2
ROOTS, BRANCHES, AND THE CLEAR BLUE SKY
Therefore I say, grant reason to any animal with social and
sexual instincts, and yet with passion, he must have conscience.
SOMETIMES WHEN THE WORLD SEEMS A LOVELORN PLACE, I contemplate a snapshot over my desk of two bonobo apes hugging and kissing with lush abandon, and I perk right up. I’m inspired by these fellow primates whose social life is, in the words of one zoologist, “ruled by compassion.” They are, I like to think, a reminder not only of where we come from but of what sort of creature we are at heart.
It isn’t the usual picture of our evolutionary heritage. The official family portrait that science hangs over the mantelpiece depicts us as brainy, aggression-prone apes driven by selfish instincts and constrained (at best) by a thin thread of culture. It’s only lately that some scientists are stressing the more benign traits we share with higher primates: conciliation, nurturance, our flair for alliance— and especially empathy. More than superior smarts and a talent for predation, it may be our ability to sense what others are feeling that has put us on evolution’s fast track—and will be the saving grace that keeps our stock rolling.
Charles Darwin himself, great chronicler of the “struggle for existence,” found in animals the ancient taproot of our goodness. In their instinct for “mutual aid,” he saw the moral lineaments of human society. His writings are filled with admiring accounts of animal reciprocity, cooperation, and even love— a word, shunned by most evolutionary biologists, that appears some ninety-five times in the Descent of Man (against only two entries for survival of the fittest). Darwin beheld in even the humblest mammal the origins of the Golden Rule: Their “strong sexual, parental, and social instincts,” he suggested, “give rise to ‘do unto others as yourself’ and ‘love thy neighbor as thyself.’” Our ancestral line, contrary to its selfish-gene reputation, has given us a startling capacity to care deeply about what happens to each other.
To understand the mysteries of our makeup, science has looked to the creatures closest to the original prototype. On that branch of the tree upon which we perch, there’s nobody here but us anthropoids—you and me, gorillas and orangutans, chimps and bonobos—aka the great apes.
The family resemblance has always been unmistakable, but genomics has confirmed the patrimony: We’re not just similar to chimps—we share with them a downright cousinish 99.4 percent of our DNA. A 2003 report to the National Academy of Sciences, issued some 130 years after the publication of the Descent of Man, argued that because we are “only slightly remodeled chimpanzeelike apes”, we should expand Le Club Humaine to include some more low-brow members.
If that happened—and taxonomically it just might—it would be a big boost for animal advocates who regard apes as cognizant, feeling beings who deserve some designation of personhood (“extending the circle of compassion,” as Jane Goodall puts it, “to our closest living relatives”).
Others find the genomic hoopla overblown. “A banana’s got 30 percent of human DNA,” huffed one biologist, “but I find it hard to believe a banana is 30 percent as conscious as I am.” Others still—and not just fundamentalists slapping Evolution’s Just a Theory stickers on Alabama schoolbooks—find the kinship unsettling, seeing in chimps’ proclivity for mayhem a dim omen for the human prospect.
The world has always been divided between those who believe we’re basically kind and those who say we’re basically cutthroat. Is compassion a fundamental human instinct, or does it depend on putting a lid on our inner chimp? I decided I’d best go to the source on that one.
THE GEORGIA WOODS, MAJESTIC AND MIASMIC, SUGGEST THE primeval forest of our origins. The racket emanating from the white and ochre Quonsets clumped in its midst only adds to the impression. Faint hoots, shrieks, grunts, and an occasional piercing scream punctuate the humid air as I near the barbed-wire-topped enclosure of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center.
I’m met by Frans de Waal, a lanky, quizzical zoologist in blue jeans and wire rims who directs the center’s Living Links program. In books like Chimpanzee Politics and Our Inner Ape, de Waal has taken a witty and penetrating look at the evolutionary bases of human behavior, from the loftiest altruism to the most lowdown maneuvering. De Waal has found in chimps, who peeled off from our shared common ancestor a few million years ago, clues to the interplay between selfishness and kindliness that keeps our own species scratching its head.
We clamber up to his mission control center, a makeshift-looking yellow tower with a bird’s-eye view of the chimp colony.The creatures below, formally known as Pan troglodytes, go about their daily business amid spare furnishings done in Late Neoprimate: a few plastic barrels to climb and perch on, some big rubber tires for swinging, and a freestanding 8-foot wall for privacy (especially for secret trysts between subordinate males and wandering prize females).
