www.UsHumans.net: Chapter 8
Primate social systems, and the origins of our emotions, morals, and language
Primates are a subcategory of mammals that include monkeys and apes. There are hundreds of monkey species but only a handful of ape species, consisting of humans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. In the previous chapters we found that mammals are distinguished from other animals by their parenting behaviors. In most ways, the daily behavior of primates consists of the same activities as all other mammals: feeding, play, communication, relations with others of the same group and of other groups of the same species, defense against predators, reproduction, and child rearing and training. In this chapter, we will see that primates differ from the other mammals in that they form more complex social systems and that these are based on the extended family. Rather than a dominance hierarchy of individuals, primate society consists of a dominance hierarchy of families.
Primates and their social groups are unique in that each individual recognizes the other members of its extended family. We recognize our brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents and such. Other mammals do not do this. Of all the members of the community, we cooperate first with our extended family members. Our family relations form a large part of what it is to be human.
Notice also that as extended family relations began to occur, such a sizeable increase in social system complexity would occur simultaneously with an increase in intelligence. It takes added intelligence to recognize and track not only your own extended family but also who is related to whom throughout your group. The two largest differences between primates and the other mammals are their cooperating, extended families and their increased intelligence. The increased intelligence of primates is seen in many of their daily behaviors.
Primates simultaneously developed a complex social system and the emotions, behaviors, and morals to produce that social system. Being a social species means that we feel a strong urge to live in groups of individuals who participate in a mutually beneficial exchange of assistance; we exchange assistance in any way that benefits both of the participating individuals or families. A social species and this "Golden Rule" occur together, that is, neither occurs without the other. It is no accident that this remains to be the central issue in today's religions.
In daily practice, being a social species means that we exchange help on any task deemed larger than can be accomplished by one individual alone. In Chapter 15, we'll see how individuals and families within farming communities exchange daily assistance in any task that requires the efforts of more than a single individual or family. Our social system is this exchange of help, whether it is watching for predators, cooperating as an extended family to obtain the best mating opportunities, the gathering of several families to harvest a crop, or the pooling of efforts to build civilization. In today's big cities, we still innately exchange assistance in any way in which we see it is needed. Not only does the social system include this exchange, it is this exchange.
In this chapter we also ask "Where did our emotions and morals come from?" We sometimes find it difficult to look inside ourselves and discern the fundamental purpose of our emotions and behaviors and to see which of them are more fundamental. Our morals and emotions are important elements of what it is to be human. We have gained crucial clues to the answers to these questions from the recent scientific studies that will be described in this chapter.
As you read this chapter try to decide whether our social system, emotions, morals, ethics, and language are innate features of our biological heritage or whether they are learned behaviors that we invented long ago and have been passing on to each new generation. Scientists debate whether genes or learning plays the largest role in the development of each of our behaviors. It is difficult to know for certain which behaviors are innate and which are learned.
We are often surprised at the things that have been found to be purely learned behaviors. For example, we have found that cats do not know that they are "supposed" to eat mice unless they are taught to do so by their mothers. As important as reproduction is to the continued existence of our species, it is surprising to learn that people do not know how sexual intercourse is done until another person tells them; this is not innate knowledge. A newborn mammal is genetically programmed to assume that the first thing it sees will be its mother. This is usually the case out in the wilderness but scientists have found that in the lab the newborn will take up just about anything as its mother. Which of your own behaviors are learned and which are innate? Do we learn to smile, have tempers, play, or hunt? When and why did we begin to be able to speak?
It is difficult to imagine what our lives would be like if we couldn't verbally communicate with other persons. Its also hard to imagine not having our inner-voice constantly speaking within our own head. I imagine that words are actually redundant afterthoughts to an original thought. We all pull our hand back from a hot object without first holding an internal conversation about it with ourselves. When we feel thirsty, we will drink whether or not were able to say the word to express the feeling to others. Actions follow feelings, emotions, and thought processes without having any internal verbal conversation–even for dogs and cats. One could actually live his or her entire life without this level of communication. We could learn by watching our parents, we could fall in love, chose a spouse, and in turn teach our own children how to live–all without words. In fact, we lived for millions of years without today's level of verbal communication, as other animals still do.
Today we experience a complex feeling and then search from a list of words others have used when expressing what we think likely had been a similar feeling for them–for example, being exhilarated, feeling dread, or anxiousness. (How many emotional states have we named? ) We are able to communicate these states because we share a common human nature, but words are not needed to generate or to experience our feelings–or to make plans or carry out actions. We are adept at noticing what others are doing or feeling–and what they are saying while they are doing or feeling it. The same sort of thing is occurring when we “notice” that a group of persons uses a particular fashion to say "I'm one of that group."
Our use of language is an important part of our lives. Is our use of language built on prior innate communication abilities of primates? Of mammals? Do chimpanzees have any ability to communicate with others? The scientific studies involving the language abilities of apes give important clues to our own nature that we could not obtain in any other manner. As it has been said, if there were no other apes to study, we would have been limited to simply sitting in our arm chairs trying to deduce logically how it is that we came to acquire language but sea-lions did not.
Some indications of our close relationship to the other primates include the following. There are striking similarities between us humans and our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. For example, the head of a chimpanzee infant has much the same shape as that of a human infant (this can be seen in a video clip at www.arkive.org/species/GES/mammals/Pan_paniscus/Pan_paniscus_09b.html?movietype=rpMed). When you see a group of primates interacting socially, do you see any similarities to the social interactions of a group of humans–for example, of parents supervising children playing in a park? In Carl Sagan's book The Dragons of Eden, he states that a monkey's two worst fears are snakes and falling from a tree and that we humans today show our primate ancestry by having these same nightmares. In Consilience The Unity of Knowledge Edward O. Wilson explains our genetically based fear of snakes and our cultural elaborations of this fear.
Do you feel that we show an ancient and basic attachment to trees when we say “That tree has character in the way its thick, central branches spread into more curvy branches” or in our commonly held respect and awe of trees. Trees comprise an important element of traditional religions–more so than do bushes and other items not of interest to primates. Which does a deer prefer, trees or bushes? Which do primates prefer? The shape of the Bodhi tree seems to appeal to many of us (under one of which sat Buddha). Fresh water springs are similarly regarded–and were also very important to our biological ancestors. Do such appeals exist because of our primate and animal nature? Why do we like waterfalls? Do these things evoke within us today the same feelings as they did in our ancestors a few million years ago?
The beginning of this chapter contains a summary of the ideas presented in Primate behavior: information, social knowledge, and the evolution of culture, by Diane Quiatt and Vernon Reynolds. For the remainder of the details you should read their entire book. The comparison between chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans is a summary of Bonobo, the Forgotten Ape by Frans De Waal and Frans Lanting. The origins of our behaviors are described in Good Natured, the Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, also by Frans De Waal. If you want to know about the core of our being, this is the very next book you should read. I give a limited summary of his ideas here. This chapter also contains summaries of two important books about the origins of our emotions and our language: Why We Feel, The Science of Human Emotions by Victor S Johnston; and Kanzi, The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind, by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Roger Lewin.
Social system of nonprimate mammals
Some mammals live their lives as lone individuals and do not have daily contact with other members of their species. When several members of a species live together in a group there is some sort of social system. The members may work together to notice or to ward off predators and to find food.
For many mammals, the social system often consists of a dominance hierarchy. The group is headed by the most dominant individual–the pack leader or so-called alpha individual. Within the group, each pair of individuals form a mutual agreement about who will have priority access to food and potential mates and such. This agreement begins during their adolescent encounters and continues to mature as they mature. The agreement determines which individual will back down during future encounters. This is not a static arrangement because the hierarchical rankings do shift through time and conditions of health.
The hierarchy serves to reduce conflict among group members. This is a better solution than having each encounter result in a fight to the death because there would soon be only one individual of the species left alive and the species would disappear from the earth. When the members of a species do not fight to the death then those members are more likely to live long enough to have children.
The group consists of numerous individuals. We might choose to identify these members by numbering them according to their ranking in the dominance hierarchy. For the case of a group of one-hundred individuals, they can be hierarchically numbered from one to one hundred. The meaning of the numbering system is that individual number five always acts dominant to individuals six through one hundred and always acts submissive to individuals one through four. When a pair of individuals approaches an item of mutual interest, such as food, then the higher ranking individual takes the item and the other moves on.
The group also consists of several families. The most dominant individual, who is the group’s alpha member, might be a member of family A while the next three most-dominant individuals might be members of families B, C, and D. The group members interact as pairs of individuals and do not cooperate as members of particular families.
The social system of primates is much more complicated; this difference gives us an important clue about our own nature. Primates differ from other mammals in that they live in social groups based on the extended family. Within a group of primates, each individual recognizes the other members of its extended family and the entire extended family cooperates as a unit. Primate individuals also recognize the extended family of every other individual within the group. We recognize and assist our brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, and grandparents and such. Our family relations form a large part of being a human. Primate individuals know the members of their extended family: other mammals do not. Primate social systems are the most complex because there is extensive cooperation among related individuals.
In a primate social system, the group is not lead by a single individual, the "pack leader" at the top of the dominance hierarchy, but is instead lead by the members of the dominant extended family. This means that the members of one family are dominant to the members of all other families. Even adults back down to youngsters of the dominant family.
The social system of the macaque monkeys can be used as an illustrative example of a primate system. See www.arkive.org/species/GES/mammals/Macaca_sinica/more_moving_images.html for videos. A group of macaque monkeys consists of a number of families who live together. The female members of an extended family include aunts, cousins, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters. As the male members of the group reach the age of sexual maturity they migrate to other neighboring groups. This means that the non-infant male members of a group are strangers; they are not brothers, uncles, or grandfathers. The female members are related to a number of the other females, and these related females help each other. There is a mutually beneficial exchange of assistance among the related females in obtaining the best mating opportunities and in obtaining access to the best food areas and such.
The group consists of many such female families but one family has dominance over all others. That is, all of the aunts, cousins, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters of one family are dominant to all of the other females. Through the years, this dominance will shift from one family to another. The dominant group is the one with the largest number of healthy, mature females of childbearing age. A mature non dominant female will back down to all of the members of the dominant family, even to the youngsters. For example, a ten-year-old non-dominant female will move away from a food source when a two-year-old member of the dominant family approaches.
These groups of related and cooperating females are called matrilineages in humans and matrilines in other primates. These are mutually beneficial help-alliances. In some primate societies, females emigrate upon reaching sexual maturity. In this case the males may form cooperating patrilines but these have never been found to be ranked by dominance.
The dominance hierarchy of primate families does not mean there is no cooperation among unrelated individuals. It means individuals will not fight over certain things that are of mutual interest. For example, all group members cooperate in finding food sources but once it is found the dominance hierarchy determines who gets to eat first. (Primates generally look for food as a group because it is found in group-sized bundles.) As you might expect, there is more fighting among the members of a family than there is between members of different families. These fights always end in a reconciliation because the relationship is mutually valued. Both members know they are better off with each other's assistance and support than if they try to go it alone or acquire an enemy.
Some species, including seals and sea lions, linger together in large groups but have little social interaction. A true society has a fixed membership and well-defined personal relationships among all members. For most nonprimate mammals, two individuals interact to form relationships that in turn form the social system, which is a dominance hierarchy. For primates, it is often the reverse in that the social structure governs relationships and interactions between individuals. For example, two particular primate families might interact in a certain way one day but differently one month later because of shifts in the hierarchy.
Mammals recognize distinct individuals by sight, sound, and smell. Nonprimate mammals recognize single individuals only but primates also recognize extended family structures. Each individual monitors the behavior of all other individuals and also the behavior of each pair of individuals. For example, before a macaque individual challenges a particular female, it needs to know which others will or will not come to that female's assistance. Primates recognize the family relationships between every pair within the group. These relations between individuals and families results in a wider range of social behaviors than occurs in a simpler dominance hierarchy composed of individuals only.
Complex social systems promote bigger brains, sympathy, empathy, and self-awareness
For us humans today, to “know” a person is to be able to predict his or her behavior in various situations. Similarly, to “know” the relationship between a pair of individuals is to be able to predict their behavior in various situations. We are naturally adept at doing this. It is something we do effortlessly because our brains have evolved to perform this specific task. We don’t struggle with it as we do when memorizing numbers or trying to multiply them together.
Social knowledge–the prediction of the behavior of others–builds bigger brains. It takes memory, learning, and intelligence for an individual to know who is related to whom and to know how an individual and its relatives will behave as different situations arise. If an individual could not keep track of this information then there would be no extended family cooperation and no social system based on the extended family. As a social system becomes more complicated, an increase in brain capacity would simultaneously occur. Increasingly complex behavior and increasing intelligence enable and promote each other. The steadily increasing brain size of our primate ancestors may have begun as the primate social system took on this added complexity. Simply having a more complex social system both requires and exhibits a bigger brain. Language is similarly complicated. Its use simultaneously builds on and builds up larger brains.
Pinker points out that keeping track of the give and take between you and each of those other individuals also requires an additional increase in intelligence. An "intelligence arms race" may have occurred between members of the group who did not want to be socially outmaneuvered or taken advantage of by “our brainy little cohorts.” We are experts at detecting possible cases of having been socially swindled by another individual. Each of us makes sure that the interactions of our society continue to be mutually beneficial for the interacting individuals.
An individual compares the current behavioral situation with memories of past behaviors in an attempt to predict the outcome of the current situation. To predict the social behavior of other individuals, it helps to put yourself in their place, imagine what they are experiencing, and then decide what you would do if you were them. This is empathy. Such imaginings also promote self-awareness. (Humans also try to extrapolate our own behavior onto inanimate objects and even onto natural phenomenon: this is closely related to our oldest religions.)
Self-awareness is observed in chimpanzees and in the other apes: when chimps are placed in front of a mirror, it takes just a few minutes for them to figure out that they are seeing themselves. They then spend a while examining inside their mouths, the top of their head, and everywhere else they couldn't see before. Monkeys never figure out that they are seeing their own image–or they just don't behave as humans do as their own image is recognized. One can put a red dot on the forehead of an animal and then place that animal in front of a mirror. We then watch to see whether the animal touches the dot in the mirror or the dot on its own head. Touching the dot on its own forehead shows that the animal understands that it is seeing its own image in the mirror. A chimp will touch the dot on its own forehead. The members of every ape species have been found to touch their own forehead while the members of every monkey species instead touch the dot in the mirror. (My younger brother tried to eat the red dot on his forehead but found he couldn't reach his forehead with his mouth no matter how fast he moved.)
The Biami people of Papua New Guinea had no natural materials, not even a lake, to use as a mirror. When an anthropologist first gave mirrors to them, the Biami were shocked and surprised to see their own images because they had never seen them. The then used the mirrors to examine the inside of their mouth and the top of their head and such.
We have the ability today to make and use tools. What does this ability say about the development of larger brains? Our stone tools were used to obtain food in the form of animal meat. Lions and wolves and such catch food by chasing it and then grabbing it with their own teeth. We use wits and tools. (We saw above that Homo habilis was our first ancestor to do this.)
Were our ancestors evolutionarily selected for their ability to make tools? Pinker points out that whenever a specific ability is needed and is selected for through the generations, the resulting animal will have an ability to do that one task but no others. He says that the specific ability to create stone tools is an unlikely target of natural selection.
Reasoning allows us to create tools. Our ability for general reasoning existed before we began obtaining food through reasoning. What is reasoning and how do our brains do it? You might like to read the books by Greenfield and Pinker for more clues. Is there any difference between social reasoning and the reasoning used in parenting, creating stone-tools, food collecting, predator avoidance, and modern engineering?
The use of stone tools to obtain an animal's meat, against its wishes, does not mean a whole lot to those of us who live in the big city. Many of us have never even seen a wild animal, much less tried to kill one using stone tools. A couple million years ago, our ancestors began to do this. A description of the hunting tactics of today's gatherer-hunters will help illustrate the difference in intelligence needed for the tactics of humans compared with those of lions and wolves and such. (I have heard a rumor that Alaskan bears will notice a person's repetitive schedule of returning home at the same time each day and may actually wait to ambush that person at that time.)
The next paragraphs illustrate the sort of tasks our brains handle. This is important. To get clues to our own nature, we want to notice those things our brains are made to do. We know our brain is made to do a particular task if we find that task is done effortlessly. To gauge the differences between us humans and another species, you might gauge the ease with which that species does these tasks.
How do humans go about hunting for food? In The wizard of the upper Amazon, F. Bruce Lamb gives some examples of how hunters in the Amazonian forest use their intelligence to harvest animals from a region. In his book he recalls the months he spent as a boy among the Amahuaca people during the early 1900s. The Amahuaca are a group of fifty to one hundred persons who live in a single village. Each family is allotted hunting, gathering, and farming areas around the village.
Before leaving camp to pursue a specific animal, hunters mask their own odors by rubbing their bodies with some roots; when hunting a specific animal, they cover their bodies with the scent of that animal. Next they do a dance, consume a potion, and then off they go. The hunter does not wander aimlessly in search of animals but instead harvests animals from the neighborhood. The hunter knows the sounds, footprints, activities, nesting habits, and favorite foods of each species of local animals he wants to eat. The hunter knows that if the leader of certain animal packs is stabbed or darted then there will be a few moments of confusion, giving time to shoot more. After spotting a monkey band in a distant tree top, the hunter will make the sound of a fallen baby monkey. This may bring the monkey troop close enough to be able to dart one. The hunter also knows to be aware of the seasonal condition of the monkey troop's favorite fruit trees and will wait near a just-ripening fruit tree for the arrival of the monkeys. Since jaguars are known to eat a certain bird, the hunter will sometimes attract a jaguar by making the sound of that bird. Fawns like to hide in a particular type of bush. When hunters see tracks around one of these bushes, they will wait nearby until the fawn returns. The hunter then shoots the fawn but leaves the mother unharmed so she can continue to produce more fawns in the future. Hunters also note the location of each hunted animal's favorite food source. Whenever they then hear a certain animal they want to catch, the hunters have only to walk toward that animal’s nearest food source. Similarly, the hunter will notice the favorite tree-stump of a local owl.
Upon return to the village, hunters discuss the amount of game and collectible food, any animal gathering or nest sites, the movements of the local bands of monkeys and of pigs, and any sightings of the neighboring peoples or strangers they've encountered. They then know which areas have more game and which have less. If one person is having bad luck at hunting or fishing, the others will examine and discuss that person's equipment and techniques. Youngsters are being trained as they listen to the daily discussions of hunting techniques and results and of animal tracks, behavior, and sounds. (It does not happen very often that these forest dwellers hear a sound that they cannot identify. An unidentifiable sound is assumed to come from a spirit.)
Similarly detailed knowledge is used in gathering edible plants from a region. The plant and animal contents within every footstep of the entire gathering and hunting area is mapped in this way. The food collectors do this for several hours per week throughout their lifetimes. Whenever you hear the word gatherer-hunter, you should think of the intelligence and the mass of knowledge of plants and of animal habits that the group uses in harvesting food along with the customs used to find, prepare, and to share that food. Those of us humans living as gatherer-hunters today make and use nets, hooks, rope, spears, and bowls and such and have complicated procedures to handle hundreds of daily needs. There are complicated procedures just to prepare otherwise inedible varieties of roots, nuts, and poisonous animals. (The next chapter contains a more-detailed look at the culture of another Amazonian group, the Kalapalo people.)
The techniques of the Amahuaca hunter illustrate what is meant by hunting with our brains rather than with our feet and teeth. Pinker explains that living by our wits in this way shows why so much intelligence was needed by our gatherer-hunter ancestors and what they were doing with it–even two million years ago. Plant and animal harvesting are tasks that our brains are made to do. The difference in food-getting techniques between humans and other animals tells us much about ourselves. We humans observe other animals and find exploitable behaviors. We also observe plant cycles. (The word-order in Ashley Montagu’s term gatherer-hunter refers to the fact that, for traditional peoples, the majority of food comes from gathering plants while hunting furnishes the lesser portion.)
Pinker wonders how complicated were the hunting tactics of each of our ancestral species–for example, afarensis–and how complicated were their tools that were not made of stone and so are not part of the archaeological record. As our tool-using, hominid ancestors first began to harvest (hunt) animals this way, they became further separated from the other ape species. Today’s chimpanzees are seen to cooperatively kill monkeys for food. This is done by having some group members drive a target monkey toward others waiting in ambush; lions employ a similar tactic. Is this a first step toward the more sophisticated animal harvesting technics of us humans?
How many days would it take for you to become very familiar with the plant and animal layout of your own neighborhood? It is a safe bet that you have already memorized the layouts of many streets and the aisle-by-aisle contents of many stores. Learning a layout is another of our effortless mental tasks. We have developed this ability because its need consistently existed through the generations and proved to be useful in the survival of our ancestors.
When we humans see animals, we naturally and effortlessly analyze their actions–we’ll say, “look at what that squirrel is doing.” Amahuaca hunters study mainly those aspects of animal behavior that enable them to be more skillful at animal harvesting, while modern biologists study every aspect of each animal–for example, its biochemistry. Today's city dwellers don't know much about animal behavior because they never see any animals. If hunters know little about the ways of their animal prey then they have little success at outwitting them.
The higher intelligence of primates results in some unusual daily behaviors not seen in other mammals. When introduced to them at an early age, apes have demonstrated the ability to distinguish shapes and colors, and spoken sounds, too. Monkeys are also able visually to distinguish shapes. Primates understand that movies represent reality. For example, when shown a video tape depicting food being placed in a certain location within an adjacent room (they are already familiar with that other room) they will run right over to the filmed spot and obtain the food. They will also remember the one who did wrong toward themselves or their relatives and seek revenge even after much time has passed. They learn from the misfortunes of others: if one chimp had been shot by a person from a truck, the others will run away whenever they see that truck returning. Chimps also like to look where another is looking or pointing.
Scientists are cautious about attributing thoughts or reasoning to nonhuman animals because it isn't readily possible to "read their minds" in repeatable measurements. Animal actions are most often explained as simple "robotic reactions." Only the most clever scientists have concocted experiments involving animal behavior that have no other possible interpretation but that thinking is occurring in the studied animals.
Deception is a behavior that is meant to fool others and unquestionably shows that thinking is occurring, but it is hard to arrange in a repeatable experiment. Leading others away from food that they hadn't seen so that you can return to get it, is an example of deceptive behavior (our dog Rowdy does this to my younger brother). Other examples of deception include not looking at food so as not to alert others of its presence so that you can have it for yourself, pretending to be hurt to get another into trouble, or pretending that there is something nearby to be afraid of so that someone else drops their food, which you then grab. Primates display many behaviors that indicate they are acting intentionally. They get others into trouble, they deceive, and they predict the behavior of others.
Certain birds species are seen to deceptively lure predators away from their nests by pretending to have a broken wing. Predators follow the seemingly injured parent away from its nest. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh wonders if this behavior is genetically innate or if it was invented in the past and then taught to successive generations. This sort of deceptive behavior is not easily repeated in the lab and so is not often reported in scientific literature. Sue was once seen Matata, who is a bonobo living in her lab, place a bowl into the hands of a visitor and then begin screaming as if that person had taken it from her.
