with the Cape Point group, which includes Winnie, a female with one of the radio-collars in question. Upon seeing her for the first time I, of course, questioned whether the collar had any impact on her day-to-day life. After spending a month around Winnie, I saw no evidence that collar had any impact on her. I saw her engaging in all the typical baboon behaviors, including grooming and foraging. Interestingly, I never saw her touch or express any interest in or discomfort with the collar.
During my time in the Cape, I came to have a profound respect for the research that BRU is conducting and how that research helps the South African National Parks Service manage their natural resources, including these baboons. Radio-tracking collars help researchers understand more about the needs of these intriguing animals, which in turn enables the Park Service to better manage them. BRU and the Parks Service should be applauded for their work with the Cape baboons.
--Darby Proctor]]>http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/blog/index.php?entry=entry080911-1105292008-09-11T00:00:00Z2008-09-11T00:00:00ZGiving is self-rewarding for monkeysnew paper by Frans de Waal and Kristi Leimgruber has just been published in PNAS. This paper shows evidence that capuchin monkeys enjoy sharing with other monkeys.
"ATLANTA— Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have shown capuchin monkeys, just like humans, find giving to be a satisfying experience. This finding comes on the coattails of a recent imaging study in humans that documented activity in reward centers of the brain after humans gave to charity. Empathy in seeing the pleasure of another’s fortune is thought to be the impetus for sharing, a trait this study shows transcends primate species. The study is available online in the Early Edition of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Frans de Waal, PhD, director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes Research Center, and Kristi Leimgruber, research specialist, led a team of researchers who exchanged tokens for food with eight adult female capuchins. Each capuchin was paired with a relative, an unrelated familiar female from her own social group or a stranger (a female from a different group). The capuchins then were given the choice of two tokens: the selfish option, which rewarded that capuchin alone with an apple slice; or the prosocial option, which rewarded both capuchins with an apple slice. The monkeys predominantly selected the prosocial token when paired with a relative or familiar individual but not when paired with a stranger.
A capuchin in this experiment selects a token.
“The fact the capuchins predominantly selected the prosocial option must mean seeing another monkey receive food is satisfying or rewarding for them,” said de Waal. “We believe prosocial behavior is empathy based. Empathy increases in both humans and animals with social closeness, and in our study, closer partners made more prosocial choices. They seem to care for the welfare of those they know,” continued de Waal.
de Waal and his research team next will attempt to determine whether giving is self-rewarding to capuchins because they can eat together or if the monkeys simply like to see the other monkey enjoying food."
You can download a PDF of the article here. ]]>http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/blog/index.php?entry=entry080825-1950402008-08-25T00:00:00Z2008-08-25T00:00:00ZNothing boring about studying yawns A chimpanzee yawn. Photo by: William Calvin
Last week saw two new species added to the list of species capable of contagious yawning. Ramiro Joly-Mascheroni and colleagues reported in Biology Letters that dogs yawn in response to a human yawning, and Alessia Leone and colleagues reported at the 22nd Congress of the International Primatological Society that gelada baboons yawn in response to other baboons yawning. For those keeping score, five species out of five examined show contagious yawning. The totals are, in order of discovery, humans, chimpanzees, stump-tail macaques, domestic dogs, and gelada baboons. The most interesting part is that no one has yet identified a species that has not shown contagious yawning when tested. How pervasive is this trait? We have yet to find out.
A gelada baboon yawn. Photo by: Michael Nichols
Ultimately, this comparative endeavor will be very useful in assessing empathic abilities in different species. If we can find a way to experimentally link contagious yawning with empathy in nonhumans, then we will have a behavior easily identifiable that will be directly comparable across species. The ability to compare species with a single measure would be immensely helpful in understanding the evolution of empathic abilities. These studies bring us a little bit closer to resolving centuries old debates on the uniqueness of human empathy, and that is nothing to yawn about.
A dog yawning. ]]>http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/blog/index.php?entry=entry080815-1328122008-08-15T00:00:00Z2008-08-15T00:00:00ZFrans de Waal and Richard Dawkins interview now availableOn the Origin of Species." You can read our original post about that visit here.
]]>http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/blog/index.php?entry=entry080814-0946402008-08-14T00:00:00Z2008-08-14T00:00:00ZOops! Bonobo picture by Frans de Waal graces the cover of TWO new booksMy Family Album, of ape photographs that he has taken during that past 30 years.
