 of the afternoon talks on this first Tuesday of Nobel Conference 32. This morning we heard from Dr. DeWayne Rumball about psychology and intelligence and language acquisition among the primates. For our first talk this afternoon we turn our attention to the social context in which these primates live. Dr. Franz DeWall has gained an international reputation as a researcher into the society and the culture of primates. His research is worthy for our discussion and for our attention here at Nobel Conference even if it focused only on the primates and what we can learn and what he has to tell us about them. But Dr. DeWall's research, especially his recent publications, goes go much further. To locate the origins of human morality in biology. To demonstrate how ethical behavior can be explained in evolutionary terms. Thus asking provocative questions which bring humans and their primate cousins closer together on so many different levels. His research findings reflect the best traditions of scientific inquiry, elegant experimental methods, rigorous collection and analysis of empirical data and a strong sense of care and respect for the subjects of his research. Dr. DeWall was born in the Netherlands and trained as a zoologist and ethologist in the European tradition at three different Dutch universities. He received a PhD in biology from the University of Utrecht in 1977. In 1975 he was part of a six-year project initiated on the world's largest captive colony of chimpanzees at the Arnhem Zoo. Apart from a large number of scientific papers this research found its way to the general public with the publication of his first book in 1982 entitled Chimpanzee Politics. In 1981 Dr. DeWall moved to the United States accepting a research position at the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center in Madison. There he began both observational and experimental studies of reconciliation behavior in monkeys. In 1989 he received the Los Angeles Times Book Award for his book Peacemaking Among Primates, a popularized account of 15 years of his research on conflict resolution among non-human primates. Since the mid 1980s Dr. DeWall has also worked with chimpanzees at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta and in 1991 he accepted a joint position at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center and in the psychology department at Emory University in Atlanta. His current interests include food sharing, social reciprocity and conflict resolution in primates as well as the origins of morality and justice in human society. This latter topic resulted in a third his most recent book Good Natured published this year. The research of Dr. DeWall is funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Mental Health, the National Institutes of Health and Private Foundations. One measure of the quality and the relevance of Dr. DeWall's work is that one can find scholars and experts applying the things that he has discovered in so many different fields of inquiry. His work is direct relevance to several subfields in biology and psychology. We have found business leaders using concepts from his books to describe politics and strategic thinking in corporations. The speaker of the United States House of Representatives, the Honorable Newt Gingrich, placed the book Chimpanzee Politics on a list of books that he said that incoming members of the United States of House of Representatives should read. As Dr. DeWall observed yesterday perhaps the book peacemaking among primates would have been a wiser choice for our legislators. Dr. DeWall's talk this afternoon is entitled Chimpanzee Behavior and the Origins of Human Morality and Justice. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Franz DeWall. Thank you for the nice introduction and also thank the organizers for organizing this event. The question quoted this morning whether one needs to be human to be humane is a question that I would like to rephrase a little bit differently today and ask you if an extraterrestrial observer was watching us and just from watching us and other animals how we treat each other would this observer conclude that there's only one moral creature on this planet? I personally don't think so and I'm not convinced that if he were to conclude that that he would pick our species as necessarily the moral species of the bunch. I think it's very hard based on behavior alone to decide if a species is moral or not and this raises of course also a lot of interesting questions about morality and its functionality if it's so hard to detect on the basis of behavior alone. And behavior is all we can go by if we look at non-human primates if we search for morality in the animal kingdom that's all we can do. Now searching for morality in the animal kingdom by itself is bound to challenge religion and philosophy and some would say it probably challenges God so if I go up and smoke before your eyes that's probably a disagreement from above with the opinions that I am expressing. It also challenges science and that's because science has a very cynical view of animals and of humans I should add. If animals kill and maim each other that's the animals as we know them. If animals are nice and cooperative with each other we need to come up with all sorts of special explanations to make sense of their behavior. Let me try the first slide. Is that visible? This is Robert Jerkies and Robert Jerkies already knew how problematic it was to talk in a certain fashion about animals. He had two apes he didn't know they were of different species at the time. There are bonobo on the right hand side and a chimpanzee on the left hand side. The bonobo was called Prince Chim and the chimpanzee was called Pan-Z. I'm supposed to be able to walk off the stage. Prince Chim is a bonobo and Prince Chim took care of Pan-Z. Pan-Z was a very sick animal. He had tuberculosis and Prince Chim was very gentle, very considerate of her and Jerkies wrote in one of his books he was a great admirer of Prince Chim. If I were to tell of his altruism and sympathetic behavior towards Pan-Z I should be suspected of idealizing an ape. So he knew already that exposing the nice side so to speak of animals could get them into problems. Talking about violence or