194 | Frans de Waal on Culture and Gender in Primates

0:00:00.1 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, and welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. We're very interested in human beings. Not just here on the podcast, but we listeners, I presume that you like I, are interested in the behaviors, the ways that we operate and the expectations that different human beings have of each other. We are human beings. Human beings are intrinsically interesting, but because we are some of them, we have a special interest in them, but it's also raising a problem because when we study the behaviors of human beings, it's hard to get outside, it's hard to look at human behavior as a disinterested observer, it's too easy to put ourselves into the shoes of whatever other human beings we're studying. And furthermore, when we find some human behavior, it's a little bit too easy to say that that particular behavior is actually necessary or a law of nature or something like that.

0:00:52.4 SC: Studying different cultures can save us from falling into this trap because different cultures have different customs and so forth, but maybe even more effective is to study non-human primates. Primates are our closest animal relatives, they include apes and monkeys and various lemurs and things like that, and they behave in fascinating ways, both individual ways and social ways, ways that are similar from species to species, and very different from species to species. Today's guest Frans de Waal is one of the leading primatologist and in general, animal behavior studier. Animal psychologist, I guess maybe it's fair to say that we have.

0:01:31.2 SC: He's done a lot of breakthrough studies to talk about the culture, the morality, the social structures that primates have. And as you might expect, some of them you look at and you go, "Oh, my goodness. That's just like human beings. I get it, I recognize that." And others, you go, "Wow, that's very different. [chuckle] Maybe we could be that way. Maybe we should be that way." Both sides give us something to think about. He has a new book out, which is exactly along these lines called, Simply Different. The subtitle is, Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist. So gender, remember back from previous episodes where we talked about the difference between sex and gender, you have biological sex, male or female, and then you have gender. Gender is supposed to be some kind of social construction. And how in the world could we talk about gender in the context of primates, if they don't even have language and books and Twitter feeds and Tumblr and whatever. Well, you can, because there are social roles that are played by these different primates, therefore you can ask in a not quite human context, does gender arise and does it get played out in similar ways in monkeys and apes and other primates as it does in human beings or is it completely different?

0:02:48.9 SC: I'm not gonna tell you the answer, [chuckle] listen to the episode, you'll find there's a lot of interesting intricacies going on here. And as I say in the episode, it's hard not to think of the implications for humanity, even though it's also super duper interesting, just to think about the animal behavior for its own sake. Animals are their own species, every different species that we'll talk about in this episode has a right to its own way of thinking about gender and sexuality. And it adds a little bit of richness to the human way of thinking about it to understand that our closest neighbors are facing similar issues, so let's go.

[music]

0:03:44.4 SC: Frans de Waal, welcome to The Mindscape Podcast.

0:03:46.4 Frans De Waal: I'm happy to be here.

0:03:47.6 SC: You're very famous for studying primates and their behavior, other kinds of animals as well, so let me just sort of set the stage a little bit with asking, do you care mostly about the behavior of primates for their own sake or is it something we do to try to illuminate the behavior of human beings?

0:04:05.9 FW: Well, I think I'm interested in many animals for their own sake as a biologist. And in comparison with humans, well with primates, of course, it comes almost automatically because we are primates, we're humans but that's not the first goal for me. The first goal is to understand these animals and the second goal is when I certainly when I popularize to add in humans.

0:04:31.9 SC: I noticed that just reading some of the examples you're talking about... Actually, I should ask very quickly, how do you pronounce? Bonobo is it bonobo, bonobo. [chuckle]

0:04:43.0 FW: I always say bonobo but...

0:04:46.3 SC: Bonobo.

0:04:47.3 FW: I have a dutch pronunciation, I think. [chuckle]

0:04:49.6 SC: That's fine. Maybe that will win now. So the bonobos famously they solve everything by having sex with each other as maybe you put it at one point. So it's almost impossible not to sort of visualize what that would be like as human beings, because they are pretty close to human beings.

0:05:07.3 FW: Yeah, but I think people always... Since we have so many hang-ups about sex, we exaggerate things. And so when I say bonobos do a lot of things with sex, and they have a very peaceful society as a result. People think that they engage in sex the whole day basically [chuckle] but their sexual interactions are brief, like 15 seconds is a long time. So they're brief, you better look at them as sort of handshakes or patting someone on the shoulder, but then using the genitals. [chuckle] So I think people also call them liberated, which is a very strange word, because there's nothing they had to be liberated from but in human eyes, they look liberated, is because we would never act like this or we have trouble acting like this.

0:05:57.0 SC: Well, I guess that's my question. To what extent can we overcome the temptation to compare them to human beings rather than seeing them as they are themselves?

0:06:10.1 FW: Well, I think the comparison is still interesting, and because clearly we are a very sexual primate [chuckle] even though we don't always talk about that, but we clearly are. And so the comparison is apt and appropriate, and bonobos use a lot of sex for social purposes. So there is this impression in the public mind that animal sex is for breeding and human sex is largely for entertainment, but that's a simplification. Bonobos I think [0:06:40.8] ____ of all the sexual activity, has nothing to do with reproduction because it occurs between members of the same sex, it occurs in situations where reproduction is impossible, it occurs with females who are already pregnant. You know there's all sorts of situations why they are not reproducing and they're still having sex, and that's for social purposes. The females, for example, have a collective dominance over the males, and in order to be collectively dominant, they need very strong ties to each other. So they foster their bones with sex and with grooming and food sharing, and the sex has a strategic political purpose in their case. And they very much engage in that and actually female, bonobos probably have more sex with females than with males.

0:07:28.9 SC: And I guess for human beings, it would be obvious to think that the origins of patriarchy lie in just the fact that human males tend to be bigger and stronger than human females. Is that not like that in bonobos?

0:07:42.5 FW: Bonobos, the males are bigger and stronger. And as a result if at the zoo... And this happened, for example I was at the San Diego zoo when I studied bonobos. They had one male and one female at some point, in that case, the male is dominant. But then they added a second female, all of a sudden there were two females and they were dominant together, so the female dominance is a collective dominance, and it serves a purpose because males can be harassing females, and males sometimes kill infants in some species like in the chimpanzee. And so the female dominance of males has a protective purpose for them, it protects them and their offspring.

