• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Tracking Health and Wellness Applications of Brain Science

Spanish
sb-logo-with-brain
  • Resources
    • Monthly eNewsletter
    • Solving the Brain Fitness Puzzle
    • The SharpBrains Guide to Brain Fitness
    • How to evaluate brain training claims
    • Resources at a Glance
  • Brain Teasers
    • Top 25 Brain Teasers & Games for Teens and Adults
    • Brain Teasers for each Cognitive Ability
    • More Mind Teasers & Games for Adults of any Age
  • Virtual Summits
    • 2019 SharpBrains Virtual Summit
    • Speaker Roster
    • Brainnovations Pitch Contest
    • 2017 SharpBrains Virtual Summit
    • 2016 SharpBrains Virtual Summit
    • 2015 SharpBrains Virtual Summit
    • 2014 SharpBrains Virtual Summit
  • Report: Pervasive Neurotechnology
  • Report: Digital Brain Health
  • About
    • Mission & Team
    • Endorsements
    • Public Speaking
    • In the News
    • Contact Us

Peace Among Primates (Part 2)

April 12, 2008 by Greater Good Science Center

(Edi­tor’s Note: A few days ago we pub­lished the first install­ment of this Peace Among Pri­mates series, by neu­ro­sci­en­tist Robert Sapol­sky. Today we pub­lish the sec­ond install­ment. Next Sat­ur­day, April 19th, you can come back and read the third and final part in the series.)

Peace Among Pri­mates (Part 2)

Any­one who says peace is not part of human nature knows too lit­tle about pri­mates, includ­ing ourselves.

–By Robert M. Sapolsky

Left behind

In the ear­ly 1980s, “For­est Troop,” a group of savan­na baboons I had been studying—virtually liv­ing with—for years, was going about its busi­ness in a nation­al park in Kenya when a neigh­bor­ing baboon group had a stroke of luck: Its ter­ri­to­ry encom­passed a tourist lodge that expand­ed its oper­a­tions and, con­se­quent­ly, so did the amount of food tossed into its garbage dump. Baboons are omniv­o­rous, and this “Garbage Dump Troop” was delight­ed to feast on left­over drum­sticks, half-eat­en ham­burg­ers, rem­nants of choco­late cake, and any­thing else that wound up there. Soon they had shift­ed to sleep­ing in the trees imme­di­ate­ly above the pit, descend­ing each morn­ing just in time for the day’s dump­ing of garbage. (They soon got quite obese from the rich diet and lack of exer­cise, but that is anoth­er sto­ry.) The devel­op­ment pro­duced near­ly as dra­mat­ic a shift in the social behav­ior of For­est Troop. Each morn­ing, approx­i­mate­ly half of its adult males would infil­trate Garbage Dump Troop’s ter­ri­to­ry, descend­ing on the pit in time for the day’s dump­ing and bat­tling the res­i­dent males for access to the garbage. The par­tic­u­lar For­est Troop males who did this shared two traits: They were espe­cial­ly com­bat­ive (which was nec­es­sary to get the food away from the oth­er baboons), and they were not very inter­est­ed in social­iz­ing (the raids took place ear­ly in the morn­ing, dur­ing the hours when the bulk of a savan­na baboon’s dai­ly com­mu­nal groom­ing occurs).

Soon after­ward, tuber­cu­lo­sis, a dis­ease that moves with dev­as­tat­ing speed and sever­i­ty in non­hu­man pri­mates, broke out in Garbage Dump Troop. Over the next year, most of its mem­bers died, as did all of the males from For­est Troop who had for­aged at the dump. (Con­sid­er­able sleuthing ulti­mate­ly revealed that the dis­ease had come from taint­ed meat in the garbage dump. There was lit­tle ani­mal-to-ani­mal trans­mis­sion of the tuber­cu­lo­sis, and so the dis­ease did not spread in For­est Troop beyond the garbage eaters.) The results were that For­est Troop was left with males who were less aggres­sive and more social than aver­age, and the troop now had dou­ble its pre­vi­ous female-to-male ratio.