competition or aggression has never been a problem. That's fine no one will worry about that. The standard view is still that in nature and in animal societies that there is no place for unfit individuals for individuals who have trouble surviving. They either perish or they are eliminated and it has even gotten to the point where survival of that sort of individuals is considered proof of moral decency in the human species. So here you see a list of fossils. Paleontologists have found fossil remains of individuals who could if we go down the list here and the undertaller who could not masticate food. Shanada one is a crippled individual. Romito two is a dwarf. The window of a boy is a severely handicapped individual and crab of course is a fictional character based on one of these. But what this what it shows is that individuals who survive into adulthood who are severely handicapped the assumption of the paleontologists is that's only possible if others are either take care of them or extremely tolerant of them and they consider that proof of moral decency. Now let's look at the primate record. This is a Rhesus monkey a trisomic Rhesus monkey is very similar to sort of the Down syndrome condition in the human species where we have instead of a pair of chromosomes we have three chromosomes and this is a retarded monkey in the Rhesus colony at Wisconsin Primate Center. Now this monkey did very well and was very well taken care of by her sisters and by her mother and by the rest of the group they were actually very friendly with her. This shows her at the later age. She survived till is this focused or it's not focused. She survived until 32 months of age and she was very well taken care of and in some cases even care that we could call special care sort of things that sisters were doing to her that they normally would not do with monkeys of her age. Another example is Mojoo is a Japanese macaque female who must now be like 25 years old if she's still alive at least she was alive a couple of years ago and she has raised five offspring and what is remarkable about her is that she doesn't have hands and feet. She misses hands and feet and here you see a close-up of her hands and feet and here you see her walking and what is so remarkable is that she lives in near Nagano which is actually the area where the Winter Olympics are going to be held next time. An area that's covered with snow and ice for a long period of time and so the monkeys of her troop normally travel from three to three to avoid the snow layer but she has to plow through the snow that's the only thing she can do often with an infant on her back and she has survived all this time. And so we can find in the animal kingdom examples of crippled individuals who survive and so in terms of the paleontologists we would say there are signs of moral decency there I wouldn't necessarily conclude that I would just say that the level of tolerance of this sort of individuals is much higher than many people assume and I will later get into other issues of tolerance this is food sharing at the York East Primate Center the sort of research that I work on and of course is also related to this is that in chimpanzees we find that individuals don't necessarily keep everything for themselves but also are able to share with other individuals. Now if natural selection favors the strong over the weak as we all learn how could there possibly be room for kindness in the animal kingdom isn't nature red in tooth and claw as the poet Tennyson said just to give you a very realistic picture of nature here this note is unrealistic this is nature red in tooth and claw but that's the picture really that many people still have of nature and that's of course in a picture that does doesn't accommodate morality this is the sort of image of nature that was advocated not by Darwin himself I should say that Darwin was too great a mind to get trapped in that sort of easy simplistic sort of notions about nature but Thomas Henry Huxley also known as Darwin's bulldog was the one who promoted this view of nature and as his name already nickname indicates he was a very combative character and he had a very combative view of nature and he saw morality the only way he could really incorporated into his picture of nature as a counter force he would depict nature as harsh and brutish and amoral and morality was a human invention to keep nature in check actually the parallel that he used was we are the gardeners and nature is the garden and we keep the garden under control and so just to give you a quote Huxley here says this is 100 years ago the ethical progress of society depends not on imitating the cosmic process cosmic process means meaning nature the laws of nature still lesson running away from it but in combating it so he saw morality as a counter force and that this view is still very much with us is clear from a contemporary evolutionary biologist George Williams very famous biologist who wrote articles and gave colloquia at different universities under the title is modern nature a wicked old witch and so he compared their mother nature to a wicked old witch and his view of morality is the following I account for morality as an accidental accidental capability produced in its boundless stupidity by a biological process that is normally opposed to the expression of such a capability so he sorts of accommodates it but more as a stupid mistake of modern nature than anything else so these views I would say are extremely pessimistic because basically our moral tendencies moral sentiments moral systems have no basis in nature that means that makes them fairly superficial and artificial and I think it's an extremely pessimistic view now Peter Kropotkin a Russian prince and anarchist wrote a book in 1902 mutual aid which was largely opposed to the views of Huxley and Kropotkin's evidence was not nearly as strong as his political agenda and everyone will admit that but he was right nonetheless he argued that the struggle for life is just a metaphor should not be taken literally and that actually many animals survive by doing exactly the opposite of struggling with each other by cooperating with each other and we now have over the last 20 years I think in in nature tons of examples of