I am a primatologist who spends twelve hours most days in the company of a thirteen year old chimpanzee named Bow. I am also an editor with Inverted-A Press.
Yesterday it rained all day, and today does not look to be very different. While flooding has occurred in the nearest large metropolis, on my property the most that has happened is that the ditch running alongside my internal road has turned into a peaceful babbling brook.
For Bow, however, all this rain has led to a certain amount of boredom. He enjoys going outside every day, but when it is raining, even very slightly, he will not venture out.
You can lead a chimpanzee to water, but you cannot make him cross the threshold.
There he sits, with a bemused expression, seeing the rain fall, but refusing to budge.
Set him free! the heckling animal rights people often say, when they post comments on my videos. But where would he go? How would he find shelter from the rain?
The rain is good for the flowers and the trees, By extension, this is good for the butterflies and the bees.
But none of them seem to like it when it actually rains. If they had direct control over the weather, it might never rain, they dislike it that much. You don't see them outside when it rains.
I regret that I did not excavate the perimeter of my pasture this year, because this would be a good year to fill the moat that would create Bow's island. Other years there will be much less rainfall. We have experienced droughts before. We will have droughts again. Variability is built into the weather. People find reasons to complain, no matter what the weather brings.
The question is: Once he has that island of his own, how will Bow keep from ever getting wet?
Bow is very sweet, All unbidden, he notices the dry skin on my hand, and he volunteers to groom it.
His touch is very gentle, but the grooming he gives me is thorough.
You might think that this kind treatment is in return for something else that I have done for him, but in fact it's not. This is not quid pro quo or one hand washes the other. Bow feels an inner compulsion to groom my hand, and he only does it when he feels like it. It is neither planned nor solicited.
I have been preoccupied by the concept of mutuality, which is why whatever flower is in season that attracts the most pollinators has been topmost on my list of things to photograph. Just before the trip to Bloomington, that flower was the purple milkweed, and I even took risks trying to get close to the butterflies. I got a touch of poison ivy in one elbow capturing those photos.
But there are other beautiful flowers that are blooming now, too, and yet they attract no insects. Take the Tall Phlox.
These flowers are beautiful and fragrant, yet no bees or butterflies visit them.
Maybe it's because the phlox grows back from the root every spring that it does not need to attract pollinators, and not needing to do so, it just naturally doesn't. Where there is no mutual benefit, the unplanned exchange just does not seem to take place. However, I have spotted rabbits within sight of the phlox, placidly grazing on the lawn.
The rabbit will not tell me where the predators are; it just runs off if I get too close. Does the rabbit realize that the culling effect of predators on the rabbit population is responsible for its own good health?
Meanwhile, when I least expect it, the kitten emerges from a field full of wildflowers.
Its every move says; "I am a mighty hunter. I am king of the beasts!" Then it meows to imply that I should feed it. Will it ever catch a mouse to earn its keep, I wonder?
This afternoon I picked another ripe wild plum, and I gave it to Bow.
He took it out of the bowl and stared at it intently.
Then he slipped it unceremoniously into his mouth and ate it.
In the end all that was left was the pit.
Now lots of people would misunderstand. They might think: there's reciprocity for you! He groomed her finger, so she gave him a wild plum. But I would have given him that plum, whether he had groomed my finger or not. And he would have groomed my finger, regardless of whether later in the day I'd discover a wild plum to give him. What we have here is a relationship of mutuality, not reciprocity -- the same kind of relationship that the butterflies have with the mountain mint, or the wild plum tree has with the animals that eat its fruit.
Chimpanzees, like most other animals, have some involuntary vocalizations and behaviors. We have them, too. Human babies cry when they are hungry, wet, in pain, or otherwise in distress long before they have developed a theory of mind and know that this will help them to communicate what they want. Human adults cry out when they are tortured, even if they try to keep silent. We laugh when something seems funny, and sometimes we can't stop ourselves, even though it gets us in trouble. Often we end up having to clap our hands over our mouths in order not to alert others to what we really think. Chimpanzees do that, too.
Chimpanzees have highly expressive faces, and their expressions speak volumes. Sometimes they are contemplative, and their eyes, like our own, are windows into their souls. But are all the faces and sounds they make, especially the ones directed toward us, entirely involuntary? A recent article by William Hopkins, Jared Taglialatela and David Leavens suggests that chimpanzees do have more control over their vocalizations and facial expressions than most scientists have given them credit for. Here is the abstract.
