Discussion of Kummer's (1995) book on the hamadryas baboon

 (writing in progress)
 
Parts 3-7:
 
On page 193, Kummer touches on the profound question at the heart of these Posts on baboons. The section of the book is titled ‘Male consideration of female preferences’.

It was established by careful experimentation that males acted, under certain circumstances, as if they considered the preferences of females in their repertoire of respect for marriage.

The way Kummer sees it, “the consideration displayed by...rival males is a first evolutionary step on the road to a more egalitarian society...such delicacy of perception does not necessarily mean that the strong can attribute a mental state to the weak, as humans can...the rivals may have perceived only that the opposing male behaved in a more determined way when he was the partner his female wanted...[in which case] consideration for another individual is just an elaborated form of selfishness...”
 
In other words, Kummer considered the incipient altruism evident in certain ambivalent behaviours in the hamadryas baboon, and concluded that baboons are essentially ‘proto-apes’ in this respect (although this is not how he put it).
 
On page 206 Kummer recounts an anecdote suggesting considerable paternal consideration in the hamadryas baboon. Because his account is measured and as objective as possible, he does not throw away its value in the way Sapolsky usually does in ‘A Primate’s Memoir’. It is a second-hand account but worth considering.
 
An adult male hamadryas baboon was walking down a scree slope. He dislodged a stone about 2” diameter. Six feet directly below him, infants were playing on a ledge. The male did something quite unusual: in a flash he seized the rolling stone, and he continued to hold it in the hand resting on his knee even when a female sat down beside him and groomed him. All the time, he was watching the infants. Barely a minute later the infants left, and the male opened his hand, allowing the stone to fall over the deserted playground. “Otherwise we never saw a baboon sitting with a stone in his hand.”
 
My interpretation: there is an incipent/residual morality in baboons. It is not that this is altogether absent, it is that it is downplayed adaptively. I see this as making it all the more interesting that baboons so seldom act morally.
 
On page 207ff, Kummer confirms that the hamadryas baboon completely stops playing at the age of 3-5 years. Please remember that the male reaches sexual maturity at about 6 years old. Kummer does not point this out, but I note that the male stops playing before, not after, he reaches puberty. I suspect that the complete absence of play in adult baboons is somehow relevant to their ‘quasi-sociopathy’. More particularly, I suspect that it indicates their lack of a sense of humour, and the possibility that juveniles play not from a sense of humour, but just to practise physical actions.

Please bear in mind that adults do play in other non-human animals, e.g. parrots. I infer that certain parrots may have a ‘theory of mind’ whereas baboons do not. However, in the hamadryas baboon there is an interesting complication: no sooner have the males stopped playing than they start showing a strange form of parental instinct which is actually a form of ‘kidnapping’.

Page 212: “Around the time of puberty a male develops a marked interest in mothering small baboons...[males] do all this twice as frequently as subadult females, from whom one would tend to expect it...the male replaces his little companion’s mother, whom she would otherwise still need...He makes allowances for her deficient climbing skills and carries her on his back over difficult passages...As when mothering male babies, the subadult male is building up a relationship with a child, and again he borrows the form of the mother-child bond. The age difference between him and his juvenile female is the same as that between a younger male and a kidnapped infant – seven to eight years...A young female is much easier to acquire than a sexually mature one. It is not a bad strategy for a bachelor to take over a female at that age so as to reserve her for himself, meanwhile acting as a substitute mother until she reaches sexual maturity.”
  
This behaviour by juvenile males, towards females not yet sexually mature, is the closest thing to courtship in the hamadryas baboon.
 
Kummer’s interpretation is that males begin ‘grooming’ pre-pubescent females as a way of eventually acquiring a wife, despite the otherwise insuperable odds of a society in which possession of wives is respected and the juvenile could not compete openly with mature males anyway. But what I find particularly fascinating is the way the mother relinquishes her offspring to the care of a juvenile, demonstrating the weakness of the maternal bond as well as the principle behind kidnapping/hostage-taking in baboons generally.
 
