Evidence from Sapolsky for quasi-sociopathy in baboons, part 2
(writing in progress)
...continued from https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/milewski/67899-evidence-from-sapolsky-for-quasi-sociopathy-in-baboons-part-1#
Page 281: if a human feeds baboons, soon there is abuse, and the animals start to rob one brazenly.
As Sapolsky jokes "...not yet having mastered the subtlety of distinguishing between maize meal before and after humans have decided they’ve done with it."
Could it indicate their lack of ‘theory of mind’?
To spell this out, maybe the baboon is not being as churlish and ungrateful as it seems, because its mind is (unlike that of human or chimp) incapable of understanding that the human sometimes has a motivation to give and sometimes has a motivation not to give. All it understands is that the human allowed his/her food to be taken before, and so it’s worth trying again.
My point is that the distinction so obvious to us, revolving around ‘wait until you’re invited, you bloody baboon’, may be meaningless to them precisely because they cannot see things from another’s point of view.
So, in effect most of us who have resented baboons' bad manners in such situations have had the right resentment, but for the wrong reasons; itis not that the baboon is practising bad manners, it is just that it has learned that you are a source of food. It never understood the concept of ‘giving’ in the first place, so why should it understand it in the second place?
Complementing this explanation, of course, is the fact that no baboon ever gives another any food, although a dominant individual will – according to Sapolsky – take food (e.g. an excavated tuber) from another. So, although Sapolsky does not go into any of this, I find the boorishness of baboons at the roadside in conservation areas through more understanding eyes now in terms of their incapacity for cognitive empathy.
There is more evidence of individual personalities on pages 287-8.
Sapolsky found repeatedly that one of his main concerns, when anesthetising a male, was to keep the animal out of sight of the other males while the drug worked, because one of the features of the psyche of baboons is ‘to kick them while they’re down’.
When a male individual sees a rival in a weakened state, particularly if there are nicely-remembered grudges in his mind, he show no curiosity for the reasons for the drowsiness – let alone any desire to help against what could indeed be a common threat.
Instead, onlooking male individuals have just one thought, and it is unhesitating: let’s slash this bastard with our canines while we can. From the human point of view this is not ‘fair play’, but baboons do not see it that way. They just see that weakness is there to be taken advantage of, and let’s not overthink this.
On page 303: Sapolsky had the pleasure of seeing several individuals through natural senescence, in some cases having known them from near the start of their lives. He does not mention this, but this survival of senile individuals, in an environment full of e.g. leopard and lion (the Maasai Mara National Reserve, in the Serengeti Ecosystem), is significant.
Firstly, it emphasises the puzzle I mentioned earlier, which is how do monkeys manage to survive semi-terrestrially in an open environment full of large predators – and do so even when rather decrepit and with nobody to show any altruistic protection towards the aged.
And, thinking laterally, what does this imply about the too-frequent assumption that our Palaeolithic ancestors seldom lived past 40 years old because life was so nasty, brutish, and short.
My logic is as follows: if an animal as distracted (by all the gratuitous social bullshit) and on-its-own-in-the-crowd as a baboon can reach a ripe old age (and bear in mind that Sapolsky documents not one but several such cases within his one study-group) in a predator-rich environment, why should we assume that some individuals of our own species could not do likewise, living even in the Palaeolithic to 80, 90, or even 100 years old?
Several individuals described by Sapolsky sound truly decrepit before they disappeared, so what were the leopards in particular waiting for? Do readers see how poorly-understood all of this is?
Eugene Marais might have been forgiven, in the ‘thirties, for assuming that such cases reflected the care of the group for the aged. However, that is clearly not true.
So how does a limping, arthritic old individual, so obviously weak and senile and toothless that any predator would recognise its condition at a glance, manage to live on, week after month, in a place like the Serengeti Ecosystem?
It was remarkable enough, to me, in the days when I still believed that baboons have this quasi-military formation when out foraging, with heroic and selfless males flanking the vulerable and ready to give up their lives in defence of others, that baboons survive in the Serengeti. It seems all the more remarkable now that I know what disregarding types baboons really are – however excellent their eyesight may be and however secure their sleeping places at night may be.
Would I, as a layman, have expected so much a) individual variation, and b) human similarity in baboons.
As for the great variation among individuals, no, I would not have expected it.
It just does not make intuitive sense to me that a wild species, shaped relentlessly by natural selection for millions of years, should retain such variation.
Instead, my assumption for many years (between my ages of about 20 and 35) was that individual variation evolved in humans as part of a biological syndrome of technological specialisation in combination with division of labour. The idea (which I can no longer really defend) was that it pays us humans to be far more individually variable than other mammals because our nature is to develop individual expertise, which would be beyond any Jack-of-all-trades, and that the collective of many individual expertises is what allowed us to rule the world. Baboons (and other mammals) clearly refute this because they have all the individual variation with none of my associated syndrome.