The social con­se­quences of these changes were dra­mat­ic. There remained a hier­ar­chy among the For­est Troop males, but it was far loos­er than before. Com­pared with oth­er, more typ­i­cal savan­na baboon groups, high-rank­ing males rarely harassed sub­or­di­nates and occa­sion­al­ly even relin­quished con­test­ed resources to them. Aggres­sion was less fre­quent, par­tic­u­lar­ly against third par­ties. And rates of affil­ia­tive behav­iors, such as males and females groom­ing each oth­er or sit­ting togeth­er, soared. There were even instances, now and then, of adult males groom­ing each other—a behav­ior near­ly as unprece­dent­ed as baboons sprout­ing wings.

This unique social milieu did not arise mere­ly as a func­tion of the skewed sex ratio (with half the males hav­ing died); oth­er pri­ma­tol­o­gists have occa­sion­al­ly report­ed on troops with sim­i­lar ratios but with­out a com­pa­ra­ble social atmos­phere. What was key was not just the pre­dom­i­nance of females but the type of male who remained. The demo­graph­ic disaster—what evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gists term a “selec­tive bottleneck”—had pro­duced a savan­na baboon troop quite dif­fer­ent from what most experts would have anticipated.

But the largest sur­prise did not come until some years lat­er. Female savan­na baboons spend their lives in the troop into which they are born, where­as males leave their birth troop around puber­ty; a troop’s adult males have thus all grown up else­where and immi­grat­ed as ado­les­cents. By the ear­ly 1990s, none of the orig­i­nal low aggression/high affil­i­a­tion males of For­est Troop’s tuber­cu­lo­sis peri­od was still alive; all of the group’s adult males had joined after the epi­dem­ic. Despite this, the troop’s unique social milieu persisted—as it does to this day, some 20 years after the selec­tive bot­tle­neck. In oth­er words, ado­les­cent males that enter For­est Troop after hav­ing grown up else­where wind up adopt­ing the unique behav­ioral style of the res­i­dent males. As defined by both anthro­pol­o­gists and ani­mal behav­ior­ists, “cul­ture” con­sists of local behav­ioral vari­a­tions, occur­ring for non­genet­ic and none­co­log­i­cal rea­sons, that last beyond the time of their orig­i­na­tors. For­est Troop’s low aggression/high affil­i­a­tion soci­ety con­sti­tutes noth­ing less than a multi­gen­er­a­tional benign culture.

Con­tin­u­ous study of the troop has yield­ed some insights into how its cul­ture is trans­mit­ted to new­com­ers. Genet­ics obvi­ous­ly plays no role, nor appar­ent­ly does self-selec­tion: Ado­les­cent males that trans­fer into the troop are no dif­fer­ent from those that trans­fer into oth­er troops, dis­play­ing on arrival sim­i­lar­ly high rates of aggres­sion and low rates of affil­i­a­tion. Nor is there evi­dence that new males are taught to act in benign ways by the res­i­dents. One can­not rule out the pos­si­bil­i­ty that some obser­va­tion­al learn­ing is occur­ring, but it is dif­fi­cult to detect, giv­en that the dis­tinc­tive fea­ture of this cul­ture is not the per­for­mance of a unique behav­ior but the per­for­mance of typ­i­cal behav­iors at atyp­i­cal­ly extreme rates.

To date, the most inter­est­ing hint about the mech­a­nism of trans­mis­sion is the way recent­ly trans­ferred males are treat­ed by For­est Troop’s res­i­dent females. In a typ­i­cal savan­na baboon troop, new­ly trans­ferred ado­les­cent males spend years slow­ly work­ing their way into the social fab­ric; they are extreme­ly low ranking—ignored by females and not­ed by adult males only as con­ve­nient tar­gets for aggres­sion. In For­est Troop, by con­trast, new male trans­fers are inun­dat­ed with female atten­tion soon after their arrival. Res­i­dent females first present them­selves sex­u­al­ly to new males an aver­age of 18 days after the males arrive, and they first groom the new males an aver­age of 20 days after they arrive, where­as nor­mal savan­na baboons intro­duce such behav­iors after 63 and 78 days, respec­tive­ly. Fur­ther­more, these wel­com­ing ges­tures occur more fre­quent­ly in For­est Troop dur­ing the ear­ly post-trans­fer peri­od, and there is four times as much groom­ing of males by females in For­est Troop as else­where. From almost the moment they arrive, in oth­er words, new males find out that in For­est Troop, things are done differently.

