Could apes ever rule over man? Frans de Waal, a leading primatologist, argues
that Planet of the Apes is not just science fiction - we are more like our
hairy cousins than we dare admit
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/08/05/stirevnws01001.html
Welcome to Earth, some time in the not-sodistant future. The planet has grown
into a primordial world of jungle, swamp and forest, navigable only by a mesh
of long swinging vines and moss-ridden branches. Deep in the forest, thick
vegetation breaks open to reveal a large walled city. It is fortified by ranks
of armed soldiers and inside is a maze of caves and tree houses sheltering its
thousands of inhabitants.
Lying on silk-draped four-poster beds, eating around oak dining tables and
lining the torch-lit streets of this city are apes: gorillas, baboons, chimps,
from children to 300lb adults. Primates rule the city and the planet.
Exiled to the margins, living in makeshift colonies in the mountains, are what
remains of the human race. Flushed from their hiding places and run out of the
forest by the physically and mentally superior apes, the humans are regularly
herded into caged vehicles and transported back to the city to be sold as
slaves.
But there is dissent among the ruling primate ranks. The senator apes want the
humans to be treated with more tolerance and kindness, they want them to have
a place on the planet in which they can coexist with the master ape race. The
military, however, do not agree. Humans are a lesser race, they insist: they
stink, they are uncivilised and their foul presence threatens to overrun the
planet. They must be rounded up and destroyed.
Pierre Boulle, of course, was the first to imagine such a world in his classic
novel Planet of the Apes. The scenario has become one of the most recognised
and provocative concepts in science fiction. But could it happen? Do apes
possess the characteristics necessary to become Earth's ruling primates? What
is the scientific evidence?
Could apes ever rule over man?
I don't think I have ever heard of a sadder miscalculation of human potential
than the Austrian artist who wanted to paint like an ape - except for the guy
who bungee-jumped with a cord that was two metres too long.
In 1979 Arnulf Rainer set out to copy each and every brush stroke of a
painting chimpanzee. Squatting next to the ape, he hoped to produce works of
the same clarity and intensity. The human painter, however, believed apes to
be wild, uncontrolled creatures. As a result, he painted the way that he
thought his fellow primate would paint, becoming more and more agitated
(banging the paper, spitting on it) until the chimp put a stop to all this
nonsense by chasing him round the room.
Without the owner's intervention, the human painter might have learnt that an
ape has the muscular strength of several grown men bundled into one - which
explains why it takes them no effort at all to charge a painting with energy.
Anyone interested in the "cultural" expressions of humans and apes, and how
they stack up against each other, will be delighted by Boulle's Planet of the
Apes and the movies it has inspired. Here we have a topsy-turvy world in which
the apes are superior and we poor humans do everything to prove that we are
smart, that we deserve good treatment at the hands of our hairy rulers.
Don't be confused about them: they are definitely apes, not monkeys. The great
apes are tail-less, broad-shouldered, flat-chested large primates of which
there are only four species: gorillas, orang-utans, chimpanzees and bonobos.
We are actually the fifth - it is only the fragility of the human ego which
keeps biologists from pressing this point.
But could apes, or should I say the other apes, ever rule a planet? And would
I - a primate expert and avowed ape-lover - want to live in such a world? Even
though these are definitely not the kind of questions to which primatologists
devote symposiums and conferences, we do have opinions. Partly because we hold
apes in much higher esteem intellectually than most people, we are unshocked
by the idea that they may have their own social traditions, power struggles
and petty jealousies. To us, this part of the story is not fiction or even
science fiction, but plain reality.
I have studied the way angry young male chimpanzees - endowed with an enormous
"will to power", as Nietzsche called it - swaggeringly challenge the system.
They make friends with other malcontents, rattle the confidence of the
established leader and ruthlessly knock him off his pedestal when the time
comes. Meanwhile, the alpha males have their counterstrategies, such as
systematically disrupting any grooming between rivals who together could pose
a threat to the existing order. To all intents and purposes, they are nipping
conspiracies in the bud, punishing each and every transgressor until they
grovel in the dust.
Frans de Waal with two grooming macaques
I had to resort to the writings of Machiavelli to understand their
divide-and-rule tactics and became so impressed that I am not convinced that a
human player would fare any better in these power configurations than the
average chimpanzee.
This is not because we are not smarter, but because the intelligence that goes
into this kind of manoeuvring is so basic - having to do with which friends to
make, which physical risks to take and how to divvy up the spoils - that I am
not sure our bigger brains would be of much help. A great tactician does not
need to be a rocket scientist. In addition, any human intelligence advantage
would be offset by our inferior physical strength: I would rather fight a
chimpanzee alpha male alongside a couple of ape buddies than with the backing
of three times as many human friends.