As for the similarity to humans, I think this is part of why I have been moved to write so much on this topic recently. Yes, we do recognise so much of ourselves in these behaviours of baboons that Sapolsky describes – which is precisely why he can describe them so unscientifically, and still manage to get the truthful gist across even if one takes a Kummer-like sober view when reading Sapolsky’s book.
But that is the point: so many human affinities, but so few of the human affinities that we would expect along with the package.
In other words, more than enough of the detailed aspects of human venality, greed, callousness, selfishness, scheming, politicking, brown-nosing, nepotism, classism, sexism, ageism, hedonism, etc. to get our minds nice and ready to assume that, along with all this, there must SURELY be the other side as well, all the moral and caring-and-sharing stuff. But any honest observer is immediately and persistently disappointed on that front.
Baboons lack a theory of mind, so that they cannot tell the difference between you offering them food, and them just taking the food against your will. There may possibly be one baboon in a hundred who has some glimmer of this distinction in their mind (i.e. that rare individual who has an exceptionally empathetic personality for a baboon), but most don’t and this is not their fault, it is just their biology.
Secondly, baboons do not have a behavioural repertoire in which they beg from each other, and they never give each other food. Even a mother with a full cheek pouch will not give her own juvenile offspring food e.g. if it happens to be hungry for some reason (e.g. debilitated in foraging by some injury). Even a lactating mother doesn’t ‘give’ milk to its infant; it merely allows the infant to suckle (there’s a subtle difference, not so?).
So this is the crucial insight: most people having a snack by the side of the road in Kruger National Park, in the presence of a group of baboons, subconsciously expect the baboons to BEG IN THE POLITE WAY THAT DOGS BEG, and to ‘take no for an answer’. This seems a reasonable expectation to most people because a) the domestic dog is what they know well behaviourally as a prototype, b) baboons look particularly like dogs for monkeys, c) baboons have obvious intelligence, and a reputation for smarts, and d) baboons live in seemingly caring-and-sharing groups and it seems safe to assume that they are taking no for answer from each other all the time. So, surely any half-way intelligent animal would realise that the humans call the shots?
But all these subconscious assumptions are wrong, and so baboons get a bad name.
To a baboon, you reaching out of the car window with a bread crust in your hand, clucking ‘here, baboon’, and throwing the crust on to the ground is NO DIFFERENT from you being visible behind the open window eating a sandwich. The baboon’s mind doesn’t ‘get’ this ‘beg and wait patiently’ stuff.
I doubt that there is any frequent interaction between baboons and humans that better illustrates how important it is to realise that baboons lack empathy despite having so many of our ‘negative’ human attributes.
As a corollary to this, here’s something worth further investigation and another example of where Sapolsky ‘dropped the ball’ in his book.
In various of the long-term research studies of baboons, I’ve read repeatedly that one seemingly ‘moral’ aspect of the baboon’s psyche is that it usually RESPECTS POSSESSION. If an individual possesses something, for some reason most other individuals accept that and will not try to steal it. This seems to apply to food, and it certainly applies sexually, e.g. in the hamadryas baboon. In the latter species, as Hans Kummer has described in great detail, once a given male approaches a given female for the first time, it’s as if a bell goes off and all other males just butt-out, as if by some magic rule that transcends the normal ruthlessness of their psyches.
This is why it surprised me when Sapolsky, in one easy-to-overlook clause in his book, implied that his baboons would ‘rob’ e.g. a tuber that another individual had gone to the trouble to dig up. This immoral act sounds, to the casual reader, unremarkable, because it seems to in line with all the other immoral acts by baboons. However, because I’ve taken the trouble to read carefully the various other studies, this struck me right away as inconsistent.
So, the question now becomes: did Sapolsky fib about this robbing of food? And if not, how can we explain that baboons lack any concept of giving/receiving, but still take no for an answer in some circumstances, where the matter seems contestable in terms of brute force? We just need to establish more facts here, because this kind of interaction is relevant to the whole topic of amorality in baboons. However, I’m just confused.
The first question to answer, by more careful reading is: do baboons ever rob each other of food and under which circumstances does this occur?
(as another corollary, why do big males not ‘rape’ e.g. females of their cheek pouch contents? Is this because there is a ‘hard-wiring’ in the mind whereby such immorality is psychologically forbidden (in much the same way as hamadryas males respect priority in approaching potential mates for the first time). Or is it because the anatomy of the cheek pouch is such, with a small tight sphincter between pouch and buccal cavity, that it is physically impossible to ‘rape’ = empty by force?)