At present, I think the most plau­si­ble expla­na­tion is that this troop’s spe­cial cul­ture is not passed on active­ly but sim­ply emerges, facil­i­tat­ed by the actions of the res­i­dent mem­bers. Liv­ing in a group with half the typ­i­cal num­ber of males, and with the males being nice guys to boot, For­est Troop’s females become more relaxed and less wary. (This is so, in part, because in a typ­i­cal baboon troop, a male who los­es a dom­i­nance inter­ac­tion with anoth­er male will often attack a female in frus­tra­tion.) As a result, they are more will­ing to take a chance and reach out social­ly to new arrivals, even if the new guys are typ­i­cal jerky ado­les­cents at first. The new males, in turn, find­ing them­selves treat­ed so well, even­tu­al­ly relax and adopt the behav­iors of the troop’s dis­tinc­tive social milieu.

 

(To be con­tin­ued, in a third and final install­ment, on Sat­ur­day April 19th).

Robert Sapolsky– Robert M. Sapol­sky, Ph.D., is the John A. and Cyn­thia Fry Gunn Pro­fes­sor of Bio­log­i­cal Sci­ences and a pro­fes­sor of neu­rol­o­gy and neu­ro­log­i­cal sci­ences at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty. He wrote the clas­sic Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: An Updat­ed Guide to Stress, Stress Relat­ed Dis­eases and Cop­ing. His most recent book is Mon­key­luv: And Oth­er Essays on Our Lives as Ani­mals. A longer ver­sion of this essay appeared in For­eign Affairs. We bring you this post thanks to our col­lab­o­ra­tion with Greater Good Mag­a­zine, a UC-Berke­ley-based quar­ter­ly mag­a­zine that high­lights ground break­ing sci­en­tif­ic research into the roots of com­pas­sion and altruism.

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Email
  • Print
  • More
  • Share on Tumblr
  • Pock­et

Filed Under: Education & Lifelong Learning Tagged With: baboons, behavior, culture, Forest-Troop, Genetics, Greater-Good, hierarchy, Kenya, Learning, neuroscientist, peace, primates, Robert-Sapolsky

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Michelle B says

    April 12, 2008 at 3:55

    Fas­ci­nat­ing post.

    How much can these obser­va­tions of pri­mate cul­ture be extrap­o­lat­ed to human?

  2. Michelle B says

    April 12, 2008 at 4:00

    Let me rephrase that ques­tion: How can one apply these obser­va­tions regard­ing baboon soci­ety to human? What exam­ple in human soci­ety can be used to show a sim­i­lar social mech­a­nism? Per­haps, the intro­duc­tion of women work­ers into once male-dom­i­nat­ed occupations?

    (No won­der Charleston Hes­ton bemoaned the fate of the white tra­di­tion­al male role, geesh, it does­n’t stand a chance!)

  3. Robert says

    April 12, 2008 at 10:37

    I am great­ly sad­dened to recent­ly hear that “For­est Troop” was slaugh­tered by poach­ers and with the ille­gal help of a Park Ranger. I can only imag­ine the impact this might have on Dr. Sapol­sky. I am tru­ly saddened.
    RLB

  4. Alvaro says

    April 13, 2008 at 9:14

    Robert, yes, I am sure that was a hard moment. Many lessons to be learned.

    Michelle: great ques­tion. There are many rel­e­vant impli­ca­tions. Let me pro­pose a few:
    1) The role of our envi­ron­ment in influ­enc­ing our behav­iors, vs. the usu­al­ly accept­ed more genet­ic-based “deter­min­ism”
    2) The impor­tance of ensur­ing vir­tu­ous, pos­i­tive feed­back loops.
    3) And, yes, this exam­ple sug­gests that expand­ing the role of females in a soci­ety may cre­ate a more har­mo­nious atmosphere…perhaps call­ing for more females in top busi­ness and polit­i­cal ranks?
    4) In terms of the ” intro­duc­tion of women work­ers into once male-dom­i­nat­ed occu­pa­tions”, it would be fas­ci­nat­ing to com­pare the cul­ture of three types of occu­pa­tions: a) most­ly male, b) bal­anced male/ female, c) most­ly female. What would you say?
    5) Final­ly, a pure­ly per­son­al spec­u­la­tion along the lines that genet­ics is not fate…: who is exhibit­ing more of those “female” traits in this US polit­i­cal campaign?