Although Kummer does not spell this out, this is how I would explain it. In all species of baboons, there is some form of ‘kidnapping’. In savanna baboons with their open rivalry among males for the alpha position, infants are used to negotiate fighting, an abuse that most infants survive and which the mothers oppose but can often do little to prevent. In the hamadryas baboon, in which competition among males is different because of the system of marriage, aspiring males put kidnapping to a different purpose, and one that does not endanger the infant in the same violent way but nevertheless reflects the ‘failure’ of the mother and father to prohibit ‘abduction’. I.e. infants and juveniles are used, in baboons, as a kind of indirect currency in ‘sexual politics’.

Later, this repertoire of kidnapping, which is a sort of perversion of the parental relationship, is turned to good advantage by the adolescent male hamadryas baboon in ‘raising’ a juvenile female to be his wife, which effectively means that he ‘marries’ her when she is still a child (a theme echoed in many human societies, probably including the pastoralists sharing the habitat of the hamadryas baboon in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa!).
 
One of the odd corollaries of all this is that males of the hamadryas baboon actually wind up ‘mothering’ infant males they have not fathered. This is despite the fact that even fathers in this species do not show much real paternal behaviour of their own offspring. This seems, on the face of it, paradoxical. Fathers take little direct interest in their sons (although they do protect them and sometimes carry them). However, juvenile males start acting like parents when still juveniles (pre-pubescent).

Do readers see how easy it would be for an Eugene Marais-gone-to-Ethiopia to misinterpret this ‘kidnapping’ by juvenile males as some sort of empathetic ‘training to be a good Dad’? Little in the psychology of baboons can be taken at face value, not so?
 
The social system of the hamadryas baboon is so complex that it is actually quite difficult to describe. The terms ‘harem’, ‘marriage’, and ‘kidnapping’, among others, hardly do justice to what is really going on. If we humans, with our great intelligence and extremely complex societies, find the society of another primate so bewilderingly difficult to represent even in our own terms, surely this indicates just how ‘sophisticated’ in their own way baboons are, socially? It is against this backdrop that the lack of empathy in baboons seems, to me, to be so remarkable.
 
The social behaviour of baboons is not only complex and versatile, but revelatory of surprisingly deep principles, that one can ponder for weeks at a time.

To exemplify how complex the social organisation is in the hamadryas baboon: ‘marriage’ is serial for the females, and respect for marriage by rival males is conditional.
 
We have seen that a given male individual marries one or more female individuals. As long as this male remains fit, he mates with no females other than his wives. However, it is important to realise that his tenure does not last throughout the reproductive lifetime of his wives. Sooner or later he gets old, and loses the ability to herd and control his wives. Then they accept new ‘husbands’, so that the females are serially married, not married for life. Do readers see how this system, in its own way, adds up to the equivalent of the more promiscuous system seen in savanna baboons?
 
As for respect for marriage: it is true that there is remarkable ‘gentlemanliness’ in terms of ‘whoever asks her out first wins’. However, there are occasional fights among clans, and during these chaotic encounters (e.g. at sleeping cliffs), wives can be stolen, almost as if the hectic nature of the general melee overcomes the usual inhibitions. The important point to note here is that the wives do sometimes/often accept the new husband under these circumstances, again showing that they do not really care for their husband as an individual ‘person’. There is no ‘true love’ in human terms.
 
As Kummer puts it on page 225-9: In the hamadryas baboon, “Many females thus have just as many marriage partners as a male during their lives, but consecutively rather than simultaneously...Adult females were taken over by males of other clans just as often as by those of their own.”
 
For me, the social system of the hamadryas baboon shows that classism is not a fundamental principle in the societies of baboons. Under the ‘serial marriage’ system of the hamadryas baboon, the females abandon the classism seen in savanna spp. of baboons. The sexism and ageism remain, but the classism is a minor part of the psyche in baboons. There is an aristocratic element to their social thinking, but this is

• restricted to the females,
• versatile, and
• abandoned according to circumstance.

I notice that no author I have read mentions the following. Everyone confirms that the status of a daughter, in savanna baboons, depends on the status of the mother, but nobody seems to think of the sons. The obvious question is, does the son of a high-ranking mother in savanna baboons stand a better chance when emigrates to a new group? Since nobody seems to have considered this, I assume it is irrelevant. In other words, it seems to be that classism is such a minor part of baboon society that, in the case of males, it may as well not exist. The lives of males are run according to pro-male and anti-female sexism, and - in the case of the hamadryas baboon - ageism. The latter is pro-male ageism during the juvenile years (when an individual male can ‘kidnap’ and groom a juvenile female to be his later wife), and anti-male ageism in the senile years (when everyone just ignores the old male).
 