That is, so long as we do battle without weapons. As soon as technology comes
into play, we do need rocket scientists and humans are unsurpassed. Apes use
sticks and stones, sometimes quite effectively - in the field, they have been
seen to club young leopards to death - but the making of arrow points, spears,
bows and arrows are all beyond their capabilities. Here we do have some
serious advantages: greater intelligence and more effective transmission of
knowledge.
But note that these differences are gradual. This is what makes Planet of the
Apes so compelling. It does not assume any ape behaviour for which there isn't
at least a grain of evidence, and thus justifiably breaks down the barrier
between human and animal. Having just written a book about this barrier and
about how it is a typically western preoccupation, I sympathise with the
depiction of apes as cultural creatures.
In The Ape and the Sushi Master, I follow the trajectory of the discovery of
culture in other animals, beginning in the 1950s with Kinji Imanishi and his
Japanese school of primatology. If culture is defined by socially (as opposed
to genetically) transmitted habits and knowledge, so that one group may
develop quite different ways of doing things from another group of the same
species, it is widespread indeed. The idea is taking the field of animal
behaviour by storm.
One community of chimpanzees may crack nuts between hammer and anvil stones,
whereas another community has plentiful nuts and stones but fails to do
anything with them. Such invented habits may well endure in a population for
thousands of years, but their establishment can also be rapid, far more rapid
at any rate than genetic evolution.
The great advantages of culture are speed and flexibility. Last year, for
example, male humpback whales off the Australian coast en masse adopted a new
song learnt from a group of visitors from the Indian ocean, all in order to
attract females.
The way behaviour is copied from others is interesting and for this we
sometimes use the sushi master comparison. Sushi masters have apprentices who
slave in the kitchen, mop the floor, bow to the clients, fetch ingredients and
in the meantime follow from the corners of their eyes, without ever asking a
question, everything their master is doing.
For three years they watch: an extreme case of exposure without practice. They
are waiting for the day when they will be invited to make their first sushi,
which they will do with remarkable dexterity. It is believed that this is the
same way - no reward or punishment, no formal instruction - that young
primates absorb the many cultural practices around them.
Learning from others is so second nature to us that there is a danger in
putting young humans and apes together: the direction of influence is more
likely to be from the ape to the child than the other way around. This was
discovered the hard way in the 1930s by Winthrop and Luella Kellogg, who were
forced to terminate a co-rearing experiment in their home when their son
Donald began to give guttural food barks like those of the female chimpanzee
Gua with whom he was being raised. When Donald ran to his parents while
grunting "uhuh, uhuh", it was decided that his aping of the ape had gone far
enough.
Helena Bonham-Carter in Planet of the Apes
However, the ape, too, proved to be an excellent imitator. The Kelloggs
describe how she became a typist after having seen her foster parents type for
many months. Gua would climb on the typewriter stool and sit properly behind
the machine, moving her hands simultaneously up and down the keyboard,
pounding the keys with her fingers. We can only speculate about the literary
heights the chimpanzee might have attained had the experiment continued.
Some people have questioned my idea of culture. The term evokes images of art
and classical music, symbols and language, and a heritage which needs
protection against a mass-consumption society. A so-called cultured person has
achieved a refinement of tastes, a well developed intellect and a particular
set of values. This is not how scientists use "culture" in relation to
animals.
Culture simply means that knowledge and habits are acquired from others -
often from the older generation, which explains why two groups of the same
species may act differently. Thus eating fish and chips, as the British do, or
singing in groups holding enormous glasses of beer, as the Germans do, are
both perfect examples of culture.
I also wonder what harm there can be in exploring non-human parallels of
culture. Are we happy only with a day-and-night difference, in which we have
it all and other animals have nothing? Imagine that we were to define "eating"
by the use of knife and fork. Such a definition would allow us to claim eating
as uniquely human, even uniquely western, yet we would accomplish this
distinction by confusing the instruments of consumption with its essence. The
essence of eating is to get food into one's stomach and in this regard we are
obviously not special at all.
The relevant question in relation to culture, therefore, is: what is its
essence? What is the least common denominator of all things called cultural?
In my view, this can be only the non-genetic spreading of habits and
information. The rest is embellishment. Those who have elevated language,
education, values and other typically human aspects of culture to its defining
criteria confuse the knives and forks of the process with its essence.
If apes (and some other animals) have indeed crossed the nature-culture divide
and have entered a realm that we thought was uniquely ours, this makes their
movie portrayal as the rulers of the planet a little less of a stretch. But
why do they need to be so aggressive? Is it because we are, and the script
turns everything upside down, thus presenting the apes just as ill-behaved as
us? Or is it because we like to depict apes as animals, hence as brutal and
uncivilised?
