What is the difference between human beings and chimpanzees, besides body hair and 2-4% of our DNA? I have been reading Michael Tomasello's excellent book, Why We Cooperate? Tomasello has an answer, backed up by a lot of research. Chimpanzees are capable of cooperating but they lack any understanding of cooperation. Two chimps can each learn to pull a bar in sequence, so that food is delivered. But all each chimp knows is that if I pull the bar, I get the food. Neither chimp understands that the other has to do his part, nor does either expect, let alone demand, that the other cooperates.
Human children, from an early age, have a sense of "we-ness". Helping behavior, unlearned and not signaled, develops spontaneously. When a child (about 3 years old) sees an adult in need of assistance (say, opening a cabinet door), the child is moved to provide it. In one fascinating experiment, an adult plays a simple game with a child. The child puts a block in one of two inclined tubes. It slides down the tube and the adult catches it in a tin can. It makes a pleasant ring and the adult shouts in satisfaction. The game is obviously fun, so when the adult walks away the child will try to bring him back to the game. The child understands that the adult is a partner whom he needs to keep playing, that the game is something that "we" are doing. This is something that chimpanzees cannot grasp.
I haven't read Steven Pinker's new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I have been following Pinker's argument as it developed over the last several years. You can get a short version of it at The Edge. Pinker demonstrates something that is not at all common knowledge: human beings are much less violent today than they were in the distant past. Even accounting for the horrific carnage of modern wars, human males are much less likely to die by the hands of another male than in earlier times, and the likelihood has been steadily declining.
For a very long time, social scientists believed that the opposite was true. Violence was thought to be largely a recent historical artifact. Christianity, capitalism, and social injustice distorted human nature and made men bad. By contrast, earlier societies were peopled by noble savages who lived in harmony with nature and each other. Our nearest primate relatives, the chimpanzees, spent their days eating and coupling in peace.
Then we discovered that chimpanzee groups fight brutal wars of annihilation and that rivals for leadership routinely assassinate one another. Hunter gather societies were marked by very high levels of murder and mayhem, and their wars were disproportionately lethal. All of us descend from savages, but those savages were not in any sense noble. They were murderous in the extreme.
There is good news and bad news in this. The good news is that we have made a great deal of progress. The bad news is that we remain what we have long been: modified chimpanzees. The peace that we have achieved cannot be taken for a given. It has been hard won and could be easily and quickly lost. It is important to know that.
Even ants fight "brutal wars of annihilation." In one of his essays, Henry David Thoreau described one such conflict that he witnessed with great fascination.
White blood cells attack and destroy bacteria with systematic precision and ruthlessness.
Does the fundamental software for life on this planet contain a line of "war code"?
"War Code": Great title for a science-fiction suspense thriller! And the seed of huminity's final days, too, I reckon -- if the asteroid doesn't get us first.
Posted by: Stan Gibilisco | Sunday, November 06, 2011 at 12:32 AM
I meant to say "humanity's final days." Or maybe it was "humidity's final days." Same difference, I guess.
Posted by: Stan Gibilisco | Sunday, November 06, 2011 at 12:33 AM
Have you ever heard of a place called "Get Official Samples" on the web, they give out a free samples of major brands to promote their products. I just got mine.
Posted by: robertcoxe | Sunday, November 06, 2011 at 01:39 AM
Two questions:
A) Can we be certain that helping behavior exhibited by humans is unlearned?
Parents begin helping their children even before they are born. Babies learn to mimic their parents in many ways, even before they walk. Couldn't children be mimicking their parents' helping behavior as well?
B) Without employing the aid of a pet psychic, how do we know what a chimp actually understands?
You write, "Neither chimp understands that the other has to do his part, nor does either expect, let alone demand, that the other cooperates."
But maybe this lack of expectation isn't due to a lack of understanding.
