The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (38 page)

The best illustration of the fluidity of chimpanzee power, and the attendant emotional and cognitive complexity of chimps, is the primatologist Frans de Waal's gripping, almost soap-operatic, account of life among chimps housed on a two-acre island in a zoo in the Dutch town of Arnhem. Some people find de Waal's book — indeed its very title, Chimpanzee Politics — problematic. They think he too easily attributes to chimps an almost human nature. But no one can deny that this book is unique in its minutely detailed account of life among apes. I'll tell the story as de Waal tells it, complete with his engrossingly anthropomorphic tone, and we'll deal with problems of interpretation afterward.

Yeroen, a leading character in the drama, knew well the precariousness of power. While occupying the alpha position, he relied on the allegiance of various females, most notably Mama, a highly influential ape who occupied the dominant female slot throughout de Waal's narrative. It was to the females that Yeroen turned for help when challenged by the younger, stronger Luit.

Luit's challenge escalated relentlessly. First it was sexual intercourse with a female around ovulation, blatantly performed within sight of the jealous and possessive (like any alpha) Yeroen; next came a series of aggressive "displays," or threats, aimed at Yeroen; and finally a physical assault: Luit descended on Yeroen from a tree,
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struck him, and ran away. This is not the sort of treatment to which alpha males are accustomed. Yeroen started screaming.

He then ran over to a group of chimps, mostly females, embraced each of them, and, having thus consolidated his strategic ties, led them toward Luit. Yeroen and company cornered Luit, who then dissolved into a temper tantrum. He had lost the first battle.

Yeroen seems to have sensed in advance that this challenge was in the works. De Waal's records showed that during the weeks before Luit's first overt defiance, Yeroen had more than doubled the amount of time he spent in friendly contact with adult females. Politicians do most of their baby kissing around election time.

Alas for poor Yeroen, his victory was fleeting. Luit set about to undermine the governing coalition. For weeks on end he punished Yeroen's supporters. When he saw a female grooming Yeroen, he would approach the two and threaten or actually assault the female, sometimes jumping up and down on her. Yet later, Luit might be seen grooming the same female, or playing with her children — so long as she wasn't with Yeroen. The females got the message.

Perhaps if Yeroen had defended his allies better, he could have hung on to alpha status. But this option was rendered dicey by an alliance between Luit and a young male named Nikkie. Nikkie would accompany Luit during his persecution of females, sometimes giving them a hard slap of his own. Their partnership was a natural: Nikkie, just emerging from adolescence, was struggling to establish dominance over all females — a rite of passage for young male chimps — and the affiliation with Luit made this simple. Eventually, after some hesitation, Luit gave Nikkie the added incentive of special sexual privileges.

Having isolated Yeroen, Luit could ascend to alpha rank. The transition came through several hostile encounters, though it wasn't sealed until Yeroen finally mustered the humility to greet Luit submissively.

Luit proved a wise and mature leader. Under his rule, life was orderly and just. If two chimps were fighting, he would step between them with calm authority, ending hostilities without fear or favor. And when he did side with one combatant, it was almost always the one who was losing. This pattern of support for the downtrodden —
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populism, we call it — had also been employed by Yeroen. It seemed to impress the females especially; being less caught up in the pursuit of status than males, they seemed to place a premium on social stability. Luit could now count on their support.

In the long run, however, populism would not be enough. Luit still faced, on the one hand, Yeroen's persistent fondness for power (and perhaps some lingering enmity, though the two had lavishly reconciled, with much mutual grooming, after Yeroen conceded defeat); and, on the other hand, the conspicuous ambition of Nikkie. Luit must have found the latter the more threatening, for he sought alliance with Yeroen, thus freezing Nikkie out of the leadership circle. But Yeroen, seemingly aware of his pivotal place in the balance of power, proved a coy ally, and played the two off against each other. Finally, he shifted his weight toward Nikkie and, in league with him, toppled Luit. Alpha status went to Nikkie, but Yeroen continued to play his cards so deftly that for the next year he, not Nikkie, led all males in sexual activity. De Waal considered Nikkie a "figurehead" and Yeroen the power behind the throne.