At first it seems like not much is really happening, but it’s only my naive eye. De Waal, as attuned to the chimp social whirl as a gossip columnist for the Troglodyte Times, knows all, sees all, reporting every interaction in a complex code of numbers and letters on his PalmPilot. He points out some females off in one corner, picking through each other’s fur, as essential a chimp social grace as a kaffeeklatsch. “And look, over there,” he says, gesturing at two roistering juveniles. “They’re laughing.” Sure enough, their wide-open mouths, upturned lips, and soft chuckling as they tickle and tumble are so recognizable it would be impossible to call it anything else.
I’ve never been so close before to large primates without a distracting contingent of screaming kids and parents clasping melting Mr. Frostees. When a female chimp climbs up on a barrel for a better look at me, it’s just the two of us. Receiving the full attention of an intelligent nonhuman is an unanticipated shock to the system, a thrill along the nerves. No casual passerby on a city street would regard me with such frank and unwavering curiosity. De Waal says that chimp empathy is more an expression of instinct than intellect (“Chimpunzees,” he says with a trace of his native Dutch accent, “don’t neet to have an idee”), but I imagine I see wheels turning behind those brown eyes, a cogitation however rudimentary.
Suddenly, she scampers down with a waaa! as the alpha male makes a stagey entrance, his fur bristling as if charged by a static field. Sheer charisma’s not enough: He’s set one of the orange canisters on its side and rolls it before him like an engine of war, pounding it loudly. It has the desired effect of shock and awe.
“Can you hear? They’re all making submissive sounds,” de Waal says, and indeed there’s a din of high-pitched hooting reminiscent of Cheetah in the old Tarzan movies, followed by subservient “pant-grunts”: yesboss, yesboss, yesboss.
Boisterous just doesn’t describe this guy (“Björn,” says de Waal helpfully). Every gesture is outsized and histrionic; he’s part panjandrum, part Tasmanian devil. He galumphs through the enclave, noising off, seizing the topmost perch (an alpha must be His Highness), filling every inch of social space with his Songs of Myself while his subjects howl his praise. He rolls his juggernaut through the compound at speed, beating it as rhythmically as a tom-tom. Thump-thump, thump! Thump-de-thump, thump, thump!
“Maybe says something about the origins of drumming,” de Waal suggests mildly. He clues me in to an ongoing struggle for dominance between Björn and the number two male, Socrates (aka Socko), each courting the allegiance of a third male, whose loyalty’s up for grabs. Socko, cunning and ever politic, grooms Björn, occasionally ducking his head—the ape equivalent of genuflecting to kiss the ring—even as he covets the throne. If Björn were overthrown by some act of lèse majesté, Socko would grab the same reins of rank, declaring himself Supreme Orange Plastic Barrel Roller and incumbent Dearest Breeder. It’s a bit depressing and all too human to contemplate. These guys are as likely to live in egalitarian, compassionate harmony as to randomly type out The Tempest (or, more to the point, Richard III).
While Jane Goodall has emphasized chimps’ more charming side, other researchers have stressed their talent for deceit (especially sexual sneakiness), violence (up to serial killing), theft, battery, infanticide, cannibalism, and intergroup warfare. But chimps also exhibit what we think of as human virtues: aid to the weak, sharing of resources, and social rules that reward good citizens with extra grooming and punish bad guys with ostracism. De Waal has eloquently described how the toughest rivals will reconcile after a fight, stretching out their hands to each other, smiling, kissing, and hugging; or how a bystander to a battle will sling a comforting arm around the shoulder of a victim (he calls this “consolation behavior”)—all suggesting that empathy is a 30-million-year-old habit unbroken since the hominoid dawn-time.
BUT IF THERE ARE GANDHIS AMBLING AROUND THE PRIMATE world, they’d turn up among the bonobos. Regarded until the 1930s as “pygmy chimps” bonobos are now recognized as Pan paniscus, a species of strikingly different character. Robert Yerkes, the primate center’s founder, had in the 1920s unwittingly kept among his chimp population a bonobo he’d dubbed Prince Chim, whose gentle, thoughtful temperament so enraptured Yerkes that he hailed him as an “intellectual genius.” (While the colony’s chimps tended to shred books for amusement, Prince Chim would sit delicately paging through one as if trying to understand what humans saw in it.)