cooperation among animals I mean there's no lack of examples of that and I'll just give you one what you see here is one of those very shallow salt water lakes in Kenya and from above you can see thousands of flamingos usually and in this case you see thousands of pelicans white pelicans and what these pelicans do is they float around in the water and they paddle with their feet and they make these semi circles I can't point it out but you see a semi circle of in the middle of the slide at the bottom you see is a semi circle of pelicans who paddle with their feet and the fish are all driven together at a particular spot and then synchronously they picked them up and so each pelican this way probably gets a lot more fish than when he was fishing on his own and this is one example one of the lots of examples that we have of animal cooperation or what Kropotkin would call mutual aid now ironically at the same time that biologists were discovering all these examples and making great progress in the understanding of cooperative and altruistic behavior some have made altruism sound like just another form of egoism and in the case of the pelicans this is obviously a right approach in the sense that these pelicans each one of them get something out of this at the same moment it's an immediate reward system and there's no reason to assume that any of these pelicans has a desire to be nice to the other one that's not we don't need to invoke that sort of motivations we can just invoke selfish motivations for what they're doing here but that's not always the case in nature there's lots of helpful acts that have a delay the payoff is delayed tremendously sometimes like years of maybe even generations who knows so if you take for example a mongoose who climbs onto the top of a termite hill and warrants everyone for predators that fly in from above this mongoose is exposing himself taking tremendous risks attracting attention to himself at the wrong moment really and it's doubtful of course that this mongoose follows any of the calculations that we biologists have about why he's doing this we have of course all sorts of explanations of why this behavior may have evolved but for the mongoose in this particular situation for him himself there's no reason to assume that he has any understanding of how this may pay off in the future and that's the case really there's a lot of forms of of cooperation that you see in the animal kingdom the payoffs are invisible to the participants which means that the motives cannot be selfish and this is the big distinction that Ernst Meyer already made and you mean it's it's very old in evolutionary biology the distinction between what we call let's say the psychological level or the approximate level of behavior and the evolution that takes place over millions of years so evolution follows a natural selection follows a much slower process that takes place over millions of years that is invisible to the participants and all that the participants the individuals know is the situation right now and how they're going to respond to particular situations and so you can be perfectly unselfish genuinely in selfies at the approximate level whereas at the same time your behavior evolved for certain reasons of self preservation or survival and this brings me to the second metaphor that has gotten us into trouble the first one is the struggle for life metaphor the second one is the selfish gene metaphor which I consider a metaphor that has now outlived its usefulness the self gene metaphor has led to the idea that since our genes are selfish we must be selfish by extents and to we are sort of selfish by association now given how natural selection works I'm not going to go into details today it is okay to say that genes promote themselves I think that's an okay phrase to say but obviously genes cannot be selfies they don't even have a self so where would they be selfish so let's take a quote from Dawkins oh yeah this is my improvement of the title of Dawkins instead of the selfish gene it should be the self promoting gene of course the marketing department of his publisher would probably not have agreed with the improvement that I propose here here we have a quote from Dawkins I'm not going to read the whole quote but the last end says let us try to teach generosity and altruism because we are born selfies no we are not born selfies natural selection could be interpreted as a process of genetic self promotion but we're not born selfies that is a psychological statement that we cannot make same was said by George Williams who said that we have been evolved to be selfies and I don't think that's necessarily the case we have to a large extent evolve to be cooperative now the realization that not everything is selfishness in the animal kingdom or in the human mind is penetrating not only biology similar movements are underway in the economy where rational choice models are being questioned by Robert Frank and other economists and in social psychology where people who have studied altruism and motivational systems for a long time have concluded that there is such a thing as genuine altruism in the human species for example Dan Batson who has worked all his life on this issue has concluded that the attitude of social psychologists towards altruism is similar to the attitude of the Victorians towards sex they cannot handle it and they try to explain it away and Lauren with spay who has also worked all his life on this issue concludes that rewards is what sympathy is not about even if one always derived pleasure from helping others it would not follow that one helps others in order to feel pleasure and actually if selfies motives enter into acts of sympathy it sort of destroys the sympathy and he wrote a whole book about that particular issue so it's not just in biology that we are questioning now these the mixing let's say of ultimate approximate mechanisms but also outside that field now I wrote a book good nature in which I made all these points at much greater lengths than I can do here and it was barely out a couple of months or the following thing happened I don't if you can see what happens here but this is at the Brookfield Zoo Binti a female gorilla rescued a boy who fell into her enclosure