0:08:28.4 SC: Interesting, but it's that collective behavior that the other cooperating in order to overcome the individual strength advantage that the males have.

0:08:37.6 FW: Yeah, and it's very prominent that there's now a study that recently came out on bonobos, where they analyzed this video, the interactions, the sexual interactions, and they also measured oxytocin after the fact from urine collection. And they found that females are actually emotionally more affected by sex with females than with males, [chuckle] and also they get probably more satisfaction from sex with females than with males. Females have a large clitoris, all mammals have a clitoris people sometimes forget that. And the mouse has a clitoris, the elephant has a clitoris, but the biggest clitoris we find in the dolphin and the bonobo. Bigger than in humans, and that is because in both species dolphins and bonobos sex plays a very important social role. So there's a lot of sexual interaction and I think pleasure is there to enhance it.

0:09:32.5 SC: You've mentioned a couple of things already that encouraged me to sort of dig into the science, the practice of science part of this. You talked about being at the zoo or whatever, when you're studying the primates, bonobos and others, is it mostly at a zoo or at your own sort of facility or out in the wild or a mixture?

0:09:54.5 FW: Well, we study bonobos and chimps under all circumstances. I myself have mostly worked in captivity such as the zoos or at the primate center where I work. At the moment, we do a lot of studies at the sanctuary the only bonobo sanctuary in the world is in Kinshasa, where we have a lot of bonobos that are victims of the bush meat hunting, and so they arrived as orphans, they are then raised by humans and released in their colony, and then later they released them in the wild actually. And they have already twice released adopted orphans, rescued orphans into the wild.

0:10:33.7 SC: And they do...

0:10:34.3 FW: So we do studies at these sanctuaries which are half captive because the enclosures are enormous, they are I think 60 acres or something. They're like big forest in which they live, and then you have people who work in the field and we combine all that data. The approach and primatology is to use all the data you can get, and so that's post captive data and data from the field.

0:10:58.0 SC: And is it mostly just letting the primates do whatever they want and watching, or do you sort of interfere and try to set up situations where you can see what happens?

0:11:08.5 FW: Well, I've always done both. So I'm originally an observer. I was trained as an ethologist, which is a biologist who observes animal... Naturalistic animal behaviour. So initially, I did most of the things observationally, but later I started to do experiments like these chimpanzees, for example, bringing them together and see, are they willing to share food, with whom are they willing to share food under what kind of circumstances do they need to get something back for it? Or can you do it just for free, so to speak, or do they imitate it sort of and what do they copy from each other? And actually, the imitation is very interesting from the perspective of the gender studies that I'm involved in at the moment, is that I think there is a tendency for males to imitate males more, and for females to imitate females more... For example, young daughters, they copy the behavior of their moms more faithfully than young sons, and so there is this picking up of the model of your own sex, so to speak. And that enhances of course, sex typical behavior, and that means also that the gender concept is probably applicable to other primates because they learn things from each other. And so instead of saying that sex differences in the bonobo and the chimpanzee must be biological, I would argue...

0:12:30.1 FW: Well, there's probably a lot of culture in there because they have a very slow development, they are adults when they are 16. And they nurse for five years, four to five years. So they have a very slow development, they learn a ton of things in their lifetime, and there's no reason to say that what they do is biological more than, but we do I think, because people have that impression that we are cultural beings and animals are instinctive, but I would say we are also so much instinctive and animals also so much cultural beings, so the distinction is not so clear.

0:13:05.4 SC: So Waal when you use the word gender, it's in... We actually talked about this recently with a philosopher, Sally Salinger about the meaning of the word gender. Different than the meaning of the word sex. And I think it's exactly lining up with what you're saying, the biology is sex and culture is gender, and you're saying that the primates have both.

0:13:24.8 FW: Yeah, and humans have both of course.

0:13:26.8 SC: Of course.

0:13:30.9 FW: That is the curiosity that people have about biology, is that we see gender differences in society and we wonder where they come from.

[laughter]

0:13:40.9 FW: Now, we say, of course, some people will say they're all cultural and socialization, some people will say they are nature, we have men and women, and they're naturally different. These are two extreme positions in my view, because I'm an interactionist, I think, it's always both. It's always a little bit nature and a little bit nurture, and it's very hard to disentangle them. It's very hard to say, let's say masculine behavior, it's very hard to say which part of that is human nature or primate nature, and which part is culturally imposed. And so people like to make the distinction, but we know that it's almost impossible to make. So for example, the media, they will say such things as like, "This trait is 90% genetic." And then I always think, [chuckle] "How did they know that? What is 90%?" It's always an interaction with something else.

0:14:36.6 SC: They're probably getting mixed up with heritability or something like that.

0:14:40.8 FW: Yeah, yeah, they learn from statisticians that you can translate the correlation into percentage explanation and stuff like that, but it doesn't work that way, I think. This nature and nurture.

0:14:52.9 SC: Well, what do you mean by culture when you're talking about bonobos or other primates? How do they hand down culture? Is it parents teaching children or is it more complicated?

0:15:03.6 FW: It's not teaching in the sense of active socialization. And it's not like female bonobo telling her daughter how to behave. She cannot tell that to her and she can show her how to behave, but she cannot tell her. But also in humans, I would say socialization, we always think it's a sort of one way street, the parents socializing their children. I think these children socialize themselves. The children look around and look for models, male models, female models, dependents. Actually, transgender children, they look for models of the opposite sex that they were born with. And that's an explanation for much of their masculinisation or feminization in their behavior. So self-socialization is a very important concept. And I think it applies to other primates. Because other primates, for example, young males, they pay attention to the adult males. There's a recent study came out on orangutans in the forest. Orangutans are also apes. And what they found is that the daughters, they eat exactly the same foods as their moms. And in the forests you have hundreds or thousands of different species of things that you can eat or should not eat. So, the daughters copy what their moms are doing.

0:16:23.8 FW: The sons, they have a much different diet. And that is because they watch males also. The males will come by, they watch what they eat and they copy their behaviour. And so I think in the primates, we see self-socialization along gender lines, so to speak. And I think in humans that's maybe even more important than the socialization that comes from their parents. Because the parents, they may tell whatever their boys to play with dolls or something like that. That's the way parents nowadays sometimes socialize their children, but if the boy doesn't wanna play with dolls, then that's probably not gonna happen. [laughter] So you can try, but I'm not sure how successful you are at that.

