The Naked Ape (15 page)

Any social contact is at best mildly fear-provoking. The behaviour of the other individual at the moment of meeting is an unknown quantity. Both the smile and the laugh indicate the existence of this fear and its combination with feelings of attraction and acceptance. But when the laugh develops into high intensity, it signals the readiness for further ‘startlement’, for further exploitation of the danger-with-safety situation. If, on the other hand, the smiling expression of the low-level laugh grows instead into something else—into a broad grin—it signals that the situation is not to be extended in that way. It indicates simply that the initial mood is an end in itself, without any vigorous elaborations. Mutual smiling reassures the smilers that they are both in a slightly apprehensive, but reciprocally attracted, state of mind. Being slightly fearful means being non-aggressive and being non aggressive means being friendly, and in this way the smile evolves as a friendly attraction device.

Why, if we have needed this signal, have other primates managed without it? They do, it is true, have friendly gestures of various kinds, but the smile for us is an additional one, and one of tremendous importance in our daily lives, both as infants and as adults. What is it about our own pattern of existence that has brought it so much to the forefront. The answer, it would seem, lies in our famous naked skins. When a young monkey is born it clings tightly to its mother’s fur. There it stays, hour in and hour out, day after day. For weeks, or even months, it never leaves the snug protection of its mother’s body. Later, when it is venturing away from her for the first time, it can run back to her at a moment’s notice and cling on again in an instant. It has its own positive way of ensuring close physical contact. Even if the mother does not welcome this contact (as the infant grows older and heavier), she will have a hard time rejecting it. Anyone who has ever had to act as a foster-mother for a young chimpanzee can testify to this.

When we are born we are in a much more hazardous position. Not only are we too weak to cling, but there is nothing to cling to. Robbed of any mechanical means of ensuring close proximity with our mothers, we must rely entirely on maternally stimulating signals. We can scream our heads off to summon parental attention, but having got it we must do something more to maintain it. A young chimpanzee screams for attention just as we do. The mother rushes over and grabs it up. Instantly the baby is dinging again. This is the moment at which we need a clinging-substitute, some kind of signal that will reward the mother and make her want to stay on with us. The signal we use is the smile.

Smiling begins during the first few weeks of life, but to start with it is not directed at anything in particular. By about the fifth week it is being given as a definite reaction to certain stimuli. The baby’s eyes can now fixate objects. At first it is most responsive to a pair of eyes staring at it. Even two black spots on a piece of card will do. As the weeks pass, a mouth also becomes necessary. Two black spots with a mouth-line below them are now more efficient at eliciting the response. Soon a widening of the mouth becomes vital, and then the eyes begin to lose their significance as key stimuli. At this stage, around three to four months, the response starts to become more specific. It is narrowed down from any old face to the particular face of the mother. Parental imprinting is taking place. The astonishing thing about the growth of this reaction is that, at the time when it is developing, the infant is hopeless at discriminating between such things as squares and triangles, or other sharp geometrical shapes. It seems as if there is a special advance in the maturing of the ability to recognize certain rather limited kinds of shapes—those related to human features—while other visual abilities lag behind. This ensures that the infant’s vision is going to dwell on the right kind of object. It will avoid becoming imprinted on some near-by inanimate shape.

By the age of seven months the infant is completely imprinted on its mother. Whatever she does now, she will retain her mother-image for her offspring for the rest of its life. Young ducklings achieve this by the act of following the mother, young apes by clinging to her. We develop the vital bond of attachment via the smiling response.

As a visual stimulus the smile has attained its unique configuration principally by the simple act of turning up the mouth-corners. The mouth is opened to some extent and the lips pulled back, as in the face of fear, but by the addition of the curling up of the corners the character of the expression is radically changed. This development has in turn led to the possibility of another and contrasting facial posture—that of the down-turned mouth. By adopting a mouth-line that is the complete opposite of the smile shape, it is possible to signal an anti-smile. Just as laughing evolved out of crying and smiling out of laughing, so the unfriendly face has evolved, by a pendulum swing, from the friendly face.