and she transported she picked she picked up the boy held it for a while and then transported him over quite a distance to a place where people could take care of the boy I did not pay Binti to do this but have sort of sort of made the point in a nutshell that these animals can do complex things in which they take care of each other and and actually what was most surprising is how surprised people were maybe because this is the view we have of gorillas because I think no one who works with great apes was necessarily surprised by her actions because this is not such an unusual thing to do for them to each other at least they normally don't do it to people but they do do it to each others and and of course immediately when this happened to where some scientists I must say none of no primatologists but some scientists outside of primatology who came up with simplifying sort of explanations and the one I heard over and over was the one that the one that Binti had a confused maternal instinct well let's imagine here here's Binti she's in her enclosure where normally no people come and a boy long like this white with his shirt and shoes and everything falls in from above drops there is unconscious she has her own kid on her back and she's maternally confused for me that's a very hard explanation to swallow I do admit it's possible that's her training may have been involved and it isn't certainly her she was very used to people she had was actually partly erased by people so I'm sure that sort of thing may have played a role but the act itself required some intelligence and decision-making and that's what she did and and required probably emotions of sympathy which we know apes have and actually on the the next day I was in the Milwaukee zoo I was in the wrong zoo the Brookfield zoo had 20,000 people in addition there was you all wanted to see Binti in addition there was the Democratic Convention where all these Democrats wanted to see Binti as well and I was at the Brookfield zoo at Milwaukee Zoo talking with caretakers about their bonobos and they gave me an example in response to the Binti case which was just a striking I think but of course would never made the newspapers this was they have an old female a kitty is her name who is blind and cannot find her way around in the building in which she's kept and so sometimes the oldest male of the group goes over to her and takes her by the hand and leads her around or carries her even around well so that's at least as striking but of course this is something that happens among the apes and it's not nearly as interesting from a publicity perspective as when they save a little boy now before I tell you something about my own research on this sort of issues I should add that I got into issues of sympathy and empathy and reconciliation and so on sort of backwards I don't have a very rosy picture necessarily of the animal kingdom I don't necessarily believe that animals are always nice and friendly with each other I started out studying aggression in violence and this was in the time that Lawrence's book had come out on aggression I was a graduate student and there was funding available at that time for research on aggressive behavior and lots of studies were being done both here and in Europe on aggressive behavior and I noticed very quickly watching a group of macaques who are supposedly an aggressive species that they spent maybe 3% 4% of their time on aggressive behavior and that's all for the rest of the time they're playing and grooming and sitting together and sleeping together and actually seem quite happy and harmonious and so I got interested in how is it possible to have these outbursts of aggression and then at other times to get along so so nicely and to be so cooperative in many ways and so I got interested in the discrepancy between those two things and how they could be reconciled and so I have seen my share of power struggles and blood and violence and don't have any illusions in that regard and of course tomorrow you will hear from Dr. Richard Rangham a lot more about violence but of course the potential the the fact that these animals have the potential to kill each other and the potential to be so violent makes it so interesting to look at conflict resolution because really they're resolving a problem and why would you be interested in problems that are being resolved that are minor problems I think they're resolving major problems in their societies and that's why I'm interested in this issue well here we have an act of aggression between chimpanzees in on the right a male who attacks a female and is mainly using his hands and feet a lot of the aggression in the animal kingdom as you know is ritualized and so usually male chimps don't use their teeth when they fight with females but they may use their teeth when they fight with other males now we're getting more and more interested in what happens afterwards and here you see for example after a fight between two male chimpanzees at the iron and zoo colony one male on the right holds out his hand opens his hand to the other one and invites him and about a second after I took the picture the two males came together in the fork of the tree and embraced and kissed each other and then they climbed to the ground and they groomed each other and we call that a reconciliation and I'll give you one more example here we have a female on the right who is approaching a male who beat her up she offers a hand for a hand kiss to the male then they engage in a mouse to mouse kiss which is the typical reconciliation pattern of the species and look at the female on the left there's an old female watching all this on the left and the young female also goes to her and bears her teeth and complains to her in a particular sound and then the old female taps her on the back and makes these reassuring movements on her. Now the first contact we call a reconciliation the second contact we call a consolation so a reconciliation is defined as a friendly contact between two opponents not long after a fight and the consolation is friendly contacts with bystanders who were not involved in the conflict and the behavior of those two is different like the reconciliation is more often kissing and embracing and