0:17:07.6 SC: Is there the occasional young boy or girl or orangutan who follows the diet of the... Is there a girl who follows the diet of the father and vice versa, or is it absolutely strict?

0:17:20.9 FW: No, that's the interesting part. I think the same gender diversity that we see in human society is probably also present in the primates. And we don't have good systematic studies on that, but I describe in my book, for example, Donna, a female chimpanzee, who from a very young age onwards, acted more like a male. She grew up to be later a robust individual that looked like a male and acted like a male and hangout with the males. And if the males would all get worked up and display and intimidate everybody, she would go along with them. Whereas, other females would never do that. But from a very young age, when she was three already, she would play with the alpha male, wrestle with the alpha male. And the alpha male was interested in her. Normally, these adult males, they wrestle with young males, not with females. But in this case, Donna was an exception. And so from a very young age onwards, she was more attracted to males. She acted more like a male. She became more male-like. I would not call her a lesbian because she was not sexually interested in females or in males for that matter. And so I describe her as a gender non-conforming individual, basically.

0:18:40.6 SC: [laughter] Yeah. No, that makes perfect sense.

0:18:42.9 FW: Although, she could be, she could be trans if she could talk and I could ask her what her identity was, but I cannot ask her.

0:18:50.9 SC: Sure.

0:18:51.7 FW: But who knows? She might say that her identity is more male than female. Yeah.

0:18:56.2 SC: Well, no, it makes sense if the culture is following the cultural transmission of behaviors and so forth, is following behaviors of other apes that you interact with, and most of them align along sexual lines, but some don't. Then, yeah, that's what we're talking about, I think.

0:19:14.6 FW: Yeah, so we have... I think we have diversity in the sense that you sometimes have males who are big males, but they are not interested in politics and they're not interested in reaching the top position, and they don't play that kind of game, and they stay out of it. And you have females who act more male-like. So, gender, we usually divide not in male and female, but in masculine and feminine, and everything in between. As in gender is a much more flexible concept than sex, even though in sex also you have things in between. But sex is 99% binary, and I would never call gender binary. Gender is more a spectrum. And I think once we start looking for that in the other primates, we will find a very similar spectrum probably.

0:20:02.1 SC: And [chuckle] I can't help it asking this question. In human societies, not only is there's the spectrum of gender identities and behaviors, but then there are some members of our society who don't like it. [chuckle] Who try to enforce a more or less rigid dichotomy. Are there the same thing in primate, other primate societies?

0:20:21.2 FW: That's for me, that's the fascinating thing is that that's absent. Intolerance of that is absent. So Donna was a very well integrated individual and no trouble at all. And I've known others, I've also known individuals who have more homosexual than heterosexual tendencies, and I've never seen trouble with them in the sense that I think primates would probably only ostracise someone or exclude someone who disturbs the peace, who makes trouble for them. And I can see how they would go against that, but since these individuals don't, Donna was not a troublemaker, so these individuals don't, there's no reason for them. And they don't have that tendency, the human tendency to label and to pigeonhole everyone. So we are a symbolic species, we like to paste a label on everybody, you are homosexual, you are heterosexual, you are man, you are woman, we have all these pigeonholes, and if you don't fit, there are some people who just can't stand it and go against that, and that's not a problem that the primates have and...

0:21:32.9 SC: Interesting.

0:21:33.8 FW: I've also sometimes compared it with racial issues because we have some species where you have a lot of colour variation, so for example, you have spider monkeys called [0:21:45.4] ____ spider monkey, which runs from almost white, very light to almost black, very dark, and these colour variations, they occur in captivity for sure. These animals are thrown together and I've never seen trouble with that, but I recently talked to a field worker who works in the fields where he also have this variation, and he said he's never seen much of a difference in treatment between the one or the other. And I think it's because for the primates, that's not necessarily an issue, colour or sexual behaviour or... As long as it doesn't bother them and it doesn't, why would you even react to it? And so I think in terms of tolerance, we could certainly learn something of the other primates.

[chuckle]

0:22:35.3 SC: It does seem pretty common in the animal kingdom to have some kind of bias for members of your species that are like you, to have an in group and an out group. Is there something like that, maybe with the colour of the fur or something analogous or is it just as long as you're in my species, you're my buddy?

0:22:56.0 FW: Well, all the primates have in group, out group distinctions, and some are very hostile to the out group. For example chimpanzees have only different degrees of hostility between groups but that was interesting in that regard because bonobos, even though they're very close to chimps in many ways, they are not territorial. So yes, they have a little bit of tensions between groups at the border of their territories but very soon they mingle, very soon they have sex with each other, very soon they sit together, they share food, there's now even observations of females of one group adopting orphans from another group. And so, the bonobos have mingling between groups, peaceful mingling, whereas chimpanzees only have different degrees of hostility. So in group, out group distinction is a very common thing in many animals, it's not based on the colour though, it's not based on external features, it's more like you belong here and you belong there, it's...

0:24:00.5 SC: I see.

0:24:00.5 FW: It's not based on that kind of features now.

0:24:02.8 SC: Well, this takes us back a little bit or it's a good reason to go back to other research that you've done in the past, because my impression is that there was a lot of emphasis throughout research on primates on how they are aggressive with each other, how they have hierarchies, in groups and out groups, and then one of your points early on was, yes, but they're also quite compassionate and even moral with each other. Is that too much of an exaggeration, do you think the primates have morality?

0:24:31.2 FW: Well, it's a big jump in the sense that [chuckle] I started out my studies on empathy...

0:24:37.9 SC: Empathy.

0:24:39.2 FW: And I got interested in the fact that when for example, one of the chimps has been attacked and is distressed and is screaming, that others will go over and embrace them and calm them down and kiss them, and show reassurance, and in humans, this is called an act of empathy, so I got interested in empathy very early on and did many studies of it and now they are... Empathy is now a much more accepted concept in animals and even rodent studies on empathy nowadays, and neuroscience studies on [0:25:11.5] ____ and stuff like that, but empathy is now a very well-accepted topic. And when I studied empathy, I noticed that people always connect it with morality, the philosophers do so. The Dalai Lama will tell you that all you need is actually compassion and you don't need much more to be a moral being. I don't think most philosophers would agree with that, but empathy is a very central part of moral philosophy, and because why would you be moral if you're not interested in others? That would be sort of ridiculous. And so you do need to have an interest in orders, in their welfare and their well-being to be a moral being. And so I got interested in the evolution of morality.

