Baboon Metaphysics: A Complex Hierarchy Pleases a Princess

Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, a husband-and-wife team of biologists at the University of Pennsylvania and authors of the books “How Monkeys See the World”, and the newly released “Baboon Metaphysics” have spent 14 over years observing the Moremi baboons. Through clever experiments the researchers have worked out many aspects of how baboons think.

Being able to read a baboon’s mind helps researchers understand the evolution and nature of the human mind, as well. Darwin once jotted down in a notebook in 1838, “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.”

Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth know a lot about baboons. They know for instance that baboons’ minds are specialized for social interaction, for understanding the structure of their complex society and for navigating their way within it.

“Monkey society is governed by the same two general rules that governed the behavior of women in so many 19th-century novels,” Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth write. “Stay loyal to your relatives (though perhaps at a distance, if they are an impediment), but also try to ingratiate yourself with the members of high-ranking families.”

Baboon society is founded on mother-daughter lines of descent. Eight or nine matrilines comprise a troop, each with a rank order that is hereditary. Rank among female baboons is handed down, with a daughter automatically assuming her mother’s rank. This hierarchy can remain stable for generations. Whereas the male hierarchy is constantly changing as males fight among themselves and with new arrivals.

Having an inherited position similar to that of troop of female baboons was a very special confirmation for a member of the British royal family, Princess Michael of Kent. When she visited Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth in Botswana, she remarked to them, “I always knew that when people who aren’t like us claim that hereditary rank is not part of human nature, they must be wrong. Now you’ve given me evolutionary proof!”

But it’s not just the British Royal family that has much in common with baboons. Although the human lines of descent split apart from baboons some 30 million years ago, the species still has much in common with it’s human cousins. Both are primates whose ancestors came down from the trees and learned to survive on the ground in large social groups, and both chimps and humans use tools. The baboon mind may therefore shed considerable light on the early stages of the evolution of the human mind.

Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth have thoroughly tested baboons’ knowledge of where everyone stands in the hierarchy. In a typical interaction, for example, a dominant baboon gives a threat grunt, and its inferior screams. Dipping into their vast library of recorded baboon sounds, the researchers can artificially create a sequence in which an inferior baboon’s threat grunt is instead followed by a superior’s scream.

Baboons don’t pay attention when normal interaction is played back to them, but they show great surprise when they hear the fabricated sequence, which would imply that their social world was greatly out of whack.

This simple reaction says a lot about what is going in the baboon’s mind. It shows that the animal can construe “A dominates B,” and distinguish it from “B dominates A,” which means it must be able to break the sounds down into separate elements, recognize the meaning of each, and combine the meanings into a sentence-like thought.

“That’s what we do when we parse a sentence,” Dr. Seyfarth said. Human language is unique because no other species is known to be capable of anything so complex. But when it comes to perceiving and deconstructing sounds, baboons’ ability seems quite language-like.

“Baboons provide you with an example of what sort of social and cognitive complexity is possible in the absence of language and a theory of mind,” she said.

But why did human brains develop a complex theory of mind, while other primates did not? Dr. Cheney concludes that no one is quite sure of how to answer that question yet. “The selective forces that gave rise to our large brains and our full-blown theory of mind remain mysterious, at least to us.”

Posted by Rebecca Sato

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Story Link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/science/09babo.html?pagewanted=2&_r=3&ref=science

Comments

[Mr. Bear]

Cool. Sometimes my wife watches me, in a white lab coat, and jots notes on a clipboard...

[asdf]

looks like coop

[starry-eyed]

I just get such a kick out of that British royal who was so excited to be like a baboon. Geez Louise honey- the rest of us have known for centuries that the royal family is just like a troop of baboons. But is that really something to be proud of...?