There is a long tradition of blaming our negative characteristics on the
animal side of human nature. Thus, when people rampage and kill, they are said
to act like animals. For our noble traits, on the other hand, we have an
entirely different story. Our cultures and religions happily take credit,
claiming that we developed and cultivated these traits by ourselves. We even
call kind and generous behaviour "humane", which eliminates any confusion
about where we got it.
In this rather black and white view, it is logical to depict apes as
uncivilised monsters and to emphasise their aggressiveness. The truth, though,
is that apes, just as humans, can be both. They can be extremely violent,
killing each other over territory and females, but they can also show sympathy
and care.
They share food with each other, defend the weak against the strong and offer
consolation to distressed individuals, putting an arm around the shoulder of a
screaming victim of attack, sitting with them till they calm down. I have done
experiments to see how they keep favours in mind and repay one good deed with
another, thus building a simple market place of services. My conclusion is
that in all regards, apes are like us, not just on the negative but also on
the positive side.
However, I am talking only of chimpanzees, the apes with the most aggressive
reputation. You should see the bonobo, their hedonistic sibling species.
Bonobos resolve conflicts with sex and are far more peaceable than the other
apes. A totally different planet would have resulted, one called bonoboland in
which females dominate males, in which homosexual acts are perfectly normal
and in which xenophobia and domination are replaced by mingling and
coexistence.
Preciously little was known about these hippies of the primate world when
Boulle wrote his book, but I bet that the author, a Frenchman, would not have
been able to resist the enrichment of his plot that bonobos would have
provided.
So there you have it: the mixed reflections of a primate expert on a movie
that stereotypes his favourite animals while at the same time challenging us
to imagine a world dominated by them. Not only this, but the movie also
presents us with the interesting dilemma that it is difficult to prove that
you are anything other than ridiculous, anything other than a dumb brute, if
your audience does not want to see you this way.
Art imitating life: zoo chimpanzees that watch television and paint
This is a familiar dilemma for those of us who think there is nothing
inherently funny about apes, that the only reason we laugh about them is
because we wish to keep them at arm's length. And laugh we do, as exemplified
by special occasions set up for such fun. Ape dinner parties became standard
at zoos and menageries in the 19th century and we still see the equivalent on
television. In the United States there is an entire Chimp Channel devoted to
dressed-up apes trained to move their mouths frantically while an audio track
with human speech gives the impression that they are talking.
The goal is to project the image of animals doing their best to be like us,
yet failing miserably. They have to fail, because if they become too good at
eating with cutlery (a sure sign of civilisation), the scene immediately turns
threatening. As explained by Ramona and Desmond Morris, this cannot be
tolerated: "In the late 1920s the London Zoo started to organise these
demonstrations on a regular basis. Each afternoon at a set time a group of
young chimpanzees performed at a table for the amusement of zoo visitors. They
were trained to use bowls, plates, spoons, cups and a teapot. For the
chimpanzee brain, learning to perform these trivial tasks provided only a
minor challenge. There was the ever-present danger that their table manners
would become too polished. To relieve the monotony, it often became necessary
to train them to 'misbehave'. They excelled at this, too, and their timing
became so perfect that the teacups were always popped into the teapot and the
tea drunk through the spout, just at the vital moment when the keeper turned
his back."
To have apes ridicule our species, especially the cultural refinements that we
admire so greatly in ourselves, could be looked at as a form of
self-deprecation. That would be the optimistic view. The alternative is that
by allowing animals to mock us we let them make even greater fools of
themselves which permits us to laugh away any doubts we might harbour about
ourselves. That we select apes for this job is logical because it is
particularly in the face of animals similar to us that human uniqueness needs
confirmation.
This is what makes Planet of the Apes so unique: instead of making fun of the
apes, it makes fun of us and puts us in the role of trying to prove that we
are less stupid than we look.
All of this is not to say that I would love to live in a world dominated by
apes - like everyone else, I prefer to be on top.
My whole point is that such a world would not necessarily be devoid of the
civilising tendencies that make our present lives bearable. Instead of being
ruled by robots or a bunch of piranhas, we would be at the mercy of
warm-blooded fellow primates who act, think and operate very much like us. It
would be an educational experience not unlike that of Rainer, the painter, who
discovered that the best way to get along with apes is to forget one's
prejudices and to heed their body language and sensitivities, which are
obviously from the same planet as ours.
Dr Frans B M de Waal is C H Candler professor of primate behaviour at Emory
University, Atlanta and author of The Ape and the Sushi Master, Penguin,
£16.99
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