0:25:58.9 FW: I never say though, that chimpanzees or bonobos are moral beings because I think there's more to human morality than just empathy, and I think it's more than that, because there's also reasoning about moral rules, there is consensus building about moral rules, that is the enforcement or the guilt feelings, the justification of moral rules, and so there is much more I think to human morality than just a feeling of empathy but still, some of the building blocks of human morality can be found in other species, it's not like we designed it from scratch.

0:26:41.0 SC: And is this sense of empathy more or less universal among the primates or is it another thing that varies a lot from species to species?

0:26:49.3 FW: Empathy is found in almost all the primates, and I would say all mammals, and there's now even bird studies on empathy. I think empathy is a general mammalian characteristic that I think probably came out of parental care, which in mammals is mostly maternal care, which also explains why empathy is more developed in the female than the male in general, is regulated by oxytocin, which is by origin the sort of maternal hormone. And so, I think empathy is found in all the mammals, but is in some species much more restricted than in others. So, for example, if you are a solitary species, like, let's say, the Tiger or something. You only have empathy for, certainly not for your victims, the prey. [chuckle] And you only have empathy for maybe a sexual partner or your offspring. There's not much else to have empathy for. Whereas if you're a social species like the chimpanzee or an elephant or a dolphin who live in tight societies, then empathy needs to be extended to other relationships, not just mother offspring. It needs to be present between males and so on. It needs to be present, more widespread. Yeah.

0:28:11.0 SC: And it's just one aspect of what we think of as morality, as you already mentioned. Another one being cooperation. And you have these wonderful examples, even predating the work that you did yourself of chimpanzees working together for things. Can you talk just about what cooperation means in the primate world?

0:28:29.4 FW: Well, corporation is everywhere. I noted anthropologists at the moment, they'd like to emphasize human cooperation and say, "We are uniquely cooperative," but [laughter] I don't think if you compare us with ants or termites, we're gonna beat them. So, I think, cooperation is found everywhere in the animal kingdom, and many animals could not survive on their own.

0:28:55.1 FW: I just mentioned the Tiger. The Tiger is maybe an exception, but there's lots of animals who don't do well on their own. For example, in the primates we know that young males who... Let's say young male baboons who leave the troop, they have a lot of trouble surviving. They are much better off living in a group than in the period when they are adolescent, when they are between groups. And so, survival depends on living in a group. And living in a group is because you get benefits from being with others, collaborating with others, getting the assistance of others. They warn you for predators, that's the sort of the basic stuff, warning you for predators and helping you find food. But there's also animals who are actively cooperative, like the cooperative hunters, like Orcas and so on. Or wolves. So, yeah, high levels of corporation can be found in the Animal Kingdom. What I always find interesting about cooperation, is what I call targeted helping when it's based on an understanding of the situation of the other.

0:30:01.1 FW: So it's not just, we go all after the same prey and we catch it together, which is one way of cooperating. But understanding the situation of somebody else, and that's something you can see in the primates. So, for example, there are experiments that have been done with chimpanzees where one chimpanzee has to select a tool from the whole toolbox, that the other needs. So, the first chimpanzee needs to look at the situation of the other one, and then pick out the right tool that the other one needs. So that's targeted helping, what is based on understanding the situation of the other. And it requires taking the perspective of somebody else, and so in animals like chimps and elephants and dolphins, I think we see that kind of level of corporation.

0:30:48.5 SC: So that's what I was just gonna say. There's some kind of a theory of mind. These animals, not only do they know what they know, but they have opinions about what other friends of theirs know.

0:30:57.7 FW: Yeah, that's related to that. Yeah.

0:31:00.1 SC: And how do you, you mentioned a little bit, but how do you test this? I mean, how do you... Is it again, just watching what happens? Or can you sort of put them in a controlled environment and try to, sort of, nudge them toward or against cooperating with each other.

0:31:16.4 FW: Well, you can see what they do spontaneously and there are observations. There's many anecdotal observations of this kind of helping behavior. But in the field, of course, it's a bit hard to set up these experiments. In addition, many field workers don't like to do experiments because then they are messing with the lives of these animals, which is not their goal. So it's a bit tough to do that, but in captivity, you have sometimes... Like the experiment I mentioned with the tools. There was recently a study on bonobos where they found it. And this was actually between bonobos who didn't even know each other, strangers, where one bonobo could release a piece of food above the cage of another one. And then the other one would have the food and they were willing to do it, even though they got nothing in return for it. [chuckle] So they're willing to do these things. So that's altruistic behavior and target it helping right there.

0:32:15.1 SC: I guess I should ask, what is the typical diet of bonobo or other primates? Are they mostly herbivores, are they omnivores?

0:32:24.7 FW: Both of them, chimps and bonobos, they live mostly on fruits and leaves. But they love meat. So chimpanzees hunt, male chimpanzees hunt monkeys, which is very complex task. And there's a lot of debate on how complex it is, what they do is... Is it highly coordinated? They certainly catch more monkeys when they work together than when they work alone. And so bonobos are less cooperative hunters, I think. But if they have a chance to eat meat, they will eat meat. And if they can catch a duck, for example, or something, they will do so.

0:33:02.8 SC: And this kind of hunting cooperation, is it again, you alluded to it already, but just to prod more deeply. Is it arising spontaneously? Or do they talk to each other in some way? How explicit is the planning. I envision like a bunch of chimpanzees huddling up together and saying, "You go over there and you go over there," but that's probably not realistic.

[chuckle]

0:33:23.6 FW: No. There is sometimes a task division. So in West Africa, Crystal Bush has done many studies of the hunting behavior in the West Africa, and... He says that there's a role division. That there are blockers, so there are males, which are usually older males, more experienced males, who go into the distance. When they have spotted a monkey group, they go into the distance, and they sit high up in the trees and wait for the other chimps, the other males, to start hunting the monkeys. So they drive the monkeys through the canopy of the forest, and then these monkeys meet the blockers who then capture them. And then afterwards they share the meat with everyone. And so that's a very important part, is that if these blockers would run away with the prey, then of course it would not be a sustainable cooperation. So it's very important for cooperation to have sharing going on at the end. And that's sometimes forgotten. Because we did studies on the sense of fairness. I don't know if you know these studies, but we have done studies on the sense of fairness in monkeys and in apes. And people say, "Why would they have a sense of fairness? What is the function?"

