How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (21 page)

Well, being an unreconstructed empiricist of the old school, I was of course inclined to bin it. That I did not do so was simply because along with the letter came the accumulated correspondence that had passed successively down the line from its starting point in the USA. I started to read it out of curiosity.

What made these letters so interesting (every one from a professional scientist, by the way) was that they all des-
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perately tried to prevent the sender being stigmatised as superstitious. ‘Jim, you know I do not believe in this kind of crap,’ pleaded one, ‘but I am sending it to you anyway because... ’ Or, ‘Ever since I was a kid, I just hated these chain letters and refused to send them on. But I’m sending you this one because... ’

And what made the big difference? Very simply the threat of bad luck. Every single one ended with a plea for understanding: ‘I’ve got a grant application pending, and I cant afford to take the risk... ’ or ‘I’ve got a job interview next week, and with the job market the way it is right now... ’

So, smiling to myself with an ever so slightly supercilious air of condescension, I put the bundle back in the envelope, and dropped it in the wastepaper bin. I had a busy week away from home ahead of me, with a conference to organise for the next day and the usual crises of the term looming.

Perhaps I ought to have recognised the signs sooner, but I didn’t. The next day, Tuesday, my conference started on a bad footing because there was no extension cable for the projector and it was some way through the first (by then well delayed) session before one turned up. Wednesday and Thursday I managed to double-book myself on teaching arrangements for two different courses. Thursday, I reluctantly cut a meeting to make a lunchtime book-launch party on the other side of London, only to discover when I got there that I had turned up a week early. Returning home Thursday night, I discovered that my wife had taken to her bed with the flu. Then, as the weekend progressed, the rest of the family went down with it one by one, until finally it was my turn. It was a bad dose: I hadn’t been ill enough
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to be off work for twenty-five years. The two boys were running temperatures of 103oF and it was the first time my daughter had ever had a day off in the eleven years since she had started school.

Now you know – and I know – that this was really just a long series of coincidences. But when you weigh up the probabilities of all five (or was it nine?) things happening in the same week, it does make you think, doesn’t it? The odds must be around a million to one. Small wonder people start to believe in superstitions and astrology when things happen on this scale.

But if you analyse things more carefully, the odds turn out to be much less impressive. The domino effect of the flu on the family would have been more impressive if they had all been in different households, and that year’s winter flu hadn’t generally been acknowledged to be unusually virulent. Some of the classes at the children’s various schools were down to half their usual size that week, and not a few families succumbed in their entirety.

Double-booking teaching is hardly unusual, especially in the first chaotic week of term. Nor is the late starting of a conference due to technical hiccoughs all that unusual. But wasting a lot of time chasing halfway round London to a launch party a week early – well, surely that’s something altogether out of the ordinary? Yes... but I had actually written it in my diary as being that week when I received the invitation six weeks earlier – a long time before anyone had even thought of sending the chain-let-ter package to me, and possibly earlier than the whole silly chain had been started off. To include this in the calculation really would be cheating – or at least presump-tive on the part of the Fates.
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And if it comes to that, all of these events occurred before the four days of grace were up. In fact, it really was outrageously mean of the Fates to victimise me when I still had a day in hand to send on the letter and its contents! Nothing should have happened before Friday! Not one of these cases of ‘bad luck’ should count! In fact, history and hindsight tell me that, aside from the onset of my own dose of flu, nothing at all happened in the week starting with the fifth day after I received the letter.

So, the likelihood that all these mishaps were caused by my refusal to send on the chain letter was actually zero. In fact, the chances of something going wrong on any given day is probably quite high, though we tend not to notice most of them until something draws them forcefully to our attention. Then when something like a chain letter does raise them into our consciousness, we tend to look about for post hoc confirmatory evidence. Like I said – very unscientific.

Still, I suppose I shouldn’t be too ungrateful, because the chain letter did set me thinking, and gave me a topic for an article that earned me the usual nice little fee...

So, thanks, guys.
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‘I think, therefore I am,’ declared the seventeenth-century philosopher-mathematician René Descartes, adding by way of afterthought that, since animals obviously didn’t speak, they couldn’t think and therefore certainly didn’t have souls. We have lived in the them-and-us dichotomy of Descartes’ shadow ever since. Nowhere has his influence been more intrusive than in the social sciences, where conventional wisdom has always insisted that the great divide between humans and other animals makes the latter totally inappropriate as models for the study of human behaviour. The great markers that set us apart from the brute beasts are culture and language.

The argument, of course, hinges on the uniqueness of these two key phenomena. The result has sometimes been a near-farcical effort to defend the honour of our species against upstart claims that mere beasts might aspire to such a noble condition. Every attempt to show that some animal or other possesses language or culture has been
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met with a counter-claim that has tried to shift the goalposts by redefining the terms. Man-the-tool-user rapidly became Man-the-tool-maker when it became apparent that many species of animals do in fact use tools.

So what is this culture of which we are so defensive? Half a century ago, the American anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn surveyed the literature and emerged with some forty different definitions in current usage by anthropologists and social scientists. By and large, these seem to break down into three major classes of definition: culture consists of ideas in people’s minds (social rules, patterns of ritual, beliefs, etc); culture consists of artefacts that are the products of those minds (so-called material culture like tools, pottery and its decorations, clothing, etc); culture is language and its products (high culture in the everyday sense, everything from Shakespeare to Bob Marley). The last, of course, brings us back to that other unique pillar of the human condition, language, and so rather shifts the goalposts again.