Recently, Frans was contacted by a publishing company asking if one of his bonobo photographs could be used on the cover of a book. A few days later he received a similar e-mail. Assuming that these e-mails were from the same person Frans gave permission. However, Frans had just given permission to two separate books.
All Frans could say for himself was "I am not a photo agency, but a busy scientist, so I don't keep very careful track of this sort of requests, of which I get too many. And so yes, in my mind I must have thought I was dealing with a single book, and never realized I gave two permissions."
Fortunately for Frans, no one seems too upset about the cover snaffu, although it did get some press coverage.
Update: The media followed up on their original story with an explanation of how all this happened. Read more here. ]]>http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/blog/index.php?entry=entry080813-1127382008-08-13T00:00:00Z2008-08-13T00:00:00ZThe Influence of Japanese Primatology In the meantime, however, Imanishi’s students set out to identify individuals (giving them names or numbers), following them over their lifetime (they knew their kinship relations), and speculating about culture in their animals. All of this is now, of course standard practice, and kinship structure and cultural transmisison have become mainstays of primatology. In the end Japanese primatology won by developing the approach that now everyone uses.
The linked article by Tetsuro Matsuzawa and Bill McGrew, just out in Current Biology, offers some interesting new insights in Imanishi.
Here a picture of a potato washing monkey at Koshima Island (photo: Frans de Waal).
Just to add one anecdote, described in my book The Ape and the Sushi Master (pp. 110-113, which includes a section on Imanishi), here is what happened when a Western “enemy” visited him:
Kinji Imanishi and the Rabid Englishman
“In my Western way, I came to Kyoto, the home of Imanishi and his School seeking the man and his ideas, but I came as an avowed opponent.” Beverly Halstead, 1984
An eccentric Englishman, who couldn’t resist comparing himself to a Nineteenth Century explorer, landed on an Eastern shore, in 1984. As if possessed, he hammered away day and night on an old typewriter until he had a rather disorganized product in hand: a volume of over two hundred pages. Along with naïve comments on a society that he didn’t seem to like, the rambling text defended Darwin against the dominant Japanese scientist of the day, Kinji Imanishi. All of this was accomplished in a one-month period, thus defying the old saw that in order to write about Japan one needs to stay either three weeks or thirty years.
Beverly Halstead’s colonial attitude was complete: a heavy load of prejudice about the country he was visiting, absence of knowledge about his adversary (all of Imanishi’s important works are in Japanese, a language Halstead admitted not knowing), manipulation by the locals (the author had been invited by left-wing professors out to undermine Imanishi without getting their hands dirty), and earth-shaking cultural discoveries, such as that the Japanese are more individualistic than one might think.
As Westerner, it is impossible to read Halstead’s manuscript - dug up from a Kyoto library - without curling one’s toes in embarrassment, especially realizing that the text subsequently appeared in Japanese. The Englishman didn’t waste time on politeness. At one point, he managed to meet Imanishi in person, an opportunity he used to lecture the 82-year-old Emeritus Professor. After having handed the father of Japanese primatology a gift - a bottle of whisky - he confronted him with a carefully translated document with statements such as “Imanishi’s evolution theory is Japanese in its unreality” and “You see the wood, but the trees are not in focus.” No wonder, Halstead describes Imanishi’s facial expression on this occasion as one of profound regret at having agreed to the encounter.
What could possibly have compelled Halstead to be so rude? Why, upon return to his home land, did he write an article that trashed not only Imanishi’s views but an entire culture? How did Nature even dare to run it with a patronizing opening line such as: “The popularity of Kinji Imanishi’s writings in Japan gives an interesting insight into Japanese society”? If the whole affair provides any insight at all, it is in Halstead’s personality.
The late Beverly Halstead, from the University of Reading in Great Britain, was by training a geologist and paleontologist. Known for Communist sympathies in his early years, he later became a flag-bearer for Darwinism. Once described as “Darwin’s Terrier” (in a play on T. H. Huxley as “Darwin’s Bulldog”), Halstead had a professional life peppered with spectacular quarrels. An obituary in The Independent of May 3, 1991, highlights the nature of his combative attitude: “[He] was never the rebel but the supporter of traditional orthodoxy against what he saw as misplaced enthusiasm for the new.”
I guess, he was the kind of person who sought security in doctrine - any doctrine. We all know the kind: the former Marxist who turns devout Catholic, or the people who escape the grasp of a sect only to become born-again Christians. Halstead was definitely not Christian (“Darwin rendered the entire edifice of Christianity redundant,” he wrote), but clearly thirsted for dogma.