consolation is more often embracing than kissing. I should say that in the last 20 years or so the first study that we did was this I think is 20 years ago there is now a whole network of people doing conflict resolution studies on primates and I think this we have a bulletin on the internet we have like a hundred subscribers and I think about 50% of them are actively involved in some form of research on reconciliation and reconciliation behavior has now been described for at least 20 or probably 25 different species of primates and also in the field not just in captivity also in the field and there's also experimental studies that are going on and so it's it seems to be very widespread and we try to expand now in different directions in the sense that we want to add children to it because of course children show this behavior but it has never been documented with the same sort of rigorous procedures that we follow in the primate studies and we want to add non-primates to the list because I'm pretty convinced that it also occurs in animals other than primates. When I first discovered reconciliation in chimpanzees the first reaction of people was you know what do you expect chimps do everything that people do so of course you do reconciliation but this probably limited to the chimpanzee. Well that explanation didn't make sense to me because if you think about why they would be doing it the only reason you can come up with is that there is some sort of relationship between two individuals that is disturbed but they attach value to that relationship and they need to repair the relationship. Well the need to repair relationships is not limited to chimps at all. That should be present in many species that have cooperative relationships where the individuals recognize each other and so hyenas, dolphins, elephants, wolves you name it. All these cooperative animals with highly complex societies should have something like a reconciliation process otherwise it's hard to imagine how they deal with the issues of aggression and so we're expecting that that it's not limited to the primates. And just to show you two aspects of the complexity of conflict resolution in non-human primates both from chimpanzees. First is mediation and that's a behavior that thus far has not been described for other animals than chimpanzees and I should add that since people have looked at thousands and thousands of reconciliations in monkeys and haven't ever described this sort of mediation it probably doesn't occur. And what happens here is for example you have in this is at the Arnim Zoo again but we have recently seen examples at Jurki's primary center also you have two males who have been running around screaming and fighting and stuff like that and instead of avoiding each other which they could easily do because this is a very large island they sit at the short distance from each other and they avoid eye contact. So if the male on the left looks up the one on the right will look at the sky and if the one on the right looks up the one on the left will pick up some object and inspect it so it's like two men at the bar who don't get along sort of and under these circumstances then you may have a female usually an older female who mediates between them and so a female may walk up to the male on the left start grooming him I groom him for a couple of minutes and then she walks very slowly from him to the other male and then he will walk right behind her so he doesn't need to make eye contact with the opponent and if he doesn't follow she may turn around and pull at his arm to make him follow so it seems to be an intentional process then she grooms the other guy and so you have three chimps sitting there grooming and then at some point she leaves and then the two males continue grooming but by that time then of course they're grooming each other and so she has brought the two males together. What is interesting about that sort of behavior is first of all the cognition involved the female needs to understand what happened between these males that there's a problem between these males and how to solve the problem between them and that may require the sort of social awareness that maybe many monkeys don't have. The second thing is that there needs to be some motivation so you can think of very short term motivations for the females such as if males are tense they take it out often on the females and so it may be to her advantage to fix the problem between them and you can think maybe even of longer term motivations where she has an interest a certain stake in the harmonious community and I've called that community concern is that I think you don't need to invoke group selection or anything like that to explain it but I think it's in the interest of all members or at least most members who live in a society to maintain the peace in that society so the female becomes a peacemaker probably because it's in our own interest to have a harmonious group life. Well this is mediation you could call this from below because the female is usually supported to the males in chimpanzee society and this is mediation from above which is very normal in chimpanzees at least in captive groups where we have a in this case an adult male the alpha male who intervenes in a dispute and breaks up the the fight so here we have two females the one on the complete left and the one on the complete right who during one of our food tests started screaming and yelling at each other and the male comes over and sort of holds it you know and stops them and then sits between them usually till the tensions disappear well doesn't mean that they completely disappear you know how that goes with people also but till they disappear at least to the extent that there's no fighting anymore so again this is mediation and again this is a form of conflict resolution at a higher level where third parties get involved in the relationships of others this is just to remind you of the relationships among the various primate species I cannot point or I can try to point but I don't think you're gonna see much let me see here now it is not gonna work but you see on the left a branch which is called humans and apes basically we are apes of course you may not think of yourself as an ape but