On page 233, Kummer mentions the following. When females of the hamadryas baboon fight, they behave similarly to males in ‘fencing with gaping jaws’. I find this interesting because their canines are hardly more dangerous than human canines, and nothing that can really be ‘fenced with’ as such, except in a token repertoire, a kind of shadow of the male repertoire. Can you imagine women ‘fencing with their canines’?
 
When the male of the hamadryas baboon gets too old to keep his ‘harem’, he lapses into a kind of retirement, in which he changes behaviourally and physically. He loses his mane, and at this stage no longer has sharp canines. What is interesting is that, during these senile years he sometimes PLAYS, something unusual for adult baboons. I gather that what happens is that juveniles, usually his own progeny, will sometimes approach him playfully, and instead of ignoring them he plays with them, however passively. He acts like an indulgent grandfather to them, having nothing macho left to prove. This behaviour is not well-developed enough to be important. However, once again it illustrates a certain complexity and versatility that makes the general lack of empathy all the more remarkable.
 
In the lion, there is evidence that brothers, part of a single coalition, share mates to some extent. The hamadryas baboon is lion-like in certain ways. However, Kummer points out that there is no evidence that males favour kin in sharing mates. In this sense (although the pattern is too nebulous to be importwnt), it seems that if anything the lion is more ‘altruistic’ (in terms of ‘kin selection’) than baboons. Being someone’s brother, in baboons, seems to count for nothing in sexual terms.
 
On page 250, Kummer states “Full-grown males often position themselves between danger and the weaker members of the group...When threatened by hyenas or the nomads’ dogs, adult males form a shield...forming a barricade against the dog.” What Kummer describes here is that male individuals from different clans within a single band, i.e. males that normally have little to do with each other although spatially associated in a loose way, do show some group-solidarity when it comes to anti-predator defence. My interpretation: each male is essentially protecting his own wives and sons/daughters, and the solidarity is inadvertent rather than revealing some kind of selfless gallantry.
 
On page 254, Kummer summarises thus: “A primate group is a compromise between the large group for protection against danger and the small one for protection against hunger and too-long marches. Most species choose to have one intermediate size group, like that of the savanna baboons. In the semidesert, though, the range of optimal group sizes is extreme. The hamadryas have solved this problem with a building-block society, a system of groups and subgroups that separate and rejoin along preformed seams, depending on the concentration and distribution of resources. At the rare but large sleeping cliffs, they spend the night in troops of hundreds of individuals. The troop is much larger than the groups of other baboon species and, in fact, represents a fusion of these. The largest troop we knew lived near the town of Dire Dawa and comprised 750 members, all of whom found room on the same cliff. The permanent water holes in the wadis are the next-smaller resources. Here the hamadryas baboons gather in bands, which correspond to groups in the savanna baboons. To search for food, the band must usually be subdivided...berry bushes and dobera trees standing on the barren ground of the hillsides, a hundred yards of more apart...offer just enough room for one family. The divergent requirements imposed by the resource distribution have both combined the old savanna baboon groups and torn them apart, producing the fusion-fission system [of the hamadryas baboon]”.
 
I can comment on this in three ways. Please note the:

• precision whereby Kummer refers to the three levels of congregation in baboons (defined as family groups, clans, bands, and troops),
• versatility, and
• capacity to congregate up to 750-strong.

The hamadryas baboon normally forages in a congregation so small that it consists of really just one family (albeit often with more than one adult female as the wives to a single mature male). However, this species has an extremely gregarious aspect.

Do readers see why I use the term ‘supersocial’ for baboons?

To stand back for a moment and express again what I find remarkable about baboons: here we have extremely intelligent primates capable of congregating in groups of up to 750 individuals (in the evening and morning, for the purposes of sleeping safe from predators on a single cliff system). And within this huge assemblage the society is organised on such complex lines that the social structure is bewildering. Yet all of this social complexity and versatility is mediated by an amoral approach.