Many decades later de Waal, dubbing bonobos “the forgotten ape,” meticulously chronicled not only their high intelligence but their conciliatory customs. His own disposition is so amiable, his speech so measured and considered, it’s easy to forget what a relentless infighter he’s been for his theories. He tells me he has made his largely male colleagues deeply uncomfortable by pointing out that this decidedly nonmacho species can claim just as much kinship to us as the chest-beating chimps. But unlike the bellicose trogs, when bonobos meet a potential rival group it’s less like a battle than a tea party (often a rather erotic one, a simian Déjeuner sur l’herbe). As the bonobo males hang back standoff-ishly, females will approach the opposing tribe’s bravos to do the peacemaking—usually some variant of sleeping with the enemy.* Conflicts inside bonobo groups often end through the efforts of females, who will interpose themselves between rivalrous males like so many United Nations blue helmets.
De Waal says he feels a little responsible for “bonobos being idealized as peacenik hippies next to the bad-guy chimps.” But he expresses more regret that the bonobo wasn’t studied earlier for clues to the origins of human behavior. If bonobos instead of chimps had been taken as the prehuman model, the killerape crowd would never have gotten such traction. The scientific premises about our primate inheritance—and hence our modern assumptions about our basic nature—might have stressed equality of the sexes, familial bonds, and peacemaking rather than male dominance hierarchies and naked aggression.
Primatologists are finding in the bonobos evidence that it is not tooth-and-nail competition but conciliation, cuddling, and cooperation that may be the central organizing principle of human evolution. “Survival of the kindest,” de Waal calls it. “Could it be,” he wonders, “that the bonobo is cognitively specialized to read emotions and to take the point of view of others? In short, is the bonobo the most empathic ape?”
It is a heretical position, not only in singling out bonobos for such a distinction but for attributing empathy to an animal in the first place. Empathy has often been considered a uniquely human capacity, requiring a human level of intellect. Thomas H. Huxley, known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his ferocious early championing of natural selection (“ruthless self-assertion,” he wrote, by which “the strongest...tread down the weaker”), maintained that our ability to feel compassion and to act for the benefit of others depended on the unique power of human rationality for “curbing the instincts of savagery.”
But clearly not all animal instincts are savage; many are rather tender. Should we assume we’re so much more empathetic than, say, a bonobo just because we have more cognitive firepower? (Indeed we often behave as though we’ve lost touch with our innate kindness. Our very ability to govern our feelings enables us to overrule our natural sympathies.) At its most basic level, empathy is a form of largely mindless and nearly automatic resonance. Its likely origins can be found in the evolutionary biology of parenthood. The animal mother who proved most sensitive to the needs of her offspring was most likely to ensure their survival, a capacity marked in natural selection’s double-plus column—and reinforced by strong emotion. A human mother’s gut-level response to her baby’s four-alarm cry is an experience likely shared by a cat anxious to get to her squeaking kittens or a father bird’s rushing to stuff a fledgling’s mouth.
Infant animals, from their side, survive by evoking empathy, signaling their vital needs with dependent, “adorable” helplessness to which parents are hardwired to succumb. Adults of many species mimic infantile behavior when they want to elicit sympathy from others. Even a formidable male chimp defeated in a dominance struggle will sit in the dust pouting, emitting the occasional sorrowing yelp, reaching out so pitiably that eventually another chimp can’t bear it and comes to comfort him.
Signals of distress are powerful stimuli for the empathic response, suggestive of compassion’s primal meaning, “to suffer with.” This can lead to animal behavior that appears startlingly simpatico. In a study conducted in 1964, a group of psychiatrists at Northwestern University trained rhesus monkeys to pull a chain to get a reward of their favored food. But when the same chain was rigged to deliver not only food but also a nasty shock to a monkey in an adjacent cage, the others soon refused to yank it. The desire to avoid seeing, hearing, and feeling the distress of a companion overrode the desire to eat. One particular rhesus went without food for twelve days rather than pull the chain.
In the early 1990s, Italian neuroscientists pinpointed a mechanism in the primate brain that might form the primitive basis for the empathic response. They discovered specialized neurons in macaque monkeys’ premotor cortex (the brain area that plans and executes physical tasks) that had a unique property: These cells would fire not only when the animal performed a specific movement but also when it watched the experimenter perform the same action.
For example, if a monkey had previously plucked a raisin from a tray and then watched the experimenter’s hand pick up a raisin, the same neuron would fire in its brain in both cases. These “mirror neurons,” as they were quickly dubbed, seemed to act as an internal reflection of another creature’s experience. Primates appear to have a brain mechanism dedicated to empathy’s basic motto: I feel you in me.