Consciousness, self-awareness, emotions, our senses, and our language are also large parts of what it is that makes us human. A certain level of consciousness, self-awareness, and language is sometimes taken as a criterion for humanness. Does self-awareness exist in other animals? Is it merely less pronounced than it is in us humans? Each comparison between us and other animals may indicate shared characteristics that simply differ in magnitude–as our common ancestry would produce. (We saw that all mammals share so much in common that humans and mice share 85% of their genetic makeup.) We are all familiar wit the difference in magnitudes of abilities for smell and speech in humans and dogs. A dog's sense of smell is one-million times more sensitive than ours, while we understand 10,000 times as many spoken words as does a dog. But it isn't the case that humans can't smell and that dog's can't communicate.
The social systems of common chimpanzees and Bonobos
We would like to know when and why our social system developed into its current form. It has been observed that the social system of each primate species is adapted to fit its own environment of food, predators, and climate. Our own social system formed on the drying East-African savanna yet we can see that it shares much with those of other primates. Our extended family and our monogamous parenting strategy form a large part of what it is to be human.
Today the African savanna is occupied by baboons, which are a monkey species. Are there any similarities between our ancestor's society and that of today's savanna baboons? The savanna baboons form a male-dominated and aggressive society. Males cooperate in hunting for meat but compete for control of the harem and have become twice the size of females.
We obtain important clues about the reasons our own social system has taken on its particular form by comparing it with those of other ape species–especially those of our two closest relatives, the common chimpanzee and the bonobo chimpanzee. (We'll refer to the common chimpanzees more-simply as "chimpanzees," and the bonobo chimpanzees as "bonobos.") Frans De Waal and Frans Lanting compare our social systems with these two apes in Bonobo, the Forgotten Ape. You might like to read their entire book to learn more of the details than are given in the following short summary. Listen to Frans de Waal give a talk about chimpanzee politics at www.itconversations.com/shows/detail231.html. See bonobo and chimpanzee photos at www.worldwildlife.org/apes/bonobo.cfm and www.worldwildlife.org/apes/chimpanzee.cfm. Visit www.arkive.org/species/GES/mammals/Pan_paniscus/more_moving_images.html for several bonobo clips and visit www.arkive.org/species/GES/mammals/Pan_troglodytes/more_moving_images.html for several video clips of common chimpanzees.
Sue Savage-Rumbaugh points out that when a person looks face-to-face into the eye of one of these apes it is clear that this is another rational being with a powerful personality as complicated as our own. This contact is an experience never forgotten. Genetic studies indicate that about six million years ago, a common ancestral animal type diverged into the three lines that would become chimpanzee, bonobo, and human. We also see that humans and chimpanzees share 98% of their genes. The pre-human line lived on the drying East African savannah while the pre-chimpanzee line continued to live in the forest.
For the last fifty years, many scientists have been studying, comparing, and testing ape behavior, their social systems, and the interactions of individual apes within their social systems. Scientists do this by observing apes in their natural settings and following them through their daily movements and activities. Scientists stand near the edge of a group of apes in the wild and observe their social interactions. They do this day after day. At first the apes would keep away from the scientists, but after they came to know that the scientists posed no threat they stopped running away and just went on with their daily activities. Scientists also observe these apes within large zoo groupings. It has been found that their social behavior in the zoo is much the same as their behavior in their own, natural setting. In a large number of ways, their behavior is also similar to our own.
During their lengthy observations, scientists become familiar with many individual animals and know which individuals are related to which of the others. Observations of the group of individuals are made for many years, and thousands of interactions between individuals are recorded. It would be like writing each of your minute-by-minute social interactions down in your daily dairy. The amount of data collected for each individual primate is enough to write complete biographies. It's easy to see that these measurements can go on for much of a scientist's lifetime. This is the reason that the results they present carry some weight. We can all ask endless questions about "isn't this behavior due to this or that" but their level of understanding is the result of more-thorough study and knowledge of individuals. Without that bulk of information it would be like a stranger's poor attempt to explain your friend's behavior in general terms without having complete understanding of her specific personality.
These studies tell us much about ourselves. One important finding has been that core aspects of our own society are seen in those of the other primates. The social life of each primate species includes differing levels of bonding, altruism, alliance formation, power struggles, disputes, and reconciliations. The society of each species has unique features due to their differing current and past environments of predators, food, and climate. When we come to understand why ape social systems differ from one species to another then we can begin to see what sort of factors might have occurred to make our own system different from each of these others.
These primate studies find many behaviors that are not all that unfamiliar to us. Infants suck their thumbs, and they merely have to hold out their hand to bring mom back to them. Youngsters are seen to pout, whimper, and yelp. If these tactics don't work they might try throwing a temper tantrum. Adults sometimes resort to a temper tantrum if another individual doesn't share food with them or after losing a fight. They laugh coarsely when another tickles their bellies or armpits. They hold out their hand to ask for food. Chimpanzees kiss. Bonobo chimpanzees rub their tongues together while they are kissing.
They use our own familiar facial expressions to communicate happiness, play, disappointment, frustration, or the desire for contact. They have a friendly smile and a fearful grin that shows lots of teeth, sort of the way Daffy Duck does it when he is in trouble. Young chimps like to make funny faces. Sometimes they will reach around the back of their head to pull open their cheek, while at other times they will suck in their cheeks or bulge their upper lip and shake their jaw rapidly.
A typical observation of an adolescent chimpanzee male might find him teasing an old and slow female by throwing dirt at her. She might not be able to grab him at that moment but later–even an hour later–she will catch him when he isn't looking and give him a return bite. He will then run to his aunt and act as if he didn't deserve this punishment. Next, he'll walk a wide circle around the previously teased female to get to her son so that he can play with him–while keeping a close eye on her movements. Soon the teaser and the teased have made up (reconciled) and are grooming each other. There is not much difference between the behavior of juvenile apes and that of our own children at the playground. They each will laugh and squabble and get their mothers involved. Visit www.arkive.org/species/GES/mammals/Pan_troglodytes for several video clips of chimpanzees.
Both bonobos and chimpanzees are found in African forests but bonobos live where these are thicker, with more plentiful food. The society of both bonobos and chimpanzees consist of 25 to 120 individuals who form a large community. The members of this large community separate into many smaller groups to search for food. For every social species, the size of a group must be large enough to provide protection from predators but small enough that there is enough food for all. Chimpanzee groups contain about six individuals while bonobo groups contain twenty–even more when lots of food is available. (Grazing herds of thousands of individuals have food everywhere, and it is equally accessible to all.)
A particular individual spends a little time first with one small group and then switches to another. That individual might choose to switch groups by the hour or by the day. Only mothers and dependent children remain together always as they form the core of society. An entire community of one hundred bonobos might nest together at night. Each individual forms a nest by pulling some leafy branches together up in a tree. An individual does not disturb others who are nesting. There are other neighboring communities but none of them mix by day or by night. As females reach puberty, they will leave their original community and move (emigrate) into a neighboring one to avoid inbreeding.
Before scientists could understand this arrangement of many groups within a community and of females emigrating to other neighboring communities, they had to know and track many individual chimpanzees for many years. All that was seen at first were hundreds of nearly identical looking chimpanzees within a region. Can you make any sense out of the collection of individual squirrels or birds in your neighborhood?
We next have a closer look at each of chimpanzee and bonobo society. The large differences between the two give us some idea of the possible range in social systems of closely related primate species. We want to see what these social systems can tell us about the social system of our early ancestors.
The males of chimpanzee society form a dominance hierarchy. The top or alpha male is the only one to mate with the females. Females raise their young with little assistance from the males whose only contribution is to occasionally play with the youngsters. When chimpanzees find food, it is shared by all members of the group, but the most dominant male gets the first portion. He then shares first with his male allies and next with the females who are currently in oestrus.
Chimpanzees are tool users. They are seen to prepare tool twigs by striping away leaves and then inserting them inside a termite nest. (You can view video clips of this tool-use at the ARKive Images of Life on Earth website, see www.arkive.org/species/GES/mammals/Pan_troglodytes/Pan_troglodytes_tr_08a.html, and at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/1006_041006_chimps.html.) As termites walk onto this twig, the chimp pulls it out so he or she can eat those termites. Chimps will also use a stick to reach things. They crack nuts with rocks and they teach this technique to their infants. Chimps use leaves as sponges to absorb water to drink from tree-holes. Certain zoo chimps use a pepper-half as a water scoop. Until a hundred years ago, we humans still knew to crack walnuts between flat rocks and to form leaves into drinking cups while at a stream. (These things are described in Gleanings From Long Ago by Ellen Mordecai and The Blessed Town, Ofxord, Georgia, at the Turn of the Century by Polly Stone Buck.)
Chimpanzees engage in elaborate power struggles. The key to becoming the alpha male is to form an alliance with one or two other males and then challenge the current leader. (Notice that this is done without the use of spoken language.) A male will challenge the alpha by dragging a stick or leafy branch, see www.arkive.org/species/GES/mammals/Pan_troglodytes/Pan_trogiodytes_sc_12a.html?movietype=rpMed. He will shake it, slap it against the ground, and drag it around while making lots of noise. The challenger gets his friends to join in while the alpha male is busy getting his own friends to join in. There will be screaming and barking and shifting alliances in a spectacle that might last thirty minutes. If the alpha continues to run away then the challenger will continue to make future attacks. It is not over until one assumes a submissive posture toward the other. Now that they agree on rank they will make up by hugging, kissing, and grooming, see www.arkive.org/species/GES/mammals/Pan_paniscus/Pan_paniscus_05.html?movietype=rpMed. If the challenger was successful then his behavior will change from aggression to tolerance. There can be internal competition and power politics, but there must also be unity in the community because the lives of each group member depends on the continued existence of the community. Also, as mentioned in Chapter 7, a new alpha male might kill infants so that their mothers will more-quickly return to oestrus. He will then impregnate these females with his own offspring. Females with new infants will avoid the group for a while to avoid this potential danger.
Chimpanzee males cooperate in hunting small monkeys. To catch their prey, some of the hunters drive a monkey group in a desired direction while others block them from taking escape routes. When a monkey is caught, the meat is divided between the participating males and the non hunting females. For a video, see www.arkive.org/species/GES/mammals/Pan_troglodytes/Pan_trogiodytes_sc_08d.htm=?movietype=rpMed. The males also cooperate in defending their territory against neighboring communities. The most cooperative species are seen to have the most formalized hierarchies.
There is a wide range in primate societies. Do you recognize any part of our own social system in that of the chimpanzees? Is their social system similar to that of our ancestors? The common chimpanzees and the bonobo chimpanzees are our two closest, biological relatives. The social systems of these two are similar in many ways but are also very different from each other. The bonobos and their social system are described next.
Many bonobo actions, such as those following, show thoughts similar to our own and may demonstrate empathy and sympathy. One bonobo surprised a bird and caught it. He then carried it to the top of a tree, held out its wings, and tossed it up to fly away. When one bonobo saw that an infant was thirsty, it filled its own mouth with water and then walked over to the infant to give it the water. Group members will help an old member get to another place. It is seen that bonobos treat a sleeping nest as a private space in that they never enter another's nest unless invited.
Bonobos easily walk upright, often while carrying food. (Is this why we initially did that?) For a video, visit www.arkive.org/species/GES/mammals/Pan_paniscus/Pan_paniscus_06a.html?movietype=rpMed. This has made their legs larger than their arms, like ours, and their backs straighter and more human-like. In contrast, chimpanzee arms and legs and more-equally sized because they are more-equally used.
Since the forest is much thicker where the bonobo live, they communicate more vocally than visually. Chimpanzees will call only to intimidate, when seriously alarmed, or when aroused by food, but bonobos vocalize constantly and for the slightest reason. They vocalize back and forth as rapidly as ping pong, in turn, and without interrupting each other. Bonobo voices are more highly pitched than are those of chimpanzees. The difference between chimpanzee and bonobo pitch is about the same as the difference between those of a man and a boy. In the attempts of scientists to teach human language to various species, Bonobos have done the best in listening to our voice and learning to use language; Kanzi is a bonobo whom we will meet in the discussion of language below. Visit www.arkive.org/species/GES/mammals/Pan_paniscus for video clips of bonobos.
In most every animal species, males are larger than females. Competing males often have horns, tusks, or fangs. Females usually do not have these things at all or have more-reduced versions. Males sometimes rudely take advantage of their larger size by pushing females away from food and such. The only mammal species not having a system of male dominance are lemurs, spotted hyenas, and bonobos. Which is the dominant sex in human societies? Is it the same in every human society around the world and throughout history?
Bonobo society is female-centered, with smaller females dominating males. When bonobos find food, females share it first as they cement their relationships. When a chimpanzee female is placed with a male bonobo in a zoo, she quickly learns that she can try to dominate him; but she knows not to try this with a chimpanzee male. (We too learn very quickly what each and every individual will or will not allow during our interactions, and we customize our behavior with each individual.)
Bonobo males do compete over status but lack any formalized ritual of dominance and submission. Every group member knows for certain which male is the alpha but the other positions are more vague. An aggressive encounter between two bonobo males isn't at all like the lengthy and noisy spectacles of chimpanzees. These encounters end as the two make up, which they do by rubbing their scrotums together for about fifteen seconds. Male alliance formation is barely visible. Bonobos have no hunting parties so the males do not have this reason to bond. A new alpha takes over with the help of his mother. During the contest, the most critical confrontation is not between the two males but between their mothers. Sons of healthy females go far in bonobo society while orphans and sons of weak mothers do not. Females form bonds and alliances to control the alpha male; in bonobo society, males rule the world but females rule the males. (This is often said of our own society.)
Bonobo females, like chimpanzee females, emigrate to another community when they reach puberty. Since the adult females within a group have immigrated from another community, they are not related to each other. In chimpanzee society, it is the males who form bonds, while in bonobos it is the females who do so. The food abundance allows females to more easily associate and to form bonds. There is no highest ranking female but the oldest are usually more influential. The females of lowest status are those who have recently immigrated from another community; they try to keep a low profile.
Bonobos substitute sex for aggression; it is the glue of their society. In other species, sexual behavior is a distinct part of life, but for bonobos the two are indistinguishable. Social greeting, bonding, food sharing, and making-up is done by having sex for about fifteen seconds. On the average, sex is initiated about once every ninety minutes, even between members of the extended family. They copulate face to face, or front to back, and in any other way that is gymnastically possible. They masturbate themselves and each other and have oral sex. For more about this, visit http://songweaver.com/info/bonobos.html.
Despite the absence of stable mate bonds, bonobos share with us an extended sexual receptivity. In most animal species, females are in oestrus and ready for sexual intercourse for just a few days per year. Bonobo females are ready for sex during 50% of their entire adult life. Their extended receptivity, and by a larger number of females at the same time, reduces male competitiveness because one male cannot simultaneously guard half the group's adult females. Since bonobo females mate with every male there is no harem for the males to compete over–and no infanticide. As a new alpha male takes over the group, there is no infanticide because the new alpha is as likely to be the father of the group's infants as is any other male in the community. He cannot kill his own children. This would violate the procreation principle of evolution.
Bonobos are sensitive, lively, gentle, nervous, and are rarely violent. Chimpanzees are coarse, hot tempered, and are often violent. They also want to be more independent, while bonobos want to sit together and coordinate activities. De Waal explains that chimpanzees “resolve sexual issues with power" in that the alpha is the only male to have sex. In contrast, bonobos "resolve power issues with sex" in that the use of sex in every aspect of society has drastically reduced aggressive conflicts. Do you see anything familiar in your own society to that of either the chimpanzees or the bonobos? Visit www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/07/3/l_073_03.html for a video comparison of bonobos and chimpanzees. It explains the affects of food-packet size on the social behavior of the two types.
Frans De Waal also describes Karen Strier's studies of the muriquis monkeys in Brazil. For video clips, visit www.arkive.org/species/GES/mammals/Brachyteles_arachnoides/more_moving_images.html. They are an endangered species of about five hundred individuals and are proving to be the most gentle of all primates. During 1,200 hours of observation, only nine aggressive chases were seen. There is no fighting over food because it is so abundant. There is an egalitarian relation between the sexes. Males do not fight physically over females because a female will have sex with each male in turn. Each male begins by attempting to remove the previous male's sperm from the female. The testicles of the males have become enlarged through time in their attempt to deliver the largest amount of sperm to the female because the male who supplies the most sperm will likely be the one who impregnates her with his offspring. For this species, nature has reduced physical aggression and replaced it with a contest of sperm quantities. Males do not fight. Instead they spend much time together, often embracing in a group.
What do these primate social systems tell us about ourselves?
Primates have an innate urge to form social systems: we humans cannot live without social interaction. While every primate social system contains much in common, different aspects are emphasized by each species. Experiments have found flexibility in the social system form taken by each particular species; it is not solely determined by genetics. The experiments involved moving an infant from its natural social system and placing it into that of another species. The studies found that the infant's social characteristics moved toward those of the new species after they had been placed with them. For example, scientists mixed some two-year-old rhesus, see www.arkive.org/species/GES/mammals/Macaca_mulatta/more_moving_images.html, monkeys within a larger group of 2.5-year-old stump-tailed macaque monkeys. The rhesus monkeys have a more-strict dominance hierarchy and so have a lower rate of reconciliation (making-up) after fighting than do the macaques. When they were first placed together, the smaller group of rhesus expected the macaques to act like them but within a few months the rhesus monkeys had acquired the new rules and were reconciling at the same rate as the macaques. We too act differently in different groups.
Our recent understandings of the social systems of other primates have given us profound insight into that of our own. These studies reveal the sorts of variables that can affect the social system of different species. This gives us some ideas of what things may have played determining roles in the formation of the social system of our early ancestors. These studies also help us to know the potential flexibility of our own society. The social systems of apes and monkeys share much in common but also show great flexibility in adapting to the environment of each species.
The most unique aspect of the human social system is our monogamous parenting relationship. Our nuclear family includes the full-time presence of the father. Both parents contribute in raising offspring. For all other ape species, child-rearing is done by females. The sole contribution by the males is to play with them occasionally and to protect them. Our monogamous parenting strategy makes for less male competition over females than seen in chimpanzees. We also saw that chimpanzee males bond but females don't, while bonobos do just the opposite. In humans, males do bond and become friends with other males, and females do bond and become friends with other females.
As was mentioned earlier, the African rift raised mountains and altered the regional climate. During this process, the eastern landscape slowly changed from forest to savanna. This rift separated Africa into wetter-western and drier-eastern climates. Changes in the environment always leads to changes in the species. The social system of our human ancestors adapted to make them better matched to the developing savanna environment. Before the rift developed in Africa, the region had more ape species than monkey species. The rift lead to the demise of most of the African apes so that today, just three types remain. But the rift also lead to the line of apes that would become human. The human line developed in the drying east.
Neither bonobos nor chimpanzees are well suited to a savanna environment. Bonobos have the most abundantly available food and this leaves them little to fight over–except for the careers of each mother's son. Bonobo society would likely change if they were forced to move onto savanna plains where food is less available. Savanna life would require greater travel distances to feed the same number of individuals, but apes are more subject to predation in these open areas. (Our own upright-walking may have developed as we were forced to travel between shrinking forest areas.) Bonobo males do not know who their children are and so are unlikely to be of much help protecting them in such a situation. How would their social system change to cope with these new needs? Would they form monogamous parenting relationships or would they find another solution?
Male chimpanzees compete for dominance, cooperate to hunt, engage in territorial defense together, and do not help to raise children. When they have to, chimpanzee females are able to forage on their own because food is available. Until their newborn children have aged, they avoid the rest of the chimpanzee pack and its threats of new-alpha infanticide. If these females suddenly had to move onto the savanna then they would need to be closer to the pack for the two activities of food collecting and predator protection. But this means that more children would be lost to new-alpha infanticide. How would their social system change to cope with these new needs?
Food is more widely scattered on the savanna than it is in the forest. We have ethnographic examples, such as the Nevada and Utah Paiute and the Western Shoshone, of large groups of people splitting into single families to search for widely-scattered food. (Visit http://historytogo.utah.gov/paiute.html for a description of those of us humans who are the Utah Paiute, and visit www.utemountainute.com for information about the Ute today.) What is the chance that we developed our monogamous parenting strategy as a food gathering technique on the drying East-African savanna?
Before our ancestors had to adapt to the developing savanna, was our social system anything like the bonobos or the chimps? Through the day, did we also switch from one food collecting group to another or had we already formed into bands of twenty to one-hundred related individuals? Females raising offspring without any help from males would have a much tougher time out on the plains. Increased male involvement is required. In our nuclear family, both males and females contribute in raising, feeding, and protecting children. We rarely have harems, and new leaders never practice infanticide.
Our big brains and slow maturation rate cause other differences between us and the other primates. For big-brained humans, pregnancy lasts as long as possible so that the baby's brain can develop as much as possible. The female pelvic area has changed such that the baby can be born with its brain as fully developed and as large as possible. However, this big-brained baby cannot be so large that it will harm its mother during birth. A nine-month pregnancy results in the best balance between these two requirements. No other animal has as much difficulty during childbirth as do we humans. Our babies emerge as late as possible but are still not fully developed.
Our babies are especially helpless while they are infants because their brains have not yet fully developed. We also have the most prolonged adolescence of any animal. If a male abandons his children, they are more likely to die. To stay with them, he needs to know that the infants are his own children. Because of our especially helpless children, it is beneficial to form nuclear families with monogamous parenting relations rather than having the more typical mammalian parenting system. An infant on the open savanna is more likely to survive when both parents nurture and care for it. We saw in Chapter 7 that only about 5% of mammal species form monogamous parenting relations. (Ethnographic studies have found that modern humans are not strictly monogamous in that some higher socially ranking persons might have multiple spouses.)
In Chapter 7 we also saw that most animal species copulate only a few times per year while humans do this a number of times each week, even though just a few children are produced in a lifetime. Few other animals have sexual intercourse as frequently as do we humans. This increased frequency of sexual intercourse between monogamous spouses must have resulted in an increased number of successfully raised children and it had to be advantageous for not one but both parents. Natural selection means being well-matched to your environment of predators, climate, and food so that you will live long enough to have children, and this is just as important for males as it is for females. Human sexuality produces both pleasure and love. Not only does it produce children, it also bonds mates. The lifelong, child-raising bond between husband and wife is sustained in part through sexual intercourse. The nuclear family, consisting of children and two parents, forms the basis of our world.
Matrilineages, patrilineages, and cross-cousin marriages
Anthropologists have lived with thousands of peoples, from gatherer-hunters to fishers to city-dwellers, all around the world and have recorded the ways of those peoples. Anthropologists refer to a people’s way of life as their “culture.” Culture consists of a people’s instructions on how to do everything in life and is taught to each generation of children. Each human is nearly identical genetically in that we share the same inherited genetic predispositions. For example, each of us feels an innate urge to form a primate social system and to acquire culture. From one person to another, and from one group to another, we differ only in the details of our personalties and culture. A person’s personality is partly genetic and much influenced by the sum of life experiences. The culture of a group of people is a sort of personality of that group of people as a whole. (Each nation and each corporation also have a personality.) There is much variation in the details of the societies and cultures of the peoples of the earth. Here are a few samples of this variation.