This is what I think all the primatologists including de Waal have missed: baboons are not just proto-apes because their social complexity can greatly exceed that of any ape, and can exceed even that of human species such as H. neanderthalensis. What these primatologists fail to acknowledge is the incongruity of the advanced level of society relative to the primitive level of morality, in e.g. the hamadryas baboon.   
 
On page 255, Kummer discussed hunting by baboons: “It is astonishing that hamadryas baboons do not systematically nut small mammals.’ He explains this by invoking the fact that baboons do not have the behavioural repertoire of sharing prey, which means that hunting would break up the group and would not be a viable strategy. He describes how even a female individual, having caught a hare, refuses to share this item with any other member of her family.

It is also clear from Kummer’s observations that the ‘rule’ of respect for possession of prey is NOT consistent. In most instances of hunting cited in this book, the prey was stolen by an adult male, and then eaten selfishly. Kummer emphasises that an adult male will not even give his own brother a piece of the prey.
 
As Kummer (page 256) puts it: “Although the baboons are physically quite capable of hunting, they are let down by their social inability to give, or at least to allow others to take...wild dogs and lions share their prey with adults and juveniles...Most primates lack a genetic program for giving...Of all the primates, only humans have made hunting a way of sustaining their lives. The precondition for this breakthrough was a new willingness to donate something to a companion. This may have become possible only when people developed the ability to empathize with one another. Although the role played by the invention of weapons is usually given priority in the development of hunting, in my opinion this was initially less important...[non-human] primates are unable to share food.”

Kummer (like de Waal) does not see a categorical difference between cercopithecids and apes in terms of an inability to give and share.

I disagree: I think that apes are far better at giving and sharing than baboons are, although the apes are still far inferior to humans, CONSIDERING THE LEVELS OF CONGREGATION. It’s on this distinction that our proposed paper rests.

On page 271, Kummer tells of an observation that seems to contradict the stupidity of baboons as detectives. When the local nomadic pastoralists move camp, they often burn any possessions they are leaving behind. Researcher Alex Stolba ‘saw a resting group of hamadryas get up immediately when a column of smoke ascended out of the plain, and all the baboons disappeared in that direction. The smoke promised an abandoned goat kraal and a thick layer of dung with beetle larvae.”
 
One of the noteworthy features of baboons is that adult males do not really make friends of each other. Adult males do coexist in the same group, but their interactions are largely fear-based and ‘negative’. It is rare for adult males to groom or even touch each other, and the most common form of touch, as far as I can see, is mock-mounting, in which the mounter asserts dominance of the mountee.

It is as if the ‘nuclear deterrent’ of the dangerous canines makes all adult males fearful of each other to the point that this cannot be overcome in friendships no matter how long the individuals live together. Even the senile individuals among the males, which are now harmless, are not befriended by males in their prime as grooming partners, and I think this is true even when the male in its prime is the son of the senile individual. We’ve previously noted that juvenile males play frequently up to a point just before puberty, and then for their whole sexual lives desist from playing with each other.

Now I can add to this by saying that not only do these adult males, who romped carefree with each other as juveniles, no longer play with each other, but they fear each other (including their own brothers) so much that they are reluctant even to look directly at each other, or to groom each other.
 
Do readers see the significance of this? Two brothers, who grew up together and played for years together, cannot engage in the potentially empathetic interaction of mutual grooming because fear dominates their emotions about each other. Just this fact alone seems – although I’ve never seen this pointed out in the literature – to support the interpretation of ‘quasi-psychopathy’, not so? Do you see how sociopathic it would seem in a human society for two brothers, who grew up together, to live in the same group (clan, in the case of the hamadryas) but never to act in friendly ways towards each other?

Even brothers devolve to familiar ‘enemies’ in the sense that they are potential rivals for the same female individuals, and they cannot overcome their mutual fear even to the degree of touching each other in benign, casual ways. For adult brothers to embrace is, as far as I have read, unthinkable – although embracing is in fact an important gesture in baboon societies at the highest levels of intimacy (e.g. between mother and infant but also between male and female in a consorting pair in some circumstances (needs checking). Putting my point a different way, and again I think this is subtlely original: in the fraternal relationship, there is a great source of fear in the form of the canines, but no corresponding and balancing source of love, such as cooperation to hunt and share prey, or cooperation to groom mutually. Because the fear outweighs the love, the net result is that brothers act like strangers to each other unless they actually happen to be contesting females (or prey), in which case they fight. The IMBALANCE is what seems quasi-psychopathic, not so?