In the following clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOrgOW9LnT4), the featured chimp certainly seems, to me, to have expect cooperation from his human friend. He also seems to exhibit some of the helping behaviors you note that human children have. I acknowledge that his behavior is learned, rather than innate, but his behavior seems to indicate that he does have some idea of how cooperation works.
Posted by: Miranda | Sunday, November 06, 2011 at 04:05 AM
Good post, Ken. Likely the influence of Marx on the human condition:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1HUfjTrCIM&feature=fvst
Posted by: larry kurtz | Sunday, November 06, 2011 at 07:25 AM
Miranda: the experiments are carefully controlled to make sure that the child is not cued in any way by the experiment and that the situation is novel. When animal behavior depends on learning it requires a lot of contextual cues. Those can be controlled for.
The chimp will keep pulling the bar as long as gets his food, regardless of what the other chimp does. If one partner ceases to cooperate, the other will make no attempt to get his partner back in the game. Children will frequently stop as soon as the other player stops and will try to get the other player to rejoin the effort.
Posted by: Ken Blanchard | Sunday, November 06, 2011 at 09:11 AM
My cat brings mice in from her hunt for me to share (I pretend to be grateful, my wife, not so much). In return she (the cat, not the wife) expects a bite of cheese whenever I make myself a sandwich. May I recommend Jared Diamond's "The Third Chimpanzee" for further reading and enlightenment on this subject. Within, he outlines the very behaviors we have yet to evolve past. Among them xenophobia, genocide, and a propensity toward substance abuse/addiction.
Posted by: Bill Fleming | Sunday, November 06, 2011 at 09:24 AM
Sorry to jump threads on you, Doc; but Stan wondered whether there were any Liberal economists with integrity. Here's one, Stan:
http://www.startribune.com/bios/16828336.html
Posted by: larry kurtz | Sunday, November 06, 2011 at 05:23 PM
"...Stan wondered whether there were any Liberal economists with integrity."
I did?
Actually I'm starting to wonder if there are +any+ economists with integrity.
Posted by: Stan Gibilisco | Sunday, November 06, 2011 at 05:33 PM
Halloween, i think. the put-egg-on-my-face-comment. Not you? I've been walking by the Rec in Deadwood nearly every morning on my way to Pump House Coffee at about 6:30. Come on over if you want and I'll buy.
Posted by: larry kurtz | Sunday, November 06, 2011 at 05:55 PM
Six thirty in the morning? Middle of the night! I usually swim at the Deadwood Rec Center at around 9:30 and get out around 11:00.
Alas, my sunrise swimming ritual has faded into a distant memory, South Beach and Kona, sunburns and sandflies, echoes of a bygone millennium.
Now all you'll see is a pallid wraith staggering around Deadwood and Lead with a bottle of Diet Dew.
Posted by: Stan Gibilisco | Sunday, November 06, 2011 at 11:13 PM
Bill: my sympathies for your wife and cat. Diamond's "Third Chimpanzee" is indeed a fine book. I frequently use his speculations about the evolution of concealed ovulation in my course.
Posted by: Ken Blanchard | Monday, November 07, 2011 at 12:26 AM
I work with a few people who have autism spectrum disorders where typical human social skills and reciprocity are affected. Although these people may lack an ability to express or show empathy in what we would recognize as normal, we can communicate with a few people who have some intellectual, though maybe not an emotional, understanding of empathy, or if they have an emotional understanding, they have a limited ability to demonstrate it. I have always wondered whether autism spectrum "disorders" might represent the phenotypic expression of an artifact of human genetic history.
Posted by: Donald Pay | Tuesday, November 08, 2011 at 10:51 PM
Donald: your last comment was very interesting. I think you are on to something. One interpretation of autism is that it represents a mode of awareness that is common to other animals. This is no insult. It might be that autistic persons offer us a window into the world of our nearest relatives on the family tree of mammals.
Posted by: Ken Blanchard | Saturday, November 12, 2011 at 01:07 AM