you are an ape and so 30 million years ago we had the split between the old world monkeys and the old world humans and apes and then about 8 million years ago the split was between gorilla and others and about 6 million years ago between humans and the two pan species which are chimpanzees and bonobos and chimpanzees and bonobos are very closely related and are put in the same genius for that reason so if we talk about monkeys I will present you some monkey data even though this is the conference on apes at the end of an age I'll just bring in some monkeys you you have to notice how much different they are and how distant they are compared to the apes oh this is not monkeys these are these are still bonobos just very briefly bonobos do all these things that chimps do with kissing and embracing they do with sexual behavior and they have very human like sexual behavior I'm not sure I should be getting into this this is the missionary position as you know it has sort of interesting history how it got that name the history of that is that there was a time in the 50s do I have time to get into that in the in the 50s the anthropologists were very eagerly looking for all sorts of examples of behavior that could not be explained biologically and only culturally and I think very stupidly they got into sex as well as sex is so obviously you're biologically determined behavior that didn't you know goes all the way from insects to us all sorts of animals have sexual interactions so they claim two areas of human sexuality for the cultural domain and the two where orgasm they said only we have orgasms and often they even said only Western culture knows orgasms and the other one was the missionary position which was at that time called just a face-to-face position but probably they thought that it was such a good innovation that it needed to be taught to pre-literate people and who better to do that than the missionaries and I don't think the missionaries were supposed to assume the position necessarily so the bonobos anyway the bonobos do all these things that chimps do kissing and embracing and so on after fights they do in a sexual manner now let me say a few things about monkeys because when I came to the US I came to the Wisconsin primates and I'm not far from here actually they had mainly Reese's monkeys and Reese's monkeys have the reputation and deservedly so I think of being about the nastiest most aggressive primates that exist very hierarchical primates actually Abraham Maslow the psychologist compared them to Nazis he wrote in the 40s so I think it made a lot of sense to make that comparison so he had they had a fascist quality for him well they're very hierarchical and very aggressive and so I thought even they because they have certainly also a level of cooperation in their society even the Reese's monkeys should have reconciliations if it is to work the way I think it works so I saw this was a very interesting challenge to get into Reese's monkeys and designed a study to study reconciliation in them and I compared them with stumptail macaques which we also had at the same facility say exactly same environment so it was a very easy comparison and stumptails are much nicer in the words of George Bush they are the kinder gentler sort of society and after I had discovered that Reese's monkeys show reconciliation behavior and stumptails show reconciliation behavior but stumptails do it at a much higher level than the Reese's monkeys I got interested in doing an experiment on learning of reconciliation behavior and just to give you a little background on that is that there is almost no literature on conflict resolution from the same perspective that we use for primates for humans if you go to the library and you look for aggression and violence you will find tons of books the whole library is full of books with aggression and violence in humans if you look for peacemaking reconciliation that sort of issues you will find virtually nothing there's maybe a handful of articles on humans on reconciliation behavior and so one day I challenged a group of developmental psychologists saying that well we have all this data on primates what do you have and if you don't have it why don't you have it and the defense that I got from some of them is well in monkeys and apes of course this is all instinctive and very simple but in humans it's extremely complicated and so that's how they sort of justified not having collected anything on that and what stuck in my mind is instinctive because that's really a term that we don't use anymore I don't even know what it would be instinctive because basically all behavior in certainly in primates but I think in almost all organisms is a product of environment and genes and it's very hard to tease apart what is what and so I got interested in the learning of peacemaking skills anyway and designed an experiment in which I put some juvenile stumptile monkey this is a juvenile stumptile monkey together with juvenile reasons monkeys in a design well don't try to read this I'm going to explain this to you what we did is we housed reasons monkeys for juvenile reasons monkeys for five months together with juvenile stumptile monkeys stumptiles were selected slightly older so that they would be dominant on the assumption that it would be that reasons would learn more from an older dominant model than from younger individuals and they were housed together day and night and five months is a very long time in the development of reasons monkey I've compared it to putting a human child for two years in a chimp colony and I can assure you you get a very different human child back after that exposure then before it went in and then the control procedure is exactly the same the only difference is that of course there's no stumptiles in the control procedure this is all done with reasons monkeys then after the experiment we split them out again so we have a group of reasons monkeys that was exposed to stumptiles and a group of reasons monkeys that was not exposed to stumptiles that's the design of the experiment and just to tell you what happened if you look at the wide bars first the white bars are the control reasons monkeys and you see they stay all at approximately the same level of