To him, Imanishi’s disagreement with Darwin was blasphemy. He came to set the old man straight, and with him an entire nation that, in his words, was engaged in a peculiar conspiracy to mislead everyone about themselves. The emphasis in Japan on social harmony is pure self-deception, Halstead concluded, because we all know that underneath there must exist incredible competition.
This was an interesting thought coming from a former Communist.
Halstead, L. B. (1984). Kinji Imanishi: The View from the Mountain Top. Unpublished English manuscript in the Kyoto University Library, later published in Japanese.
- Frans de Waal ]]>http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/blog/index.php?entry=entry080724-1012342008-07-24T00:00:00Z2008-07-24T00:00:00ZChimps Aren't Chumpshere.
Chimps Aren’t Chumps By STEVE ROSS Published: July 21, 2008 - New York Times
Chicago
You see it on greeting cards and in countless TV programs and commercials: the exaggerated grin on the face of a young chimpanzee, often one that’s wearing sunglasses or a grass skirt. It’s about as common a ploy for laughs as a pie in the face. Generations have been amused by the antics of Bonzo, J. Fred Muggs, Zippy and, more recently, the business-suited chimps of Careerbuilder.com. A chimpanzee covering its eyes in embarrassment? What’s not to love?
But this picture, harmless as it might appear, is giving the public the mistaken and even dangerous impression that chimpanzees have a safe and comfortable existence — and nothing could be further from the truth.
A survey that I and several colleagues conducted in 2005 found that one in three visitors to the Lincoln Park Zoo assumed that chimpanzees are not endangered. Yet more than 90 percent of these same visitors understood that gorillas and orangutans face serious threats to their survival. And many of those who imagined chimpanzees to be safe reported that they based their thinking on the prevalence of chimps in advertisements, on television and in the movies.
In reality, chimpanzees face a severe threat in the wild: their numbers have dropped to about 20 percent of what they were a century ago, as their habitat in equatorial Africa is deforested and they are hunted as bushmeat. And once you know this, it can become more difficult to view chimpanzees as silly subhuman caricatures. Consider that chimpanzees share as much as 98 percent of our genetic makeup. They make and use tools, recognize and identify hundreds of individuals in their groups and learn from others skills like termite fishing. Of course, the reverse is also true: we are 98 percent chimpanzee. Would we condone putting funny clothes on human children so that we could laugh at the way they look like subhuman buffoons?
A progressive society should weigh the moral costs and benefits of practices like these. Misrepresentations of chimpanzees may not be as repugnant as racism, bigotry or sexism. But they can still serve as a benchmark for our society’s moral progress.
The good news is that a growing number of companies, including Honda, Puma and Subaru, have pledged to stop the use of primates in advertisements. The journal Science recently stopped its promotional campaign featuring chimpanzees in hats reading the magazine. That two consecutive Super Bowls have gone by without a major ad campaign featuring a chimpanzee is reason for optimism. Sometimes, success has to be measured in small increments.
Steve Ross is the supervisor of behavioral and cognitive research at the Lester Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes at the Lincoln Park Zoo.
You can see the original article here. ]]>http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/blog/index.php?entry=entry080722-1003012008-07-22T00:00:00Z2008-07-22T00:00:00ZThe Perils of Primate Pets For a summary of the ABC segment, click here.
First, primates are wild animals and will never be domesticated like cats and dogs. The process of domestication happens over many generations, not over the lifetime of one individual. A pet monkey will always be a wild animal, no matter how docile they appeared as an infant.
Second, while many monkeys are small and may appear “childlike,” they mature into adults in a few short years. Many people purchase monkeys as a sort of “child replacement” after their own children have left the house, assuming that the monkey will fill the space their children left, while being less responsibility than a human child. The rationale many give for purchasing a monkey instead of having a child is that 1) they do not have time for a human child or 2) they do not like that their own children grew up. Monkey children too require enormous amounts of time and grow up much faster than a human. Humans tend to carry their children with them for years. However, monkeys are often carried by their monkey mothers for about one year. After which they are able to move around on their own and are resistant to unwanted attention. In reviewing video clips of the ABC segment, the monkeys were often trying to pull away and biting at their human mother to escape. Being constantly held or contained is foreign to a wild monkey, even one that is raised in a human home.
A further complication in the monkey life span is that monkeys, particularly males, can become quite aggressive after reaching sexual maturity, something many owners have discovered after being attacked by their pet. This aggression is a natural behavior and a further reason why monkeys, and any other wild animal, do not make good pets. It is dangerous both to the monkey and the humans around them. Click here to see some rather graphic pictures of what can happen when pet monkeys are aggressive toward their owners.