Many peoples form matrilineages, with dominance shifting between families. Each family tries to improve its status relative to the others. Marriages are arranged to insure that the line is preserved and that its position is improved relative to all others. (When Westerners hear of arranged marriages, they think that it makes no sense at all, but the "sense" is in the benefit to the families and to the lines.) Often it is only the first marriage that is arranged. When a divorce occurs, the two persons involved will often choose their next spouse for themselves. This is the way of the Kipsigis people who live in villages in the African savanna-woodlands and are farmers and cattle ranchers. Cattle, land, and cash are major preoccupations of their men. Parents arrange marriages and pay a bride-price in cattle.
Many peoples have adopted the system of cross-cousin marriage. In this system, a son marries the mother's brother's daughter. Of the resulting children, males marry the mother's brother's daughters while females marry the wife's brother's son, see www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/anthropology/tutor/marriage/xcuz.html. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement that keeps generating spouses and children for both lineages. The Yanomamo, see www.anth.ucsb.edu/projects/axfight/movie4.html, people are patrilineal and polygamous, with men dominating women. They practice cross-cousin marriage but bend the rules of classification of would-be spouses whenever they need to do so. Marriage is an inter-lineage institution, not just something between individuals. Often marriage partners are not exclusive mating partners; in fact, many children are not produced by spouses.
Human men seek the society's items of wealth so that they can obtain wives. For humans, social status is another form of wealth. Human men compete with wealth rather than physical combat. For many human societies, arranged marriages and cross-cousin marriage systems have replaced combat.
The extent of the relationship between related individuals varies from culture to culture, and each child learns these relationships. For example, the relationship between daughter and mother-in-law varies from there being very little interaction between the two persons to there being a near ownership of the daughter by the mother-in-law. Another example is that English people today use the word "uncle" to represent either the mother's brother or the father's brother; both types of uncles have similar relationships with the children of their brothers and sisters. The pastoral, patrilineal Nuer people believe the father's brother has rights and obligations while the mother's brother has little. The Matrilineal Trobrianders do just the opposite.
Our use of language forms a large part of what it is that makes us human. Scientists from a wide range of fields have gathered clues about the origin of our language and the way in which we acquire language as children. As infants, we learn language by carefully watching the things our family and group members are doing as they are speaking. We are tuned to the many contextual and gestural clues that accompany their words. When infants first hear spoken words, they are meaningless, funny sounds. We soon recognize that these sounds are broken into a series of individual packets, including letter-sounds, syllables, and words. Sounds are classified into vowels and consonants. Words are formed through a series of shifts between consonants and vowels. Humans produce both of these types of sounds while most animals produce only one type–for example, chimpanzees produce only vowels.
Human speech is produced by puffing air through our throat, nose, and mouth while placing our tongue and lips in various positions and shapes. We make quit a variety of sounds, from plugged-nose throat rumbles to the clack made by first sucking our tongue to the roof of our mouth and then pulling it away. Each group of persons has a language composed of a subset of the available range of human-producible sounds. The sounds used in the language of the Bushmen of South Africa includes that upper-roof clack while the language of many Pacific Islanders consists mostly of vowels and few consonants. We also communicate different word meanings by varying our tone as we produce a single sound. For example, low, medium, high, rising, and falling tones are used in Thai to give five different meanings to a single syllable. My friend Dat says for example that in Vietnamese, the word “da” has one spelling but means four different things–ice, to kick, skin, or the past tense of to do–depending on the spoken accent.
The next time you hear a foreign language being spoken, pay attention to the rate at which these sounds are produced by one person and comprehended by another. Listen to the sounds being used in that language. Are there any that are not being used in your own language? The set of sounds used to speak English is very similar to the set used to speak Lettish, which is the language of Latvia.
While infants, our ears are especially tuned to the nuances of spoken words. Adult ears are less discerning and so have trouble distinguishing and producing the sounds of a new language they are trying to learn, resulting in funny accents. A much smaller version of this same sort of thing occurs when you first hear several songs from a new type of music: they all sound the same until you learn to better distinguish one song from the next.
Infants notice that every time people separate they also utter a certain sound or series of sounds. English speaking people say “bye.” Every time a person receives an item or action from another person, he or she acknowledges it by uttering “thanks.” Notice that the particular sound does not matter: it could just as well be the sound made when you pull your sucked-in cheeks away from your teeth. The child notices that the event and the spoken sounds go hand in hand: the two always accompany each other. He or she equates the event and the spoken sounds. We learn to speak by watching what is happening while sounds are being produced. We look for correlations between actions and words or between words and items, such as “ball.” A growing child soon notices a few hundred such correlations. Our brains are made to do this. An adult having a 10,000-word vocabulary has noticed 10,000 such correlations. As adults speak, they will say the same word that they’ve heard others say in the same situation or to communicate the same emotion. For example, you may have noticed the distinction in situations in which people use the word “elated” rather than “happy” or “jubilant.” We use words to communicate states to others who have experienced those same states. We agree on the words used to express those states. (Can adults learn a foreign language by noticing the correlations between actions and spoken words, rather than by merely memorizing equivalent translations back to their first language? Is this the reason its best to learn a foreign language by moving to that foreign country and immersing yourself in it?) A child is soon able to communicate thoughts such as “reality is only a dream.”
To make some sounds, a person must coordinate the movement of as many as seventy-five different muscles. A child’s first sounds are indistinct, but they are soon clearly enunciated. Three-year-olds are seen to struggle with the muscle movements of lips and tongue necessary to produce each sound. During the first years of our life, we spend hundreds of hours practicing until we can speak effortlessly–no longer remembering how difficult it had been at first. Adults are no longer aware that they have consciously produced those seventy-five muscle movements; they take the production of speech for granted in the same way they take breathing for granted. Visit www.phon.ox.ac.uk/~jcoleman/peat.qt and www.phon.ox.ac.uk/~jcoleman/elgar.qt to see the way you move your tongue when speaking. Did you know you were doing that? Without seeing your speech-producing muscles, you learned how to move those muscles such that the previously agreed upon sounds of English, Farsi, or Swahili were made.
Notice that it similarly required hundreds of hours of practice to become proficient at most every other complex task you have mastered, including walking, dancing, catching, throwing, playing a board game, skiing, driving a car, performing arithmetic, managing your home, getting along with others, gauging the intent of others, raising children, and performing our own occupation. (Scientists measure the increase in neuronal connections that form as we repeatedly practice a new task.) Can you estimate how many hours you spent learning each of these chores? We are more naturally prepared for certain tasks, but one’s skill improves through time and with each attempt no matter the chore. To see the way in which you control the movement of your foot and leg bones while walking, watch Steve Collins and Andy Ruina’s robot walk at
In Primate behavior, Quiatt and Reynolds point out that our word-language is highly instilled because we have developed a hardwired circuit, our "inner-voice," that instantly and automatically produces the word to accompany the sight of every object–whether we want it to or not. (Our "inner-voice" is not the seat of our consciousness, or even an indication for our unique consciousness, it is simply a circuit that we cannot turn off.) Persons who are deaf at birth and learn sign language during childhood develop an inner-signer rather than an inner-voice.
The fact that we can equally well develop an inner-voice or an inner-signer provides a particularly revealing example of how our brains have only general abilities for tasks–not specific forms. We have an innate predisposition to learn and to use complex language but the exact form of that language is not preset within our genetic makeup. Our innate language ability enables us to learn to speak Farsi or to sign Italian. (We will similarly see that we have an innate predisposition to form complex culture, but the details of that culture are not genetically predetermined.) It has also been found that if, during childhood, we are not surrounded by other people and so do not have the opportunity to learn language by the age of ten or so, then we will never learn language. This is known because there have been a few cases of children who were discovered after having lived in isolation for most of their life. You might like to read Savage Girls and Wild Boys, A history of Feral Children by Michael Newton.
There are many languages around the world but only a small number of grammatical systems. (Visit www.ethnologue.com for information about today’s 7,000 languages. A list of the languages spoken in each nation is available at www.unesco.org/culture/worldreport/html_eng/stat2/table6.pdf.) Our systems of grammar differ, for example, in the order in which words are spoken; some peoples say "big tree" while others say "tree big." The grammar of all peoples, whether gatherer-hunter or big-city dweller, has been found to be equally complex.
Linguists have found that there are a handful of languages that have spread out to cover large regions of the globe. This has been deduced by comparing basic words from each existing language. It is seen that our most fundamental words, such as “hand” or “mother,” change very slowly. Indo-European is the ancient language that was the precursor to the current languages of both India and Europe. In India today, the word for “father” is “pater.” There are many basic, slowly-changing words in India and Europe that are related by interchanging the characters 'p' and 'f' in these two languages. Some linguists hope to deduce a collection of words from the first language spoken by humans. For more information about modern languages derived from Indo-European, visit http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test3materials/History_of_English.htm and www.utexas.edu/depts/classics/documents/PIE.html.
The migrations of people have carried languages around the planet and mixed them together. Migrations begin when the local population becomes too great, as occurs, for example, during the introduction or sudden improvement of farming. There are some languages, like that of the Basque people in Spain, that may not be derived from any of the languages known to have spread across regions of the planet. It may be that the Basque people have been in Spain for tens of thousands of years: they may be the direct descendants, and so is their language, of the prehistoric peoples who made cave paintings in that region. For more information about the Basque, visit www.allempires.com/empires/basque/basque.htm.
The bonobo chimpanzee Kanzi, who will be further-described below, has a language capacity that is similar to a human child. Kanzi understands a few hundred spoken words and understands that the meaning of words depends on the order in which they are spoken. In Apes, Men, and Language Eugene Linden describes how the chimpanzee Washoe learned sign language, and that the first time Washoe was given a radish she described its taste as "cry-hurt-fruit"–just as many of us would do. The language abilities of these world-famous chimpanzees may indicate that our human ability is not unique but is simply an enhancement of a previously-existing mental ability of animals to communicate. Even our pets understand a few spoken words.
Our ability to make spoken words is due to the changes in our anatomy involving the lowered position of our larynx. In our biological past, we became able to speak at the same time that the physical anatomy for speech developed. Scientists examine the size of the cavity produced by the Wernicle’s area in fossil skulls to get clues about the time at which this occurred. We also know that a human loses the ability to speak if the Broca or Wernicle areas of the brain (see www.tbts.org/assets/images/brainmap.gif) become damaged.
In the same way that the human ability for communication is an enhancement of previously-existing animal ability, I imagine that our self-awareness and consciousness levels are simply more enhanced than that of other animals. Consciousness is studied by many different scientific disciplines. There are thousands of books containing debates over questions like the following. Can you make a machine think? If you build a machine that senses its external environment and reacts to it, is it conscious? Are we nothing more than a machine that senses its environment and reacts to it? Is it our thoughts that make us more than a machine? Is there consciousness in each animal that has a lump of neurons? Visit http://suhep.phy.syr.edu/courses/modules/MM for more information.
The study of the language abilities of apes gives important clues about our own past language abilities. For example, visit www.koko.org. Some of these ape species may be extinct in a few decades. If these closely related apes had become extinct before these studies were made then these clues could not have been obtained in any other way. Instead of seeing another animal that is an ape very similar to ourselves, we would have been left trying to figure out why we are so different from giraffes and such.
Scientific studies of language ability in apes
The next few pages contain a summary of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Roger Lewin's Kanzi, the Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind. Sue and Roger explain that the central question for their research is the nature of the human mind. How did it arise, and how does its own construction affect itself? Is there continuity between our minds and those of other species, or is there a sharp break between our minds and theirs? These ape studies give us insight into the essence of our own humanity.
Sue's research team spends many hours per day with the bonobos–including those named Kanzi, Mutata, and Panbanisha–who live at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa, see www.iowagreatapes.org. The lab website includes video clips showing that Kanzi understands spoken English and makes tools and that Panbanisha writes lexigram symbols. You can take a virtual tour of the lab and read about the researchers. There are descriptions and videos of prosimians, monkeys, bonobos, chimpanzees, and orangutans and there is information about conservation.
Team members come to know the individual personalities of these apes as thoroughly as we come to know those of our good friends. The researchers see that Kanzi thinks about his actions and listens to the things people are saying about him. Kanzi and the other apes like to watch action shows on TV and pay close attention to themes of danger and of danger resolved. Austin and Sherman are two bonobos who Sue worked with at other labs. Austin likes to watch water being poured (in Chapter 2 we mentioned that this was a characteristic of a natural-born scientist).Both Sherman and Austin learned to use a joystick to play video games after seeing Sue do it just a few times. Those apes who are exposed to language while they are infants will easily learn to use a joystick while apes who were not require much more instruction before they can do this. Sue found that the apes she has raised from birth within a language-rich environment act more attentively and are more reflective than are other apes. This tells us something about the effects of learning language on the organization of an infant's developing brain. (Visit www.newhorizons.org/neuro/hhmi.htm for a discussion of the plasticity of the learning brain.) Sherman and Austin would pretend they were eating and sharing imaginary food. They would pretend to use strings to pull imaginary toys. Sherman and Austin would remind Sue of a promise she had made to them the day before, and they would correctly answer when she asked where they had left a toy yesterday. These actions indicate a sense of time, including past, present, and future.
An ape learns to recognize and to distinguish brightly colored shapes if it is repeatedly shown these shapes while it is an infant; adult apes will not learn to do this. Just as we humans are able to learn to talk only if taught as infants, apes learn to understand the words of our spoken language only if continually exposed to human speech as infants. Adult apes who have never heard human speech, perceive it to be nothing but noise. Sue says that the developmental period of an ape is as profound and plastic as is that of our own.
Kanzi learned to understand spoken language in the same way that a human does: while Kanzi was an infant, he listened to adults talk and watched to see what they were doing as they were talking. Kanzi learned to recognize a few hundred words of human spoken language. Sue found that as Kanzi was learning language, it helped to make facial expression to also communicate the meaning of her sentences (communicating with facial expressions is certainly older than communicating with spoken words).
We assume when a child uses a word it also knows what it means. However, when an ape uses a word many of us are skeptical and do not believe it understands the meaning of the words it is using. Some of us skeptics think of very complicated explanations for an animal's behavior rather than more-simply concluding that the animal is acting in the same way a human would do under the same circumstance. This is in opposition to the trusted principle of Occam's razor. (When my niece April was young she once used a pencil to make some marks on a paper and asked "Does it say something?" While we were undergraduates, my friend Hamid was once working on some mathematics when he turned and said "Look, its turning into something." I was not as skeptical of April and Hamid as were Sue's colleagues about the abilities of apes.)
For many years, skeptics dismissed the ape's apparent comprehension as mere imitation. Sue was even more critical of her own conclusions than were her skeptics. She extensively describes her own doubts and the facts which eventually convinced her it that the apes were doing more than just imitating people. For example, when two humans talk to each other we communicate not just with our spoken words but with many other signals. When skeptics see an ape do the same while communicating with another ape, or with one of the skeptics, this often convinces that skeptic that the ape really understands both sides of the conversation. We can distinguish a conversation between our self and another intelligent being from a one-sided conversation between our self and a mechanical machine that is merely imitating a two-way conversation.
Sue studied the acquisition of language by the chimpanzees, Sherman and Austin. She wanted to find out if she could tell them something that they did not already know. Sue's team uses colored symbols and shapes to represent words. These lexigrams are displayed on a large board and are moved around after each use so that it is known that the apes are looking for the right lexigram rather than a certain position on the board. A portion of the board can be seen at www.greatapetrust.org/images/language/lex01.jpg. To teach the chimps that a lexigram represents a specific object–a banana, for example–they will initially be given a banana while pointing to its lexigram. This is done repeatedly throughout a period of time while continually reducing the amount of banana given until the chimps no longer expect to receive bananas when they point to its lexigram. Sherman and Austin learned many lexigrams this way, and they knew the difference between naming an item and asking to eat one. By the way, Sue and her colleagues also used these colored symbols to communicate with their own infants long before they were able to speak, and many parents are beginning to use sign language to communicate with their one-year-old infants about their basic needs.
Sue's team would ask Sherman or Austin to do something with a specified object that was in a container of many items. If the team accidentally named an item that was not in the container the apes would let them know. Next, the team showed one ape what was in the container. This ape had to tell the other so that they would both be given some food to eat. Each ape understood that the other already knew what was in the container. They learned to share food this way. When only one could eat, he showed that he felt guilty for eating while the other could not.
Next, Sherman and Austin were placed in adjoining rooms separated by a window. Each could see which lexigram the other was pressing. They enjoyed lexigramming so much that they did it even when nobody asked them to and would tell the other about their intentions just before they went and did something. When new foods and new lexigrams were introduced, Sherman and Austin would agree on which lexigram to use to represent each new item.
In one set of experiments, Sherman's room was full of tools while Austin's contained food. Both got to eat when informing the other of something and then requesting something in return: they were cooperating. For example, the team would let Sherman see which object they had placed into a container and then give food to both chimps if he could tell Austin which object was in the container. The team might ask one chimp to request that the other bring a specified object or exchange one object for another. Their language competence first emerged when it became required for them to use it to obtain and share food. Sue wonders if our ancestor's ability for social communication enabled an increase in social food-getting.
Sherman sometimes confused key and syringe, which are both inserted, while Austin sometimes confused wrench and key, which are both turned. This makes Sue wonder if they are more often thinking in terms of verbs, while we are more often thinking in terms of nouns. For example, Sherman once accidentally asked for a key when he meant to ask for a wrench. When Austin handed him the mistakenly-requested key, Sherman looked at his own board and realized his mistake because the lexigram for "key" was lit up. Sherman then looked at Austin while tapping the wrench lexigram; this made Austin understood the mistake so that he then handed Sherman the wrench.
Next the scientists turned off the keyboard of one chimp and then let him watch the team place peanut-butter into a container. Instead of the keyboard, the team left many different labels from many different product containers in the room. Right away this chimp held up the peanut-butter jar label for the other to see, making up for the lack of the keyboard by instead using the label. The other chimp figured out what was meant and hit the peanut-butter lexigram on his own keyboard. The chimps demonstrated that they knew and recognized thirty different labels. Nobody had ever taught them that they could use manufacturer labels for communication.
Next they tested the ability of the chimps to categorize items as "food" or "tools." For example, Sherman would use a general lexigram for "glass" but never for his favorite glass. He instead used an unusual symbol that he had assigned to represent that favorite glass. Sherman and Austin could sort photos into people, animals, tools, food, and vehicles.
Just a few decades ago, bonobo chimpanzees were first discovered in the African forest. Bonobo chimpanzees are more adept at certain communication tasks than are the common chimpanzees. We saw above that, in the wild, bonobos live in thicker forest areas and have to use more vocal means of communication while the common chimpanzees communicate more visually. This may make bonobos more communicatively creative in general. Adult bonobos recognize human facial and body expressions but chimpanzees do not unless they have been raised by humans. Bonobos found ten different uses for their pail while chimpanzees used it only to make loud displays. Bonobos use hand-signals during communication–and during copulation, too. A bonobo will drag a branch on the ground to tell its group members that they should move in the indicated direction.
Sue and her team were trying to teach an adult bonobo, named Matata, to use lexigrams but were not being very successful. Matata's adopted infant son Kanzi was with her during these lessons and one day astounded Sue's team by just up and using the lexigrams. For example, he signed "give apple" and then went to the fridge to select an apple. Sue and her team accidentally discovered that apes learn to communicate in the same way as do human children–in a social context through interaction and expectation. We learn that words refer to things, events, and feelings. We learn the meaning of words when we see others react to it in a cause and effect way. We gain additional clues from gestures, glances, tones, knowledge of similar situations, facial expressions, lip and eye expressions, and actions. (My friend Mike says he reads people's meaning by looking at their eyes, while I listen to their tone.) Your child's one-word utterances are made to convey much more because of his or her gestures. Kanzi learned language socially, by listening and watching–just as we do it. This shows that our brain is not altogether different from Kanzi’s in understanding language and in communication. Sue then understood that Matata was simply too old to learn easily to communicate–just as humans can learn language only while being infants. Sue thought she had been pretty silly in her earlier research, trying to choose daily words for her apes to learn. As if we choose which words to teach to our own children and in which order.
Kanzi’s thinking was revealed in his daily actions. When Kanzi wanted to be carried in a certain direction, he would either point with his arms or turn Sue's head in that direction. To get an out-of-reach object, he would point to a person and then to that object. To ask for a jar to be opened, he would point to the jar with one hand and then make a spinning motion with his other hand. He would point at a nut with one hand and then make a hammering motion with this other hand. Kanzi would mention that it is raining outside and he once accurately described the hair of a visitor as a mushroom. Right after Mary Ann joined Sue's team of researchers, she took Kanzi for a walk and he tricked her into taking her to places in the forest where he had never before been allowed. He knew these places were off limits and knew also that Mary Ann did not know this.
Kanzi’s actions show his capacities to understand self, other, and sympathy. Kanzi once tried to take advantage of Sue's sympathy to get her to force his mother to let him nurse. We have seen that acts of sympathy happen only if an individual understands the pain of another. This means that you are "putting yourself in their place." This ability is an important requirement for animals to have social groups. The group's bond will increase as this ability increases. Kanzi would use the keyboard to form multi-word sentences. For example, he would tell one person to tickle another. The fact that he came up with this use for his keyboard without anyone showing it to him indicates that he has a real sense of self and of "other." Kanzi's language ability also indicates that he knows the difference between his state of mind and that of another individual. Why would he tell us something unless he thought we didn't already know it? We speak because we know that the knowledge state of the speaker and the listener are different.
Kanzi understands spoken works and is not limited to being told things through the keyboard. Sue now understands that this was made possible because Kanzi had been surrounded by humans and was listening to them speaking words since the day he was born. His developing brain learned to listen and to distinguish the individual sounds of our spoken words. To understand spoken words, the bonobo chimpanzee Kanzi does not have to look at the speaker's facial expressions as did the common chimpanzees. In fact, Sue can cover her head while she speaks and Kanzi still understands what she is saying to him. This can be seen in videos at http://www.greatapetrust.org/media/avclips.php.
Kanzi also listens in on conversations between other persons. Kanzi once communicated to a non-lexigramming ape to return Sue's keys. If one person asks another "Did you leave the lights on last night?" Kanzi will look at the light switch. The team found that they would have to spell-out the words they didn't want Kanzi to hear. This made Kanzi listen more-closely because he recognized this to be an attempt to conceal something from him–just as our children do.
The research team often used video recorders. Sherman and Austin always knew instantly whether they were seeing themselves live on a TV monitor or whether it was a recording that was being played back. They would simply stick out their tongue to see if their TV image would do the same. (My friend Paul laughs about walking past a darkened home and seeing a person in its window; he says he had to flap his arms to find out that it was his own reflection.) If they found that the image was a recording then they paid it little attention but would react in many ways to live cameras. Austin would take the live camera and point it down his throat to see what it looked like in there; he would even get a flashlight to help illuminate his wonder. Sherman always tried to look tough whenever he saw his own, live image. Kanzi used the live camera to observe his attempts to blowup balloons and to blow bubbles with bubble gum. Panbanisha admired her own image. When Sue placed the live monitor in front of a group of impaired students, she found that show-offs would stick out their tongue and that shy persons would look away. We saw above that individuals from every ape species know when they are seeing their own image in a mirror but monkeys do not. Sue found that monkeys would understand when the television image told them another individual was behind them but they never reacted as if they understood they were seeing their own lone image.