Apart from some inherent circularities (only humans have language, therefore only humans can have culture because culture is language), most of these definitions raise questions about the uniqueness of human behaviour. Are animals’ minds really empty? Do they have
no
beliefs about the world? Are the hammers and anvils that the chimpanzees use for cracking nuts bona fide instances of material culture or not?

Bill McGrew (now at Cambridge University) has been a vigorous critic of the culture-as-artefacts school of human uniqueness. In his book
Chimpanzee Material
Culture
, he challenged the advocates of this view to show
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why the chimpanzee’s toolkit fails to meet the definitions they readily accept for humans. Three decades of intensive fieldwork in Africa has uncovered a long list of natural and manufactured tools that chimpanzees use, ranging from hammers to probes, fishing tools to sponges. Were we to lose the labels from such exhibits in a museum, he insists, we would be hard pressed to tell whether they had been manufactured by humans or apes. In only two respects does the chimpanzee toolkit differ from that of pre-technological human societies: chimpanzees do not have vessels of storage and do not construct traps (for fishing or hunting).

Two other widely touted examples of animal culture have long since entered into popular mythology. One is the way blue tits learned to remove the cardboard discs that once capped British milk bottles: during the 1940s, the habit of prising off the caps so they could sip the cream that (in those days) lay on top of the milk gradually spread among these little garden birds throughout much of southern England. The other is the habit of washing sand off sweet potatoes that spread through a troop of Japanese macaques once the habit had been invented by a young female named Imo.

Both examples have, however, received hard knocks at the hands of psychologists during the last few years. Several careful reconsiderations of the data have pointed out that, for a culturally learned behaviour, the rate of transmission through the population was remarkably slow in both cases. It took literally decades for Imo’s potato-washing to spread to the rest of the troop; even then, only animals that were younger than her learned to copy the habit. The old dogs never learned new tricks. It seems that
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in most cases these new habits spread by a much simpler process: an observer animal’s attention is drawn to a problem by the behaviour of the tutor, and it then learns the solution to the problem for itself by a process of trial and error. In humans, the tutor would teach the observer both the nature of the problem and the solution or the pupil would simply copy the tutor, and this marks a clear distinction between culture in humans and culture in animals.

Observations of this kind have led psychologists like Mike Tomasello, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig in Germany, to doubt whether any animal has true culture in the human sense. But before we leap to premature conclusions, we might bear in mind the questions that are being asked.

Tomasello is interested in the mechanisms of transmission; primatologists like McGrew are interested in what the animals actually do. By any reasonable operational definition of culture, chimpanzees have culture, but, as Tomasello points out, we may legitimately doubt whether they learn it in quite the same way as we do. One way of asking the question, then, is to separate out the
capacity
for culture
(apes can develop variations in behaviour that are random, casual innovations of no particular ecological relevance – a bit like wearing baseball caps backwards) but only humans have the
potential for culture
that allows them to exploit novel innovations which build progressively on what people have done before – the thing that made possible Isaac Newton’s ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ view of how science, a cultural activity if ever there was one, evolves.
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It is obvious that what we often view as culture in humans is deeply embedded in language. We use language to describe, to teach, to intone our rituals. Animals, as Descartes observed, do not. Yet they are not dumb. Dogs bark, monkeys chatter. Conventional wisdom has always insisted that these are merely the direct products of the underlying emotions. Dogs bark because that is the kind of noise their vocal tract produces when they reach a certain level of excitement. While humans too produce similar kinds of vocalisations (screams and grunts), they also produce sound chains that are arbitrary yet meaningful. We can easily dismiss the much-vaunted waggle dance that honey bees use to notify each other of the direction and distance of nectar sources because it is specific to a very particular situation. Honey bees do not use the waggle dance to enquire after each other’s health or sympa-thise over a misfortune.

Yet, recent research suggests that, when it comes to monkeys and apes, it may be necessary to turn conventional wisdom on its head. Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, of the University of Pennsylvania, carried out a series of ingenious experiments on wild vervet monkeys in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park. By playing vocalisations of known individuals from hidden speakers, they have been able to demonstrate quite uncontroversially that vervet vocalisations convey considerable information that is quite independent of the behaviour of the vocalisers. Vervets reliably use calls to refer to specific kinds of predators (leopards versus birds of prey versus snakes). They know from minor differences in sound whether a grunt
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is a comment on what another vervet is about to do or on something it has seen, such as whether the caller is being approached by a dominant animal or a subordinate. In their more recent work in Botswana, Cheney and Seyfarth have demonstrated that baboons use grunts in a way that amounts to an apology in order to mollify an ally they have previously offended. And all this with what was once thought to be a simple all-purpose grunt.

There is, it seems, much more to animals’ vocalisations than we had supposed. Like the proverbial visitor to China, the naïve observer hears only a jumble of sounds where in fact something much more complex is going on. We have been, and still are, mere beginners when it comes to deciphering the languages of other species.

More impressive still are the achievements of the language-trained chimpanzees, which I’ll discuss in more detail in Chapter 21. Around a dozen chimpanzees, a gorilla and an orang utan have now been trained to use a variety of artificial languages, and the chimps in particular have demonstrated quite remarkable abilities, responding to instructions and answering questions at the cognitive level of young children. More alarmingly, perhaps, most of these achievements have been matched by an African grey parrot, the late and much-lamented Alex, who used spoken English to communicate.

There remains, however, one crucial stumbling block for animals. The ability to engage in the higher forms of culture that we associate with religious ritual, literature and even science depends on the ability to step outside one-
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self to see the world from an independent perspective.