Do chimpanzees have voluntary control over their communicative acts? I agree with Hopkins, Taglialatela and Leavens that they do. Where my thinking somewhat diverges is from their expressed thought that humans must have developed language after they achieved greater control over their vocalizations than chimpanzees currently have. I don't think that communication requires a theory of mind or voluntary control in order to take place. If anything, voluntary control by the individual member of a community over his communicative acts is what leads to deceit and tend to bring about the breakdown of the system.
Take bees as an example.
Bees can communicate to one another a location of valuable food sources. On my property right now, the Virginia Mountain Mint is blooming in profusion. At first, a single bee discovered this.
But in no time at all other bees arrived, and they appeared to be working side by side.
Even though bees can communicate information to one another, this does not necessarily mean that they are self aware or that they have a theory of mind. The transmission of information through a code can happen in inanimate systems, too, such as computers. DNA code, which is biological and not man-made, transmits information to future generations without any conscious being to interpret it. If human language is a code, we did not necessarily need to know we were transmitting information to other humans before we began using it. On the contrary, only after we gained the knowledge that others were heeding our cries did we learn to manipulate them by feeding them false information.
Not all bees are eusocial. Sometimes the communication system breaks down, and the surplus is not managed properly. and then... the colony collapses, and individual bees go their separate ways. I wrote about this at length here:
Any involuntary reflex that nature gives us to communicate to others can also be faked. Once we realize we might gain something by faking it, we can -- and do -- manipulate the information that we feed to our conspecifics. Human babies discover their power over caretakers and start crying even when their basic needs are met in order to get more attention at around six months, about the same age when they learn to tell apart different people and start to develop stranger anxiety. Developing a theory of mind leads to deception and manipulation. Of course, the age varies with the individual and the baby may not do it at all, if he is autistic. Human females fake orgasms in order to curry favor with their lovers, as Nora Ephron memorably dramatized in her script for "When Harry Met Sally." People fake injury in order to get out of work. All of these actions are counterproductive from the collective perspective of the "good of all mankind", but they exploit the fact that individual members of society have conflicting interests.
While it is possible to fake a cry when the reason for it is not present, it is much harder to suppress an involuntary reflex when the triggering event happens, even if it compromises the self-interest of the individual. The involuntary cry did not necessarily evolve to help the individual emitting it. It was designed to alert others. In my novel, Theodosia and the Pirates, Jean Laffite explains the natural function of the pleasure cry to Theodosia."“It was not given to you in order to serve you. It was
given to serve your husband."
Chimpanzees have involuntary food vocalizations in order to alert other chimpanzees to the presence of a food source. These vocalizations evolved naturally in order to help the chimpanzee tribe to survive. If they did not have survival value, the vocalizations would not have been retained, because these cries can endanger the individual by drawing the attention of predators. The benefit to the group must outweigh the risk to the individual, or else this chimpanzee trait would not have survived. However, alerting other chimpanzees to the presence of a food source may cause a chimpanzee who is lower on the feeding hierarchy to lose out on a tasty treat, and so clever chimpanzees, despite experiencing the involuntary urge to cry out at the sight of good food, clap their hands over their mouths.
It is very important to understand, for purposes of determining which form of communication came first, that while involuntary vocalizations help to automatically transmit information to others in the group, they no longer work that way as soon as the individual finds he can control and manipulate them. Hence, theory of mind, self awareness and individuation create havoc in the code and lead to a breakdown in the collective transmission of information. Learning to control our vocalizations and facial expressions leads to fake smiles and false cries, not to better coding.
Chimpanzees, in my experience, have a far more developed theory of mind than humans and are much more socially aware. They read body language very well, can anticipate our actions before we take them, and they learn to prevaricate before they even acquire language. It seems that their involuntary reflexes, vocalizations and displays are hard-wired so strongly precisely because any control a chimpanzee has over his communication immediately leads to deception. I think that human language is productive as a means of communication only to the extent that humans are more naive and less socially motivated than chimps. In comparison to chimpanzees, humans come off as autistic and less aware of others' true motives, and hence they are less manipulative and share information more freely.
On the other hand, despite all his hard-wired behaviors, Bow shows the ability to master himself at least long enough to warn me that a display of dominance is about to take place.He will very gently nudge me aside, so that he will have enough room to show how very big and strong he is -- without actually hurting anyone. I think that is very evolved. Don't you?
There are some phrases in the Declaration of Independence that I find objectionable, but the "pursuit of happiness" is not one of them. I think Thomas Jefferson got that one just right.
Bow enjoying the very green scenery this 4th of July
We are not guaranteed that we will catch up with happiness if we pursue it, because like a clever little rabbit it can lead us on a merry chase.
Happiness is like the hummingbird in our peripheral vision: we may never be able to focus enough to get a clear shot.