0:34:32.9 FW: Well, the function is that if you have a cooperative society, you need to share at the end. If you don't, that whole cooperation's gonna fall apart. And that's an important lesson, I would say, for human society as well. If you don't have equity in human society, if there are some guys who take everything, like we now have, some billionaires who take all the money, that's gonna undermine the cooperative-ness of the society, that's gonna under... It's gonna create tensions, tensions like the French Revolution. It's gonna create tensions that could be bad, and it's gonna undermine cooperation. And so equity is an important issue in relation to cooperation. It doesn't need to be perfect, that's for sure, but there needs to be some degree of it.

0:35:21.0 SC: Tell us more for those who have not heard of it, about these fairness experiments. Is this the grapes and the cucumbers we're thinking about?

0:35:29.7 FW: Yeah. Yeah, we started out together with Sarah Brosnan. I did a study on Capuchin monkeys, that was the first study. It's because we found when testing these monkeys that they paid attention to what other ones were getting. And we saw this was sort of ridiculous. [chuckle] One monkey does a task, gets rewards for it. But if the monkey next to it... We always tested them together, 'cause Capuchin monkeys don't like to be tested alone, so we always had two monkeys side by side in the test chamber. And we noticed that if the other one was doing better, they got very upset by that. And we saw this was ridiculous, because none of the books about animals teaching and training talk about this, the comparison that they may make. And we started testing it out systematically. And we did this famous experiment that you can find on the Internet. If you type in the words, "Fairness," and, "Monkey," you will get the experiment. And what it shows is that one monkey gets cucumber slices, the other one gets grapes for the same task. Now, if you give cucumber slices to both monkeys, they will do it 25 times in a row. There's no problem, cucumber is perfectly fine. But if the other one is getting grapes, then the one who gets cucumber gets very upset and doesn't wanna do it any more. Throws out the cucumber. And so...

0:36:51.5 SC: Because grapes are better.

0:36:51.6 FW: It's almost like an irrational response, but if you look at it from the perspective of a cooperative primate, they are cooperative primates too, if you look at from that perspective, it's something you need to watch what you get. You need to... If you are doing a lot better than me, I need to pay attention to that. I need to protest against it, it's not in my interest to be in that kind of situation.

0:37:13.8 SC: But presumably from kind of a Game Theory perspective, if it's just once that one gets a cucumber, and one gets a grape, and that's the end of the whole experiment, then who cares? Nothing you can do about it. But the idea is the monkeys know it's not just once, this is gonna happen again, and they want to imagine a fair future for themselves.

0:37:33.3 FW: [chuckle] Yeah. And of course in chimpanzee, it goes further. Chimpanzees are apes, are much closer to us. And in chimpanzees, the one who gets the grapes may refuse the grape until the other one also gets a grape. So in chimpanzees, they will equalize the outcome even if the outcome was in their own favor. And that is a tendency that is more a sense of fairness, I would say, than... It's not as egocentric as what the monkeys do and what young children do. And in humans, I think in small scale societies, it works the same way. If you hear about hunter gatherers, there's a very strong sense of fairness among hunter gatherers. Is that the hunter who brings home the meat, so to speak, he sometimes doesn't even have the right to divide the meat, it's the group who divides the meat for him. So I think we have that tendency in small scale societies. It's... Unfortunately, it's lost in our massive, multi-million people societies nowadays, it's a bit lost. And it's because we have anonymous relationships where people can get away with these things.

0:38:47.0 SC: Well, so my data point is that when I was a kid, and I had a brother, there was no sense of fairness whatsoever. My brother would try to take the biggest piece of everything. So [chuckle] is this something that gets trained into you over time? Does that happen with the monkeys, or are they just born with a sense of equality for everybody?

0:39:03.4 FW: And so you resent your brother still about that?

0:39:05.9 SC: I'm just saying that he tried to get the bigger pieces of cake, that's all I'm saying. It's a data point.

[laughter]

0:39:12.3 FW: It's a data point. I had five brothers. [chuckle] So I... And I know what it is to fight for your share, yeah. [chuckle]

0:39:21.4 SC: I mean, that's what I'm imagining. I can imagine that there are some monkeys who want everything to be fair, they want everyone to get equally, but there have to be some monkeys who just are very happy to take all the stuff.

0:39:33.3 FW: Yeah, of course. And the Capuchin monkeys, the one who gets the grapes, never object to it, that's fine. It's... And the chimpanzees which are more cooperative and more complex, that even the dominant understands that he's undermining his own relationships if he doesn't share. And I think that is an understanding that your brother didn't have yet, but at some point, he may have developed that. When he...

0:40:01.8 SC: [laughter] I'd like to think that.

0:40:02.9 FW: So for example, now, if you have a meal as your brother, I'm not sure you still do, but if you do...

0:40:09.3 SC: We do.

0:40:09.7 FW: Maybe he understands if he takes everything that you will not be very happy.

0:40:13.5 SC: It is true.

0:40:14.1 FW: So he has advanced now to a different stage.

0:40:18.1 SC: So I'm wondering, especially since the different species are different, how well do we understand why the behaviors are like this, do we have explanations in terms of evolution and so forth, or is there an element of arbitrariness in sort of what customs arise among different kinds of primates?

0:40:33.8 FW: You mean like the comparison between bonobos and chimpanzees?

0:40:36.9 SC: Yeah. Do we have a theory of why one is one way or the Capuchin monkeys are another way?

0:40:43.2 FW: Yeah. We have a theory about chimps and bonobos, which is that bonobos live in a forest that maybe has more food to offer per surface area for the bonobos because they also have no gorillas in that forest. Chimpanzees have gorillas that they compete with, and the gorillas eat a lot of ground vegetation and the bonobos live in a place where there's no gorillas and may have a better food distribution for them, which allows them to travel together. So instead of spreading out as chimpanzees have to do very often, they can stick together, which allows the females to stick together. And female bonobos are very protective of each other, they're very... They have a high level of solidarity. And so the ecological circumstances allowed them to have a society where female support is very important whereas chimpanzees are more on their own, the females are more often on their own and have to fend for themselves. So that's an ecological explanation. Sometimes in captivity, where chimpanzee females are together, so I worked for a long time, it was a colony of 25 chimps where the females were... By necessity, always together.