In seventeen months Kanzi learned 150 different, spoken words. If you carefully choose 150 words, including big, small, red, blue, green, near, far, hello, and goodbye, along with the names of a few objects and the numbers one through ten then you will be able to communicate everyday needs with another person. Kanzi always uses the English ordering of words, for example he would put the verb in front of the noun while communicating the idea "hide ball." If you asked Kanzi to throw a potato at the turtle he always understood the order of the words and never mistakenly threw the turtle at the potato. Did we invent syntax or is it somehow part of our brain's wiring? Would another ape invent the same syntax?
Kanzi understood sentences as complicated as "Kanzi, if you give Austin your monster-mask, I'll let you have some of his cereal." Sue would ask Kanzi to hand her a particular photo out of a set of thirty-five photos of different things. In 180 trials, Kanzi selected the right picture 95% of the time when asked with lexigrams and 93% of the time when asked in English. Kanzi was tested 660 times in seven months with complicated sentences, like "Get the ball that's in the group room," or "pour the milk on the cereal." Kanzi often forgot one of two items when asked something like, "Give Sue the hat and the potato." Lieberman postulated that in our biological past, our auditory ability to distinguish the sounds of spoken words would develop in step with the ability of our vocal tracts to make sounds, but Kanzi has shown a high ability to listen to spoken sounds even though he can't speak them.
Sue explains that many animals can make vowel but not consonant sounds. Our uniquely bent throat–due to our upright stance–allows us to block nose air and instead send it through our mouth in sudden bursts. (Our bent throat also makes us susceptible to choking.) To form words, we separate vowel sounds with consonant sounds. These consonant sounds could not have been made by our australopithecine ancestors but only by our fully upright hominid ancestors. Sue explains that it is likely that at this point in our past we simply invented language; it may not be a direct result of our brain's wiring. We continue to teach it to each new generation. Brain studies with infants have shown that object manipulation and language are located in the same regions of the brain until the age of two.
Nick Toth is an expert at making stone tools. He constructs them using the technics of our ancestors, using one rock to strike the top of another one. When striking in just the right way, he produces knife flakes from the bottom of the target rock as he hits its top. This is similar to the way in which bb-bullets form conically-shaped holes when they strike a window. A novice doesn't have much luck at just picking up a rock and making a stone tool because it is counterintuitive that flakes emerge from the bottom of the target rock.
In just two months, Nick taught Kanzi to strike rocks together to make flakes. Kanzi's lack of an opposable thumb makes these things more difficult for him than for Nick. After eighteen months of practice, neither Kanzi nor Sue could make rocks of as high a quality as are the ancient samples found in archaeological sites. Since Kanzi can make stone tools, why did Homo Habilis need twice the brain size as has Kanzi? Maybe it took a larger brain to know that the tool would be useful at a later moment. We have to come across the right type of rock to make these stone tools, and then we have to carry them with us for later use. Our Homo erectus ancestors were able to make Acheulean tools with just fifteen minutes of effort. They had an end result in mind as they were working, just as you have while doing a task. You may have seen your pet performing some activity that showed he or she had a specific, end result in mind. (Comparing the mental state of our ancestors–and of our pets, too–with our own during similar activities, allows us to have a tiny glimpse into their minds and abilities.)
Mammalian youngsters learn how to do each of life’s tasks by watching their parents do them. No spoken language is used while teaching and learning these things. The language abilities increased for our australopithecine through homo ancestors. Kanzi knows hundreds of words but learned to make stone tools mostly by just watching Nick. Which of our ancestors was the first to have names (nouns) for every plant and animal in its surroundings? As we have more things to name, our language ability will be expanding. What is the number of different nouns and verbs needed to teach children the techniques of gathering and hunting? How many are needed by the Amahuaca hunter, whose techniques were described above, to teach children how to wait near a fawn’s nesting place? How many are needed to teach children the techniques of home-building and of food preparation? Was the cultural fluorescence of Homo sapiens enabled or accompanied by the expansion of language to include thousands of words spoken with a sufficient grammar? (Pinker points out that the human brain likely changed a bit during this same time.) Just by watching others, by age fifteen or so, could we learn to perform all the techniques of daily life, including things as complicated as home building, weaving, and farming? We humans still have our innate, animal capacity to learn by watching. In fact, many of the things we learn, we learn most easily by simply watching. Of the several thousand things your parents taught you about your culture, from using spoons to operating vending machines and mail boxes (don’t forget to pull the flap down a second time to check that the mail disappeared), which could not have been learned without language? Our human teachers verbally expound on the details of techniques–in fact, you can not stop them from doing so–but just how much could we learn without any verbal discussion? At what point in our past cultural development, did language become necessary for further cultural expansion? Could we humans have crossed the ocean to inhabit Australia without having the use of language? No genetic mutation had to occur for us to begin farming, invent our city life, develop civilization, and fly to the moon; these things were done using our gatherer-hunter mind. But without language we cannot make plans for the community or discuss kinship structures or cause and effect relationships, such as the relation between sex, pregnancy, and birth. What is the main use of our language? Researchers find that two-thirds of our time is spent talking about other people. What is the number of words needed to describe the actions, interactions, and emotional states of people?
Can an animal reflect upon its actions without language? We have trouble imagining how we used to live without language. How does your one-year-old do it? Do you see your one-year-old in deep thought? Did such reflection begin only with language? Thought and the mental manipulation of the world take place without language. A lion could not plan the steps for its attack without mental manipulation of the world. Dancing, sculpting, music making, and athletics each require mental manipulation of the world without any language at all. In fact, many persons believe that words get in the way of these activities: in the lab, we measure this distraction as neuronal activity.
If we do these things using mental manipulation of the world without language then it may be that other animals can do the same. Language enhances thought processes but it is surely just an extension of existing facilities. Apes are seen not to merely react but to think also. Would a dog say that we can't hear or smell? Would a bat say that we can't see because we cannot echo-locate? Sue explains that to fail to try to understand the world from the point of view of the lion or the bat is to admit that the human existence is so limited that it cannot project itself satisfactorily into the minds of different creatures.
Testing and interpreting animal behavior and thought, and the continuity between other animals and humans
Sue points out that as we place an animal into a test-situation, we affect its knowledge and behavior; subsequent tests find the animal no longer the same as during that first test. This makes it impossible to recreate the former conditions. Animal behavior cannot be separated from the contexts in which they occur. Lab tests that are designed to measure animal behavior often end up merely testing our ability to hold their interest. Every organism with a complex nervous system is faced with the moment-by-moment question posed by life: "What shall I do next?" The world is different during each new moment. Nonhuman animals are not robots of meat and bone so that lab testing is like trying to design a more-limited world that has more-limited potential responses from the animal subject. For this reason, tests of ape intelligence and language abilities need to be conducted in as complete a world as possible.
Sue describes how she and Kanzi have the opportunity to be in the same world at the same time. Once they were walking in the woods along with a few pet dogs when Sue suddenly spotted a deer. Kanzi saw Sue’s expression, followed her eyes, and then saw the deer. They then looked at each other to see the other's reaction to the sight of the deer. The dogs never noticed the deer.
On another day, Sue and Panbanisha were walking in the woods when they were suddenly frightened by a big cat. This time the dogs had growled at the cat before these two apes had seen it. The sudden fright made Sue’s hair stand up and it also made Panbanisha's hair stand up. When they arrived back at the lab, Kanzi and Mutata and the other apes could tell that Sue and Panbanisha had been frightened. Sue has many examples of similar and simultaneous thinking and emotions in humans and apes: both were there experiencing the same moment.
These sorts of situations cannot be discussed in the scientific literature because they cannot easily be arranged as a repeatable experiment. The skeptical nature of scientists makes them rarely interpret an animal's behavior in terms of human emotions. It is difficult to know the mind of other animals and it’s hard to arrange situations in which behavior can be repeatably measured. An animal often acts differently the second time it encounters the same situation: that is the purpose of brains.
Sue says that we might be wrong fewer times to describe animal behavior in human terms than never to express them that way. We risk either to sometimes attribute capacities that do not exist or to never attribute capacities that do exist. Many of us begin with the assumption that other animals are not intelligent and are exceptionally skeptical of any contrary evidence. It might be informative to try instead to begin with an assumption of animal intelligence and then attempt to disprove this assumption. Sue points out that we are not unconnected from the rest of Earth's life; this kind of thinking impedes our sense of belonging to that whole.
Kanzi and Panbanisha do many remarkable things. They watch movies, play video games, and like to blow out candles on birthday cakes. Kanzi is able to converse on the telephone: he understands what he hears on the phone and responds by lexigramming. He remembers conversations from the past and understands that there is a future. Kanzi and Panbanisha enjoy making art and playing the piano and drums. They also write. They will reproduce lexigrams in the dirt or will use chalk to write them onto the floor. You will enjoy seeing Kanzi and Panbanisha doing these things in the videos that Sue’s team have made, including Kanzi: An Ape of Genius. Kanzi and Panbanisha can be seen in the 1994 PBS documentary Can Chimps Talk? (A discussion of this show can be found at www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/teachers/programs/2105_chimps.html.) In these videos, you can witness the moment in which Kanzi first made a stone knife to cut the rope holding a box closed. You’ll also see that by age twenty, Kanzi could rapidly strike stone tools from a core. He holds and spins the core with one hand, looking for target spots to strike with a rock held in his other hand. It is impressive to watch Kanzi and Panbanisha do these things in the videos. These profound moments make clear our closeness to the other species of our world and allow us to witness those moments as they occurred in the lives of our ancestral species.
The forest and savannah environment of today's apes and baboons is very similar to the environment of our forest and savanna ancestors so that we would expect similar mental requirements. It is not the case that our brains are a total break from the brain's of our primate ancestors. Sue's communication and interaction with Kanzi shows that Kanzi's brain differs from ours in magnitude only. (Anything we find Kanzi cannot do would give us a clue about what was added to the brains of our hominid ancestors over the brains of previous primates.)
There is continuity between the capabilities of our brain and those of the rest of the Earth's animals. Sue points out that Kanzi gives us important clues about the common substrate of mind shared by chimpanzees and humans and our mutual ancestors. Without Kanzi we could not obtain this important information about ourselves without traveling back in time and actually meeting our ancestors and their minds. Imagine how distinct we would think we were if every other primate species had already become extinct, or how we would view ourselves if Australopithecus, Neanderthal, and Homo Habilis individuals still existed today.
Origin and purpose of our feelings and emotions
Our emotions makeup a large part of what it is to be human. We are inundated with feelings and emotions. This makes it difficult for us simply to look inside ourselves to decide the origin and purpose of our various emotions and to determine which emotions are the building blocks for others. In the next few pages we will take a closer look at the clues that have recently been obtained through scientific studies. We will see that our emotions are a result of our biological past. As we have seen in previous chapters, a trait of any type, behaviors and emotions included, get passed from one generation to the next if that trait makes us more likely to live long enough to have children. (For us parenting mammals, this also means that it needs to better-enable us to live long enough to raise those resulting children such that they themselves become old enough to have children.) This means that emotions are also subject to natural selection.
Scientists who spend their lifetimes studying feelings and emotions obtain clues from a variety of sources. Measurements are made of the electrical and chemical activities of a person's brain while they are having emotions. We have learned much from the accident victims of the last century by observing the changes in their emotions and behaviors resulting from the damage done to specific areas of their brains. We get clues by comparing human behavior with that of other animals. Scientists also gain insight by attempting to model emotions with algorithms (algorithms are step by step instructions saying "do this when that happens" in various situations) and then comparing the algorithm's responses with those of a person. Since the emotions of infants are not as complex as are those of adults, scientists learn much about our most biologically ancient emotions from studying infants. Johnston has extracted a clue about the history of our emotions from an observation about our phobias, as described below.
The following description is a summary of Victor S. Johnston's Why We Feel, The Science of Human Emotions. Johnston presents examples showing that our feelings and emotions are the result of our biological evolution, and he describes the role of perception and learning in their use. Johnston points out that we don't question why we have emotions any more than we question why we have eyebrows. We cannot hold the emotion of love in our hand because it is not a physical object, yet we treasure it as an important and real part of our lives.
The sense of touch of a paramecium provides an example of our earliest evaluatory, sensory feelings. This small, two-dimensional, single-celled organism has an oval shape but is as flat as a pancake. It propels itself by moving numerous hairs located around its entire circumference. When a paramecium encounters food, it will ingest it, but it will instead move away from non-food objects because its survival might be at risk. The paramecium's behavior does not change with age and continues to consist of simple approach and avoidance motions. Life forms that came later have been more able to learn. For example, a dog is born with a sense of smell but learns to follow an odor trail.
We humans have acquired the five senses of touch, sight, hearing, taste, and smell plus a set of emotions and feelings. We also sense other things not usually listed among our senses. We sense sunlight or heat on our arm, tissue damage, bad food, extremes of temperature, and many other things. Our blood-sugar and salt levels illicit feelings of hunger and thirst. A child doesn't have to be taught to feel hunger or thirst, to like sugar, or to feel pain when his or her skin gets scrapped. These things are innate.
Our nose is a chemical detector. When a foreign chemical contacts the tissues of our nose, chemical reactions occur that result in our sense of smell. (Though we saw above that mammalian communication includes the creation and detection of specific odors, we humans have less ability to detect odors than do most other mammals.) Johnston explains that the chemicals we encounter do not possess odor. The odor is not real. It is merely our perception of the chemical that has contacted our sensory tissue. It is the way our brain represents that chemical within our thoughts. When we smell rotten food, we have a repulsive feeling. We are especially sensitive to the sulphur emitted by rotten eggs, indicating that we have been eating eggs for millions of years. Those individuals who feel repulsed when they smell rotten food are more likely to live long enough to have children then are those individuals who feel attracted toward that rotten food. This is the reason we perceive an unpleasant smell when we encounter things that have consistently proven to be harmful through many generations. We share these experiences with our ancestors who lived millions of years ago.
Our sense of smell is also responsible for 90% of our sense of taste; the remainder is due to chemical detectors on our lips and tongues. In the same way that chemicals do not contain a "pleasant odor," there is no "sweetness" in sugar. Instead, the sweetness is the reaction we have evolved to experience when we taste this food. This happens because those individuals who eat sugar are more likely to live long enough to have children then are those individuals who feel repulsed by it and so do not eat any sugar. Sugar provides useful energy for our bodies. The pleasant feeling we experience while eating sugar is meant to encourage us to do so. Throughout our biological past, sugar was found only in fruit and such. Today, we often hear warnings against the excessive consumption of sugar that had never before been so readily available. The molecules of sugar react with the molecules of our tissue in a purely electrical manner (see the description of the electrical force in Chapter 5). Johnston explains that our conscious experience of odors, sweetness, and beauty are illusions created within our mind rather than being actual, physical properties of the objects themselves or of their molecules. This is the way of our mental world.
Our painful reactions to tissue damage is another example of a purely mental construct. Torn skin does not emit pain. Instead our brains produce this reaction to torn skin. A doctor's needle does almost no damage to our skin; our brains have greatly magnified its actual consequences. Our perception greatly amplifies the consequences of those sensed event that have biological consequences for our own survival. Just as a dog goes a little beserk when it spots another dog, our brains go a little beserk when biologically important events are sensed. Our conscious experience of emotions are evolved illusions generated within our biological brains. Johnston also explains that periods of heightened emotional arousal make us more able to learn and to be more creative mentally. By the way, creative persons are seven times more likely to be manic depressive; often, creative persons who are manic depressive do not want to be "cured."
We all know that different individuals have different abilities of sight, sound, and touch. For example, some of us do not see certain colors (these colors are visible to that person but simply perceived as, for example, a shade of gray). This fact may become known to this person when others are always talking about that color. The quality of our sense of sight does not vary as much from one person to the next as do our senses of smell and taste. We converse endlessly about colors but much less about tastes and odors. This makes a person less-likely to know if he or she can not taste a chemical that others can taste or smell an odor that others can not smell. Certain foods taste bad to some individuals because their sense of taste detects a chemical that other persons are unable to detect.
Our sense of sight has been studied in thousands of experiments. We find that different portions of our brain individually process the various components of a whole image, including its vertical and horizontal lines and its position, shape, and motion. This is the way we figure out what an object is and where it is. The visual system of animals is very sensitive to the viewed object's movement because this is often of great biological consequence.
Just before a predator attacks, it is often partially hidden behind a tree or a rock or other object. Our visual system seems to magnify the sight of an object that is near to or partially blocked by another object. For example, if you are on the ground and look at a person who is standing on a hilltop or a rooftop or is peering from around a corner, then that person's size seems to be magnified by a factor of two. I might imagine this makes the size of the Sun and Moon appear to be larger while seen rising and setting near the horizon.
Social primates are especially adapted to the recognition of faces. We have been recognizing faces for perhaps tens of millions of years, which is much longer than we have been using language to name them. As a result, many of us say that we never forget a face but never remember its name. It has been measured that 10 percent of the neurons in the inferior temporal cortex of a primate brain respond to pictures of faces. If this portion of the brain is damaged then we lose our ability to recognize faces. After our infants have reached the age of just three weeks, they will look most at faces.
Why do we think certain people have beautiful faces? Johnston has found the answer by using a computer to combine digitally hundreds of photographs of faces. If one blends many photographs of faces into a single photograph, an average face is obtained. It turns out that we do this mentally, without even being aware of it. Johnston found that the female faces we feel are beautiful are those combining the most average face with a shorter than average lip-to-jaw distance along with lips that are fuller than average. It seems inconsistent at first that the average can be the most beautiful, but the average face is due to an average arrangement of genes. And those average sets of genes have been making individuals that are among the most well adapted to their environment of predators, food, and climate. An unusual face represents a genetic experiment, and we react to it as such without even being aware of the reason why. Johnston's book contains two photographs of the same processed-to-be-very-average face, except that one of them has a shorter lip-to-jaw length and fuller lips. You'll be amazed that you likely agree about the difference in beauty of these two nearly identical faces. Johnston suggests that fuller lips might indicate fertility because of the weight-gain that can accompany the onset of menstruation. (Weight reserves and fertility are related because of the energy needed to support a growing fetus and then a nursing infant. Anthropologists have found that menstruation does not recur after giving birth until sufficient caloric reserves have been rebuilt.)
The average face slowly changes through time and geographical region, and each group of people will have a different average. Many persons can discern the country of origin of another person just by looking at their face. As I wander the United States, I get a vague idea that faces in the North East are often narrow while those in the South East are often tall; faces in the Upper Mid West often consist of a rectangular forehead above an inverted triangular-shaped jaw. The faces of the United States are a complicated and rapid, sixteen-generation mixture of the world's faces, further complicated by the fact that, every ten years many of us move from one side of the country to the other.
We humans are adept at recognizing faces we have seen before. We are better at recognizing a particular face than we are at describing a face. We say "I'd know him if I saw him." Johnston has found that his computer-processed images can help a person recreate a face they had earlier seen. This person is shown images with different mixtures of twenty facial components and then asked to answer whether this face is more-like or more-unlike the face in question. After about two-hundred trial faces, the target face is recreated. (This provides a hint that nature can zoom in on a complicated solution within a couple hundred generations.) This procedure has been found to produce more-accurate facial images than the drawings created by police sketch-artists listening to verbal descriptions.
This procedure can also be used to determine the visual attributes of the flower most attractive to a bee. This is done by displaying one picture of a flower on a screen placed near the beehive for a full day and then changing the picture each day after that. We can't ask the bees if this is more-like or more unlike the preferred flower, but we can count the number of times per day that bees lands on the picture. If this number increases with today's picture then we can interpret that as a "yes." After some days we are likely to have the bee's most-beautiful flower. The number of days required to obtain a result depends on the number of components in a flower's appearance. (The target face described above had twenty components.)
Our brain is the most complicated device we know. (For the latest in brain research, visit www.ibro.org, www.lcn.salk.edu, and www.dana.org.) All of our feelings and thoughts, including our conscious experience of sensations, are generated through changes in electrical and chemical levels within this tangled web of nerve cells. Our brain defines who we are, and it produces our view of the world around us. It is surprising that our brains function by creating interior representations of external events. That is, no real apple exists within our head but only a mentally generated representation of one. This makes it less surprising that schizophrenics and nightmare-troubled children believe that the monsters they see in their head are real. As we mentally picture an apple, it seems to be as real as any other.
We can also internally generate conscious experience while our brains are not receiving sights, sounds, or any other external input. That is, we can imagine, but it takes some effort. As we recall an image of an apple, we "see" an object that is sort of round and maybe red. Notice that it takes some effort to concentrate on that image to add the details of its appearance. The stem and that fuzzy stuff at its bottom, the detours from roundness, the exact color and the gradations in color are added to our image only if we concentrate. (I am constantly surprised at how unaware I am of what is occurring inside my own head: We can live many years and never notice that such concentration is needed to recall the details of an apple.) Imagination is an important part of thinking.
An animal is more likely to live long enough to have offspring if it monitors its surrounding world through its sensory inputs, compares current situations with memories, searches for cause and effect relations, learns, recognizes and predicts patterns, reasons to predict likely outcomes of current events, and retains understandings to be recalled and reused from then on. These abilities enable an animal to continually adapt to its moment-by-moment surroundings. We are biologically matched to our slowly changing environment of climate, predators, and food. The biological evolution of each species occurs at the speed with which its DNA changes. Learning allows creatures to change more rapidly and is a result of the life-experiences of an individual's past. Reasoning lets us adapt our actions in the least amount of time because it enables us to predict the future. Reasoning also makes us ponder questions like "Why do we ponder?" We are curious about the world and about the nature of our society and of ourselves. (Our earliest answers to these questions formed the basis of our oldest religions of deities.)
For thousands of years we have sat in our armchairs trying logically to deduce how our brains work. But every time we have tried gone out to measure the actual workings of nature after guessing from our armchairs, we have been surprised to find that nature is much more incredible than what we had imagined it to be. Real understanding of nature comes only from repeatable measurements. For the first time, scientists are able to measure the chemical and electrical activity of the brain and its neurons while it is doing various chores. We have just begun to make measurements to find out how our brains work. Tremendous progress will be made during the next few decades because we are just now beginning to be able to do this. One result has been that we are finding chemical treatments for particular mental disorders that are now seen to be caused by certain chemical imbalances. In Consilience, Edward O. Wilson points out that full understanding of the operation of the brain will lead to great increases in our understanding of psychology, sociology, and economics.
Our brains do things without us being fully aware that they are happening. This surprises us because we feel as if we know what is going on within our own minds. For example, there are numerous examples of optical illusions that trick our brains. Here are a few more examples.
We are also completely unaware of our brain's right- and left-side division of functions. This division is revealed in studies of those of us whose brain-sides are physically severed, or split, during the life saving surgery that treats some forms of epilepsy. The studies reveal some secrets of our brain's operations. For example, take a pair of glasses and paint a cat on one eyepiece and a dog on the other. Have a split-brain person wear these glasses and ask them to both say and write down what they see. Without being aware of it they will say "cat" but write "dog" because these images and mental tasks are processed in different halves of our brain. Since the halves of this person's brain are severed they no longer communicate with each other; that person is unaware of this lack of communication.