The story has a morbid epilogue. After de Waal's book was published, Nikkie and Yeroen had a falling out. But their sense of common purpose was revived after Luit resumed alpha status. One night during a brutal fight, they wounded Luit mortally — even going so far, in a gratuitous bit of Darwinian symbolism, as to rip out his testicles. De Waal had little doubt about which of the two suspected killers deserved more blame. "Nikkie, ten years younger, seemed only a pawn in Yeroen's games," he later observed. "I found myself fighting this moral judgment, but to this day I cannot look at Yeroen without seeing a murderer."
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That's the story of the Arnhem chimps, told as if they were people. Does de Waal deserve to be condemned for anthropomorphizing? Ironically, even a jury of evolutionary psychologists might vote for a conviction — on one count of the indictment, at least.

De Waal suspects that, just before Luit's bid for alpha status, when Yeroen started spending more time with the females, he had "already sensed that Luit's attitude was changing and he knew that
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his position was threatened."
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Yeroen probably did "sense" a change of attitude, and this may well account for his sudden interest in the politically pivotal females. But must we assume, with de Waal, that Yeroen "knew" about — consciously anticipated — the coming challenge and rationally took measures to head it off? Why couldn't Luit's growing assertiveness simply have inspired pangs of insecurity that pulled Yeroen into closer touch with his friends?

Certainly genes encouraging an unconsciously rational response to threat's can fare well in natural selection. When a baby chimp or a baby human, sighting a spooky-looking animal, retreats to its mother, the response is logical, but the youngster presumably isn't conscious of the logic. Similarly, when I suggested earlier that Darwin's recurrent illness may have periodically replenished his affection for Emma, I didn't mean he consciously reappraised her value in view of his poor health (though he may have). Threats of various kinds seem to nourish our affection for the people who help us face threats — kin and friends.

The point is that too readily imputing strategic brilliance to chimps may obscure a basic theme of evolutionary psychology: everyday human behavior is often a product of subterranean forces — rational forces, perhaps, but not consciously rational. Thus, de Waal may be creating a misleading dichotomy when he speaks of Yeroen's and Luit's "policy reversals, rational decisions and opportunism" and then asserts that "there is no room in this policy for sympathy and antipathy."
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What look like policies may be products of sympathy and antipathy; the ultimate policy maker is natural selection, and it calibrates these feelings to execute its policies.

With that verdict rendered, our jury of evolutionary psychologists would probably go on to acquit de Waal of many other counts of anthropomorphism. For often what he imputes to chimps is not human calculation but human feelings. During the early, inconclusive phase of Luit's challenge to Yeroen, the two periodically fought. And a fight (among chimps and many other primates, including us) is typically followed, sooner or later, by rituals of reconciliation. De Waal notes how reluctant each chimp was to start the rapprochement and ascribes their hesitation to a "sense of honor."
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He gingerly puts that phrase in quotation marks, but they may Hot be needed. In chimp society, as in human society, a peace overture can carry intimations of submission; and submission during a leadership struggle carries real Darwinian costs, as it may bring secondary or still lower status. So a genetically based aversion to such submissions (up to a point, at least) makes evolutionary sense. In our species, we call this aversion a sense of honor, or pride. Is there any reason we shouldn't use the same terms when talking about chimps? As de Waal has noted, given the close kinship of the two species, to assume a deep mental commonality is good parsimonious science: a single hypothesis that plausibly accounts for two separate phenomena.

Wives have been known to say of their husbands, "He can never hung himself to admit he's wrong," or "He's never the first to apologize," or "He hates to ask for directions." Men seem loath to concede the superiority of another human being, even in such trivial realms as municipal geography. The reason, perhaps, is that during human evolution males who too readily sought reconciliation after a fight, or otherwise needlessly submitted to others, saw their status drop, and with it their inclusive fitness. Presumably females did too; Women, like men, are reluctant to apologize or admit they're wrong. But if folk wisdom can be trusted, the average woman is less reluctant than the average man. And that shouldn't surprise us, as the fitness of our female ancestors depended less on such reluctance than did that of our male ancestors.