Here are a few relevant quotes:
 
page 304: “Certain findings indicate that [non-human] primates threaten and attack their closest relatives not less, but more often than nonrelatives...In our colony of long-tailed macaques, the mothers take food by force only from their own children...Kin are not necessarily [paragons] of unselfish love.”
 
pages 294ff: “Close observation of male relationships makes it clear that fear is the great obstacle...The trouble arises when the partners are both males, each of whom has reason to fear the canine teeth of the other one...two strong males had the most difficulty in making friends...For friendships between two strong males, the borrowed behaviors of sex and grooming are often insufficient motors. The unifying effect of a mutual opponent whitewashes this problem but does not solve it...[However, in an experimental situation of confinement] Warto acted as though the development of the relationship were more important to him than insisting on maintaining his alpha role...Warto’s novel method of coming closer by sliding backward, exactly what the situation required, is not the behaviour of a fearful male, nor is it a phylogenetically old strategy. It may be the dawning ability of a primate to imagine itself in the place of another.”
 
My comment on the latter quote: Kummer repeatedly detects subtle and unusual but, to him, indicative behaviours, in which the overall lack of empathy is broken by seemingly ethical lapses. I agree with his take, but what I think he missed was that these ethical instances are vestiges rather than being incipient. In other words, he assumes that this is the beginning of the kind of empathy we take for granted, whereas I see this as a vestige, i.e. that cercopithecids have actually lost empathy relative to the complexity and versatility of their societies.
 
The following, on page 292, shows how intelligent the hamadryas baboon is: “...suggested to us that the low-ranking females do not value the marriage with their male very highly...we checked this with an experiment...Our suspicions were confirmed...’Fidelity’ depended at least in part on how much a female had to lose in her own marriage. The males in the ‘false’ pairs did not restrain themselves in the fidelity test except for one small detail. Normally when a female begins grooming a male, he yawns with a loud sound of pleasure. These [experimentally cheating] males opened their mouths widely, but silently; they knew that the female’s spouse was behind the wall.”
 
Do readers see what I mean when I se the amorality as anomalous? Here we have a species with such social intelligence that this kind of affectation can occur; yet the morality lags behind the social sophistication.
 
Pages 283-4: “Grooming of one adult by another...is the most visible form of altruism, the rarest and highest degree of sociality...Embracing is clearly limited to relationships in which the embracer is prepared to stand up for the partner, even if it means a fight. I suspect that...their behavior is determined not by altruism...but rather by an independent, direct motivation to care for and defend another that is linked to claiming a relationship from which third parties are excluded...relationships at the level of embracing always include a claim of exclusivity. Perhaps it is exclusivity, more than altruism, that is communicated at the highest levels of interaction.”
 
In his last chapter, Kummer interprets how the ecology of the hamadryas baboon has shaped its social structure. This seems surprisingly different from that of savanna baboons. However, I think it is based on similar principles.
 
Page 314ff: “Places suitable for refuge at night were few but large, so it was useful to assemble there in troops; feeding sites were poor and widely scattered, so that foraging was better done in small groups...Even in their small foraging groups...hamadryas baboons have to travel much farther every day than any other primate species...The long-term one-male unit is evidently the hamadryas’ response to a widely scattered food supply.”
 
Kummer summarises the anti-predator defensive strategy of the hamadryas baboon as executed by a ‘cooperative alliance’ of adult male individuals, e.g. at water holes. I find this ambiguous and somewhat misleading. The defense is indeed cooperative in the sense that several male individuals, all attacking e.g. one individual of the leopard at the same time, are operating together. However, the implication of ‘cooperative’ is that there is an intention in the baboon’s mind to function as a team. This I doubt. As I see it, each male individual is motivated to protect his own wives and offspring, the cooperation being a function of the gregariousness in which several family groups assemble at the same place.