Our eyes actually result in the formation of an upside-down image within our visual system. Within a few months after our birth, our brains figure this out and perform an internal flip to make things better-agree with the outside world. To test this, one scientist wore eye lenses that made the world appear to be upside down. These lenses were worn twenty-four hours per day. After about six months, the scientist's brain figured this out and again re-flipped its internal representation of the outside world. When the lenses were then removed, it took another few months for the brain to once again "right" its image of the outside world.
If you stand in place and then repeatedly rise up and down onto your toes, you will find that your surroundings are also seen to move up and down. The height of our eyes moves up and down in a similar manner while we are walking but our brains have figured out how effectively to cancel the apparent motion of the world caused by walking. This would otherwise be quite annoying. (As a chicken walks along does its brain do the same thing. Is this related to our rapid habituation to the up and down motion we experience while sitting in oceangoing boats?).
Have you ever noticed the inner feeling of pleasantness or unpleasantness you have while mentally selecting possible behaviors in response to the current situation or while selecting possible futures from a list of options? This occurs while we are pondering questions like "What shall I do?" or "Is this good or bad, right or wrong?" When you have to choose between various possible actions, our decision occurs as we compare our internal feeling of good or bad for each possible alternative.
Pay attention to the way this feeling of good or bad is involved in some small decision you make today. For example, while simply choosing what to eat for lunch we perform a series of mental steps: we think of one food, develop a feeling for it, gauge the level of goodness or badness of that feeling, think of another food, develop a feeling for this one, gauge the level of goodness or badness of this feeling, and then select that food which provided the most-positive inner feeling. We ponder a sequence of options and compare the inner feeling of good or bad for each of them. To make those larger decisions that affect the next few years of our life we perform the same comparison of our feelings of good or bad for each alternative. We do this while selecting a job or choosing whether to move to one place or another. We generate many possible choices in our mind, mentally weigh our feeling for each of them, and then select the one that produces the most positive feeling.
Stand outside for a moment and count the number of visible items and events–there’s likely to be one-thousand. You might see buildings, trees with swaying leaves, blowing grass, gliding birds, airplane tracks in the sky, a line of ants, two persons conversing, a leaking faucet, a mother and daughter walking, a parked bicycle, an ambulance, a restaurant, a big dog roaming, a coin, an attractive person, and some traffic. We are surrounded by a continual barrage of events. Our feelings serve to greatly amplify the importance of those events that are biologically relevant to us and help us to ignore the others so that we are hardly conscious of them. For example, mates and predators are biologically important to us while the motion of wind-blown grass is not. Out of one-thousand things within sight, how many are of biological importance to you?
The entire sensed environment of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch is stored in our brain for each event we encounter in life. In addition, we also store our inner feeling or mental rating of pleasantness or unpleasantness produced during these experiences–as they were occurring. Our "inner feeler" provides a value-judgement for each situation and for each possible response, too. We not only remember each experience but also the feeling we were having as it occurred. When a future situation contains any of these contextual clues gathered by our senses, we will likely repeat that behavior found to be successful in the related situation. We have the innate ability to recognize that the current situation is similar to a past situation just as we have the innate ability to recognize a face.
Without that internal overall feeling, every situation would remain external to us. Johnston explains that the building blocks of meaning arise only from learned associations between external events and the internal emotions that they evoke. If an event warrants no feeling then it will not be remembered: you probably don’t remember the fallen twig you passed last week. Those things producing strong feelings are never forgotten. This means that our inner feelings also help us to learn and to remember. It is easy to see that they help us learn and remember successful behavioral responses for the situations encountered in life.
We experience a pleasant, inner feeling whenever our behavior is conducive to an increase in our likelihood of living long enough to have children, including those basic behaviors proving to increase our food intake or our protection from predators or the climate. Does a cat experience a pleasant feeling while cleaning itself? Can we measure this "feeling" within the brains of other animals? We instead experience a bad or unpleasant feeling whenever we see that harm is resulting. Good feelings go with our survival. It is no accident that our most pleasurable feelings are associated with food and reproduction. While these things are occurring, we are at our closest to perpetuating our genes. Johnston says that orgasms are natures way of telling us that we are increasing our reproductive success.
Early in life, every situation is new to us. After gathering some experience, we avoid those situations or behaviors that produced a bad feeling and we will repeat those that produced a good feeling. A feeling of pending pleasant or unpleasant outcome helps us to select our behavioral response to the current situation from a wide range of available options. We test various responding behaviors. Through the years, our response improves. Notice that this is also true socially.
A two-year-old child learns that its own behavior toward others influences its own internal feelings. We learn that we have a pleasant feeling when we act in a socially acceptable manner. We yearn to repeat any behavior that receives the approval of other group members. We learn which behaviors are welcomed and which are not because our group members show either approval or disapproval. This feedback guides us in building socially acceptable behavior in the same way that the "yes or no" guides us to the target face, as described above. With each action and its social response, our behavior approaches that which is best-suited to our social environment. Together, through our mutual tests and feedback, we learn the details of how to behave as a social group. Group members agree which behaviors are socially acceptable. Around the age of eight we begin a several-year process of separating ourselves from our parents. With each additional decade of life, we get increasingly better at handling the variety of social relations we encounter.
Our feelings are not learned. Johnston says that we do not learn feelings any more than we learn physically to grow. You cannot invent a new emotion or feeling: you might like to try. A person does not have to be taught which feeling to have in a particular situation: the reaction is innate. Evolution provided our ability to feel pleasant and unpleasant about the current situation, mentally generated scenarios, and pending outcomes.
Johnston has made the important discovery of the neuronal region that produces our inner feeling of good or bad. Just as we have an "inner voice" that produces the name of each item we see–whether we want it to or not–we also have an "inner feeler." To produce an overall decision of good or bad, yes or no, this neuronal region performs a summed average of innate reactions and predispositions, mental recollections of past experience, and mentally imagined, likely outcomes. If this part of the brain is damaged then we no longer have that good or bad feeling during the decision-making process and are then unable to make any decisions at all. This feeling of good or bad exaggerates and amplifies the perceived, potential biological consequences of each situation and action. If you think of something that is of no biological consequence to you–a pencil placed on a table top, for example–then it will produce no feeling of good or bad for you. Everything you observe is quickly deemed either ignorable or important, and every action you consider is deemed either pleasant or unpleasant.
Our internal feelings of good or bad also provide a mechanism enabling our emotions to influence what things we think about and how we evaluate those thoughts. Our feelings enable much of our ability to reason. Feelings by themselves are of no use. Their purpose is to cause us to direct our behavior by selecting from many possible behaviors. Without feelings, sensed external events and the chemical and electrical activities inside our bodies would be meaningless. Evolution has selected these feelings because they better-match an individual to its environment.
The origin of this good or bad feeling is believed to have been a way to control the automatic approach and avoidance motions of less-complex animals, like the paramecium we met above. Once this good or bad feeling existed, it is guaranteed that its use would then be extended to many other brain functions. Those individuals who happened to experience a good feeling in specific situations that consistently occurred in every generation, and which were in fact beneficial, would be more likely to live long enough to have offspring. It would have made them avoid something that likely would have been dangerous and made them repeat behaviors that were beneficial. The same neuronal region has been found in other types of animals and means that we can begin to know something about their thought process through our mutual experience of this overall good or bad, yes or no feeling. Since this occurs in reptiles it means that they are in fact experiencing emotions too, though they do not look like they are doing so to us. Some of us mammals think that alligators, snakes, and iguanas and such act like emotionless robots. They do not make any facial expressions to convey their emotional state to the outside world–even while they are killing their prey or fighting among themselves. Mammals found it useful to communicate visibly their emotions to other individuals.
The medial forebrain area is often called the "pleasure pathway" because it is the seat of our feeling of pleasure. Different brain regions perform different tasks, such as the processing of sights and sounds or identifying objects. If you experience a pleasant feeling while performing a certain task, it means that the brain region which performs that task is also connected by neurons to the pleasure center of your brain.
The pleasure pathway also stimulates the older reptilian portion of the brain by releasing dopamine onto the nucleus accubens, see www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh26-2/26_2images/brain.gif, through a DNA-directed process. An increase in dopamine level within the nucleus accubens underlies almost every form of pleasure that animals can experience. (This tells us that we might be able to determine if an animal experiences pleasure by monitoring dopamine levels there.) Blocking the release of dopamine removes the pleasure of eating, drinking, or having sex. Each of the addictive drugs cocaine, amphetamine, alcohol, and heroin activate the pleasure pathway and cause a release of dopamine onto the nucleus accubens. This underlies every reward and deterrent feeling, and helps us to learn, too. Direct electrical stimulation of the pleasure pathway while an animal is performing a certain task makes an animal learn that task.
Adrenaline is released through a DNA-directed process whenever an animal is experiencing pain. This is measured to occur even in species of animals as old as the fish. (You will recall from Chapter 5 that fish are older than amphibians, which in turn are older than reptiles.) Even though we don’t see pain in the facial expression of fish, they are still experiencing that pain. Catching a fish with a hook causes it pain–as it would you, too–even though it doesn’t grimace and scream.
Our emotions include happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise, sympathy, pride, embarrassment, guilt, and shame. Each occurs through a DNA-directed release of chemicals. Notice that we feel these emotions one at a time, never simultaneously. We are born with these emotions and their number remains constant throughout our lifetime. Our behaviors become more complex as increasing numbers of events and situations come to elicit our emotions. The detailed events that evoke our emotion differ for each adult due to the differing life experiences of each individual. The emotions themselves remain constant and retain their relationship to the biological consequences of the happiness and sadness and such that evoke them.
As we age and learn, a growing number of events, which are each very specific, come to evoke these genetically available emotions. These new events may have never before occurred in the biological past of our ancestors. Evolution guides our traits but good and bad feelings guide our learned behaviors. As a new situation arises in our life, we can choose from an increasing number of learned behaviors with which to approach it. When a trial behavior turns out to be useful in one type of situation, an animal will then try that behavior in any similar, future situation.
What are happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise, sympathy, pride, embarrassment, guilt, and shame? Johnston says that our emotions are qualitatively different conscious states that have evolved to represent the nature and overall magnitude of expected threats or benefits to some aspect of our personal survival. Our emotions are evoked by specific mental production rules rather than by our senses detecting external events. The intensity of an emotion magnifies the biological consequences of the evoking event. These adaptions evolved through natural selection because the basic eliciting events remained fairly constant through many generations. Our emotions are as able to provoke a reaction within us as are our sensory inputs.
We have names for many emotions that are different gradations of a handful of more-basic emotions. The intensity of happiness goes from joy to ecstasy, sadness ranges from discomfort to great depression, and disgust ranges from loathing to revulsion and contempt. Fear ranges from light apprehension or anxiety to intense panic or terror. Anger goes from mild irritation to rage. Amazement and sudden excitement are due to the surprise of unexpected events, and the intensity of the feeling of surprise increases with the intensity of the feeling of unexpectedness.
Surprise is a necessary and sufficient condition for learning to occur. We learn because we were surprised that the event did not unfold as expected from our past experience. Since every event is new for a child, they are learning rapidly. The medial forebrain area is not only involved in our sense of good or bad but also in eliciting a learning response. After an event has repeatedly occurred, it no longer generates a learning response within us. Johnston describes how we become able to drive automobiles with little conscious effort even though it is a complicated activity. We must navigate streets and traffic while operating knobs and levers and talking to others.
Johnston points out the incredible fact that looking at a child's initial emotions and the events that evoke them is like traveling back in time to observe the emotions and events that evoked them in our biological ancestors. We react today to many of the same evoking events which stirred our ancestors. Finding events and emotions which are common to both ourselves and our ancestors give us clues about the core of our nature. Scientists most easily observe in infants our basic set of innate emotions because their behavior is the least complicated Their emotional reactions have not yet been altered by extensive life-experience. The newborn's emotions include happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise.
Since newborns cannot yet talk, they communicate these emotions by making genetically set facial expressions which have a meaning agreed upon by both infant and parents. At first, innate responses control the muscles that create an infant's facial expressions but later we learn to control these muscles at will; for example, we become able to act and pretend. The mother and infant relationship has no need for acted facial expressions. We show our emotions with the corresponding expression for each, including smiles, frowns, angry stares, or fearful grimaces. We show disgust with a protruding tongue and closed eyes, and we show surprise with a wide-open mouth. These emotions are initially evoked by just a small number of events that have been consistently present throughout the biological history of our species. Since every infant has identical facial expressions, even when born blind and deaf, we know that they are genetically set. By the way, does the lack of female facial hair in humans allow for increased communication through facial expressions? Do societies of facial-hair-shaving males allow for increased communication through facial expressions?
A newborn shows happiness with a smile. This happens after receiving food, being stroked or rocked, or by hearing a soft voice. Soon the sight of his or her parents will also evoke happiness. At the age of six to ten weeks a social smile develops. In Consilience, Edward O. Wilson explains that in addition, we have an innate happy-smile that automatically occurs the moment a sudden event makes us happy–even when we are blind from birth we will do this. For example, when we meet an old friend, we will rapidly grow a large smile.
Love attaches us to other humans. Without love's binds we would instead be lone individuals. If a child does not have the opportunity to form a bond with at least one adult during its first two years of life then it will have trouble forming any social and affectionate relations for the rest of its life. It will whine and cling to anyone. This child will show an excessive desire for attention and its future relationships will be superficial. It will show slow development and be withdrawn and depressed. This has been determined through many studies, some lasting forty years and involving large numbers of persons.
An infant first becomes angry when something has hurt it; the child might say "The ball hurt me on purpose." This makes it easier to see that feelings of anger in adults always come in response to actions of others who we believe have harmed us or have wronged us in an unjust way. If you think of the last few times you were angry you might be surprised to notice that each involved a situation in that you felt you had been wronged or treated unfairly or injustly. We get mad for no other reason.
A child's social feelings of embarrassment, guilt, and shame first occur around age three when he or she has cheated in a mutually beneficial social relationship. A child's social emotions are initially evoked by a small set of important events that our ancestors consistently encountered and that consistently threatened or enhanced their survival. Those individuals who could detect and respond to these behaviors of others were more likely to live long enough to reproduce than were the individuals who were oblivious to these behaviors. Social animals have these feelings while non-social animals do not. A child is first seen to beam with pride for its own actions but soon shows pride for the actions of his or her family and friends, too. The more pleasure we have received from an individual, the more pride we feel for their accomplishments and the more guilt we feel if we cause their unhappiness. A child will not feel guilty about not returning a borrowed item unless he or she had earlier developed good feelings about having similar items. The loss of an item will not evoke sadness unless that item had earlier evoked happiness. The intensity of the sadness for that item's loss is related to the intensity of the happiness that item had brought.
A newborn will show fear when shown a large picture of a cliff, making it appear as if the edge of that cliff is near. A loud noise can also evoke fear. In our past, these noises would probably have been made by predators. We show fear when we are faced with anticipated pain or danger. Later in life, we feel fear from an increasing number of events that we believe might cause us harm. For example, we might fear the loss of our job, our home, or our health. Fear does not produce pain.
Specific fears can become more generalized. For example, a childhood fear of a mouse can become generalized to include all small animals. Such generalizations may have been biologically prudent–for example, when bitten by a small animal. The exact event that initially caused the fear may in time be forgotten while the general fear remains.
Humans sometimes come to have extreme irrational fears, which are called phobias, of certain things. For example we might develop a phobia of spiders, snakes, strangers, open spaces, high places, or water. Johnston points out that the objects and situations that cause common phobias today are often the same objects and situations that were occurring a million years ago–during the early origins of our Hominid ancestors. Today, there is little potential harm from these things. It would make more sense for us today to develop phobias for knives or speeding automobiles but these objects have not been influencing us for long. We may be predisposed to form a rapid, conditioned fear to those events that were a real threat to our survival in our ancestral world. (Is water phobia related to being attacked by predators while visiting water holes?)
Our parenting emotions are useful in our survival. Our earliest mammalian ancestors were the first to be child-rearing parents instead of egg-laying–and egg-forgetting–reptiles. Those of us who felt a pleasant feeling while tending to our young were more likely to help those offspring live long enough to in turn have offspring of their own. In the same way, at some point in our primate past, those of our direct ancestors who began having pleasant feelings while forming into social groups and remaining with a single lifelong mate were better-matched to their environment of climate, predators, and food.
At birth we consist of our ancient, biologically inherited, human nature. We are equipped with only a handful of emotions and feelings. Psychologists categorize our personalities using a handful of paired ratings, such as outgoing or introverted, sensitive or uncaring about others, suspicious or trusting, and dominant or submissive but find also that our ratings depend on the people with whom we associate. Ten such pairings result in about one thousand different personalities. We build onto our personalities through a lifetime of interactions with other humans in our culture. Personality shows a mathematically sensitive dependence on the early experiences of life. In turn, culture, society and civilization are built from interacting individuals and families. Culture, personality, society, and civilization act on each other and provide the background for a child's life experiences.
Our children can become what our civilization molds them into and our civilization can become what our children choose to mold it into. A series of pleasant interactions produces pleasant personalities for our children. But crime and violence in the home or neighborhood can produce the life experiences for a child who might develop a feeling of hopelessness and might even cause this child to resort to a life of drugs or crime. What sort of society and government would this child feel is "natural?"
The brains of reptiles have fewer components than do those of mammals. The brains of both have regions that control walking and other such movements. In addition, the newer mammalian brain has the added limbic region found to process the very emotions we have been discussing. In fact, it has separate components for many of the behaviors and emotions involved in personal survival, including feeding, fight or flight responses, and the feelings and behaviors involving play, mating, copulation, and maternal care. Humans have yet another brain region, the neocortex, which contains our reasoning processes. Scientists have found that a brief electrical stimulation within the old reptilian brain areas will cause the muscles of an animal to move–for example, to make a walking motion. When this area of the brain is damaged we lose our ability to control our muscles, as occurs in Parkinson's Disease, but we do not lose our reasoning abilities.
The thinking and emotional portions of our brain communicate with each other in the limbic system's cingulate gyrus, see www.afsafund.org/images/BrainAnatomy.gif, where feelings are experienced. This enables our own thoughts to elicit emotional reactions and permits emotions to influence thought. The cingulate gyrus is also connected to the hypothalamus that controls automatic functions such as heart and breathing rates. This enables emotions to influence these automatic functions. You may have noticed that your heart and breathing rates sometimes increase while you are being emotional. Each of our senses is also routed through the emotional limbic system of our brain so that they can each generate emotional responses. We can then feel pleasure from any of our senses. For example, some of us have a pleasant feeling while looking at a sunset, see http://www.iuwe.net/elearn/b02/32.htm.
When specific portions of an animal's brain are damaged or removed it will lose the specific abilities handled by that brain portion. For example, temporal lobe damage results in a loss of fear and a loss of the ability to discriminate harm from safety and food from predators. A monkey with temporal lobe damage might try to examine the tongue of a snake or nibble its own feces and will exhibit no vocal or facial signs of anger. Damage to a very specific area of the visual cortex results in not only a loss of color vision but a total loss of the memory of color. This person will no longer remember what it was like to see colors or to have color vision. Both learned and innate fears go away when the amygdala is damaged or removed. Removing the hippocampus removes just those fears that occur when placed in a situation that is similar to one that had previously evoked fear. This indicates that the hippocampus is involved in processing contextual clues.
Johnston explains that each component of the brain is made to alert the remaining whole that something important to survival is happening. In an aroused chemical and electrical state, a neuron influences its neighbors. When no external event or internal process is happening to activate that neuron then it will not influence the chemical and electrical state of its neighbors. Less-active regions can also be momentarily inhibited so that focus can occur in those regions currently being more active.
Johnston explains that our brain's decisions are based on feelings not on logic; In fact, we often act in a completely illogical manner. For example, we might spend $10 driving across town to save $3 at a particular store. We think in terms of what is pleasant or unpleasant not in terms of numbers. Sentimental value is always more important than economic value (except for few those of us who are sentimental about money). We don't seek the absolute best solution because we do not have the time to consider every detail of every option. We instead seek the most overall beneficial choice that can be made quickly. We jump to a decision that feels right. This is more important to us than finding the most logical solution. Our feelings amplify one criterion over another and assign weights to each alternative. Decisions become easier to make when it involves a situation in which our feelings are more pronounced. After calming down we might say "I don't know why I did it. At the time I was really mad (or sad, afraid, or happy)."
Often we must make social decisions that are directly related to our reproductive success: we are very good at these sorts of problems. Our brains are suited to finding solutions to the sorts of problems we encounter in life. Notice that these are not mathematical questions. Here are three examples.
When you find out that someone's spouse is cheating on them, will you tell that person about his or her spouse’s activity? Does your answer depend on whether that person is a stranger, family member, or friend? What is the logical thing to do? Is there a logical solution at all?
Suppose 600 persons are in danger of losing their lives. Suppose it is known that if no action is taken it is certain that 400 will die but 200 will live. If we instead take action, 200 will die and the remaining 400 might also die. What would you do? We can find a quick solution based on our feelings without extensive logical considerations, particularly if a family member is among the 600 persons. Researchers have also found that most people choose the risky action when the question is posed in terms of saving lives and that most people will instead choose the safer action when the question is posed in terms of losing lives, though both have the same stated outcomes. Researchers have also found that we choose the risky action to attempt to save all when just six persons are involved but choose the safer action when 6,000 persons are involved. Smaller numbers of persons make a more personal group of people. Our strategy switches from risky to safe when the number of persons exceeds 120. It probably isn't a coincidence that this is about the number of persons within our ancient gatherer-hunter bands.
In an actual occurrence of this sort of choice, we will see in Chapter 15 that during the early 1800s, some parents made the difficult decision to have their entire family exposed to a small amount of smallpox material. They did this because it had recently been found that this would make the family immune to the terrible disease, but it also had a chance of killing one or more of their family members. Would you do this?
Suppose that one crop field is stated to always contain some food while another is stated to sometimes contain lots of food but sometimes no food. From which field would you prefer to obtain your food? Researchers find that if we have just eaten, we are more likely to choose the risky field, and that while feeling hungry, we more often choose the safer field.
Our brain is most-capable of handling the situations that our ancient, biological ancestors continually encountered. We still encounter many of these situations today, including that of our socially cooperating and mutually beneficial group. One purpose of our brain is to make predictions of the behavior of the others within our social group. We think in terms of social costs paid and not-paid and of benefits accepted or denied. Our brains are naturally adept at effortlessly performing certain exceedingly complex tasks because they are of biological importance–for example, recognizing faces and understanding which individuals are related to one another. We have seen that we effortlessly notice the simultaneous absence of a man and woman from our group. We are very good at detecting possible cases of having been socially cheated. During a social interaction, we instantly know if someone is attempting to take more from us then they are going to give. We effortlessly see through the most complicated social maneuvers. For example, we might figure out that Kyle is trying to get Bryan to interfere in the relationship between Isabella and Jake because his third-cousin's ex-roommate Kari thinks April should get even with Jake for yelling at Jeff, who is her friend. It is not as effortless for us to figure out things like the number that results from dividing twenty-two by seven.