But there is more to smiling than a mouth-line. As adults we may be able to convey our mood by a mere twist of the lips, but the infant throws much more into the battle. When smiling at full intensity, it also kicks and waves its arms about, stretches its hands out towards the stimulus and moves them about, produces babbling vocalisations, tilts back its head and protrudes its chin, leans its trunk forward or rolls it to one side, and exaggerates its respiration. Its eyes become brighter and may close slightly; wrinkles appear underneath or alongside the eyes and sometimes also on the bridge of the nose; the skin-fold between the sides of the nose and the sides of the mouth becomes more accentuated, and the tongue may be slightly protruded. Of these various elements the body movements seem to indicate a struggle on the infant’s part to make contact with the mother. With its clumsy physique, the baby is probably showing us all that remains of the ancestral primate clinging response.

I have been dwelling on the baby’s smile, but smiling is, of course, a two-way signal. When the infant smiles at its mother she responds with a similar signal. Each rewards the other and the bond between them tightens in both directions. You may feel that this is an obvious statement, but there can be a catch in it. Some mothers, when feeling agitated, anxious, or cross with the child, try to conceal their mood by forcing a smile. They hope that the counterfeit face will avoid upsetting the infant, but in reality this trick may do more harm than good. I mentioned earlier that it is almost impossible to fool a baby over questions of maternal mood. In the early years of life we seem to be acutely responsive to subtle signs of parental agitation and parental calm. At the pre-verbal stages, before the massive machinery of symbolic, cultural communication has bogged us down, we rely much more on tiny movements, postural changes and tones of voice than we need to in later life. Other species are particularly good at this, too. The astonishing ability of ‘Clever Hans’, the famous counting horse, was in fact based on its acuteness in responding to minute postural changes in his trainer. When asked to do a sum, Hans would tap his foot the appropriate number of times and then stop. Even if the trainer left the room and someone else took over, it still worked, because as the vital number of taps was reached, the stranger could not help tensing his body slightly. We all have this ability ourselves, even as adults (it is used a great deal by fortune-tellers to judge when they are on the right lines), but in pre-verbal infants it appears to be especially active. If the mother is making tense and agitated movements, no matter how concealed, she will communicate these to her child. If at the same time she gives a strong smile, it does not fool the infant, it only confuses it. Two conflicting messages are being transmitted. If this is done a great deal it may be permanently damaging and cause the child serious difficulties when making social contacts and adjustments later in life.

Leaving the subject of smiling, we must now turn to a very different activity. As the months pass, a new pattern of infant behaviour begins to emerge: aggression arrives on the scene. Temper tantrums and angry crying begin to differentiate themselves from the earlier all-purpose crying response. The baby signals its aggression by a more broken, irregular form of screaming and by violent striking out with its arms and legs. It attacks small objects, shakes large ones, spits and spews, and tries to bite, scratch or strike anything in reach. At first these activities are rather random and uncoordinated. The crying indicates that fear is still present. The aggression has not yet matured to the point of a pure attack: this will come much later when the infant is sure of itself and fully aware of its physical capacities. When it does develop, it, too, has its own special facial signals. These consist of a tight-lipped glare. The lips are pursed into a hard line, with the mouth-corners held forward rather than pulled back. The eyes stare fixedly at the opponent and the eyebrows are lowered in a frown. The fists are clenched. The child has begun to assert itself.

It has been found that this aggressiveness can be increased by raising the density of a group of children. Under crowded conditions the friendly social interactions between members of a group become reduced, and the destructive and aggressive patterns show a marked rise in frequency and intensity. This is significant when one remembers that in other animals fighting is used not only to sort out dominance disputes, but also to increase the spacing-out of the members of a species. We will return to this in Chapter Five.