In every species, one of the sexes leaves the social group in which they were born after reaching sexual maturity. It is no surprise then, when an adult male capuchin turns on its human family, as their natural instinct is to leave the group. And while they are smaller than a human, monkeys are much faster and capable of inflicting serious harm with their nails and teeth. Many monkey owners who have experienced the pain of this natural aggression have resorted to extreme measures to keep their monkey as a pet. They remove all of the monkey’s teeth and possibly even the nails. This is one of the most disturbing realities of private monkey ownership. It is ludicrous to claim that a monkey is a surrogate child while removing its teeth and nails. This would never be allowed in a human child, so why for a surrogate monkey child? While you may be protecting yourself, ask yourself why you need protecting. Biting is a very natural monkey behavior, something that they regularly do to others in their group, even their own mother, as a way to express disapproval or assert their dominance.
Third, people need to be aware of how monkeys are brought into the pet trade industry. If they are bred in the US, the mothers are darted (sedated) and the infant ripped off to be sold as a pet. We are well aware of the deep and long lasting psychological damage that is inflicted upon orphaned human children and the results are similar in non-human primates. One can only imagine what the result would be if not only removed from their mother, but from all contact with their own species. In order to develop normally, a monkey must have contact with members of their species and ideally their mother. Infants who are removed from their social group early often develop abnormal behaviors, such as rocking and may even inflict harm to themselves (self-injurious behavior).
A capuchin whose teeth have been removed by its owner.
The situation is even worse when monkeys are imported from countries where they are indigenous. Pet traders will go into a forest to get baby monkeys. The mother and any others who attempt to interfere, are often killed when removing a dependent infant. One of our graduate students, Colleen Gault, is currently in Costa Rica studying groups of white-faced capuchins. Over the past 4 years they have lost several mother-offspring pairs. While they have not directly witnessed the poaching of these individuals, no other adults have disappeared during that time, making the particular disappearance of females with dependent offspring quite suspect. For every infant that is brought into the pet trade, the mother and others in the group likely lost their lives in the process. In addition, not every infant survives, so for all that do make it to sale, several other individuals have died. For those studying monkeys in their natural environment, it is upsetting to spend years following individuals, putting together life histories, only to have their animals’ lives end at the hands of a poacher because someone thought it would be cute to have a baby monkey. And while it is illegal to import primates into the United States, the demand for them as pets continues to promote the capture of primates in the wild.
Lastly, there are not enough sanctuaries equipped to take in all of the privately owned monkeys that are eventually given up by their human family when they realize they can no longer care for them. Most of the sanctuaries that take in pet primates are at full capacity and have waiting lists. With the average lifespan of a monkey being 30 years, very few on the waiting list will ever get in. Who knows what the families will resort to if they are already at the point of surrendering their animal, but unable to find a place to retire them to. Often the animal is confined to a cage and given little attention, and is essentially abandoned, resulting in long-term psychological damage. Unfortunately, students interested in primate behavior are unable to study the primates at these sanctuaries because there is very little normal behavior exhibited by the monkeys after being raised in isolation from members of their own species. It is nearly impossible to rehabilitate these individuals to living with other monkeys after being deprived of appropriate social models. This also puts enormous strain on the people who work at these sanctuaries as they are not dealing with normal primates, but ones who are suffering from years of abuse and isolation.
While we primarily focused on monkeys, the pet trade industry is a serious problem for all primates, including the great apes, such as chimpanzees and gorillas. The trauma and suffering described above is true for all primate species, and the apes can live twice as long as monkeys, up to 60 years. At least 1 in 4 of the 625 species of primates are endangered and are on the verge of extinction. A list of the 25 most critically endangered primates can be found here: http://www.save-the-primates.org.au/fac ... s-list.htm Unfortunately, many of the species listed are found in people’s homes and in the entertainment industry, having been purchased and imported illegally, causing irreversible damage to these dwindling populations. The bushmeat trade also contributes to the pet trade industry because many infants are left orphaned and then sold at local markets as pets.
Again, the members of the Living Links Center do not condone private ownership of primates and this list only touches on a few reasons why this is the case. Primates are indeed amazing creatures, but we should do everything we can to preserve them in the wild, and keep them out of private homes.
A capuchin in its natural habitat.
For more information on the pet trade industry and the bushmeat trade, please see:
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