Those things that you learn with the least amount of effort involve the things that have existed throughout extended periods of our biological past. A continued use for these things is the reason that our biological heritage includes emphasized abilities for them. We have seen that we effortlessly learn geographic layouts and that we readily learn by watching someone else perform a task. You might like to make a list of the things that you most-effortlessly learn.
Johnston explains that consciousness is not found in any single region of the brain. It is in its whole. When we look at the sun, we process its shape, color, and pleasantness in different regions of our brain. The experience of a beautiful red sunset occurs as the brain binds together the activations of its separate regions into a unifying event. We have just recently become able to measure the activities of each of the brain's regions while it is operating during such thoughts.
Susan Greenfield is a scientist who uses machines to monitor chemical and electrical processes as they are occurring within our brains, in real-time. In Journey to the Centers of the Mind she explains how she maps our brain's neuronal activity as it is developing a single thought. While we are thinking, the zillions of neurons of our brain are seen to be forming little pockets of activation. At first, few neurons are involved but the number keeps increasing. When a great enough number of neurons and a large enough amount of neuronal activity and consensus has been reached, then we feel that we have just had an entire thought. This will occur in each animal that has a collection of neuronal circuits forming a brain. For thousands of years people have wondered what was going on inside our brain in the instant before an idea "pops" into our head. Now we can actually measure this "pop" developing. Susan Greenfield describes the process as "growing regions of neuronal activity."
We constantly sense the world around us. We sense an external event and then ponder it for a few seconds. Susan Greenfield also explains that our lifelong consciousness really consists of a series of individual five-second awarenesses, one after another. That is, we will consider one thing for about five seconds and then we go on to consider something else for five seconds. Do you do this? You might like to keep track of the lengths and sequences of the thoughts you have during a one-hour period.
Our brains are chemical and electrical machines that monitor the signals produced by the senses. (The senses are also chemical and electrical machines.) Our neurons also store the moment-by-moment collections of sensory information and search for cause and effect relationships between moments. As we ponder the universe and ourselves, we are still doing nothing more than our usual neuronal search for cause and effect patterns. An animal is more likely to live long enough to have children if its understandings of past events can be used to predict what is about to happen in a new situation. If a previously hidden predator jumps at us from a tree, and we understand this connection, then we can be aware of the possibility when we walk near similar objects in the future. Our neurons also remember the experiences we have had with the rest of the world because we will live longer if each experience does not continue to be our first.
Memory, and the ability to understand cause and effect patterns about our surroundings, makes an animal more likely to live long enough to have children. This is as true for a less sensory-equipped insect as it is for a human. Through its trial-and-error attempts during early life, an animal learns many little things–for example, how far it is able to jump. It also learns many more crucial things, including which animals are food and which are predators. For primates like us, it's also helpful to know which group members are part of which extended family.
Johnston explains that our feelings are precious to us. We want to understand them because we want to understand ourselves. As we come to understand how they are chemical and electrical products of the evolution of consciousness, we are all the more amazed by them. Our passions add love and meaning to the silent void of meaning. To lose them would return us to the amoeba. Each of us would choose a normal life-span possessing feelings over an endless life-span without them–because for a human, that would not be life.
Our feelings are a bridge to the minds of our ancestors who gathered food, lived, and loved on the African plains more than a million years ago. Many situations evoking hope or fear within our minds today are similar to situations that our ancestors encountered in the distant past. Johnston says "Now, like the ghostly oracles of ancient prophets, each fleeting conscious feeling excites or forewarns of reproductive consequences yet to come. Not knowing where the words come from but heeding their advice, we creatively learn and reason about the world around us. Guided by passions and illusional senses woven into the very fabric of our brains, we explore the outer universe. Now we are beginning to use our feeling mind to look inward to understand itself."
Origin and purpose of our morals
Are our morals part of our biological inheritance or did we invent them for ourselves? This is an important question; in forming an answer to it we must reach to the core of our being. Do other animals have morals? Are our own morals an extension of the simpler morals of simpler, ancestral animal species? Do you believe that animals behave as unfeeling, genetic robots, or are they thinking, feeling, and choosing beings that understand that others are also thinking, feeling, and choosing beings? Much of the following discussion of these questions is a summary of Frans De Waal's Good Natured, the origins of right and wrong in humans and other animals. To better understand humans, this should be the next book that you read.
Do animals realize how their behavior affects others and so sometimes choose their immediate behavior such that others benefit more than themselves? If they do, this might indicate the basis of a morality. Some scientists believe that we can conclude no more than that animals act as robots with no idea of the consequences of their actions. Still, it is possible to conduct repeatable measurements and obtain less limited conclusions. All persons must carefully consider the evidence for themselves and come to their own conclusions. In the animal behavioral sciences, terms are carefully defined so as not to portray more than can be unambiguously concluded. For example, the term bonding is used so as not to imply friendship in the human sense. As mentioned above, this is done because we cannot read the minds of other animals or hold conversations with them.
Animal bonding may be a robotic behavior that is accompanied by no emotions, or it may be a state of mind that is as emotional as it is for a human. Humans become friends most often with persons of similar age, background, political preference, religion, socioeconomic status and so on. Bonding in hierarchically conscious female rhesus monkeys is evident when two individuals are inseparable. And like us, since these pairs are most often of similar status and age, they will also have children of similar ages.
A scientist's statement about a particular behavior of a particular species is obtained from statistically repeatable results of many trials involving many individuals. This is the way animal behavior is studied, interpreted, and debated by scientists. For example, one scientist’s statement that chimpanzees will console an individual who has just been the object of another's aggression is based on the observation of the aftermath of 1,321 spontaneous, aggressive incidents among a group of twenty chimpanzees. Here in this book, many specific examples of animal behavior are also given as anecdotal arguments for general underlying causes. Aspects of behavior that infrequently occur are difficult to study in a statistical manner because of the time needed to accumulate large numbers of observations of rarely occurring actions. Still, these less-frequent behaviors can reveal much about an animal.
Human uniqueness has been more thoroughly examined in recent decades. We are finding that our intelligence, sexuality, use of language, altruism, and tool use are not unique in the animal kingdom but simply more pronounced–as would naturally result from our common ancestry. (For a video clip of a crow bending a wire into a hook-shaped tool, see http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/297/5583/981/DC1, and to see a crow pulling strings, visit www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/humans/intlife/3.html. Other animal learning behaviors can be seen at http://pbs-saf.virage.com /cgi-bin/visearch?user=pbs-saf&template= template.html& query=octopus& category=0&viKeyword=octopus&submit=Search, using no spaces.) The same goes for our innate capacity to form culture. Chimpanzees show incipient culture when they teach tool use to youngsters. In addition, regionally distinct behaviors indicate learned culture, as found in the two following examples. Out of all bonobo communities, the members of just one will clap their hands before grooming each other. Some macaque monkey groups dip potatoes in salty ocean water to make them taste better.
For thousands of years, human ethics and morality has been a subject of debate among philosophers. Those of us humans who are philosophers have had to attempt logically to deduce the reasons for our ethics and morality. Until recently, this subject had been outside the reach of biologists. But their experimentally reproducible measurements are now beginning to provide important clues to help us understand this aspect of ourselves.
It required a few centuries for biologists to untangle their subject into its enormous number of separate pieces so that each could be more-simply studied and understood. Recently, they have been putting these now-understood pieces back together and are beginning to understand an animal, a species, and a planet as a whole. Ethics and morality are beginning to be measured and understood as part of an animal's biology. Biologists are now ready to understand the most important biological system on the Earth: the total human, including its society, psychology, and its ethics and morality. If biologists could not have come to understand this system, then their field of study would have been all for nothing. In the same way, physicist's and their field of study would have been all for nothing if they could not understand the way in which electrically bound molecules result in human life. We want most of all to understand ourselves and our own world.
Millions of years ago, our ancestors were not social animals. Individuals kept to themselves. Then, it proved to be the case that for some of our later ancestors, those individuals who felt an inclination to stay with others to cooperate in mutually beneficial ways and to exert effort in keeping the community intact were more likely to live long enough to have offspring. Those resulting offspring inherited that behavior. We exchanged assistance in looking for food, watching for predators, and maintaining our community. For still more recent ancestors, who were earlier primates, it was additionally found that cooperating, extended families resulted in improved chances for living long enough to have offspring. In general, cooperation among the members of a species is highest in the locations where life is harshest because this cooperation helps to keep the species from becoming extinct. Our biological ancestors experienced a harshening climate a few million years ago in the drying African savannah, as did our human ancestors about 10,000 years ago when they responded with full-time, cooperative farming.
Our innate predisposition to form and maintain a social system based on cooperating, extended families developed because it proved to improve our ability to survive and multiply over those choosing to “go it alone.” We feel such a strong urge to live in cooperating, social groups that it doesn’t occur to us that there is any other possible way of life. Very few of us might choose to be a hermit on a mountain but none of us has to choose to live in a cooperating group: that is what we do naturally. In fact, we generally find it miserable to live without social interaction for just a short time.
This also means that the lives of our newly-social ancestors literally depended on the community's continued existence. They developed behaviors that kept it functioning in order to secure its continued existence–and hence their own. Social individuals understand that their own behavior is not good for themselves if it damages the community because there would then be no community. They would again be "going it alone" and find themselves less likely to survive. Our notions of right and wrong stems from our innate understanding that something isn't good for me if it's not good for another member of my community.
In each species, an individual's urge to help others matches its own need for help. A species of lone individuals neither require nor give help. The behaviors of a social species become more complex in ways that are unknown to non-social animals. An individual's consideration of right and wrong behavior in interactions with other community members and in maintaining the community is the basis for ethics and morality. Our social community is highly cooperative and trust based.
The development of a social species and this "Golden Rule" of exchanging mutual assistance will necessarily occur together. If there is no exchange of mutual assistance then there will be no social species–we would all instead be going it alone. The "Golden Rule" is simply a statement of the behavior that enabled and developed our social system. We all agree about how to behave with our family and friends, neighbors, and strangers (these are the categories of people who make up our social system) because this Golden Rule is innate to our social species; otherwise, we wouldn’t be a social species. This is the nature of a human. It is no accident that this remains to be the central issue in today's religions, each of which agrees that the Golden Rule–and our nuclear and extended family relations, too–form the core of our behavior. Our religions express our innate notions of justice and of proper behavior, and our governments legally define them. (Today's major religions differ in detail only, as we will see in Chapter 13 when we look at some of today's religions.)
Whenever we have a feeling that we are doing something wrong, our actions are involving other persons. We have an innate feeling that "it isn't right for me if it's wrong for someone else." Those of us who are Christians say "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Those of us who are Buddhists say "Treat everyone as if they are you," and that "The group is important, not one individual." Islam teaches one to "Love for your brother what you would love for yourself," and Confucianists say "Before you act you should apply the personal test: how would you feel yourself? You can find the answer in yourself."
De Waal says that “the first hint of moral obligation and indebtedness occurred when a species began to be social by doing as the other did and expecting the other to do what you did." To act in any contrary manner is to commit an injustice against another person. Our ideas of right and wrong stem from our innate capacities for empathy, sympathy, altruism, and our capacity to form and maintain a social community. To act with empathy means to take the perspective of another individual and to understand what is happening to them. Having sympathy means having a concern for another's well-being and that you care about another individual's predicament because you can see yourself in their place and imagine the same thing happening to you. We innately cooperate and innately react against unjust interactions, and we compromise, have disputes, and reconcile. Each of us humans possess innate predispositions to have a spouse and children, to cooperate with our extended family members, and to be members of a society. We saw in previous chapters that our social groups of nuclear and extended families began with our distant biological ancestors. We cooperate with our extended family members and with our group members because of the mutually beneficial results. Anything less than a mutually beneficial result is seen to be an injustice. We guard against injustice. Unjust or one-sided behavior cannot build a society. The first-ever society would not have developed unless it was mutually beneficial for each of its members. When an interaction is believed to be too one-sided or members have opposing views, we expend effort to find a compromise that keeps the spouse, family, or society together and avoids a split. A family and a society are similar in many ways, as explained by each of our religions (see Chapter 13). We'll see in Chapter 19 that democracy operates through the compromise of viewpoints, priorities, goals, and agendas and that the effort of compromise is expended because the alternative is to suffer civil-war. War always involves injustice–and is too often the idea of a self-serving leader.
We breathe and eat simply to live. But much of human life is about the proper behavior between family, friends, and neighbors–the members of our society–and our reactions against the injustice of any improper behavior. Most of human passion and effort involves love, family, parenthood, cooperation, community, justice, and guarding against injustice. You might notice that most every thought, conversation, or action in human life involves love and family or community and justice. When people are talking, it's usually about the well-being of either their family or society. How do you describe, most-briefly, what it is to be human? The answer is “love and family, community and justice.” These have been the topic of most every literary work ever made. The purpose of our art–in every form–is to experience, communicate, and evoke these human concerns and emotions.
The details of proper behavior for every conceivable situation are not part of our genetic makeup. This is similar to our innate childhood capacity to learn complex language. Language and morality are too complex to be genetically programmed in any but the most general fashion. Our predisposition for morality is to "do as the other did, and expect the other to do what you did." This is enough to guide the countless variety of social interactions, as explained by each of our religions (see Chapter 13). We are born with an innate capacity and a desire as children to acquire the complex social behaviors that make us an accepted and valued member of the community. What we view to be the worst acts of "antisocial" behavior are most often committed by those persons who, as children, did not experience a loving relationship with parents or were severely mistreated. In our relationships, we return what we receive.
As children, we learn the social rules and are given leeway for infractions while learning them. This occurs in every species. For example, one chimpanzee mother was observed trying to take advantage of the leeway she knew would be given to her infant in going out of order at the eating spot. Her plan worked once, but when she tried it again a higher-ranking individual figured out what she was up to and chased away the both of them.
As children, we watch and learn and we respond to the feedback we receive as we interact with others until we begin to understand "the moral fabric of our society." Our innate capacity to form social communities also manifests itself in the way we feel impelled to behave in ways that receive the approval of the members of our community. It takes time to learn which behaviors will have the approval of others and make us a valued member of society. We also learn which behaviors do not receive the approval of others. If we display unacceptable behavior then we are shunned by others and experience a bad feeling. We have an innate desire to be socially accepted and to be considered a valued member of our community. We are so strongly concerned that we behave acceptably and receive the approval of others that when something goes wrong, our first reaction is to ask ourselves “What did I do wrong?” though it often is not at all our own fault.
Do other animals have morals? Even here, we have been finding that we humans are not as unique as we had once thought. All of the characteristics–including emotions, behaviors, and morals–of a species must match its environment of predators, climate, and food. The individuals of a social species are more likely to maintain their mutually life-preserving society and so live long enough to have children if they have an innate capacity to see and preserve the collective interests, take joint action for the common good, are sensitive to the needs of others, feel empathy, act in mutual aid, develop social norms and enforce them socially, resolve a conflict with another or between others, and have a sense of fairness. These behaviors enable and sustain our innate need to belong to a mutually beneficial society that cares for us–and for our young–and also satisfies our desire to be well viewed by others. Frans De Waal says that "Moral rule represents the power of the community over the individual." We make considerations of right and wrong because we have an innate capacity to see our behavior from the perspective of another individual. We know that what we sometimes want for ourselves may be wrong for someone else or wrong for our life-preserving, social community–so we don’t do it.
It is natural that each social species has the morals to go with its specific social system because the social system and the behaviors and morals to go with it develop concurrently. If another species were to identify its most important social behavior in a "Golden Rule," it would surely match its social way-of-life. Spiders, fish, frogs, lizards, crows, gazelles, lions, cats, and squirrels and such have different ways of mating, parenting, and interacting with those of its own kind. Some gather in groups and some do not. Their emotions, behaviors, and way of life form a matched set–these things cannot be separated from each other. They have an innate feeling of what is right and wrong for their species. Edward O. Wilson describes the ideals of proper behavior for social ants in Sociobiology. A species of lone individuals may have fewer "rights and wrongs" than does a social primate in its society of cooperating, extended families.
Notice that “right” behaviors are those done by most every member of the species and that “wrong” behaviors are those done by few members. If right behavior was uncommon then there would be no social system. Right behavior is simply that which is the predominate behavior. It is predominate because it is innate. It is innate because it has proven to work in that the individuals of the resulting society live long enough to have offspring.
The benefit of being a member of a social community is that you have a better chance of surviving. This outweighs the drawback of being surrounded by others who want the same food and mates as do you. Disputes between the members of a community are unavoidable when many individuals have to share the limited resources of food and mates. Disputes occur and are followed by reconciliation to keep the community functioning. During childhood, our elders tell us to apologize and to hug and makeup (I remember mom telling me to "let go of my sister's hair and apologize"). We encourage community values in each child. In turn, this calls for equal voices between community members and leads to a sense of justice and fair play and to the expectation of an egalitarian community. A dispute causes us to be emotionally uncomfortable. After a dispute there is a reconciliation–and this is done for nothing except the good of the community. The community members must continue to function together because the life of each individual literally depends on it. The reconciliation shows that the relationship is mutually valued.
Notice that an individual never acts aggressively while alone. This is a social behavior because it occurs only in social interactions. Disputes are a part of society. Since human aggression usually appears as a brief dispute between family and friends, it means that human aggression cannot be considered to be separate from the social community as if it were an independent and uncontrollable drive. If aggression was a separate drive or personality trait then we wouldn't see its social limits.
We have an innate predisposition for reconciliation but its use is a learned social skill. The percentage of disputes that end in reconciliation varies between species and is seen to be strongly modified by each individual's experiences. When group cooperation is suddenly needed there is a quick reconciliation between recent disputants. Chimpanzees reconcile by hugging and kissing, golden monkeys hold hands, bonobos have sex, and tonkeana-macaque monkeys clasp and lip-smack. Which gestures and actions do you make?
In a dominance hierarchy, it is usually the alpha male who stops disputes before they disrupt the community. This is often done by supporting the younger or the weaker of the two disputers and without partiality toward friends and family. A deadlocked dispute between two males who are fighting to be the alpha can be broken up only by a female. In return, that female gains social advantages for her involvement. There is group pandemonium when the two important individuals reconcile. If the alpha male is ineffectual at controlling disputes then he might be more quickly ousted. The alpha chimpanzee depends on support from below, especially from females. If a non-alpha male builds a reputation for solving disputes then he might be given this part of the alpha's job. He is "given" this job when a majority of the group members show that they are willing to have their disputes settled by him. The members prefer the most fair dispute-solver and will physically block an unfair solver from doing the job. Primate leadership qualities include service to the community. Power struggles are as much popularity contests as they are physical battles. Notice that all of this is done without this use of spoken language.
Chimpanzees carefully monitor the community-minded behavior of the members. The members of a chimpanzee community share most with those who share with others. Scientists determined this by counting acts of food sharing among every combination of members. We teach our children to share.
For us humans, reputation is everything. It is both the award and the punishment. We spend our lifetimes building it but can lose it with one wrong action. We are concerned about our appearance in the social mirror. Our lives depend on our community. We monitor the behavior and contributions of others. If a human saves the life of a child then the community members award this person with open doors and business contracts. De Waal says that it's more than what you and I do for each other, it's what the other members perceive of our actions. We ostracize those who act in their own interests or against the community's interests. We look for those with demonstrated qualities and strengths.
During their extensive observation and study of primates, some scientists see behaviors they interpret to show empathy, sympathy, and altruism, and that primates routinely take the perspective of another individual. Human emotions constantly have us taking someone else's point of view. One retarded rhesus monkey was seen to be given extra assistance by its group members. He was also given extra leeway for violating the social rules it was unable to learn. For example, if he walked over the dominant male he would simply be ignored not punished. Similar care and leeway were given to sick and to blind individuals. Scientists followed the life of Mozu for twenty years. She is a macaque monkey who had stumps for arms and legs and was an accepted member of her group. She had children and successfully raised them. (For a video about Mozu, see www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/mozu/html/body_intro.html) Does this show compassion by the other group members?
We humans have innate capacities for love and sympathy and we care for others, but do other animals have these capacities and demonstrate care for others? Some examples of helping behavior in other species include the following. Dolphins are social mammals (see http://myweb.dal.ca/~hwhitehe/BIOL4060/Cetsoc.htm) and are seen to help an injured group-member back to the surface of the water so that it doesn't drown and will bite through ropes and nets that trap group members. Since a bat cannot go without food for more than two days, bats will help feed a group member with whom they often associate and groom. Birds help to feed their relative’s infants. A social group of horses or elephants and such will form a protective ring around their young whenever a predator attacks. Mammal whales similarly form a protective ring around an injured group member–which unfortunately also happened to make all of them easier to harpoon. De Waal says that such sympathetic entrapment would not be effective with non-social animals. Whales will also bump the boat of an attacking person.
Do these actions evoke emotions of your own? Do these animals experience pleasant feelings and emotions, as we do, while they are doing these things? Can we directly measure this by monitoring the chemical and electrical activities of their brains and comparing it with those of our own? Here are some more examples.
Elephants show distress during the death of a group member. They will try to help it to stand and try to put food in its mouth. In the future, they will return to the location of its death and gently touch and lift its drying bones. They have even been seen to cover a dead group member with leaves and dirt.
When a primate infant is separated from its mother because of her death, at first it is agitated and calls. Later it shows despair, is unresponsive, loses its appetite, and takes a slouching posture with an empty gaze. In the reverse situation, when an infant dies, its mother might carry the body for a few days. When one chimpanzee suddenly died of heart failure, another was seen to scream out. All those who were within hearing range became quite for a few minutes. When one fell out of a tree and died, its group members stayed with it for a few hours before leaving. One dying infant was left alone except for gentle caresses from its group members.
As one psychotherapist and his wife raised an infant chimpanzee, they found that it instantly knew when one of them was ill or in pain. It responded with caressing hugs and by grooming, feeding, and protecting them. Even more distant relatives, such as lemurs and prosimians, are seen to respond when others are hurt. There is an example of one prosimian mother not paying sufficient attention to her injured daughter. That mother's mother scolded her for this and showed her what to do.
Do you think that the emotionless robotic behavior of these animals is simply being misinterpreted or are they acting with the same concerns as we do? Some scientists want to know what is going through their minds. You can see that the examples given above have not been observed frequently enough to generate unambiguous conclusions.
Parenthood is the likely evolutionary source of empathy and sympathy, both of which form the building blocks of primate society. Parents must recognize when their offspring are in need of food, warmth, cleansing, or grooming or need relief from distress. Parents must recognize their infant's appeals for these things, and infants must learn which appeals result in the parent's care. Once these tender concerns exist in the evolutionary history of a species, individuals can extend them to other interactions and situations. Some scientists wonder if it is a coincidence that we often act toward our mates with the same high-pitched voices and funny names as we do with our children.
The members of a self-aware species know they have a self and that others do also. This makes them prepared to develop empathy and sympathy and to see others as thinking, feeling, and needing individuals just like themselves. Other species must have some sense of self just by being able to see their own bodies and smell their own territorial markers. Understanding that there are surroundings that are not part of their own self makes them know something about self versus not self.
