The Age of Empathy (39 page)

140
“She appears genuinely concerned”
: Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth (2008, p. 156) hint at emotional arousal in baboons without empathic perspective-taking.

142
attacked a camel herder
: Joyce Poole in
Coming of Age with Elephants
(1996, p. 163).

143
bereaved baboons
: Study by Anne Engh and co-workers (2005), discussed in “Baboons in Mourning Seek Comfort Among Friends” (
ScienceDaily.com
, January 31, 2006).

143
“nightmare of anxiety”
: Eugène Marais, a South African naturalist, published
My Friends the Baboons
in 1939.

143
The monkey had given only a tiny nip
: John Allman (personal communication). Even if capuchins have a capacity for consolation, research does not always demonstrate it because we compare average postconflict and baseline data. But Peter Verbeek did find evidence that capuchin victims of aggression seek contact with others and are treated in an exceptionally friendly manner (Verbeek and de Waal, 1997).

144
hamadryas baboons
: Drawing based on a photograph in Hans Kummer’s
Social Organization of Hamadryas Baboons
(1968, p. 60).

144
incidents in wild bonnet monkeys
: Anindya Sinha (personal communication).

145
baboons sometimes reassure distressed infants
: Example from Barbara Smuts (1985, p. 112), who adds that the male’s grunting was particularly striking as the infant showed no agony: “Achilles behaved as if he thought that slipping in the sand was an experience that deserved the same sort of reassurance he would normally give when the infant of a female friend screamed or geckered in distress.”

145
“One day, as she leapt”
: From Robert Sapolsky’s
A Primate’s Memoir
(2001, p. 240).

146
Ahla, a baboon
: Baboons used to be employed as goatherds in South Africa, often riding one of the larger goats, as described by Walter von Hoesch (1961). Cheney and Seyfarth (2008, p. 34) cite an ex-owner, according to whom baboons require no special training to become experts at goat mother-kid relationships.

146
bridging behavior
: Filippo Aureli and Colleen Schaffner (personal communication) on wild spider monkeys. The earliest descriptions of bridging behavior and its implications came from Ray Carpenter (1934). Further see Daniel Povinelli and John Cant’s (1995) attempt to link arboreal locomotion to the self-concept.

147
monkeys … don’t pass
: Mirror research on primates has been reviewed by James Anderson and Gordon Gallup (1999).

147
The self is part of every action
: The obligatory self-awareness of all animals is discussed by Emanuela Cenami Spada and co-workers (1995) and Mark Bekoff and Paul Sherman (2003). Animals lacking mirror
self-recognition nevertheless often understand self-agency (Jorgensen et al., 1995; Toda and Watanabe, 2008).

148
mirror understanding
: Instead of splitting species into those that recognize themselves in a mirror and those that don’t, there exist intermediate levels of understanding. Some animals, such as budgies or fighter fish, never stop courting or fighting their mirror image, whereas most dogs and cats at least gradually lose interest in mirrors. Capuchin monkeys go further in that they seem to perceive their reflection right away as different from a real monkey (de Waal et al., 2005). A gradualist perspective on mirror understanding also typifies studies of young children (Rochat, 2003).

150
“it takes a thief to know a thief”
: As Brandon Keim amusingly put it: “First comes self-knowledge, then crime: it’s like a Garden of Eden myth for birds!”
(Wired,
August 19, 2008). Obviously, corvids may use perspective-taking not just for deception, but also for helping and/or consolation, for which there is indeed some evidence (Seed et al., 2007). Further see Nathan Emery and Nicky Clayton’s studies of these fascinating birds (2001, 2004). The obvious question of whether magpies or other corvids have VEN cells (like mammals with MSR) may not be relevant: The architecture of the bird brain is so different that similar capacities as in mammals likely came about through convergent evolution, and hence do not necessarily share the same neural substrate.

152
the hunting dog
: Examples from Susan Stanich (personal communication).