(writing in progress)
Comentários
Preliminary comparison of Old World monkeys and Carnivora, in terms of giving and an ethic of generosity:
Let us play some more with this realisation that baboons never give each other any objects/material resources, at any time in their lives. This is something that – if true – epitomises just how different they are from us, and by extension how different their ‘moral’ system is from ours.
Let us compare baboons with e.g. canids. Do canids give each other anything?
I think the answer yes.
Parent canids (both mother and father, plus sundry helpers who are not actually parents) give offspring food by regurgitation, and by carrying food items to the offspring. And the father gives the mother food while she is otherwise occupied, e.g. during lactation. I suspect that, even outside the breeding period, if a female canid begged her monogamous mate for food in the appropriate way, he might give her food, e.g. by placing a bone in front of her or regurgitating for her.
These are clear acts of giving, not so?
I am unsure that any canid gives its offspring toys; it is worth keeping this as a search image when reading the literature. Monkeys certainly do nothing of the sort, another point that seems to have been unnoticed, and just taken for granted subconsciously. But, if one thinks about it, many naturalists possibly assume (as would be revealed by clearly questioning them) that monkey parents give their offspring toys to play with. Nothing of the sort.
I am also unsure if any canid gives its offspring small prey to practise on. However, felids certainly do this. This is simultaneously an act of giving an object, and an act of teaching - albeit in the latter case not a particularly explicit one.
Since it is logical to expect begging behaviour to go with giving behaviour, do readers see how this whole syndrome of behaviours is notably lacking in baboons?
The following is only half-serious, but consider this. Is it true that baboons rob each other fairly frequently (e.g. of food and of infants to play with), i.e. is it true that they know how to take but not how to give objects? If so, an explanation occurs to me for why, in part, grooming has been developed in them, almost to a fault. If one thinks about the act of grooming, it can be described as ‘giving by taking’. I.e. an act of care is given, but no object or resource is given; indeed something is taken away, namely the parasites and flakes of skin. But in this way baboons can at least engage in some sort of communion that twists taking, in a funny way, into an act of giving. Am I making too much of this?
As as aside, please note in particular something I have never seen written anywhere:
Not only do males of baboons not really court females. An obvious option for such courtship is not taken, viz the simple act of giving the female some food to endear himself to her. Do readers see how, as one thinks about this, the pattern of a lack of giving, and all its corollaries (empathy, etc.), consolidates into something significant, but until now overlooked?
We hear repeatedly how our ancestors in the Pleistocene lived to only about 40 years old, at which time they were already 'worn out' by survival.
This reflects a common confusion between life expectancy and lifespan.
Long-term field-studies of baboons have shown that these animals, in the wild under normal predation, live regularly to ripe old ages. These ages are equivalent to the elderly years of humans, as marked by physical decrepitude of various sorts - including, as Sapolsky points out, obvious flatulence.
I.e. it is usual for baboons, even when beset by lion, leopard and spotted hyena plus human enemies, to 'live long enough to become senile old farts.'
This should help to correct the misconception that for humans to live to 90 years or more is something essentially modern.
Things one would be unlikely to hear a baboon saying:
It strikes me that the following might be a good journalistic technique for explaining the quasi-sociopathic minds of baboons and other Old World monkeys to naturalists.
It is quite easy to imagine a mother baboon saying to her infant ‘I love you’. Maternal love surely does not require compassion or empathy, in the context of these Posts? To assert that baboons are incapable of maternal love goes too far, in my opinion.
However, something I cannot imagine a baboon saying is ‘that’s not fair!’. I doubt that baboons have any concept of ‘fair’.
Another thing I cannot imagine a baboon saying is ‘please’ or ‘thank you’. Do these expressions not, by their very nature, reflect a ‘theory of mind’, i.e. an appreciation, even if just token, of the viewpoint of another individual?
How about ‘Give me some food’? I cannot imagine a baboon saying this to a conspecific, or any other animal. However, I can indeed imagine a male saying to a female ‘ok, you can have that’ when she takes a corncob from him after he has raided a maize-field - provided the two individuals are ‘friends’. Baboons (at least according to Eugene Marais) do sometimes allow sharing of food although they do not actively share food. There is a subtle but important distinction.
Would readers agree that we could play an enjoyable game of thinking of further things that no baboon would be likely to say?
E.g. ‘Let me teach you something, my son.’ Or: ‘I don’t deserve to be punished.’ Or: ‘Groom me and I’ll groom you.’
This exercise, of ‘verbalising the psychology of baboons in order to communicate how anomalous it is relative to human values, mightnbe most effective if done in such a way that itis clear what they CAN conceptualise, as well as what they cannot.