Chimpanzees seem to have a capacity to take the point of view of others and to put themselves in "the other's shoes." Some anecdotal examples of behavior that might show they do think and that they perceive others as feeling, thinking beings, include the following. Some chimpanzee adults began to scream when zoo caretakers began putting water into a moat in which unaware infants were playing. While reconciling, one male licked the wounds he had just given to the other male during the dispute. Chimps will console an individual who has just fought with another. A mother might temporarily give more attention to an older, injured offspring than to her youngest. Chimps like to make themselves more attractive by wearing vines and things. Does this mean that they think others have an opinion of them and see them as another self? Since apes love to watch television and play video games, are they taking the view of others?
Gorilla’s show similar thinking. One gorilla pretended to have its arm stuck in the wall of its zoo cage so that the caretaker would come to its rescue. It understood that the caretaker saw it as a feeling animal and would be sympathetic. If it is able to take advantage of the caretaker's sympathy does this mean that it understands and feels sympathy itself?
Tests with guppies show that they learn by observing the actions of others of their own species. De Waal points out that this shows that identifying yourself with another individual and taking the other's situation as your own, is a very old trait–as old as are fish.
Human babies show sympathy on their first day of life when they cry in sympathy with the cries of other babies. One-year-old children show sympathy to another person's yells of "ouch" and to their crying, coughing, and choking. That this behavior occurs in children suggests that these emotions are innate and that emotions and actions come first in life while the verbal rationalizations and justifications come later. Even as adults, we are often better at explaining why we just did something than we are at explaining what action we are about to take.
De Waal says that the presumed gap in intelligence and consciousness between humans and other apes seems narrower to anyone meeting Kanzi. De Waal asks, for what are these apes requiring and using all this brain power. When a researcher once asked Kanzi's non-language-understanding sister to groom him, she didn't understand what the researcher was saying. Kanzi saw that she didn't understand so he tried to explain it to her by placing her hand on the researcher so she could begin grooming. Notice that when you hear someone speak, you listen to the funny sounds that person makes and you know that they are describing their own needs because you know that they are beings just like you and that they have their own needs. You are being empathetic and putting yourself in their shoes. Isn't this what Kanzi is doing also while he is communicating?
The familiar pet dog forms bonds with other dogs and with us. It licks our face because that is its way of showing that it is submissive. They show concern about pleasing others. Dogs can be trained not to take food off the dinner table. Some varieties of dogs will not take that food even while its human owner is gone, but others will always do so. When a dog takes the food, it will display a guilty posture when its owner returns. Is it thinking about right and wrong or just punishment? Is it expecting reprisal for going against the hierarchy? Against the community?
Many components of our emotions are geared toward showing and detecting behaviors that help or hurt the community. Our society works only when everyone contributes. We know who contributes the most and who takes the most. In every interaction among any pair of persons, both must act fairly toward the other. We are experts at detecting when a person is attempting to dupe or take advantage of us, and we know the difference between real and pretended behavior. We quickly learn what each person within our group expects from us–and what they will let us get away with–in our interactions.
Our sense of guilt is due to our knowledge of the importance of the social rules. A low-ranking male is sometimes seen to act "guilty" in front of the alpha male after sneaking sex with a female while the alpha was away. Shame exists because we are keenly concerned about how others perceive our own actions. These things are built on our self-awareness and our ability to take the perspective of others.
We display our innate, guilty blush when we know that we have done wrong toward another. It is no accident that this blush occurs right in our face, which is our most visible place. The guilty blush indicates a lack of trustworthiness; its absence also tells us about another person's character. We do not want to be labeled as a person who lies without blushing, acts without remorse, or bypasses social rules. This shows how important it is that we all live up to the mutual agreements of our social system. We have a sense of fair play and justice in our society.
For millions of years, the basic collection of humans has consisted of a small number of extended families. This band of twenty to two hundred or so individuals has been an important element of life, and it has occurred throughout the world. About 5,000 years ago, our farming villages had grown to contain hundreds of extended families. Since the detailed form of our society has changed through time and from region to region, we know that its exact form is not genetically programmed. Wilson points out that the only role our genes play in the process is that they provide the innate predisposition to form social groups and culture.
It should also be mentioned that the crowding of cities does not itself cause crime. When a group of primates is moved from a large area into one that is much smaller, there will be a temporary increase in the number of disputes. But after about two weeks everything returns to normal. (By the way, two weeks is also the amount of time needed for one person to adjust to a radical change in his or her own life, as might occur when imprisoned or when learning that we have a terminal illness.) When the available area is decreased tremendously by a factor of 600 to 3,000, the aggression is seen to only double. At the same time the number of submissive greetings, reconciliations, and groomings increase even more. When the area decreases, the social rules are quickly adjusted to accommodate the increased population density. For example, dominant members will let lower-ranking individuals come closer than they had previously allowed. (A similar thing happens in waiting lines and when hundreds of men are crammed into a military submarine.) A temporary increase in aggression also occurs when the available area is increased because individuals are no longer allowed to approach dominants as closely as they had been while living in the smaller space. Experiments with the highly social dwarf-mongoose bird have found that they also quickly adjust to new social conditions. For us humans, we expect to maintain a certain distance between pairs of individuals while conversing, but this distance varies with the cultural group. For example, North Americans keep about one yard or meter apart while talking but in South America and the Middle East the customary distance is one-third that amount. A North American might offend a south American by stepping back during a conversation.
In 1962 there was much publicity about an experiment that found that the sudden crowding of mice lead them to begin raping and murdering each other. This was troubling for many persons until the result of similar experiments conducted with primates found that primate communities were not so drastically upset by such changes. Experiments with primates have found that they do not react as do mice to sudden changes in available space; instead, they adjust by taking social countermeasures. The benefits for being a member of a primate community did not change when the available area changed and neither did their sense of belonging. Instead, the members made necessary adjustments to keep the community together. This implies that for us humans, population density does not cause our acts of crime. There must be other reasons for this to happen. (Some of these reasons will be discussed in later chapters. By the way, during which century did our big cities begin to have crime and police forces?)
As the brain of an individual of any species encounters an object, it quickly decides many things, including whether or not it has previously encountered such an object and whether that encounter was pleasant or unpleasant. The individual decides whether or not that object is alive, ignorable, of biological importance, of the same species, predator or prey, edible, moving, approaching, or is a potential mate. When the object is another member of the same primate species, the viewer also determines whether or not the object is a member of the home group, is higher or lower in the hierarchy, is its own child, is its own mate, is a member of its own family, or is a friend. When considering potential actions, an individual decides whether or not it has previously accomplished a similar action and what responses occurred from others. In a social situations, the individual notes the emotion being felt and remembers what action it took in earlier, similar situations and whether or not its actions received the approval of others. Humans also give verbal names to each of the objects and actions. A newborn child begins with a slate clean of experience and with encountered object, answers each of these questions and accumulates “experience.” Species differ only in the list of questions to be answered. (This is easily programmed for a computer if the steps involving sensing and recognizing are taken as given. In the coming decades our computers will be able to handle recognition and reasoning.)
Consider again, what it means for humans and mice to share 85% of their genes. Since most genes make lungs and livers and such, we animals are not all that different from each other, we mammals are even less so, and we primates have the least differences of all. Just as mouse and human insides are much the same, their outer behaviors also differ little: we both forage, mate, raise children, and grow old. Humans and chimpanzees share 98% of their genes and also share many social behaviors involving the extended family.
We have now discussed all the natural events that led to us humans. Our ancestors had become fully human by about 100,000 years ago when our skeletons became nearly modern and culture became more pronounced. The nature of us humans–that is, all of the things that make us human–had already developed by then. Our biological heritage includes parenting mammals, social primates, and cultural hominids.
We have the senses, skeletons, and internal organs that have accumulated through time during the development of our ancestral, stepping-stone species, from bacteria to worm to mammal and then primate. Our senses distinguish us from the plants. If you want to know what it is like to be a plant then imagine how your life would be without having your senses and emotions and such.
Humans are one type of parenting mammal: we live for our children. We are distinguished from the other animals by being mammals that nurture our young. If you want to know what it is like to be a non-mammalian animal then imagine your life without being aware of the existence of your children.
Primates have an innate urge to form social groups. We saw similarities but also considerable variation in the social systems of different primate species–even between those of the common and bonobo chimpanzees. We saw that bonobos are sensitive, lively, gentle, nervous and are rarely violent. Chimpanzees are coarse, hot tempered and are often violent. They also want to be more independent, while bonobos want to sit together and coordinate activities. Chimpanzees "resolve sexual issues with power" in that the alpha is the only male to have sex. In contrast, bonobos "resolve power issues with sex" in that their use of sex in every aspect of society has drastically reduced aggressive conflicts. These two cases alone hint of the wide range of possibilities for the social system of our own ancestors who lived a few million years ago.
Primates live in social groups that interact as cooperating, extended families rather than as isolated individuals. They recognize the individuals of each extended family within the group, including parents and offspring, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, and grandparents. Other mammals interact as "pairs of individuals," while primates interact as "pairs of extended families." Humans are one type of social primate: we care for our extended families and for our society. We are distinguished from the other mammals by being social primates that form mutually beneficial groups consisting of extended families. If you want to know what it is like to be a nonprimate mammal then imagine your life without being aware of the existence of your extended family members and perhaps not being a member of a social group at all. Johnston points out that our socially cooperative efforts make all of us more likely to live long enough to have children and to raise those resulting children long enough that they in turn have their own children. The primate social system forms a large part of what it is that makes us human. We humans have the emotions, morals, and behaviors to match our environment of climate, predators, and food and the needs of our animal, parenting, and social species.
A drying climate on the African savanna led to our hominid ancestors who walked upright and, a couple million years later, developed stone tools. Our continuing increase in brain size lead especially to helpless newborn infants, monogamous parenting relations, prolonged adolescence, and to our increased culture and language. We humans are distinguished from the other primates by our increased language, tool use, and culture. (A tool common to many of today's cultures is our civilization.)
Consciousness, self-awareness, emotions, morals, senses, and language are also large parts of what it is that makes us human. Our basic emotions include happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise, sympathy, pride, embarrassment, guilt, and shame. Without these emotions our relationships with our family members and with the members of our society would be shallow and robotic. Some of our innate emotions help to enforce social cooperation and fairness. Our emotions are produced through certain chemical and electrical activities within our brains.
We sense, learn, remember, reason, and predict. Our brains exist because an animal is more likely to live long enough to have children if it has a packet of neurons that monitors the surrounding world, recording our moment by moment sensory input along with our overall positive or negative feeling of the benefits or drawbacks of each moment. This feeling helps us make decisions and to learn and remember the most-successful behaviors for each of the situations encountered during our lifetimes. We compare memories with the current moment and with imagined moments to choose our current behavior and to predict outcomes.
An examination of our feelings and emotions shows that we share minds with our remote primate and hominid ancestors. Keep in mind that in response to very specific situations, which exist as the presence of specific chemicals around DNA within cells, DNA reacts with the production of brain chemicals we experience to be pleasant. For example, the sight of your favorite food, person, or offspring is processed in your brain and in response, there occurs the formation of chemicals that we experience to be pleasant. Our emotions, behaviors, and morals developed simultaneously with our animal, parenting mammal, social primate, and cultural human ways. For example, we didn’t first become parents and then a few million years later develop parenting emotions nor did we first form social groups and then wait a few million years for social behavior–the Golden Rule–to develop. Other social primates have the social morals that enabled and produced their society. The social morals of our primate cousins are similar because our common ancestor developed increased senses of self, sympathy, empathy, and community good along with the co-developing ideas of right and wrong behavior within the community and for the community good. Chimpanzees–our nearest relatives–arguably possess capacities for sympathy and empathy and they possess scientifically measured capacities for social behavior, including a reciprocity of treatment, reconciliation after everyday disputes, and a concern for the maintenance of the community.
Since the lives of us community members literally depend on the continuation of the community, we monitor the fair behavior and contributions of others. We pay attention to the community-minded actions of others, and we are concerned about our own appearance in the "social mirror." As for every social primate, reputation is everything for a human: it is both the reward and the punishment. We spend our lifetimes building it but can then lose it with one wrong action. De Waal explains that conscious community concern is at the heart of human morality. Our Golden Rule is innate to each of us.
Do the other social primates have emotions and morality? Are they a society of robots who happen to make similar motions to us or are they thinking, feeling, empathizing, and sympathizing beings? It is natural that each primate species has the morals to go with its social system. The social system and the behaviors and morals to go with it would both develop at the same time.
We are a social species and we have the morality to go with the particular form of our own social system. Our social system forms because we have the social system morality that enables it to form. Our social system and our social system morality are really one in the same. Neither would occur alone. We see it as those behaviors designed to keep the community functioning for the benefit of all. All members of the social community do as they expect others to do and will react against any other action as an injustice. This is a large part of today's religions. We all agree about the proper behavior between family, friends, and the neighbors within our social community: to do as the other did, and to expect the other to do what you did. In the previous chapters we have seen that people everywhere are the same in that during most every moment we are caring for the well-being of our family and the maintenance of our society; we react against the attempt of any person, or group of persons, to behave in an unfair or unjust manner. We simply want to laugh and joke with our spouse, family, friends and neighbors, pursue life and the limits of our talents, and raise children. The thoughts and actions of a human involve little besides love and family, community and justice.
This is the nature of a human. Nature brought us to the point of sufficient mental abilities to develop our social system, language, tools, and culture. Having culture gives us a way to change as rapidly as the environment without having to change physically and so makes us less susceptible to extinction when the environment rapidly changes. Our development of the tools and techniques of our culture has allowed us to become somewhat independent of the previously dictating environment of climate, predators, and food. By two million years ago we could no longer live without our culture. Nature made this molecule machine able to learn, to reason, and to develop culture but could not determine the details of what would be learned or reasoned or determine the culture that would be developed. Being able to form culture means that we humans choose the details of our way of daily life as we follow our predisposition to form mutually beneficial and just societies of cooperating extended families.
The members of our society exchange help in every way that is necessary and mutually beneficial in their own time and place. We exchange help in any task requiring more than the efforts of one individual. (In the coming chapters we’ll see that through time, the tasks qualifying for mutual assistance change from watching for predators to putting out fires and such.) We form societies because they make for a better life for each us than would be possible by going it alone. Nearly every thought or action of each person involves the well-being of their family or society, our society's Golden Rule of fair play or "doing as we expect others to do," or our strong reactions to any infraction of this rule (injustice). This rule enables society to such an extent that the Rule and society are one in the same. We feel strongly impelled to live by this Rule and react strongly to its violation. These are the topics of most every conversation–and most every novel or film, too. Here science and religion agree with what each of us has always known about our self: that we are guided by this Rule and react against its violation. To say that it is the nature of a human to live in social groups is also to say that the Golden Rule of "doing as we expect others to do" is in the nature of a human, otherwise we would not be a social species.
This also means that we humans are good by nature. "Good" behaviors are simply those that are common or typical. They are common to all of us due to our common humanness and are summarized by our rule to "to do as the other did, and to expect the other to do what you did." Common behavior is found by averaging the behavior of all of us. An example of common behavior is the polite greeting that occurs as we meet a friend or a member of our extended family. Nearly 100% of us do this daily. Bad behaviors are those that are unusual in us. Since a single bad person can kill fifty others, if 2% of us were bad persons by nature then our species would have already ended itself. Instead, we know that in recent centuries about one person in ten thousand has murdered another human. Murder is a rare behavior.
Our civilization necessarily remains consistent with our nature. Nature made us human, but the details of our culture and civilization have been determined by us humans. Our civilization and our social system have become worldwide. Science and technology are today's tools and are just different aspects of our culture. Much of our culture consists of our solutions to the everyday problems we've noticed and to the questions we've asked about the world around us. Culture is an outgrowth of reasoning and is a long list of "how to do everything in life within our own social group." If one person asks "How should we fold our shirt the night before our wedding?" someone else will come up with an answer. Reasoning is our search for cause and effect patterns. The accuracy of our solutions matches the accuracy of our observations. Our view of the world consists of our answers to thousands of questions like "Why does it rain?" An answer of our ancestors might have been "Because that's what rain likes to do." This answer satisfies me. We are satisfied with just about any answer that seems to have some element of logic in it, even if the answer is simply that "x comes before y in the alphabet." An answer seems to comfort us by ending the misery of being surrounded by the unknown. As we come to better understand one aspect of our world, we are then more able to understand additional aspects. Through the last few centuries, the accuracies of our answers have been increasing.
At this point in our story we have reached the time at which we were about to become farmers and build the cities and political systems of our civilization. Before the beginnings of written history are discussed, we will stop to see a description of human culture because we humans are distinguished from the other primates by their increased culture. In the next chapter, the culture of a group of gatherer-hunters will be described to help us better understand how we all used to live before we moved into the big city. We also want to see that there is an amazing diversity in human culture. Our own outlooks are enhanced when we come to see the viewpoints of others.
Questions
1. In what way do you feel differently for family members than you do for friends, neighbors, or strangers?
2. Is the family any different today then it was for your grandparents?
3. How much do family relations vary around the world?
4. Is our idea of a family unit due to our genes or is it learned behavior passed from one generation to the next?
5. Do house cats, lions, wolves, deer, fish, or giraffes recognize the members of their extended family? Do they exchange help with them? Do they compete with them? Do they act differently toward them than they do with unrelated individuals? Do human brothers compete for the same females?
6. When ants and bees cooperate to build structures, is this different from humans cooperating to build a city?
7. Describe the sequence of changes in our ancestor's behavior as our language ability increased from a few primate vocalizations to the usage of hundreds of words. If we did not obtain our ability to speak, would we have been able to build our civilization?
8. Will dolphins build civilization? Will bees, birds, or bonobos?
9. Are all animals that have a central nervous system aware of their own existence? Are they conscious? Does consciousness arise from the communication between neurons? What is consciousness? Is an amoeba conscious? Is a bush? How about the other types of animals, including clams, fish, bees, frogs, snakes, insects, birds and mice?
10. Which other animals are self-aware? Since our pets learn their name, does it mean they have a sense of self?
11. How are you able to think? What is happening as you are trying to figure out something? What is the difference in your state of mind while you are talking, singing, writing poetry, thinking, running, or protecting your children?
12. How is thinking different from your response to pull your hand away from a hot object? Is your brain doing anything different when it is adding numbers than when it is deducing cause and effect patterns?
13. Do other animals have the same set of senses as we do? How can we determine what are their senses, especially if they are sensitive to something we humans can not sense?
14. List some emotions and discuss their biological purpose. Do reptiles, insects, or fish have these emotions? Do other mammals or primates?
15. Many emotions are more intense versions of a single, more fundamental emotion. How many independent emotions do we have?
16. Does an animal's self-awareness depend on its intelligence?
17. For how many seconds do you think about one thing? How long does your child do this? Your Pet? At the end of a short walk, write down the series of thoughts that have just gone through your mind. How many seconds did each thought last?
18. Compare your group's dominance hierarchies of individuals and of families with those of macaque monkeys, wolves, and of a grazing animal, like gazelles.
19. Birds and mammals are both descendants of reptiles. Are the behaviors of birds more varied than those of reptiles. Compare bird behavior with mammal, primate, and human behavior.
20. Why can't you tickle yourself? Since other apes have the same tickle spot, it must have originated in a common ancestor. What was society like for this ancestor? When did the tickle spot develop? Why?
21. In what order did the following events occur? The reduced food supply of the drying East African savanna, our big brained and long-term helpless infants, our decrease in body hair, our nuclear family, our bands of nuclear families, our monogamous parenting strategy, our bipedal adaption, our language, our culture, and our use of tools. Its hard for us to imagine how any animal can think or make decisions without using language. Which of these things did we do without using language? What role did language play in each of these? How many words and gestures could we make one million years ago?
22. Some scientists wonder if our loss of body hair was due to the extra heat generated while walking. We lost our body hair to avoid having it retain heat. Do you agree? How can we measure this?
23. Compare the food density for humans living in Nevada three centuries ago with that of the drying East African savanna. The Nevada Paiute forage as individual nuclear families. Do you think our ancestors did the same on the drying East African savanna?
24. In your own life, do you see any hint of human male alliance formation for the purpose of choosing or defeating the current dominant male or family? Do you see any hint of human female alliance formation for choosing or defeating the dominant female or family? Do you see a human mother or father try to socially push others out of the way to improve their own child's social rank?
25. Do you see within ourselves any hint of male dominance hierarchies controlling access to a harem? Do you see emigration during puberty? Infanticide?
26. Do you recognize any inclination within you to be part of a harem?
27. Is human war related to the form of aggression seen in everyday social disputes? Is aggression related to hunting or to contests over territorial mating areas? Is it related to a struggle within the dominance hierarchy? Is aggression related to the lust for power? Or is war ideological and different from these things? What would it take to make us go to war if we had as little aggression as Bonobos? Do we have more or less aggression than Bonobos? Are war and murder the same thing?
28. Design an experiment to see if Kanzi can relate planting with soon-to-appear plants. Do nonhuman apes relate copulation with soon-to-appear infants?
29. Does your cat get a pleasant, happy feeling when it goes off on its own since it is in its nature to be a lone hunter? Which of our pleasant little feelings occur because we are doing something that is appropriate for our survival?
30. Do all people have humor? Are the same things that are funny to you also funny to an individual who lives in the Brazilian rain forest?
31. Compare humans with another monogamous species.
32. How are men and women different? (Comics tell us about such things and are a good source for topics to discuss in your answer to this question.) Which of these "differences" are innate and which are a learned part of culture? Do these differences exist? Are the differences between the men and women of your continent the same as the differences between the men and women of other continents? Are these differences shared among gatherer-hunter, village farmers, and wage earners? De Waal asks, "Does society emphasize innate predispositions or does it just find it convenient to have men and women occupy their respective roles?" Both sexes can do everything the other does, except birth and nurse. One male chimp was seen to adopt and raise an orphan, and sometimes a female chimp will make a noisy branch-dragging display. Do men really have an aversion to stop while traveling, to ask for directions, or to go back along a wrongly-attempted path? Do women really travel in a more-prepared fashion by carrying food? Do these alleged behaviors truly occur? Would these behaviors help our ancestors to disperse around the entire surface of the planet? The more we perform a certain task, the more brain cells are recruited to perform that task. This occurs, for example, when we learn to dance or to play a musical instrument. Our color vision may have developed to better distinguish the proper ripeness of fruit. Women are measurably better than are men at distinguishing grades of color–for example, between light blue and sky blue. Does this mean that women, more than men, have been selecting fruit within gatherer-hunter society, or does it mean that women develop this ability more than do men in today’s culture, or is there another reason?
33. For some species, the hierarchy results in food moving from the top down. For chimpanzees, the food flows in both directions. Can this instill a sense of fairness and justice in a chimpanzee? How is our habit of sharing daily food and having ritual feasts related to our idea of justice?
34. Describe a social situation that causes you to temporarily adapt the way you interact with other individuals.
35. How do you act differently with your family than you do with other members of the community? Compare your behavior while among friends to that while among other community members. Compare your behavior while among friends to that while among family members.
36. Describe how our life would be different if we could not communicate with other humans. How would our civilization be different?
37. After we began to use spoken language, how much time elapsed before someone made the first poem by saying a sequence of musically-related sounds. When and why did we start singing? Which other animals sing? Why do they sing? Scientists have found primate species in which family members sing to one another from the forest trees, see . Whales and birds sing to communicate, especially with potential mates. It may be that our ancestors were singing for the same reasons. Wolves sing, too. Does your pet dog ever sing along with you? Did our ancestors sing emotion-laden tones before they were able to communicate with spoken words? Is poetry spoken music? Are its rhyming sounds pleasing to the ear in a musical manner? (You might like to view the PBS video Song of the Earth, see www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/song.)