153
“a bipedal animal such as man”
: Quoted from an unpublished 1974 manuscript by Emil Menzel. The author offers extraordinarily detailed descriptions of how chimpanzees deduce the nature and location of hidden objects from the behavior of knowledgeable others, concluding that chimps “have a very effective system of directional communication, to which nothing would be added by manual signalling.”

154
spit into the grass
: This example argues against explanations based on human modeling or training, because no one ever taught Liza to spit for grapes.

154
“The threatened female”
: From
Chimpanzee Politics
(de Waal, 1982, p. 27).

155
“Noises are heard”
: Joaquim Veà and Jordi Sabater-Pi (1998, p. 289).

155
One difference with human pointing
: Michael Tomasello considers declarative pointing a typically human part of language development:
“Apes are not motivated to simply share information and attitudes with others, nor do they comprehend when others attempt to communicate with these motives” (Tomasello et al., 2007, p. 718). The examples that I offer in the text—pointing at hidden scientists, showing off stinky maggots—contradict this view, suggesting that the volunteering of information is not entirely absent in apes. It remains true, however, that they are less inclined than humans to engage in such behavior.

158
“Every man is presumed to seek”
: From Thomas Hobbes’s
De Cive
(1651, p. 36).

159
“He looked at his beautiful hands”
: Irène Némirovsky (2006, p. 35).

161
attached to a dancing pole
: Nigel Scullion, a senior Australian politician, was arrested in a Russian strip club
(Skynews,
December 12, 2007).

161
Present-day egalitarians
: Egalitarianism is hard work, as Christopher Boehm’s (1993) studies make clear. The basic human tendency is social stratification, but in many small-scale societies people actively employ “leveling mechanisms” to keep ambitious males from gaining control. This kind of political organization may have typified much of human prehistory.

161
Sigmund Freud
: In
Totem and Taboo,
Freud (1913) described “Darwin’s primal horde,” in which a jealous, violent father kept all women for himself, driving out his sons as soon as they were grown.

161
the same areas in men’s brains
: Study by Brian Knutson and co-workers (2008). The quote is from Kevin McCabe in “Men’s Brains Link Sex and Money” (CNN International, April 12, 2008).

162
“What we think about ourselves”
: From Robert Frank’s
Passions within Reason
(1988, p. xi). Frank was one of the first to claim that traditional self-interest models fail to account for many aspects of human economic activity.

163
bringing home stag
: Brian Skyrms (2004).

163
perished on K2
: “The Descent of Men,” by Maurice Isserman (
New York Times,
August 10, 2008).

164
eye-poking
: The eye-poking game is described by Susan Perry and coauthors (2003). See also Perry (2008).

167
In one experiment
: Experiment described by Toh-Kyeong Ahn and co-authors (2003). For literature that questions “rational choice” models in economy, see Herbert Gintis’s co-edited
Moral Sentiments
and Material Interests
(2005), Paul Zak’s
Moral Markets
(2008), Michael Shermer’s
The Mind of the Market
(2008), and Pauline Rosenau (2006).

168
Williams syndrome
: Ursula Bellugi and co-workers (2000). The child’s quote is from David Dobbs, “The Gregarious Brain,”
New York Times Magazine,
July 8, 2007.

170
Hermit crabs
: Ivan Chase (1988).

170
“Nobody ever saw a dog”
: From Adam Smith’s (1776)
The Wealth of

Nations.
172
“Let us take a group of volunteers”
: Petr Kropotkin (1906, p. 190),
The
Conquest of Bread.

172
vampire bats
: Gerald Wilkinson (1988).

173
partake in the hunt
: Contingency between a chimpanzee’s contribution to the hunt and access to meat has been suggested by Christophe and Hedwige Boesch (2000).

173
hierarchy takes a backseat
: It is remarkable how little effect the dominance hierarchy has when apes enter food-sharing mode. This has been remarked upon by fieldworkers, and is well documented in captivity (de Waal, 1989). Primatologists speak of “respect of possession”—that is, once an adult of any rank has become the owner of an item, others give up their claims (e.g., Kummer, 1991).