De Waal also speaks of "respect." When Luit's dominance was finally undeniable, and Yeroen faintly sought rapprochement, Luit ignored him until he heard some "respectful grunts," unambiguous signs of submission.
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A beta chimp may well feel toward the alpha much the way a losing prizefighter feels toward an opponent he says he now "respects." And at moments of utter ape dominance, when the vanquished crouches in abject submission, awe may be an apt word.

Jane Goodall, like de Waal, saw "respect" in the apes she came to know, though she used that word somewhat differently. Recalling the apprenticeship of a young chimp, Goblin, under the alpha male Figan, she writes that "Goblin was very respectful of his 'hero,'
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followed him around, watched what he did, and often groomed him."
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Everyone who has been through adolescence and has had a role model can imagine how Goblin felt. In fact, some might suggest that reverent is a better word than respectful.

All of this may sound facile — a grand leap from surface parallels between us and apes to the depths of primate psychology. And maybe it will turn out to have been facile; maybe the uncanny resemblance between chimp and human life isn't grounded in a common evolutionary origin or a common biochemistry. Still, if we are not going to explain such things — respect, reverence, awe, honor, stubborn pride, contempt, disdain, ambition, and so on — as natural selection's way of equipping us for life in a status hierarchy, how, then, are we to explain them? Why are they found in cultures everywhere? Is there an alternative theory? If so, does it explain, as well, why pride and ambition, for example, seem to reach greater heights in men, on average, than in women? Modern Darwinism has an explanation for all of this, and it's simple: natural selection in a context of status hierarchy.

One of de Waal's alleged anthropomorphisms puts flesh on a skeletal speculation made by Robert Trivers in his 1971 paper on reciprocal altruism. De Waal believes conduct among chimps may be "governed by the same sense of moral Tightness and justice as it is among humans." This thought was provoked by a female chimp named Puist, who "had supported Luit in chasing Nikkie. When Nikkie later displayed at Puist she turned to Luit and held out her hand to him in search of support. Luit, however, did nothing to protect her against Nikkie's attack. Immediately Puist turned on Luit, barking furiously, chased him across the enclosure and even hit him."
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It doesn't take great imagination to see in such fury the heated indignation with which you might chastise a friend who had deserted you in time of need.

The deepest source of this "sense of fairness" is, as Trivers noted, reciprocal altruism. No status hierarchy need be involved. Indeed, what de Waal calls two of the basic rules of chimpanzee conduct — "One good turn deserves another," and "An eye for an eye, a tooth
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for a tooth" — amount to a description of TIT FOR TAT, which evolved in the absence of status.

Still, it is competition for social status — and the attendant phenomenon of social alliance, of collective enmity — that has given these deeply held philosophical intuitions much of their weight. Human coalitions competing for status often feature a vague sense of moral entitlement, a sense that the other coalition deserves to lose. The fact that our species evolved amid both reciprocal altruism and social hierarchy may underlie not just personal grudges and reprisals, but race riots and world wars.

That war may in this sense be "natural" doesn't mean it's good, of course; or even that it's inevitable. And much the same can be said of social hierarchy. That natural selection has opted for social inequality in our species certainly doesn't make inequality right; and it makes it inevitable in only a limited sense. Namely: when groups of people — especially males — spend much time together, some sort of hierarchy, if implicit and subtle, is pretty sure to appear. Whether we know it or not, we tend naturally to rank one another, and we signify the ranking through patterns of attention, agreement, and deference — whom we pay attention to, whom we agree with, whose jokes we laugh at, whose suggestions we take.
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But social inequality in the larger sense — gross disparities in wealth and privilege across a whole nation — is another matter. That is a product of government policy, or lack of policy.