  5. Al Fin says

    April 13, 2008 at 10:54

    A more straight­for­ward com­par­i­son might sug­gest that human females should be more sex­u­al­ly recep­tive to the human males around them.

    This is the oppo­site of the trend insti­gat­ed by rad­i­cal feminism–which may explain the increase in aggres­sion in some mod­ern soci­eties. For exam­ple, the free­way sys­tems of California.

    More avail­able sex might go a long way toward mit­i­gat­ing human violence.

  6. Michelle B says

    April 14, 2008 at 6:28

    @Al Fin, Fem­i­nism encour­ages sex edu­ca­tion, birth con­trol, and choice, not reduc­tion of sex­u­al recep­tiv­i­ty. If a woman feels empow­ered and safe, she is more recep­tive to life, includ­ing hav­ing sex.

    Patri­archy prob­a­bly has more to do with why women may be so uptight about sex, as they are pun­ished both phys­i­cal­ly and emo­tion­al­ly if they act ‘slut­like.’

  7. Michelle B says

    April 14, 2008 at 6:31

    Alvaro, nice col­lec­tion of points. Are you say­ing that Oba­ma could teach a few things to Clin­ton about being a woman? (tee­hee)

    Regard­ing your point 4, if that research has not already been done, it needs to be.

  8. Alvaro says

    April 15, 2008 at 12:50

    Michelle: probably…and it seems Clin­ton could teach Oba­ma some hunt­ing tricks…

  9. Ben Hemmens says

    February 13, 2009 at 12:33

    I sus­pect the baboons got peace­ful because of Sapol­sky hang­ing around, spread­ing those laid back vibes 😉

Primary Sidebar

Top Articles on Brain Health and Neuroplasticity

  1. Can you grow your hippocampus? Yes. Here’s how, and why it matters
  2. How learning changes your brain
  3. To harness neuroplasticity, start with enthusiasm
  4. Three ways to protect your mental health during –and after– COVID-19
  5. Why you turn down the radio when you're lost
  6. Solving the Brain Fitness Puzzle Is the Key to Self-Empowered Aging
  7. Ten neu­rotech­nolo­gies about to trans­form brain enhance­ment & health
  8. Five reasons the future of brain enhancement is digital, pervasive and (hopefully) bright
  9. What Educators and Parents Should Know About Neuroplasticity and Dance
  10. The Ten Habits of Highly Effective Brains
  11. Six tips to build resilience and prevent brain-damaging stress
  12. Can brain training work? Yes, if it meets these 5 conditions
  13. What are cognitive abilities and how to boost them?
  14. Eight Tips To Remember What You Read
  15. Twenty Must-Know Facts to Harness Neuroplasticity and Improve Brain Health

Top 10 Brain Teasers and Illusions

  1. You think you know the colors? Try the Stroop Test
  2. Check out this brief attention experiment
  3. Test your stress level
  4. Guess: Are there more brain connections or leaves in the Amazon?
  5. Quick brain teasers to flex two key men­tal mus­cles
  6. Count the Fs in this sentence
  7. Can you iden­tify Apple’s logo?
  8. Ten classic optical illu­sions to trick your mind
  9. What do you see?
  10. Fun Mental Rotation challenge
  • Check our Top 25 Brain Teasers, Games and Illusions

Join 12,560 readers exploring, at no cost, the latest in neuroplasticity and brain health.

By subscribing you agree to receive our free, monthly eNewsletter. We don't rent or sell emails collected, and you may unsubscribe at any time.

IMPORTANT: Please check your inbox or spam folder in a couple minutes and confirm your subscription.

Get In Touch!

Contact Us

660 4th Street, Suite 205,
San Francisco, CA 94107 USA

About Us

SharpBrains is an independent market research firm tracking health and performance applications of brain science. We prepare general and tailored market reports, publish consumer guides, produce an annual global and virtual conference, and provide strategic advisory services.

© 2023 SharpBrains. All Rights Reserved - Privacy Policy