Mirror neurons have now been found in the human brain, a largely unheralded discovery whose implications are sparking a quiet scientific revolution. “Mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology,” asserts neurobiologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, director of the University of California’s Center for Brain and Cognition. “They will provide a unifying framework for a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious.”
One of these abilities is surely empathy. One study showed that the same cells that light up when a person’s finger is jabbed with a pin also light up when someone else’s finger is pricked. We’ve all experienced this effect. We wince when we see someone stub her toe and hop painfully on one foot. We’ve been there. A parent takes her child to the pediatrician for a vaccination, then involuntarily flinches when the needle jabs. She can’t stand to see him hurt.
Mirror neurons, writes one scientist, “suggest that an archaic kind of sociality, one which does not distinguish between self and other, is woven into the primate brain.” Just as our brain is said to have a primitive “grammar nugget” that enables us to acquire the hallowed complexities of language, perhaps we have a “Golden Rule nugget” containing the neurological ground rules for compassion itself. Mirror neurons may help produce the most primitive form of empathic response, which researchers call “emotional contagion.” You’ve heard it loud and clear if you’ve ever gone to a G-rated matinee. Someone’s child starts to cry, and all toddlers within siren range promptly join in the wailing. It’s not that they consciously worry about the other child. The other kid’s distress simply triggers a similar distress in them, just as we burst out laughing when others laugh, or one person’s fear can flare suddenly through a crowd.
Is emotional contagion the reason that animals respond in ways that seem to be empathic? My friend’s new puppy, sitting in her lap as we chat one afternoon, suddenly gives her a hard nip. “Ow!” she yells, raising her finger sternly. “No!” The dog jerks his head back for a minute in surprise, then lunges at her again with his sharp baby teeth, clearly having a great time.
“Watch this,” she tells me. “Something they taught us in dogtraining class.”
She mimes crying. “Boo-hoo” she weeps softly, piteously, putting her hands over her eyes and peeking out from between her fingers. “Boo-hoo-hoo.” I am incredulous when the dog instantly stops biting, looks quizzically into her eyes, then clambers toward her face to lick it, whining in what sounds like sympathy and performing what certainly looks like an attempt to comfort her. What is puppy love?
Whatever it is, it may not be so far from ape empathy. In The Ape and the Sushi Master, Frans de Waal tells the story of a researcher in early-twentieth-century Moscow who raised a mischievous chimp named Yoni, whom she could never lure from the roof with any system of rewards, even his favorite foods. Finally she hit on a foolproof technique:
If I pretend to be crying, close my eyes and weep, Yoni immediately stops his play or any other activities, quickly runs over to me...from where I could not drive him down despite my persistent calls and entreaties. He hastily runs around me, as if looking for the offender; looking at my face, he tenderly takes my chin in his palm, lightly touches my face with this finger...
In this account the chimp does not respond to her distress signal only by becoming distressed himself but by acting to protect and comfort her. Though it could be argued that this too is simply a way to remove an aversive stimulus, it does look suspiciously close to actual empathy, compassion’s cornerstone.
Thomas Aquinas could have been describing the empathic instincts of, say, a rhesus when he wrote: “From the very fact that a person takes pity on anyone, it follows that another’s distress grieves him... ” But he added a critical coda: “One grieves or sorrows for another’s distress, in so far as one looks upon another’s distress as one’s own... because it makes them realize the same may happen to themselves [emphasis added].” Here empathy jumps the track to include cognition—an ability to mentally walk a mile in someone else’s moccasins.
Moral theorists from Aristotle onward have argued that this is why compassion is a singularly human characteristic. Alone among creatures, our exceptionally large, complex brains give us the logical skills for moral reasoning and the imagination to place ourselves in another’s circumstances (psychologists call this “perspective-taking” or “cognitive empathy”). We are moved to care about others because we can put ourselves in their predicament.
Researcher Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, a psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health, has identified the first stirrings of true empathic behavior in children between one and two years old. Here, for example, is how a twenty-one-month-old child responded when his mother pretended to be sad: peering into her face to determine what was wrong; looking concerned; giving her a hug while making “consoling sounds.” Intriguingly, in some of the sessions that took place in peoples’ homes, Zahn-Waxler also found that the family dog responded as quickly and effusively as the child to the “distressed” parent, whining and licking and looking distressed. So what, if anything, was the difference between the dog’s response and the child’s?