reconciliation throughout the entire experiment so the experiment didn't do much to their reconciliation behavior as you would expect then if you look at the stumptiles which are the hatched bars on the right we don't have one for the precondition but for all other conditions they're fairly high as we would expect the stumptiles reconcile at a high rate throughout the experiment then the middle bars which are gray are the experimental reasons monkeys and in the precondition they are at the same level as the controls and also during the first phase of co-housing you see that they're at the same level then they go up and up and even in the post phase where they are split off from the stumptiles they reconcile as much as the stumptile monkeys did and so what we have done is we have changed the behavior of reasons monkeys we have induced reconciliation behavior the much higher frequency than normal for reasons monkeys by exposing them to stumptile monkeys so we have sort of created a new and improved reasons monkey it's a really an experiment on social culture we have changed the social culture of a monkey and the fact that we can do this with a monkey by changing the social environment it gives of course a very optimistic message in the sense that if you can change reasons monkeys into peacemakers you probably can change human children also into peacemakers I'm not proposing that we should house human children with stumptiles necessarily but there must be other ways of changing the environment now get into the issue of empathy empathy is all over in human society I mean when you go to the movies or like these children who go to a puppet theater and are responding to what's happening there you know we we feel joy when or we feel happy when everything is going well for the individual we identify with others or we feel sad if everything is going wrong and we are distressed when there's violence and so on and so we really identify easily with others and feel their pain as Clinton would put it and and get involved in their emotions very easily and so it's a capacity that we are very good at and very strong in this is a drawing of two soldiers in Vietnam one consoling the other and what is interesting about consolation is that when we did our first post-conflict studies we saw reconciliation was the big issue and was the most interesting issue and now I'm starting to think that maybe consolation which is much more an altruistic kind of behavior is the more interesting one and here you see consolation in chimpanzees the male on the right has been defeated in a battle with another male and screaming and the juvenile has come over and put put an arm around him and that's what we call consolation behavior well this is some data on it I'm not sure I want to go into the details of the data but just believe me we repeated the studies that were done in our name in a much more controlled fashion and found again that chimpanzees have a strong tendency to approach victims of aggressive behavior especially if these victims were subjected to serious aggressive behavior and so they show all the responses that you would expect if consolation is a mechanism to alleviate tensions in the partner and then we repeated all these studies Philippa Aureli my co-worker did that on macaques and found nothing macaques even some species they avoid the victims of aggression they stay away from them and recently Peter Verbeke another student of mine worked on capuchin monkeys and found that capuchins have no consolation in the sense that bystanders approach victims of aggression but capuchins at least try to approach others so they seek consolation from others they sort of invited from others but it's not generously sort of offered by the others as spontaneously offered so it may be that chimpanzees and I would say by extension all the great apes and humans are special in that we have reached a level of empathy so to speak that produces consolation behavior now consolation is very common in human species of course anyone who's a parent of young children is basically in the consolation business the whole day it's we do that automatically and very readily but it's striking that in the monkeys this far we have not discovered it and if you look at the literature on empathy because maybe empathy is involved empathy has low levels and high levels the lowest level would be something like one baby cries and another baby cries that's emotional contagion and doesn't require a lot of cognitive capacities probably and the higher levels are where I can sort of position myself in your shoes and understand the world so to speak from your perspective well that's probably a very high level of cognitive ability is required there and if you look at the literature on that in human development it usually brings in words like self and self-awareness or self-consciousness in there is that you can only reach these higher levels of empathy if there's enough distinction between self and other possible so self-consciousness comes in there and there's a very interesting study Swiss scientist Doris Bischoff-Köhler has done for 10 years experiments on testing children on their level of empathy and she does that sort of experiments like the experimenter is sitting at the table with a child and her spoon breaks the experimenter spoon breaks and then see if the child understands what happened and offers her own spoon offer some other solution so understands that something bad happened to the experimenter this scientist found that there's a correlation between the level of empathy and recognition in a mirror that children who have reached the level where they can show empathy higher levels of empathy are also the children who have started recognizing themselves in a mirror and so she links those two she says mere self recognition taps into self-consciousness at a level where this form of empathy is possible and we know of course that of all the primates tested unequivocally certainly the chimpanzees and the other great apes recognize themselves in a mirror and so it is possible that chimps and other apes and humans have reached a level of self-consciousness at which this higher form of empathy is possible and maybe not possible in monkeys a second issue I would like