Baboon Metaphysics - the Evolution of the Social Mind

Photograph by Keena Seyfarth of baboons making a water crossing

Over Christmas I read Dorothy Cheney and Richard Seyfarth's Baboon Metaphysics - the Evolution of the Social Mind,  a wonderful long term field study of baboons in Botswana's Okavano Delta. I did not know that baboons make capable goat herds, successfully matching a couple of dozen kids to their mothers, with strong motivation to keep mother/kid pairs together; nor that a baboon named Jack the Signalman had a long and successful career in the late 1800s working the signals on the railways in Uitenhage between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, with an official employment number and a daily allocation of rations from the railway company.

These stories provide a backdrop to the book proper which works step by step from a description of baboon life to an analysis of baboon thinking, self-awareness, and motivation, based on complex observations and on experiments in the wild. (The experiments are well-described in Frans de Waal's review linked to from the bottom of this post.) 

One conclusion of the book is that there is striking mismatch between baboons' developed capacity to understand and their much less well developed ability to communicate; and that animals do not need an expressed language to be able to think and analyse in complex ways.

Cheney and Seyfarth write in an engaging, funny* and humane way, with plenty of comparative discussion of the cognitive ability of other social species (dogs, hyenas, chimpanzees, dolphins, jays etc), and with lots of interesting references to and insights into the work of people like Stephen Pinker and Noam Chomsky.

Baboon Metaphysics  ends with a discussion about the evolution of language, concluding that "a theory of mind and the motivation to share knowledge served as the driving forces behind the evolution of flexible vocal production", and that it is in particular the motivation to share knowledge (which neither baboons nor chimpanzees show much evidence of) that differentiates humans from other species. Finally that whereas "innovation, tool use, and technological invention may have played a crucial role in the evolution of ape and human brains, these skills probably built upon mental computations that had their origins and foundations in social interactions".

Links:

• Cheyney and Seyfarth's Baboon Research Home Page;
• page with links to WAV files of calls given by adult female baboons during social interactions;
• 19 May 2007 review in the New Scientist Magazine by Frans de Waal, director of the Living Links Center at Yerkes National Primate Research Center, in Atlanta, Georgia;
• article about Cheyney and Seyfarth's research by Nicholas Wade in the 9 October 2007 New York Times;
• excerpt from the book on the publisher's web site.

* Example: "In one study, the language-trained chimpanzee Sarah was tested on her ability to reason analogically. When Sarah was shown a lock and key and asked to pick the appropriate object to accompany a can and complete the same relation, she correctly chose can opener. She therefore completed the analogy "key is to lock as can-opener is to can." (This test will doubtless bring back dark memories to all American readers who remember the analogical reasoning portion of the SAT featuring questions like "flounder is to telephone booth as yak is to (a) democracy, (b) the Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, (c) summer, (d) Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, (e) none of the above, (f) all of the above."

Comments

[Karyn Romeis]

I'm a bit confused. There seems to be an inference that baboons are apes, which they are not. Baboons are monkeys.

That said, there are many areas in South Africa where the very cleverness of baboons has made them a pest and a very real danger. Their two-inch canines and tendency to aggression when crossed (they can throw a tantrum that any toddler would be proud to achieve!).

Shortly emigrating from South Africa, I drove my boys out to a lookout point near Gordon's Bay in the western Cape, for a last look out over "home". There we were approached by a female baboon who was holding out her hands, begging, in much the same fashion as human beggars do. What was very unsettling was that her left hand was clasped around the wrist of her long dead baby. For a surreal moment I wondered if she was asking me to "fix" her baby. However, it is apparently not unknown for monkeys to carry their dead offspring around for some time before finally letting go of them. So one can safely say that the extent to which her actions were human, was limited to the begging posture, which was remarkable enough.

Thanks for the comment Karyn.

It certainly was not my intention to give the impression that baboons are apes/hominoids. There is an interesting section in the "Theory of Mind" chapter of Baboon Metaphysics, which relates to your dead offspring story:

"When an infant dies, a female baboon will often continue to carry the body for as many 10 or more days, cleaning the corpse of maggots and brushing flies away from it. As the corpse decays and mummifies, she begins to leave the body for increasing lengths of time before finally abandoning it. It is as if the mother continues to respond to the corpse as her infant even after it has lost all resemblance to a baboon. In the minds of other group members, the infant's status seems to change soon after it dies: they cease to treat it as an infant. They inspect the corpse with great curiosity, but they seldom attempt to handle it. ..... Even after the mother finally abandons the blackened, mummified corpse, the baboons continue to threaten any human who attempts to approach it. ..... What goes on in a baboon's mind as she carries her dead infant? ..... We will not attempt to suggest that baboons have a concept of death, or that the ruminate on the meaning to life. Nevertheless, baboons do seem to recognise that a corpse is something of a baboon manqué. Although not treated as as living baboon, it still seems to be regarded as something that belongs to a particular individual and family, and group members cooperate to defend the corpse. But much as we might be tempted to interpret the baboons' behaviour as empathy, it seems more likely that it simply reflects their "respect for ownership" - a reluctance to challenge an individual, or kin group, whose motivation to defend possession is high."

- Seb

[Doug Gowan]

My Christmas reading included Stephen Pinker's 'The stuff of thought: language as a window into human nature'. Pinker refers to the extraordinary development of Nicaraguan sign language after the Sandinista revolution of 1979.

No institutes for deaf children existed in Nicaragua before 1979 and sign language was unknown in the country. When a new centre for deaf children was set up the teachers knew no sign language and relied on fingering the spelling of Spanish words, which did not work well. After a few months the teachers noticed that the children seemed to be communicating in a new way. They had invented a pidgin sign language for themselves.

The story developed further when the second generation arrived and learned the pidgin sign language from the older children. These younger children, not exposed to the finger spelling, went on to develop a fully-formed sign language with syntax. This new language has since become standard in Nicaragua.

Pinker comments: "We've been able to see how it is that children — not adults — generate language".

For more on this look at the Wikipedia article on Nicaraguan sign language.

Can anyone think of a better 'proof' of the method now known as social constructivism?