38. When someone hates the taste of something that you like, is it because they can detect a chemical that you cannot taste? Find some tastes, odors, or colors that you can detect but that someone else cannot detect.
39. What is your tongue doing while you are chewing, blowing your nose, or talking? (For tongue positions that produce certain letters, see www.phon.ox.ac.uk/~jcoleman/British_English_vowels.html or the videos at www.phon.ox.ac.uk/~jcoleman/peat.qt and www.phon.ox.ac.uk/~jcoleman/elgar.qt.) Who taught it to do this? Does everyone move their tongue and lips in the exact same way to produce the same sounds? These are very complicated motions that we seemingly do without consciously struggling to generate each sound. That is, we do not stop to think about where to place our tongue and lips to form the sound for the letter 't' and such. Do you stop to think about this process or about grammar and the order in which your words are said?
40. Can you surgically alter a newborn puppy's throat so that it could make human speech? Would it be able to learn to do this? Would a chimpanzee?
41. Our memory involves all of our senses in some funny way that involves records of our entire mental state. What is occurring in our brains as an old song puts us back to a particular moment in time? Those of us who have Parkinson's Disease cannot control our muscles due to an impairment of our neuronal activity. The physician Oliver Sachs has found that some Parkinson's patients suddenly begin to dance while listening to a song that had been their favorite before the disease began. How does this occur?
42. What clues about our brain's operation do we get from the funny effects of hypnosis? For example, when discussing a particular time in our past while under hypnosis, it is found that the style of our handwritten signature also returns to that same time in the past. How does this occur?
43. At birth, do our brains know that we have arms and legs or does it find out by operating muscles in a trial and error manner? Would our brain be able to figure out how to operate twelve arms if we had that many?
44. During the sequence of the Earth's animal forms, which was the earliest animal needing to recognize the faces of several individuals? Would the same part of the brain recognizing landscape also recognize faces? How do birds navigate as they migrate those long distances each year? Could this be done by merely recognizing landscapes? (Many times I have suddenly noticed as I approached a country highway intersection by driving over a hill or around a bend in the road that I recognized this visual area by the shape and lay of its land even though I had approached from the north this time but from the west two years before. This occurred only if during the previous trip I had stopped for ten minutes in this area. For example, I might have spent ten minutes at a phone booth that was not visible as I re-approached the area. Was I "navigating" by landscape?)
45. Some people describe our current big-city business and lifestyle to be driven by a dog-eat-dog state of mind. Is this genetic or cultural? Are we genetically driven to outdo our neighbors?
46. Describe some situations that show that you continually learn to be better at handling social interactions throughout life. (Luckily that last few times I acted socially incorrect it was toward older individuals who handled it like nothing too important had happened.)
47. Can you trace the origins of a particular rule of etiquette–for example, how long to keep a birthday card–to our fundamental capacities for empathy, sympathy, and moral learning of right and wrong for you, me, and the community? Which behaviors are not traceable to these fundamental capacities?
48. Can you model an infant's personality growth? First measure the spectrum of existing character traits for a number of persons under a range of social situations. You will also have to measure the less-varied spectrum of newborn traits. Each of these spectrums will surely follow a bell-shaped curve. Then place the child in a long series of randomly selected social situations involving one or more other persons. Also, randomly select the character traits of each of those other persons from the previously measured spectrums. Maybe the child's personality trait for each type of situation is due to its own characteristic at birth plus the average deviation from the norm of the traits of each of the persons it has interacted with during previous situations of this same type. When some of us are continually surrounded by one type of behavior, it drives us away from repeating that behavior ourselves. What percentage of us move toward that average and what percentage move away from it? Can this spectrum be measured? Can this be incorporated into the model as a movement away from that average rather than toward it? What is the probability that more than half a series of ten (or one-hundred) one-on-one interactions will be with a person from the bad side of the spectrum? Does this mean we are born with increasingly average traits or that we all modify our behavior toward our society's current average? (Reproduction is set up to maintain a wide spectrum of characteristics so that we do not become all-alike. We have seen that the average of the spectrum may shift but a range in characteristics is needed for the species to exist beyond changes in its environment. Our genes are not the average of those of our parents or of our prior generations. A baby's characteristics are not the average of its two parents because divergences of a factor of one thousand would be eliminated when averaged through just ten successive generations. That is, if you divide 1024 by 2 ten times in a row then you obtain the value 1.) How many variables would be needed to produce a realistic model of the development of our personality throughout our life?
49. Describe how you learned to talk, eat, and walk. How did you come to know what a word meant and how to arrange a group of words into a sentence that had your intended meaning, for example "I eat apple" rather than "Apple eat I?"
50. If we equipped a newborn human infant with a transponder and let it listen to dolphins communicate with their whistles would this child learn to understand what the dolphins were saying? Would it have to live among the dolphins to be able to do this? Would it need anything else?
51. If our brain circuitry does not automatically create language then we instead have invented this tool and pass the invention between generations. Could we have invented upright walking? List some other things that we have assumed to be part of our automatic biology but that we might have instead invented.
52. What feeling do you have when you look at your own image in a mirror?
53. List some of your emotions, behaviors, and thoughts and describe experiments that could determine if another animal experiences these same things.
54. Can another animal invent communication using tooth clacks, head shakes, and body twists?
55. If a toddler can learn the thousands of details involved in learning language and culture can it also learn the thirty essential facts of arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, calculus, and beyond? Do some children learn mathematics and how to play musical instruments and such simply because they were given the opportunity? How many of us are given the opportunity?
56. Does Kanzi have an inner-lexigrammer?
57. Last night while sleeping my hand suddenly lifted on its own to catch and hold a bug (Gigantus gigapodus) that was crawling on me. A few seconds later I began to emerge from a dream about ice-cream and its loss of momentum and had then to decide what to do with this bug I found to be held between my fingers. I am sure this reaction has been occurring in sleeping hominids for millions of years and was just sitting there inside me waiting for its chance to be used in my own lifetime. Can you find other examples of reactions that would have occurred in ancient times?
58. Describe some innate behaviors of an infant and some learned behaviors.
59. Compare the behaviors of a puppy and a child.
60. List your pet's actions throughout a thirty minute period of time. Is your pet choosing to take these actions or is it just being robotically controlled by its genes?
61. Researchers have found a circuit within our brain that produces a religious experience of awe. What might be the evolutionary value of this response? Is it related to our curiosity? To our respect for parents and leaders?
62. We have few words to describe the things we can taste or smell. Can you describe the taste of an apple? Some foods contain certain chemicals that some of us can or cannot taste. Since we have no way of accurately discussing tastes, we do not even know that we may not be tasting the same set of chemicals. It's hard to find the exact words to describe your feelings and emotions. We can say "the way you feel when your child is born" but we can't say "joy, happiness, and twenty other emotions in various degrees." Can you describe how certain music makes you feel? Can you come closer to communicating the emotion you felt in a certain situation in terms of music or art? Do different tones express different emotions? The goal of art is to communicate or evoke an emotion. (My friend JQ explains that while one is doing art, emotions are being experienced.) How do music and art express emotions without using any words at all? How does sad music communicate sadness to us without using any words? Can nonspeaking animals agree on an emotion to accompany a certain piece of music? How can you measure this? Is it true that deep voices from large animals and deep sounds from certain instruments–drums for example–are commanding? What internal responses are generated in you when you hear quite sounds?
63. List and describe the social interactions that you have in a typical day.
64. What are moods? Which moods can you have at the same time? Are they formed as a growing gang of neuronal agreement? How are they related to our emotions and to our biological fitness?
65. Why do we get an urge for a certain food? Does the food processing portion of our body detect and remember the chemical contents of each type of food and remind us to obtain that food again whenever we are in need of those same chemicals? Does our body relate changes in our well-being to what we just ate?
66. Why do you get butterflies in your stomach and what are the circumstances that lead to them? Are they social or animal in function?
67. Do we average all other person's behaviors, smells, tastes, sounds, and voices as we do with the visual appearance of their faces? Do we average the spoken grammar we hear or the clothing fashion that we see? What sorts of things would be averaged by the members of another species?
68. Describe the incredible behavior of split-brain people. This shows how unaware we are of the way our own brains operate. We think we know who we are but aren't even aware of what is constantly occurring within ourselves. Would a newborn child show the same unusual behaviors if its brain became split before its brain areas had become specialized?
69. Describe some optical illusions that show how we are not aware of the way our own brains and eyes are working. Visit www.michaelbach.de/ot and www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html to see many such illusions.
70. Can you discern "stratigraphic" layers in human behavior? Are there behaviors that came first and were modified but not fully replaced by others that came later? Are there behavioral layers involving self, family, and society? Bonobos solve political power issues with sex. Does this mean their political power hierarchy is older or newer than their sexual solutions for conflict reduction? What clues do we get about our own layers by comparing behaviors of bonobos and common chimps? Which of our own behavioral layers are older or newer than our monogamous parenting strategy?
71. Does your mother seem to be much better than your father at tracking complicated family relationships, such as who is whose grandniece on one family side or the other, or is it your father who is better at tracking these relations? Is neither one better than the other? Does this suggest that our ancestors formed matrilineages, patrilineages, or neither? Are most of today's groups matrilineal or patrilineal? Does it depend whether a group's way of life is that of gatherer-hunters, village farmers, or city dwellers?
72. Why do we get better at being social as we age?
73. How does our brain produce each of our innate behaviors?
74. Describe some ways in which we act differently when in a crowd than while being with one person. Can you explain these differences in terms of the requirements of a social species?
75. List two hundred of the most commonly used words–such as big, small, near, far, blue, one, two, and several–and try to see how well you can communicate using just those words. Can you accomplish your daily tasks using just these words? Can you discuss ideas or art? How many words does a gatherer-hunter group need to survive? Which would be their most useful words? (My friend Erin points out that the word "not" multiplies the number of thoughts you can communicate with other words, as in "not left," "not big" and such.)
76. What does a newborn baby think of its first encounters with each of its senses? What are the differences between taste, smell, touch, hearing, and sight?
77. We saw that a newborn mammal assumes the first thing it sees will be its mother. How is the bond between mother and child affected when a premature baby has to be placed into an incubator? What is the effect on the bond when the newborn baby is placed into the nursery ward instead of staying in the mother's arms? How are bonds formed between children and their adopted parents?
78. Describe some complicated mental tasks that are easy for you to do–memorizing the layout of a store or town for example. Describe some that are difficult.
79. Does every person that you know “give and take” equally from you? Are they members of your nuclear family, extended family, friends, neighbors, or strangers?
80. How many ways do we exchange help with the other members of our social system today? Compare this number with those from a society of gatherer-hunters, a community of farmers, and groups of monkeys, grazing horses, and wolves.
81. Many words express an idea. Find a few foreign words that do not have a precise equivalent in your own language. Why is there no overlap in ideas between these two groups of persons?
82. A clone of yourself is made by using your DNA to grow another copy of you. This person would begin life (age zero) with the same nature as yourself but it would not have the same life experiences–same nature but different nurture. If you were to raise such a cloned copy of yourself, do you think you could get your copy to follow the life-steps of your own choosing? Would you know the mind of your clone and be able to convince it or trick it into doing what you wanted–as nobody has been able to do with their teenagers? Would your copy choose the same hobby as you had when it reaches the age of eight? A similar hobby? No hobby at all? Why do we have hobbies? Would your copy have the exact same interests and choose the same career? If your copy was about to make the same mistake in life as you had earlier made could you reason with yours copy to change its mind? Would your clone develop the same personality as you? Write down your ten largest personality traits. When and why did you acquire these? Would your clone have the same interests, talents, personality traits, religious beliefs, and illnesses? If you sent it as a baby to go live with the people on the other side of the world, or to Ancient Mesopotamia, or into a slum of a nearby city, which behaviors, talents, religious beliefs, and interests would remain the same? Would your clone be an inferior "toy person" because it lived in another country or lifestyle? What clues can clones provide about the nature versus nurture problem?
83. Are we able to experience more than one emotion at a time? Can you find a situation where two are mixed? What if the situation included a mixture of family, friends, neighbors, and strangers?
84. Describe a social situation in which you would wonder if you were being socially cheated.
85. How are our innate emotions held within our brains? What is depression? Why do we get depressed? Some of us humans who are depressed have said that "it hurts to smile" in that being forced to smile just reminds us that we don't want to smile. We lose interest in everything and want to just sit alone. Why does a person commit suicide? After attempting suicide, some persons have said that they "just wanted to end the continual pain that has lasted for years." Does this indicate societal problems? Which conditions in life are needed for this to occur? How do suicide rates vary in time and place and by age group? Why do we murder? Are the brains of criminals different? What do drugs do to our brains?
86. Why are words sometimes considered to be magic? For example, a witch has only to say the right poetic words to make things happen. When did we first decide words were "magic?" Was it a million years ago? 50,000 years ago? 2,000? Do words hurt more than "sticks and stones?" Why is silence deafening? How long after we began using language before someone "got the last word?"
87. Is our social system innate or learned? How much does it vary between cultures?
88. What are some possible reasons for a species of lone individuals to begin forming social groups? When would this have happened in our past?
89. Compare a primate social system with that of another mammal species that searches as a group for group-sized pockets of food–for example, wolves or lions.
90. Why does sharing food or giving gifts form a fast road to friendship?
91. The mental states, behaviors, and motivations of us humans are difficult to study in a scientifically repeatable and unambiguously interpreted manner–and that of the other primates even more so. Design an experiment that uses no language but can still prove that other people besides yourself have emotions or that they show altruism.
92. The egg-hatching strategy of ostriches is to have one bird simultaneously sit on a group of eggs from many different individuals. When there are more eggs than fit, the sitter will nudge one out, which then does not hatch. The sitter has become able to distinguish which egg is its own. Most other birds cannot do this. In fact, they'll raise a smuggled-in stranger's egg even after it has hatched and pushed the original babies out of the nest. Does this give a clue that there was an important reason for primates to begin being able to recognize the member's of their extended family? What might that reason have been? Has the ostrich brain grown in size as it became able to recognize the appearance of its own eggs? Has a section of its brain become specialized for this task?
93. Is it in our nature to look around for something to fashion into a tool when unequipped for the task at hand?
94. Most mammalian youngsters learn only from their mothers. Do you feel any predisposition to preferentially turn to your mother or to your father to learn about the basic skills of life?
95. Which animal harvesting techniques of the Amahuaca would have been known by their Homo habilis and Australopithecus predecessors?
96. Does chimpanzee society have business, governmental, or religious aspects? Compare their commercial, governmental, and religious practices to those of your own.
97. We see that we ignore most elements of the constant barrage of external events–for example, the movements of grass–unless they are of biological importance to us. List some things that are of biological importance to us and some that are not. For example, an infant will pay particular attention to another infant. Are these things innately recognized or do we learn through experience which things to pay attention to and which can be ignored? What does it take for us to develop a specialized processing area in our brain for recognizing a particular event?
98. Are there differences between the reasoning used in social situations, finding cause and effect patterns in nature, recognizing faces, noting the habits of the animals, logic, and mathematics?
99. List the reasons that our ancestors needed an increased reasoning ability. Which aspects of reasoning are involved in recognizing the members of the extended family? We saw that humans make tools and use their brains to obtain food while most other mammals use their nose, legs, and teeth. Did these two particular things provide a drive toward larger brains in humans or were they side benefits of having already had larger brains?
100. We feel respect. Do we have a single feeling of respect that is manifested in different situations or are there differences in our respect for parents and elders or in society and nation? (In Chapter 13, we will see that one goal of Confucianism is to extend respect for our elders into respect for our political structures.)
101. Describe the feeling of an archaeologist who un-buries a 5,000-year-old musical pipe and then blows into it to make music for the first time since its previous owner left it there. Are the brains of these two persons doing or feeling similar things while making and enjoying music? In what ways have our brains changed in the last 5,000 years?
102. Create a piece of art that explains how you feel about being human.
103. Can the morality of humans be scientifically studied? How about that of other animals? Describe a repeatable experiment involving the morality of humans.
104. The food of primates occurs in group-sized bundles. What role has this played in our development of a social group, a hierarchy within our group, and our nuclear and extended family?
105. Do squirrels or chimpanzees notice the cycle of moon phases or seasons?
106. How do we know that humans had emotions one thousand years ago? 20,000? 100,000? One million? When did each of our emotions first appear?
107. Describe a thought that happened today for which you could or could not determine that the word you spoke was redundant to the prior thought.
108. Do foods having no fat taste bad? Do we like the taste of fat? Does this have anything to do with our possible scavenging lifestyle on the African savannah? Does fat have a nutritional value, as does sugar, so that there is a biological reason for us to desire fat?
109. Chimpanzees have trouble manually manipulating small objects because they do not have an opposable thumb. They instead try to use fingers from each hand. Could the members of a fingerless species learn to combine efforts to manipulate small objects? What sort of society, technology, and civilization would result from such cooperation?
110. For how long have our ancestors needed to recognize and remember the faces of other individuals? For how long have our ancestors needed to recognize and remember the spoken names of other individuals? Which of these two tasks do we do best?
111. Are you more likely to live long enough to have children if you communicate your emotions to the other members of your species? What do tears communicate? Which animals do this? Which emotions do you communicate and how?
112. Can human racism be related to the primate predisposition to rank groups of families or are these different things? Is racism innate or learned behavior?
113. Do you experience a mood change when you buy something? Does it depend on whether you are buying something for yourself or for another person? Can you relate this effect to a core aspect of animal nature, such as seeking food or caring for children or yourself?
114. Our human sense of smell is very sensitive to sulphur, which is the "rotten egg gas." My friend Kelley explains that this indicates we have been eating eggs for millions of years because an egg eater needs to know if an egg is rotten. Do people today pay attention to neighborhood birds and their nesting places? Did your grandparents? Is birdwatching popular today because our ancestors have been watching birds and eating their eggs for millions of years?
115. Do you perceive a person to be more beautiful when he or she is performing an action that particularly benefits the group? Are brides, grooms, soldiers, priests, politicians, or musicians and other entertainers more attractive while they are in the spotlight?
116. Estimate the number of hours you spent learning to talk, walk, run, catch balls, play a board game, ski, drive a car, perform arithmetic, get along with others, gauge the intent of others, and to perform your own occupation and such.
117. Only stone tools have survived through time. Were they our first tools? What other tools did Homo habilis use and for what purpose?
118. Compare the animal hunting tactics of lions, gatherer-hunters, and hawks.
119. Have several persons rate the ease with which they learn and perform various tasks. Can you find those which we are biologically prepared to do?
120. Could a brain operate through the exchange of purely chemical rather than electrical signals? Could a much larger- or smaller-scale brain operate through gravitational or nuclear signals? Would that brain be conscious? Is consciousness simply the exchange of signals? What is consciousness? Electrical signals propagate more quickly than do chemical signals. What is the speed of gravitational or nuclear signals? Can we build a computer that operates via the strong nuclear force among protons and neutrons or via the gravitational force among planet-sized masses? Since nuclear interactions take place in the time needed for light to cross quarks, which is at most 10-26 seconds, would this computer operate billions of times faster than today’s large-scale computers? Continuing with problems four and twenty-nine in Chapter 5, could we manipulate small-scale quarks or large-scale stars and galaxies into self-duplicating and self-directing combinations? Would the resulting creatures soon experimentally deduce the laws of nature? Would they know that we existed? Making them is different from making the laws of nature. Did God make us or make the laws of nature that made us? What made God? Did the laws of nature make us? If the exchange of signals is consciousness, is an atom conscious? A solar system or galaxy? Is the universe conscious? In what way does living matter differ from non-living matter? What is the universe? What is life? (Ask mom and dad; they know what is life, as do our community members.)
121. Did one group of humans invent good social behavior and then spread throughout the world? If it enabled them to spread then it was advantageous behavior, so why didn’t nature stumble across this behavior?
122. Describe some things that show our similarly functioning brains. For example, after listening to the lyrics of a song but one time, most of us agree on the three words that serve as the title of the song.
123. Are humans altruistic or self-serving and greedy? Are our leaders altruistic or self-serving and greedy?
Primary sources for the chapter
Primate behavior–information, social knowledge, and the evolution of culture. Diane Quiatt and Vernon Reynolds. Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-521-35255-X hardback.
Why We Feel, The Science of Human Emotions, Victor S Johnston, 1999, Perseus Books, Reading MA.
Wizard of the Upper Amazon, by F. Bruce Lamb, 1974, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley. (This book contains a description of the Amahuaca.)
Kanzi, The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind, by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Roger Lewin, 1994, John Wiley and Son's New York.
Bonobo, the Forgotten Ape, Frans De Waal and Frans Lanting. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997.
Good Natured, the Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, Frans De Waal, 1996, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.
Suggestions for further reading
Wild Minds, What Animals Really Think, Marc D. Hauser, 2000, Henry Holt and Company, New York, New York
Journey to the Centers of the Mind, Susan A. Greenfield, 1995, W.H. Freeman and Company.
Apes, Men, and Language, Eugene Linden 1974 Saturday Review Press.
Gorillas in the Mist, Diane Fossey 1983, Houghton Miffin Co, Boston Mass.
In the Shadow of Man, Jane Van Lawick-Goddall, 1971, Houghton Mifflin Co, Boston.
The Nature of Human Aggression by Ashley Montagu 1976, Oxford University Press New York. (Ashley Montagu is the source of the term "gatherer-hunters.")
On Human Nature, Edward O. Wilson, 1978, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Beast or Angel, Choices that make us Human, Rene Dubos, 1974, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.
The Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan, 1977 Ballantine Books, New York.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, 1992, Ballantine Books, New York.
The Prehistory of the Mind, The Cognitive Origins of Art and Science, Steven Mithen, 1996, Thames and Hudson Ltd, London.
Next of Kin, What Chimpanzees Have Taught me About Who We Are, Roger Fouts with Tukel Mills, 1997, William Morrow and Company, New York.
Ancestors, In Search of Human Origins, Donald Johanson, Lenora Johanson, and Blake Edgar, 1994, Villard Books, New York.
Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy. How Music Captures Our Imagination, Robert Jourdain, 1997, Avon Books, New York.
Music and Miracles, Don Campbell, 1992, Quest Books, Wheaton, Illinois.
Incredible optical illusions, Nigel Rodgers, 1998, Barnes and Noble, Inc.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sachs, 1985, Touchstone, New York, New York.
How the mind works, Steven Pinker, 1997, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, New York.
The Alex Studies: cognitive and communicative abilities of Grey Parrots, Irene Pepperberg, 2000, ISBN 0-674-00051-X, discusses the intelligence of parrots.
The Children of the Dream, Bruno Betteleim, 1969, Avon Books, New York, New York.
As Nature Made Him, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, John Colapinto, 2000, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, New York.
Savage Girls and Wild Boys, A history of Feral Children, Michael Newton, 2002, St. Martin's Press, New York. We get valuable clues about human nature from the rare cases of human children found raised by wolves or monkeys.
Copyright © 2009 Robert Dalling, www.UsHumans.net