0:42:05.3 FW: Then these female chimps also started acting a little bit like bonobos. They help each other, and so the balance of power between males and females in captivity is actually better between the genders than it is in wild chimpanzees, is because they're living together and the females help each other against overly aggressive males. So I think captivity is an interesting situation because it sometimes enhances these female cooperative tendencies.

0:42:35.2 SC: Does it go so far into what we would think of as altruism, are primates really sacrificing their own well-beings for the well-being of others or the tribe?

0:42:48.6 FW: Yeah, they will, they will. The literature has been very cynical about altruism of animals. So altruism of humans, of course, we admire and we say it's wonderful, and so on but about animals, it has always been downplayed, like they cannot really be kind and altruistic to each other. I think that's total nonsense. In the wild, for example, chimpanzees sometimes help each other against leopards. So one chimpanzee gets attacked by a leopard and has a special way of screaming at that point, and others then come to help against the leopard, which is a very dangerous enterprise. And we also know that chimpanzees sometimes rescue each other from drowning. So this has been observed in captivity mostly, where you have enclosures with moats around it and chimps cannot swim, and so when they end up in the moat, which sometimes happens, then others may rescue them, which is very risky and dangerous thing for them to do, but they still do it.

0:43:50.2 FW: And so yeah, I think there is altruistic behavior, and there's sometimes also altruistic behaviour from which they get nothing back. So I described already how in bonobos, they had done this experiment where one bonobo could produce food for another, and they did that even on the circumstances where they get nothing back. And let me give you another example. In chimpanzees, we had one time, an old female in a colony who could not walk anymore, barely walk anymore. And so each time she went to the water faucet to drink, which was a long distance for her, younger females would run ahead of her to the water faucet and suck up a lot of water and then run back to her and spit it into her mouth. And so they would be helping her to drink, they would also help her to join her friends in the climbing frame and push her up to join her friends to groom with them. And this old female clearly could not return any favors. She could not do anything for them at that point as she was close to death. And so there is altruistic behavior that is not between kin and that is not gonna be repaid. And people underestimate, I think, those tendencies which are clearly present in the primates.

0:45:06.1 SC: Do you think it comes in at the level of primates or even before primates or in other species?

0:45:12.0 FW: Oh, I think that there's examples of other species as well, of helping behavior sometimes even between species like dolphins helping human swimmers against sharks. Things like that are also reported, mostly anecdotal because we don't do experiments on dolphins and sharks and human swimmers, of course, but still... Yeah, these things are reported. And I believe that that's the case, and that's all based on mammalian empathy I think. Mammalian empathy evolved to serve your own inner circle and your family and so on. It evolved for those reasons, but once it exists, it can be applied outside of that little circle. And that's the interesting part, is that these empathy tendencies in the dolphin clearly did not evolve to help human swimmers, but once that situation arises, it can be used there.

0:46:03.4 SC: Well, that's interesting in terms of the kind of mechanism or explanation. I recently did a podcast about the gene's eye view of evolution, and you'll sacrifice yourself for two siblings or eight cousins or whatever. And that makes sort of a mathematical sense, but like you say, once a capacity has developed, it might be applied more broadly, even if there's no direct evolutionary advantage, right?

0:46:29.0 FW: Yeah, of course. And that's often forgotten in the gene-centric field. So one time, I had a debate with Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, who came to see my chimpanzees, and I explained that situation of the old female who was being held by younger females, and the old female could certainly not do something back for them. And he came up with a new theory, which was that there must be misfiring genes. Now, I don't know, genes are little chunks of DNA basically. I'm not sure how they're gonna be misfiring, but you know, if you wanna look at the world from the gene-centric perspective, you have to come up with the kind of stories, but I think it is actually much simpler is that certain capacities arise for a certain purpose, but once they are there, they can be used for all purposes. So for example, color vision arose to pick out ripe fruits, that's what we think is that color vision in the primate is related to picking out ripe fruits. But once you have it, you can use it to reach your Google Map, or you can pick out the right dress with the right shoes and... Yeah, so once it is there, it can be used for totally different purposes, and I think that's the case in all of biology.

0:47:49.2 SC: I almost hesitate to do this after these heart-warming tails of altruism, but I do wanna return to the bad behaviors that primates sometimes exhibit. Once you have cooperation, doesn't that open up the door to free riding or cheating, or you're letting everyone else do the work, do we see that in these primate cultures?

0:48:10.3 FW: Yeah, that happens. And I think they have ways of dealing with it, so we did an experiment for example these chimpanzees, where we created the situation where they could cooperate but also compete at the same time. We did a cooperation test where the whole group was present, like 20 chimps present, meaning that some individuals could sit behind to cooperate as in try to steal their food, for example, or they could cooperate with others and then steal the food of their partner. And so there was a lot of potential for competition. Now what happens, interesting, is that in the end, the chimps became almost 100% cooperative and only a few percent competitive. And that is because individuals didn't wanna work with these competitive individuals, these competitive individuals learned if they walk up to the apparatus, the corporation apparatus, the others disappear. The others say, "Well, I'm not gonna work with that guy because he always steals everything." And so there was a partner choice and the human literature, if you read about Game Theory, and so you mentioned that partner choice is an important issue, and I think in my chimpanzee experiment also, the chimp started to pick the partners that they liked, and the partners that they liked were the ones who were sharing and cooperative. So yes, you have cheating, but it's not encouraged by the system, so to speak. It's undermined by the system of partner choice.

0:49:48.2 SC: And in some sense, the examples you're giving vividly come back to this idea that if you behave badly, you will suffer down the road, you mean the rest of the society is not gonna help you out. And this is probably going too far, but in the modern world, which you brought up for human beings, our societies are so large that if you know someone we're talking to on a phone help line for some company or something like that, or someone serving us food behaves badly, that's very far removed from the people who are benefiting from our business there, and so is it imaginable that the motivation to behave better goes away as our societies become larger, is that even something that we can... And more diversified, is that even something we could see in the primate world?