Zahn-Waxler thinks a child at this age begins to realize that others are similar to but distinct from himself. At that momentous juncture, she writes, “indiscriminate emotional contagion is superseded by cognitive empathy, a willed and knowing stepping into the role of the other.” Now the heart’s blind, automatic response (that “archaic sociality which does not distinguish between self and other”) is augmented by the insight that, in the words of philosopher Paul Ricoeur, “the other is also a self.”* Mother is not just an extension of me. A two-year-old may ask an upset parent, “What’s wrong, Mommy? Why are you crying? Can I help?” True, he may try to soothe away the upset because it is disturbing him, but now he will also try to understand. It is the beginning of moral reasoning—the capability to see past oneself and into the heart of another.
The word empathy is a translation of the German Einfuhlung, a term coined in 1903 by a student of aesthetics named Theodore Lipps. He was searching for a way to express the strangely intimate emotional connection that arises between a viewer and an onstage performer. He used the example of watching an acrobat stepping across a high wire, that moment of breathless suspension when audience members gasp as if they themselves were teetering on a tightrope, the sense of, as Lipps described it, “I feel myself inside of him.”
Lipps defined empathy as an “inner participation...in foreign experiences.” Cognitive scientists refer to this ability to read another’s feelings, thoughts, or intentions as a “theory of mind” (or just by the shorthand “mind-reading”). When a friend tells us her sister has fallen seriously ill, we feel heart-stricken. We can imagine the anxiety she must feel in the pit of our own stomach; we can sense her helplessness at being unable to take a loved one’s pain away. When she announces her sister has recovered, we rejoice with her at the news. It is generally held that animals, even higher primates, cannot feel such “true” empathy, let alone compassion, because they are unable to think themselves into another’s situation.
WHAT, THEN, ARE WE TO MAKE OF KANZI THE BONOBO? Raised from infancy by psychobiologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, who literally co-parented him with an adoptive bonobo mother, he has shown what might be interpreted as cognitive empathy. Once, for example, attempting to open a jar of cherries by throwing it on the ground, Kanzi accidentally bounced the jar off the leg of his keeper, who screamed in pain and grabbed her knee. Kanzi, seeming to assume that she had hurt her hand, grasped her palm and gently turned it over, inspecting the skin. Noticing an old scar, he moved her hand in the direction of a water canteen. When the woman verbally asked what he wanted (Kanzi has shown a remarkable level of language comprehension), he pointed to the canteen and then to her old injury, as if urging her to douse her hand with water. As she did so, Kanzi tried to wash her wound.
Can an ape get inside your head? It could be argued that Kanzi didn’t have a full-blown understanding of his keeper’s needs: Cooling water was what he would have wanted if he’d had a painful scrape. (Apes have been observed cleaning wounds in the wild with water, though usually with their own saliva.) But his behavior seemed consistent with a central human moral tenet: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. He was at least standing on the threshold of “perspective-taking"—the ability to see the world through another’s eyes, a hallmark of human compassion.
Kanzi is thought by some to be standing at humanity’s very doorstep. When Darwin, speaking of the dawning of the human moral sense, proclaimed, “We also differ from the lower animals in the power of expressing our desires by words, which thus become a guide to the aid required and bestowed,” he hadn’t reckoned with an ape who seems not only to have the rudiments of morality but also speech—albeit an artificial visual language known as Yerkish. Kanzi began learning Yerkish’s hundreds of abstract colored symbols (called lexigrams) when he was a baby clambering around his mother during researchers’ fruitless attempts to teach her. Shocked scientists soon realized that Kanzi was acquiring language exactly in the way a human infant does, simply by being exposed to it. The bonobo brain, they’ve since concluded, has an innate, downright freaky capacity for language.
Kanzi (Swahili for “buried treasure”) has been adjudged in tests to have the linguistic competence of a human child. He is bilingual (trilingual, if you count Ape). He understands two thousand to three thousand English words. He has even jammed on keyboards with rock legend Peter Gabriel. Here, I thought, is an ape worth talking to: I needed some questions answered.
After several months of negotiation (“Barbara Walters asked, and we said no,” an official informed me), my interview request was unexpectedly granted. I was instructed to take a certain highway to the far outskirts of Atlanta, turn off at an anonymous black mailbox, and drive through a series of electrically controlled gates.
My host, a resident cognitive scientist named Bill Fields, pulls up to meet me in one of the little jeeps they use to tool around the 50 wooded acres of the Language Research Center. We head straight to the language room, where Fields shows me a panel of hundreds of 1-inch squares embossed with colored symbols. When he presses one lexigram symbol and then another, the images flash on a nearby plasma screen and Fields’s own recorded voice booms out in a cheerful southern drawl, “Me!...Want!...More!...Grapes!”