For example, I think it plausible that baboons effectively say to each other, on a frequent basis ‘Please do not hurt me’. This happens every time an inferior/subordinate individual presents its posterior to a superior/dominant individual in a tense situation, or (in the case of the hamadryas baboon) rushes placatingly towards the superior/dominant rather than fleeing from it.
Do readers see that the plea ‘Please don’t hurt me’ or even ‘Please forgive me’ do not require empathy? They are simply requests for the desisting from a certain action.
Unlike apes, baboons do not play by tickling:
It is well-known that chimps and other apes tickle each other. The following clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvp160qBcbE&nohtml5=False on the gorilla is worth watching. It is intelligently narrated, and informs us that gorillas not only tickle, but laugh when tickled.
By contrast, baboons and other Old World monkeys do not tickle each other, even in their playful juvenile years. Nor are they capable of laughter. This inability to play by tickling is noteworthy, as pointed out by Hans Kummer (1995).
This is one of the many differences between anthropoids and cercopithecids, showing the former to be more empathetic than the latter.
Paradox that juvenile male baboon no longer plays, yet plays at being a husband
Kummer does not put it this way, but what I notice from his accounts is that juvenile males show an odd form of ‘play’ around the time of puberty. This may reveal the real nature of play in baboons to be different from the empathetic play we take for granted in humans.
As we have seen, a surprising fact of baboon biology is that juveniles play like maniacs, until they suddenly stop playing before puberty. From then on, their lives seem ‘deadly serious’ and the monkeying-around instead seems to consist mainly of ‘bad-natured’ interactions such as politicking, rivalling, and quarrelling. But an interesting ‘exception that proves the rule’ is offered by the habit of juvenile males of the hamadryas baboon to ‘play mother’. This is hardly what one would expect from such a 'sexist' species. This mothering of infants and then juveniles, by males of the hamadryas baboon, is ‘play’ in the sense that the interaction cannot be seen as ‘serious’ in itself; how can a juvenile really substitute for the real parent? However, it is in the following sense ‘deadly serious’. For most juvenile males, the only way to acquire a first ‘wife’ is by grooming a juvenile female, starting when the female is still a mere 'child'. In other words, this is play behaviour because the male concerned is ‘playing’ at being a sexual entity, starting well before he is sexually mature in any social sense. Do readers see how this may reveal the true nature of play in baboons as something amoral? This is part of a bewildering series of permutations, in which we humans struggle to find any consistency, owing to our moral lens.
Concept of detente in baboons, using fraternal bond as example
Imagine a group of baboons in which two adult brothers, A and B, live. These brothers are potential rivals, but they could also (as in the lion) potentially be friends. We know as humans that two male individuals can potentially manage the ‘balancing act’ of being friends AND rivals. Rivalry need not destroy or prevent friendship, because empathetic animals can ‘compartmentalise’ various interactions, partly by putting themselves in each other’s shoes.
Now, in the group in question, brothers A and B are also rivals with e.g. unrelated adult male C. A is a rival of C and, in this case, has no ‘history’ with C. A and C did not grow up together, and never met until they were adults, and already rivals. A and C are strangers, and it seems quite understandable that they should show little empathy towards each other. Why would they, given that they are strangers except in their current rivalry?
In this situation as far as I can gather from the literature, A treats his brother B no differently in most respects from the strange male C. The history of fraternity counts for naught.
In his dealings with strange male C, A adopts a policy of ‘detente’. This is based on mutual fear of each other’s weaponry (canines), and the need to get along owing to the imperative for gregariousness in baboons.
The surprise is that A has a similar attitude to his brother B. This looks for all the world like ‘detente’, despite the fact that these individuals, namely A and B, ‘go way back’ and are ‘bro’s in the ‘hood‘. The inescapable conclusion is that no amount of juvenile play, and co-experience during their formative years, can produce a bond worth its name in adult male baboons. There is to all intents and purposes no possibility for a ‘brotherly bond’ in adult life. The best that can be achieved is the same relationship as with a stranger: detente.
In this detente, brother or not, the two male individuals will be rivals, and will restrain themselves so as not to risk their lives given the terrible potential of the canine teeth to injure. They will use certain placatory/conciliatory gestures to maintain this detente, e.g. avoiding looking at each other directly, and occasionally ‘presenting’ to each other in momentary lapses into a kind of affected ‘girly-boyism’. They will seldom if ever be able to trust each other enough to groom each other, despite all that they went through together in childhood. They may find themselves fighting side-by-side when the group is attacked by a leopard, or in skirmishes between adjacent groups of the same species of baboon. But such side-by-side fighting should not be confused for any willingness to ‘die for each other’, or to defend each other. Each is merely defending its own life and the life of its juvenile offspring, and the apparent camaraderie is coincidental - and, to the human eye, misleading.
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