0:50:41.1 FW: Yeah, I think the primate world, of course, it's face-to-face contact and everyone knows everyone, and they know each other sometimes since they were very little, so they know each other very, very well. And that's also why they really cannot get away with that kind of behavior because that's always remembered by the others. And you talk about comeuppance, also relates to bullying by high-ranking males, for example. So I'm very interested in alpha males, and people always have the impression that alpha males must be bullies and must be terrorizing everyone, but the ones who do actually end up usually very poorly, so in that sense, it's almost like a democratic system, is that if you have an alpha male who keeps the peace and is friendly with everyone, even though he enforces his position on a case, but he keeps the peace and he acts empathic towards... And you have males who are like that, who are responsible leaders, so to speak. Those males become so popular that if there's a young challenger who tries to take their position, the whole group is gonna defend him. Because the whole group says, "Well, we wanna keep this guy, he's a good alpha male."

0:52:01.8 FW: And then if you have the opposite, if you have a male who's a bully, sometimes you have males who terrorize everybody, and they're nasty with everyone. Those males may end up badly, in the wild we know that they're sometimes killed by the group. There's at least a dozen cases where they... And in captivity, if they are challenged by a younger male, then the whole group is gonna support the young male, so in the sense of, "Let's try to get rid of this guy." And sometimes in captivity, you need to remove that alpha male who has been deposed because his life is gonna be quite miserable in the group. So I think there is a certain justice in that regard, and that they pay attention to the reputation of an individual, and...

0:52:49.8 FW: The typical individuals that I know, high ranking males who lose their position and who have been popular, they just step down a few ranks, they become number three male and the number four male, and they have a perfectly fine life after that, so they're not ostracized, and they often become sort of the powers behind the throne because they are the ones who decide which next male is gonna be alpha male, by supporting them, so it's a very interesting political process, and at the moment, I'm also interested in alpha females, partly because of course, bonobos have alpha females, but also in chimpanzees alpha females, even though they're ranked below the males, they're still fairly important leaders and they have a lot of power in the group.

0:53:38.9 FW: So I always make this distinction between physical dominance and power, for example, Mama the alpha female chimpanzee of the large colony that I worked with, she was alpha female for 40 years, she saw a lot of alpha males come and go, and she had more power than most of the males, even though she ranked below physically, she ranked below the males, she had more influence and power and decided a lot of things in the group, and I think that's an interesting distinction to make, is between power and dominance, and if you look at it from that perspective, when people say the natural order is males dominate females, I would say, well, that's questionable because first of all, we have two close relatives where one is, the female's dominant and the other one the male's dominant, and secondly, you need to set power apart from physical dominance, and in terms of power, there is a lot of power in the females.

0:54:37.6 SC: How do you measure or quantify this idea that the alpha female has more influence over things, when, you can't hear them talking, but presumably there's some communication going on.

0:54:48.6 FW: So for example, Mama the chimpanzee female, she would always be recruited by males who were in power struggles, so if you have one male challenging another male, it was almost impossible for the challenger to be successful if he didn't have support from Mama, because Mama, had all the females behind her, and she would pay attention to what the females were doing, so if a female supported the wrong male in her view, she would go against it, she would beat up that female, so she would explain, so to speak, this is my male and you better support him, and so all the females in the colony supported the same male and that was the male picked by a Mama. So you can imagine that a male chimpanzee would pay very close attention to Mama, he would play with her children and now he'd be nice with her and share food with her and groom her, and that's how you can see how much influence she had.

0:55:54.3 SC: Right, what is... I guess the question is, how far can we go in relating the inner life, the inner mental life of a typical chimpanzee or bonobo to that of a human. Do they have hopes and dreams? Do they think about the future? Do they get embarrassed? Do they have emotions? Are these even questions we can think to answer.

0:56:13.1 FW: Well, emotions... My previous book, "Mama's last hug" is all about animal emotions. I personally don't think that there are emotions that we have that they don't have, I think emotions is definitely something we share with all of them, thinking about the future, we do increasingly experiments on planning nowadays, it's called Time Travel. Do you... Can you think ahead? Or Can you think backwards? Like that episodic memory. Can you think backwards to specific events? And so time travel is increasingly studied, and we have good evidence for time travel forward in planning sense for primates and for birds, for certain birds like the Corvids. And so the planning studies... Let me give you an example of planning, we have a little video clip of a female bonobo named Lisala, who in the sanctuary, who picked up a very heavy rock and put it on her back, a 15-pound rock, and she started walking with it and she walked for a kilometer, she walked like 15 minutes with the rock, and then she came to a place where she found some nuts, and I think she knew where the nuts were, she picked up these nuts and she continued to her walk, and then she went to a place where there was a hard surface, and she put down the nuts there and she started cracking them against the big rock that she had brought.

0:57:41.0 FW: Now, if you think about this, that means that she picked up her tool 15 minutes before she knew she would be having the nuts there at that particular location, and before she was even at the place where she could use the rock to crack the nuts. And so that kind of planning, in this case it was a spontaneous case, but we do increasingly experiments on this kind of planning, is present in the apes, which means they can think forward, they can plan ahead. I'm not sure that they're dreaming about the future, if that's what... That's not something we can determine, really, but if you can think ahead, you can also dream ahead, I suppose.

0:58:19.7 SC: I guess if I wanna sort of be a little bit skeptical, which maybe I don't wanna be, but if I did, is it possible to invent some story where everything is a moment-by moment thought, but do you still get the same answer? She had a past experience of having a big rock and that was useful for nuts, and it was just like she thought, "Oh, I should bring my big rock with me when I go walking around." How do we disentangle these ideas scientifically?

0:58:47.4 FW: Yeah, that's of course... The strategy of the behaviorists, the traditional Skinnerian behaviorist, their strategy is to try to explain it on the basis of associative learning and conditioning. And they have tried it for the last 25 years. With the rise of cognitive studies on animals, they have tried to counter every example with these conditioning explanations, but they have become less and less successful with that because then, of course, experiments are designed to show that it is not conditioning, that that's what the cognitive studies usually do. They have become less and less successful and also their whole field now consists mostly of countering ideas instead of generating new ideas, is that they...