Some of the Yerkish symbols are relatively straightforward. “Grapes” is a red G with stylized bunches hanging from it; the outline of a house stands for a log cabin on the property. But overall the chart looks like a frieze of abstract geometry.
The sign for “Squirrel” for example, is a purple circle with an X and a squiggle. “Visitor” is a triangle topped with a round circle. A few images stand for purely abstract concepts: “Yesterday” is a shadowed white moon over a dark pyramid, and other equally recondite symbols mean “Now” or “Later” (bonobos apparently have a sense of past, present, and future). It’s taken research assistants as long as a year to attain the measure of Yerkish fluency that for some bonobos is now second nature.
Fields lets a few of Kanzi’s relations into the lab and plants me by a Plexiglas window to observe. Bonobos’ appearance is often described as “gracile”: long legs, narrow shoulders, high foreheads. Unlike the beetle-browed chimps with their alternately adorable, ribald, or saturnine look, bonobo features seem, well... sincere. Each has a mat of black hair with a natural part running neatly down the middle, like some lost tribe of Borscht Belt comedians. They spend a surprising amount of time walking upright, arms swinging at their sides in a gait that eerily resembles computer animations of the skeleton of Lucy, our 3.5-million-year-old Australopithecus ancestor.
Watching them, I immediately sense how like us these creatures are. The young ones begin showing off for the stranger. One juvenile puts a black plastic garbage bag over his head and scuttles about comically. Then he drapes it over himself like a cloak, climbs up the mesh of his cage, and jumps down, looking for all the world like a kid playing Batman. A bonobo baby named Nyota peers up at me and executes a few perfect little standing backflips, then clambers up to a ledge and sits in a fair imitation of Rodin’s statue The Thinker, one hand parked pensively under his chin (and the other absently grasping his crotch).
I watch as Kanzi’s grown-up sister, Panbanisha, swipes a brush through her hair, then runs it down her fur (there seems to be a difference—at least to her). She ambles over to her attendant, Liz, a strong-looking woman with a stoic, forbearing expression, then pulls off the young woman’s sneakers and begins gently scraping under her toenails with a tiny stick, as intent as any manicurist. Any doubt that hair salons and nail parlor franchises are attributable to primate grooming instincts vanishes.
Panbanisha glances at me occasionally, poking a few desultory lexigrams on her electronic panel. I’m hoping she’ll say “Do Unto Others” or maybe just “Two Legs Good, Four Legs Bad,” but she seems to regard me as room service, requesting repeatedly that I bring her more grapes and peanuts and her favorite, lemon ice.
Unlike de Waal’s Chimpville, I can see that the Land of Bonobia is more of a let’s-all-hang-out-together place. It seems as much interspecies commune as animal research colony. Fields walks in, effusive with praise. “Panbanisha, you are so beautiful!” he exclaims, though I see only a large hairy creature with sagging dugs and a genital swelling. She grins from ear to ear. Her son, catching her mood, does a little capering dance.
“Each bonobo shares the feeling of the group,” Fields tells me. “Bonobos are happy only when everybody’s happy.” He describes an orangutan named Mari who had lost her arms and preferred to spend most of her time outdoors. “All the bonobos would refuse to eat a bite until we put Mari’s meal together and served it to her out there. Then Panbanisha would insist we bring a blanket out to Mari at night.”
Fields thinks we can learn a thing or two about social mores from the bonobos. “They always want conflict resolved—immediately, if possible,” he notes. Studying bonobo conciliation—the “biology of forgiveness in nonhuman primates,” as he puts it— might yield clues about “why we desire to forgive or be forgiven, and how to encourage it.” The bonobos’ remarkably sensitive responses to one another—what Fields terms “empathic elaboration"—could answer fundamental questions, he says, about “the universality of empathy: How much is innate, how much determined by cultural filters?”
When I ask him if the apes might be learning empathy from being around people, he responds, “I learn it from them.” All the time spent among them has made him an interspecies egalitarian. When I mention a bonobo has just bared its fangs at me, he’s mildly put out. “Fangs? They’re incisors,” he snorts. “Fangs? Then we have fangs, too!”
Finally, Fields takes me to meet Kanzi in his outdoor cage. I stand a few feet away, while the two of them communicate using a portable Yerkish chart—making introductions, says Fields, who supplements his own symbol-pointing with inaudible words. It’s a private conversation: Fields whispers; Kanzi cocks his ear carefully. Fields whispers again; Kanzi casually taps some lexigrams. Fields explains that Kanzi wants me to sit on a stool, that he’s not comfortable having me stand over him—a matter of ape etiquette.