 
Kummer summarises the strategy of the male hamadryas, thus: “He elaborated the simple behavior of driving the female away from a rival, as the savanna baboons do, into an aggressive herding behavior in which his threats bring the female from the rival to himself...If he nevertheless has to fight, after each round he runs to the female and, with his opponent watching, encloses her in his arms. In this way he exploits teh probably much older convention that where something valuable is at stake, the possessor actually holding on to it has precedence...To sum up, the hamadryas male gained the benefit of cooperation with other males against predators at the cost of another danger, that his females would take advantage of being near to many other males and deprive him of his paternity. The herding technique was his evolutionary countermove...the dominance displays and dominance orders [I think he means the male hierarchy] that are so conspicuous among savanna baboon males amazingly vanished from sight in hamadryas society...[this explains] the special morphological features of the male hamadryas...: the mantle, which attracts grooming by the female, and the red hindquarter with which to appease rivals...females no longer groom one another frequently, and they now seek to form an alliance not with their relatives but with their male...sons now stayed with their fathers rather than emigrating as the savanna baboons do. Mobility was still necessary to prevent incest, but it was exchanged between the sexes: males kept to their groups, and the females left them...But the hamadryas have apparently gotten no closer than the savanna baboons to the highest level, where one gives altruistic help to another. In summary, this viewpoint holds that the hamadryas baboons evolved in a region where food grew in such small and widely scattered areas that small foraging groups were necessary, and in these small groups marriage came into being. Sleeping cliffs and water holes were even more widely scattered, but they were so large that the families had to assemble there, and in these assemblies herding behavior, the property convention, and male alliances developed...Primates are social, but not in the sense of highly developed altruism.”
 
As you can see, Kummer has done an exceptionally thorough and detailed job of interpreting the social behaviour of the hamadryas baboon in the light of its ecology. I agree with most aspects of his interpretation. However, what I think he misses is that apes (particularly chimps) and baboons have different RATIOS between social complexity and degree of emphathy.
 
This is beyond what Kummer ever attempted, but I could quantify it as follows.
 
On scales of 1-10, chimpanzees score say 5 for social complexity (including versatility) and say 5 for empathy (including altruism). Chimpanzees are far simpler, socially, than modern humans, and although their degree of empathy is certainly greater than that in most primates it is still far inferior to that in humans. This gives us a ratio of 5/5, = 1, i.e. chimpanzees can be interpreted, in keeping with their relatedness to the apes ancestral to humans, as ‘proto-humans’ in the sense that their empathy is still primitive and somewhat ‘incipient’ but this is IN KEEPING WITH THE RATHER SIMPLE SOCIAL FABRIC IN WHICH THEY LIVE. Chimps are gregarious, but only loosely so, and not in particularly large groups. Relative to this rather rudimentary gregariousness, I see their development of empathy as being considerable, and I interpret this as in keeping with their tendency to use tools.
 
On the same scales, baboons score say 10 for social complexity and say 1 for empathy. Please note that baboons score 1, not zero, for empathy, because (as Kummer notes repeatedly in his book) there is a glimmer of empathy in some behaviours of baboons, or at least some ambivalence in which we should give baboons the benefit of the doubt. Recall the incidents

• in which a mature male considerately prevented a stone rolling on to the infants two metres downslope of him;
• cited by Sapolsky, when a mature male did seem to go out of its way to lay its life on the line for two juveniles which were not his own;
• cited by Kummer when, in a captive experiment, one mature male individual modified his behavior to make it easier for the other male individual to accept a peace-offering gesture.

These scores mean that the ratio in baboons is not 1 but 10, i.e. according to my for-example-only-analysis I find baboons and macaques to have a ratio of social complexity up to an order of magnitude greater than that of chimpanzees and other apes.
 
It is this conceptual framework that I offer as something new in primatology. I effectively giving baboons credit for having come up with an alternative strategy in terms of the RATIO between social complexity and empathy, between social versatility and altruism, and I suggest that this is a better explanation, of so many of the differences between baboons and chimpanzees, than the current view.
 
This concludes my direct coverage of Kummer’s book.

(writing in progress)

Posted on 14 de julho de 2022, 04:40 AM by milewski