174
Socko and May
: Our food-for-grooming study involved a huge computerized database of spontaneous services. Sequential analyses showed chimpanzees capable of memory-based reciprocal exchange (de Waal, 1997).

175
“marketplace of services”
: In
Chimpanzee Politics
(1982), I proposed that apes trade a wide range of services, from grooming and support to food and sex. Ronald Noë and Peter Hammerstein (1994) formulated their biological market theory, which postulates that the value of commodities and partners varies with their availability. This theory applies whenever trading partners can choose whom to deal with. The baboon baby market is one of a growing number of illustrations (Henzi and Barrett, 2002).

176
capuchins share the meat
: For capuchin monkey hunting and meat sharing see Susan Perry and Lisa Rose (1994) and Rose (1997).

177
taught to bottle-feed
: The adoption of Roosje and the eternal gratitude of her adoptive mother, Kuif, is detailed in
Our Inner Ape
(de Waal, 2005, p. 202).

178
poacher’s snare
: Stephen Amati and co-workers (2008) describe the damage caused by snares, sometimes leading to the loss of limbs. One
male chimpanzee removed a nylon snare around a female’s hand by carefully inspecting it before biting through it.

179
raid surrounding papaya plantations
: Forward-looking political or sexual exchanges among apes have been documented by de Waal (1982), Nishida et al. (1992), and Hockings et al. (2007). Kimberly Hockings was quoted by
ScienceDaily
(September 14, 2007).

179
Chester Zoo
: Nicola Koyama and co-workers (2006).

179
human cooperation a “huge anomaly”
: Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher (2003) open their article on altruism with “Human society represents a huge anomaly in the animal world.” The reason they give is that humans cooperate with nonrelatives, whereas animals restrict cooperation to close kin, as also in the following characterization by Robert Boyd (2006, p. 1555): “The behavior of other primates is easy to understand. Natural selection only favors individually costly, prosocial behavior when the beneficiaries of the behavior are disproportionately likely to share the genes that are associated with the behavior.”

180
genotyping project
: Kevin Langergraber and co-workers (2007, p. 7788) contradicted the view that primates only help kin, concluding about wild chimpanzees: “males in the majority of highly affiliative and cooperative dyads are unrelated or distantly related.” At the Arnhem Zoo, too, unrelated male chimpanzees formed close partnerships, taking serious risks on behalf of one another (de Waal, 1982). Humanity’s other closest relative, the bonobo, is marked by high levels of female solidarity resulting in collective dominance over males. Since females are the migratory sex, they lack close genetic ties within any bonobo community, which is why they are said to form a “secondary sisterhood” (de Waal, 1997). This is another example of large-scale cooperation among nonrelatives.

181
Chimps settle scores
: Primate retribution and revenge was first statistically demonstrated by de Waal and Luttrell (1988) and is further described in
Good Natured
(de Waal, 1996).

182
“If humans show”
: Robert Trivers (2004, p. 964).

182
the true cradle of cooperation
: The burgeoning literature on strong reciprocity (SR) postulates human prosocial tendencies and punishment of noncooperators. Such behavior is indeed well documented (Herbert Gintis and co-editors, 2005), but there is debate whether SR evolved in order to deal with anonymous outsiders, a category not typically considered in evolutionary models. SR is, in fact, easier understood
as having started within the community, after which it was generalized to outsiders (Burnham and Johnson, 2005).

182
Bob Dylan’s observation
: From the 1983 song “License to Kill.”

183
the king’s wives
: While much of the country lives on food aid, nine of the king’s thirteen wives went shopping overseas (BBC News, August 21, 2008).

183
“So the last will be first”
: The parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1—16) is not so much about monetary rewards as it is about entering the Kingdom of Heaven. The parable works, however, because of our sensitivity to its fairness aspect.

184
The chief emotions are egocentric
: Selfish considerations behind the desire for fairness were investigated via the Dictator Game by Jason Dana and co-workers (2004).