I sit, taking note of Kanzi’s hirsute arms, thick as fenceposts, with their massive, arboreal triceps. Bonobos are astoundingly strong, and though this is a peaceable kingdom, they can occasionally be aggressive.* Fields has only half a middle finger on one hand—the outcome, he explains vaguely, of a rare Pan-Homo dispute. But as I hang out with the famously literate ape, I’m struck by a clear unscientific impression: Kanzi has good vibes.
Kanzi points to a few more symbols, shooting me an impenetrable glance. Fields tells me that Kanzi has indicated he wants to watch Fields and me “Chase.”
“He wants to see who’s dominant,” Fields says. “He wants me to jump on you and play-bite you, to chase and tickle. But it’s too hot and buggy for that.” I feign a look of bitter disappointment.
Later, Fields and I sit in his cramped office, which is lined from floor to ceiling with tapes and CDs of thousands of hours of bonobo observation, a fraction of twenty-five years of data collection. Fields enumerates some of Kanzi’s other cognitive feats. With a little training, Kanzi has proven nearly as adept as our early ancestors at toolmaking. He can knap stone “knives” by knocking two rocks together, choosing the sharpest flake by testing the edge with his tongue and lips, then using the crude blade to saw through a piece of tough hide covering a box of goodies. Fields shows me some footage on his laptop. Sure enough, there’s Kanzi, flaking one of his flint shivs. Then Fields fast-forwards to show me footage of another ape named P-Suke, who was “wild caught” and never taught language.
“Now watch,” Fields says. The same rocks are placed in P-Suke’s hands. He lets them fall from his grasp. The ape’s hands are then manually guided to knock the stones together. He stares down, blank and uncomprehending, letting them roll from his fingers. And so it goes. P-Suke just holds the two rocks and does nothing. It’s dark at the head of the stairs: He hasn’t got a clue. No amount of coaxing or training makes the light go on. For five years they have been trying to teach P-Suke to do what Kanzi managed to learn in a matter of hours.
“Why is that?” I ask Fields, baffled. He silently reaches over, takes a pen from his desk, lifts it in the air, and plops it on top of a notebook. Then he glances at me. I realize I’m supposed to understand, but I feel a bit like P-Suke: The point eludes me.
“How is tool manipulation different from the manipulation of symbols in language?” Fields asks rhetorically. “The answer is not much. Language, culture, and tools are like the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost: They’re aspects of the same thing.”
Suddenly a realization dawns, and it feels a little stunning. Kanzi, due to his facility with one system of symbols—language— can catch on to the skill and perhaps even the concept of toolmaking that characterized early man. Kanzi has acquired a different mind than P-Suke, a symbol-using mind; and that has brought him a new way of—for want of a more cautious term—thinking about the world.
Kanzi was just a regular Joe Bonobo until he was handed (or seized for himself) the tools of symbolic thinking. “The primate brain is the hardware. Culture is the operating system,” Fields says. “I can run a simple system on my computer hardware, like DOS 1.0, or I can run Windows, or I can run Linux. Kanzi’s operating system has become different from P-Suke’s; Kanzi’s brain can now run the genera of culture.”
FIELDS’S APPROACH IS, IT’S SAFE TO SAY, UNCONVENTIONAL. His take on the bonobo world is that of an ethnographer, he says, a student of culture; and the notion that animals can have culture has been one of anthropology’s great divides. Animals are said to have only “species-specific behaviors”—instinctual, genetically fixed, nearly as preprogrammed as robots. Sure, chimps can be trained to mimic culture—to dress in street clothes or grimace in mock garrulity on the Chimp Channel. But to say that apes are affected by culture beyond minor ways observed in the wild—differences in the way one group uses a twig to filch red ants, say, or slight variations in handclasps during grooming— remains somewhat heretical.*
Unlike de Waal, Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas, and other primate researchers who observe apes’ “natural” behavior, the scientists at the Language Research Center have shifted their focus from what an ape brain does to what an ape brain can do. Fields describes the center as a “Pan-Homo Culture” where two types of primates with large vocabularies and the capacity for symbolic thought can share an uncommon meeting ground.
“When it comes to big-brained primates,” Fields tells me, harping on a favored theme, “whether us or them, there almost is no species-specific behavior. A large, complex brain is not much restrained by the genome. What feedback from the environment— from culture—can do to the neurological substrates is almost limitless.”