Apart from protecting, feeding, cleaning and playing with the offspring, the parental duties also include the all-important process of training. As with other species, this is done by a punishment-and-reward system that gradually modifies and adjusts the trial and error learning of the young. But, in addition, the offspring will be learning rapidly by imitation—a process that is comparatively poorly developed in most other mammals, but superbly heightened and refined in ourselves. So much of what other animals must laboriously learn for themselves, we acquire quickly by following the example of our parents. The naked ape is a teaching ape. (We are so attuned to this method of learning that we tend to assume that other species benefit in the same way, with the result that we have grossly over-estimated the role that teaching plays in their lives.)

Much of what we do as adults is based on this imitative absorption during our childhood years. Frequently we imagine that we are behaving in a particular way because such behaviour accords with some abstract, lofty code of moral principles, when in reality all we are doing is obeying a deeply ingrained and long ‘forgotten’ set of purely imitative impressions. It is the unmodifiable obedience to these impressions (along with our carefully concealed instinctive urges) that makes it so hard for societies to change their customs and their ‘beliefs’. Even when faced with exciting, brilliantly rational new ideas, based on the application of pure, objective intelligence, the community will still cling to its old home-based habits and prejudices. This is the cross we have to bear if we are going to sail through our vital juvenile ‘blotting paper’ phase of rapidly mopping up the accumulated experiences of previous generations. We are forced to take the biased opinions along with the valuable facts.

Luckily we have evolved a powerful antidote to this weakness which is inherent in the imitative learning process. We have a sharpened curiosity, an intensified urge to explore which work against the other tendency and produce a balance that has the potential of fantastic success. Only if a culture becomes too rigid as a result of its slavery to imitative repetition, or too daring and rashly exploratory, will it flounder. Those with a good balance between the two urges will thrive. We can see plenty of examples of the too rigid and too rash cultures around the world today. The small, backward societies, completely dominated by their heavy burden of taboos and ancient customs, are cases of the former. The same societies, when converted and ‘aided’ by advanced cultures, rapidly become examples of the latter. The sudden overdose of social novelty and exploratory excitement swamps the stabilising forces of ancestral imitation and tips the scales too far the other way. The result is cultural turmoil and disintegration. Lucky is the society that enjoys the gradual acquisition of a perfect balance between imitation and curiosity, between slavish, unthinking copying and progressive, rational experimentation.

ALL mammals have a strong exploratory urge, but for some it is more crucial than others. It depends largely on how specialised they have become during the course of evolution. If they have put all their evolutionary effort into the perfection of one particular survival trick, they do not need to bother so much about the general complexities of the world around them. So long as the ant-eater has its ants and koala bear its gum leaves, then they are well satisfied and the living is easy. The nonspecialists, on the other hand—the opportunists of the animal world—can never afford to relax. They are never sure where their next meal may be coming from, and they have to know every nook and cranny, test every possibility, and keep a sharp look-out for the lucky chance. They must explore, and keep on exploring. They must investigate, and keep on re-checking. They must have a constantly high level of curiosity.

It is not simply a matter of feeding: self-defence can make the same demands. Porcupines, hedgehogs and skunks can snuffle and stomp about as noisily as they like, heedless of their enemies, but the unarmed mammal must be forever on the alert. It must know the signs of danger and the routes of escape. To survive it must know its home range in every minute detail. Looked at in this way, it might seem rather inefficient not to specialise. Why should there be any opportunist mammals at a11? The answer is that there is a serious snag in the specialist way of life. Everything is fine as long as the special survival device works, but if the environment undergoes a major change the specialist is left stranded. If it has gone to sufficient extremes to outstrip its competitors, the animal will have been forced to make major changes in its genetical make-up, and it will not be able to reverse these quickly enough when the crunch comes. If the gum-tree forests were swept away the koala would perish. If an iron-mouthed killer developed the ability to munch up porcupine quills, the porcupine would become easy prey. For the opportunist the going may always be tough, but the creature will be able to adapt rapidly to any quick-change act that the environment decides to put on. Take away a mongoose’s rats and mice and it will switch to eggs and snails. Take away a monkey’s fruit and nuts and it will switch to roots and shoots.