Nobody is responsible for our happiness but ourselves, and even we cannot guarantee the results. Happiness is like a rare flower that blooms for a short while, if at all. But the pursuit of happiness is an ongoing process.
And despite all the admonitions to remain "in the moment", the pursuit of happiness, like any pursuit, has time built into it. It is a sequence in time, like a piece of music or a chase scene, and is not properly captured in a still shot, unless it somehow conveys motion.
Bow and I have our past, and our future, and right now, sandwiched in between the two, is where we pursue the happiness to come, while enjoying the contentment that comes from that pursuit.
Grey skies and bad weather are part and parcel of it all. If we were guaranteed that all our dreams would come true, that would put an end to the pursuit. It would finish off all the fun. We'd have little to look forward to. There would be nothing left to hope for.
It's in the dreams we dream along the way that passing pleasure and true joy can both be found. And that is the secret to happiness. It's all in the chase!
Yesterday was my day off. When I returned from my errands, on the dining room table, on a paper napkin over which was an apple with one bite taken out of it, Lawrence had written: "Bow took bite of this, spit it out and said it was bad. Do you think others?"
He was referring to all the other apples that had come in that bag. If this was a bad apple, were all the other apples bad? I felt of the apple, and it was hard and unyielding. There was no indication to me that it was rotten. The only reason the part Bow had taken a bite of was brown was because of the normal oxidation process.
I went to the pen to ask Lawrence about it. Lawrence said he had asked Bow why he thought the apple was bad, but Bow, who is not good at answering questions that start with "why" had merely answered: "Because it is bad."
In the evening I made my own investigation. I cut open the apple, tried to remove the oxidated spots and bit into it. The apple tasted fine. I then took it into the pen with Bow, along with the napkin, to begin an inquiry of my own.
"Bow, do you know what it says here?" I asked him, brandishing the napkin. "What does it say?" "?אתה יודע מה כתוב כאן? מה כתוב כאן"
I then read him the napkin, word for word. While I was reading it out loud to him, Bow followed along on the napkin, pointing at the appropriate words. He can read. But when I was done he looked away, as if totally uninterested in the issue that the napkin's words addressed.
"Is it bad? Look, I am eating now," I said and took a bite of the apple. "Is it bad?"
"?האם זה רע? תסתכל' אני אוכלת את זה עכשיו. האם זה רע"
Bow picked up the apple and started eating it. He finished the whole thing. There was no more talk about the apple being bad.
Mind you, this was one of a bag of red delicious apples, which are the least tasty of all the apples in the store. Even the Wikipedia says they don't taste so good.
But that's why they have the lowest price per pound from all the apples in the grocery store. Supply and demand. These are human grade apples, fit for eating. I eat them, too. I also let Bow have more expensive apples in moderation, but I can't have him turning up his nose on the red delicious as long as we are on a budget.
We have a pretty good life here, including a moderate climate. While it rained almost every day for a month before the trip to Bloomington, on our return we had several hot, sunny days.
On warm sunny days, Bow enjoys lounging about in the outer pen.
Meanwhile, everything outside is growing, and the fruit is ripening. Yesterday, I decided to pick the fruit that looks like "service berries as big as cherries."
The piece of fruit that I picked was so red and ripe that it fell the ground when I touched it.
There were translucent crystals on the the red fruit, probably from sappy juice that had already seeped out.
In my hand, it looked like a cherry, but I was pretty sure it was not a cherry. I took it home and washed it, and put it on a little plate.
Then I cut it open.
Once I had sliced it open, it was quite obvious that this was no cherry. Nor was it a service berry. I slipped the fruit into my mouth. It was ripe for the eating. The flavor was a little sour, followed by a strong bitter after taste. Not the choicest fruit in the grocery store, but quite edible! It was a wild plum.
Here is the seed. A seed just like this, left here by an animal that digested the fruit, but not the seed, is what brought this tree and its fruit to my land. It's just that simple. Nature provides. Every creature meets its own needs, and somehow, while everybody is being "selfish and inconsiderate" of one another, they all thrive in this natural economy. It never ceases to amaze me!
"By the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread", my foot! It's only if thou insistest on engaging in agriculture that it has to be that way.
Bow is not very ambitious. He enjoys the simple things in life. Yesterday, when I went to call him in for dinner, Bow was very mellow.
He was not in a big rush to come in, and when I approached, he took my hand and started grooming it. I can envision him living the happy, simple life with a small family on our small acreage. Once, long ago, I thought I could help him to learn to be self sufficient as a farmer. But now I think that the hunter gatherer life is more of what's right for him. It might be right for many of us humans, too.
Today, it is raining again. Bow chews his cud indoors, contented, while the heavens water all the trees that we did not plant. Life is good.
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