He’s conjuring a radical view of evolution, of the remarkable potential of primate brains to, in effect, shape themselves. I feel a surge of hope; I also get the willies. I think of us at our evolutionary juncture, trying not to fall behind our own learning curve, looking for the sweet spot between smart and heart, extending our right hand to each other with the left still at each other’s throats. That our collective push-me-pull-you sorely needs to evolve toward a better game is a no-brainer.
On the way home, I can’t help seeing the world in Primate-Vision. The airport is a captive colony, perfect for observing hominoid behavior. There’s a pair-bonded couple keeping a tolerant, protective eye on their playful juveniles. In front of me, in a long, slow line, is an irritable middle-aged alpha. When his mate says, “Put the ticket in your jacket pocket, Sid,” the old silverback rears up and growls loudly, “It is in my jacket pocket. You saw me put it in. Quit your damn nagging!” The female hangs her head, speaks softly, soothingly, grooming some lint from his rumpled sports coat.
This effect lasts for weeks. It was hard not to think display behavior as I acted extra-gregarious at a party, impressing some and leaving others cold (social hierarchy); as I got into a political argument, pushing way too hard to win (dominance conflict), then apologizing (conciliation) for any boorishness; as I caught myself deferentially ducking my head (submission, ugh!) to someone I thought of as a better writer; as I provided a soft shoulder (consolation) to a friend with marital problems. My social finesse seemed disconcertingly undergirded with apely agendas. How many of my little daily transactions are tainted by trying to maximize rank, secure a better food supply, and maneuver for breeding privileges? How many are out of pure human generosity, compassion, and sensitivity to others?
But in the weeks and the months that followed, I found myself most haunted by the memory of P-Suke—a by no means stupid, just typical Pan paniscus with an unstretched mind—and Kanzi, who through some culture-induced mental alchemy has become a sort of Pan sapiens. In what ways am I, are we all, like P-Suke, the stones of full cognizance just rolling from our grip? In what ways are we like Kanzi, tweaking our operating system to new levels of understanding? Kanzi is said to have more brain than he needs to succeed in his environmental niche. So do we—though I wonder if we have enough heart? When de Waal says that the bonobos’ “greatest intellectual achievement is not tool use but sensitivity to others,” I wish I could feel with full certainty that the same applies to us.
If our spiritual traditions are any clue, we have been trying since forever to reroute or suppress our aggressive circuits and reinforce our caring ones. We assume that our course of development runs from childhood to adulthood; but spiritual teachers have always claimed there is a superseding path, if we choose to take it, which leads to higher consciousness. What else is the extraordinary compassion of the saints but proof-of-concept that we can bootstrap our primate inheritance to its optimum capacity for kindness? That heritage has already endowed us with more compassionate traits than selfish ones: nurturance of family, emotional commitment to friends, sympathy, affection, a sense of fairness and empathy, forgiveness, maybe even altruism. Whether you believe your Maker to be the Good Lord or Darwin’s Blind Watchmaker, they’ve been working from a similar schematic—one with built-in capacities for modification and much room for improvement.
It may sound silly to say, but my short time with the bonobos has made me more trusting of the instinctual foundations of my own unruly emotional life, has given me a certain confidence in our good nature. Sure, maybe the good stuff is alloyed with chimply cunning, and my impulses are more often fight-or-flight than unconditional love. But hey, I’m riding on a vintage primate chassis: I’m just glad to know that a responsive heart comes standard and preinstalled.
A famous chimp named Washoe, the first to use American Sign Language, once leaped over a dangerous high-voltage fence to pull a newly arrived chimp from the water, risking her life for an individual she’d known only a few hours. And chimps fear and despise water. Here, surely, are clues to the roots of compassion, if not—who knows?—its o’er-spreading branches, and the clear blue sky. Researcher Roger Fouts describes how Washoe, who had lost both her offspring as infants, reacted when a keeper told her that her own newborn had just died. Looking deep into the grieving woman’s eyes, Washoe signed, “Cry,” tracing on her own cheek the path a tear would take down a human’s (chimps don’t shed tears). Then Washoe signed, “Please Person Hug.”
We’ve come so very far from Washoe in our astonishing, lonely odyssey of 2 million years. But our journey to realizing full humanity may have just begun. Meanwhile, if I had my druthers, I’d engrave Please Person Hug on the Great Seal, put the lexigram for “Grapes” in one eagle talon and “Chase-Tickle” in the other— just as an experiment, to see where we might go from there, just to see how far we could take it.