0:59:35.1 SC: [chuckle] Okay.

0:59:36.4 FW: They're in the business of shooting down explanations that the cognitive scientists come up with. And it's become a very tiresome and it has helped us design better studies, but I would say it's largely unsuccessful. They're not taken so seriously anymore. We used to fight with them and then re-design the experiments to make sure that we were taking care of this conditioning explanation, but I think... We're now sort of tired of it. And also, the generation who does that is the older generation. The younger people don't really care much about that anymore.

1:00:14.6 SC: I guess this brings up the question, can we look into the brains of the primates to see different things happening in different parts of the brain and then compare them with humans or is that something that's just too hard to do?

1:00:26.9 FW: Well, we are in a situation where people are training dogs and monkeys to be in a brain scanner.

1:00:32.5 SC: Okay.

1:00:33.1 FW: So there is a non-invasive neuroscience coming up for animals and that may sometimes solve some of these issues. It's really only in the beginning stages, but I would prefer that we do it this way than the invasive neuroscience that we've had in the past where people remove a part of the brain to see how the monkey behaves after that.

1:00:57.9 SC: Right.

1:00:58.7 FW: I always compare that as removing the part of the engine of my car and see how it still drives after that, which I think is not gonna tell me very much, but people have done these things. I think we need to move to a non-invasive neuroscience like neuro-imaging on animals and that's gonna happen.

1:01:15.5 SC: Yeah.

1:01:16.1 FW: If these apparati gets smaller and if we can train the animals like they're doing it with dogs and monkeys. If we can train them to be in the scanner and sit still for a couple of minutes, that's the way to go.

1:01:29.3 SC: And... Good. So I think that this is a good time to sort of wrap up by getting back to gender and sexuality. I mean, we started by talking about that and you filled in a lot about both the biology and the culture of these primates. How much of what we think of as human, the great spectrum of human sexuality... So not only is there heterosexuality, homosexuality, transgender and cisgender, but there's also asexuality, some people are just more sexual than others, etcetera. Do we see all this kind of diversity in the primate kingdoms or the primate species?

1:02:05.8 FW: Well, I think... We haven't been looking for it. So once you start looking for these things, you're gonna find it. So recently, a study came out, I think, on chimpanzees in the field where there was more homosexual behavior than we have ever realized. And so, this was rarely reported in addition also because people are a bit shy about sex. A lot of scientists like to talk a lot more about violence than about sex and that's also why the bonobo is often overlooked because it makes many scientists uncomfortable to talk about their sexual activities. But once we start looking for it, I think we will find quite a bit of diversity in their behavior, their sexual behavior or sexual orientation, maybe, their sexual identity even though I won't use the word identity because we cannot really determine that.

1:02:56.4 SC: We don't know. Yeah.

1:02:56.5 FW: We can say that their typical sex role behavior. So I think there's much more diversity than people think.

1:03:04.3 SC: Is there an alteration through the lifespan of an individual? Do they go from being more masculine to more feminine or back or is it something that, more or less, they figure it out and they stick with it their whole life?

1:03:17.2 FW: Well, there is a difference, of course, in the sense that males... The testosterone levels of males lower, but with age, as they do in humans. And so, older males are usually friendlier and easier-going than younger males.

[laughter]

1:03:32.8 FW: So, for example, in a chimp society, the males between 20 and 30, they are the ones who are competing for the high status and they are very active and they are sometimes quite aggressive. The older males who are over 40, they take it easy. And there's now data on how they have friendships that are more intimate with each other because they're less focused on political alliances and more focused on hanging out together and do things for fun like human males who are older. They're more into that kind of stuff. And, for example, older males... I always find it so fascinating is that I have known many high-ranking chimpanzee males who once they retire, so to speak, once they got kicked out of their positions, still hung around in the group and became very popular grooming partners for everyone. But what they also do is they play a lot more with kids.

1:04:29.1 FW: They tickle and play and chase with them and they have the greatest fun. Something that, as younger males, they never did because there were much too preoccupied with other things in their life. And so, yeah, I think there is a very interesting arc in the lifespan of chimpanzees. And for females, they don't have menopause. So menopause is one of these things that humans have and we think that... There are theories about it that we have menopause because of grandmothers with having an important function supporting their daughters with their kids. And so, females keep reproducing till very old age and often, we humans watching chimpanzees and bonobos, we sort of feel for them because we then see a female who's actually at an age that we think she should also retire and have it easy. We see her still carrying a big youngster on her back. And so, we sort of feel for them and we... I think menopause was a great advance for our society.

[laughter]

1:05:39.3 SC: That is a great lesson to take home here. I mean, maybe I'll ask you one last question. You can be as expansive or quick as you want. For those of us who are human beings and we're reading your books and your stories about the very wide spectrum of behavior in all of these primates, I mean, what should our attitude be? Alright, should we... Should it be to sort of be inspired or to be... To get cautionary tales? Should we be wary of over-interpreting things in human terms or should we just let our imaginations do that?

1:06:12.6 FW: Well, we should be wary of setting ourselves completely apart from the animal kingdom as some people do, like, "We are humans. They are animals." That's certainly an attitude that I don't support. We should be wary also of saying that everything we do is cultural and everything animals do is instinctive. I think that's a total simplification 'cause a lot of the things that animals do is cultural and a lot of things that we do is biological. And so, all these simplifications, they reduce actually our understanding, I think, of ourselves. So we don't always fully understand ourselves because we make up stories about ourselves and I see that... I'm a biologist who has worked for 25 years in a psychology department as a psychology professor. I've seen how psychology is very much obsessed with the stories that they tell themselves. For example, they tell themselves that humans are not very hierarchical. That humans, especially women, they have no hierarchies. Men may have hierarchies, but women don't. We tell stories about ourselves, which I think are nonsense, but we do that and then we start believing in them. And I think in that sense it's important to look in the mirror and the primates provide a mirror, then we look at that mirror and we get a little bit better understanding of ourselves.

1:07:43.4 SC: A reality check, if nothing else.

1:07:45.2 FW: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:07:47.6 SC: Alright. That's very good to keep in mind. So, Frans de Waal, thanks so much for being on The Mindscape Podcast.

1:07:50.4 FW: You're welcome. I loved it. Yeah.

[music]