to address is food sharing and reciprocity and food sharing here we have a quote from an anthropologist who was interested in the evolution of reciprocity and he basically says that reciprocity is widespread in human societies and he sort of dismissed at the time the food sharing that was already known at the time of the Gombe chimpanzees who showed meat sharing this is a aerial view of the Yorkies field station outside of Atlanta we have a large field station where we keep 2000 primates and in large enclosures including some chimpanzees this is one of the chimpanzees this is actually a view of my office I have an office at the field station that overlooks the chimp compound this is Mike Sarah as my assistant who is bringing food to the chimpanzees and what the chimpanzees do as soon as they see the food is to start hooting and embracing each other and behavior that we call a celebration is instead of competing with each other as many other animals would do when they see attractive food arriving the chimps immediately go into a lot of reassurance behavior which makes the food sharing possible then we throw it in from above and we keep it in bundles because it needs to be monopolizable otherwise there's no point in doing these experiments because if one individual can monopolize it then they can also share it and so then you get from these clusters of chimps that gather around to bundles here you see a cluster of sharing chimpanzees oh this is I'll get back to this individual this individual is named Gwinnie on the left the female she has a nasty form of begging but she does is see she is always more interested in the food that the male is eating the alpha male than the food that is all around her and she puts her hand on his mouth so that he can't chew and then wait till it falls out but it shows how extremely tolerant they are you mean these this alpha male is certainly dominant over her but he allows her to do that this is data that shows that chimps share reciprocally in the sense that well I'm not going to go into details but each dot is one pair of adult individuals and what it shows is that if I share a lot with you you share a lot with me if I share very little with you you share very little with me and this sort of correlation is the first step that's really required if you want to see a system of reciprocity and of course reciprocity is extremely important in human systems of morality if you think of obligations well where do obligations come from largely from systems of reciprocity and so the first step to demonstrate that chimps may have reciprocity is to look at this sort of correlations but it's not sufficient several ways in which these correlations can come about and only one of them is what we would say is remembering favors received and doing favors in return which is really what we think our systems of reciprocity so we did a series of experiments to tease it apart a little bit better which is sequential or delayed reciprocity so we're not just looking at correlations we're looking at if I do something for you does that increase the probability that in the near future you're going to do something for me that's what really what we looked at and we did that with grooming behavior here see a bunch of grooming chimps our chimps groom a lot and so it's very easy to collect data on that and what we did is collect data on grooming among them before the food trials they groom very mutually it's actually very interesting many species of primates groom very one-sidedly the subordinate grooms the dominant for example and the dominant doesn't do much back but chimps are very reciprocal groomers oh yeah this is just to show you that grooming is a service that we pay for and I think chimps pay for the service to this is the data and it's hard for me to point at it but the left bar is clearly the tallest one I think you can see that what the left bar shows is how much food does a get from be after a has groomed to be and you see so this if a has groomed to be a has a much higher probability of getting something from be in the subsequent food trial that occurs hours later and the other bar show for example the one on the right shows that how much food be gets from a is not affected by how much a groomed to be so it seems to be a tit for tat sort of thing is that if I groom you my chances of getting food from you are improved but your chances of getting food for me are not improved by that so it seems to be on an exchange basis that this occurs and this is much stronger evidence for reciprocity than previous evidence or this is Guinea again and what is interesting about Guinea is that sees the most stingy female that we have so we have very generous individuals the males are usually very generous but also some high-ranking females and some very stingy individuals and what we found is that and this relates to the whole issue of moralistic aggression as it was called by Bob Trivers 20 years ago he said that if you have a system of reciprocity you need to have some sanctions against cheaters or some sort of punishment for individuals who try to get more out of the system than they contribute otherwise the whole system is going to collapse and so what we found is that the individuals who are stingy who don't share very well with the others when they try to get something from the others they meet with more aggression they're more often rejected and the individuals who are very generous who share very easily they also have an easy time getting something from someone else and so that seems to be related to the whole issue of punishing cheaters with of course punishing someone's book because of behavior that doesn't fit the system is very much related to human morality as well so in closing what is exactly my claim and what does it mean well it would be foolish and imprudent I think to try to define morality complex phenomena such as language and politics and morality are very hard to define and all we can really do is sort of circle around the phenomenon and look for an outline of the phenomenon it's a bit like a must circling around the fire you can also burn your wings that way these these phenomena are really too big necessarily to fit a neat definition but let me give you my take on morality my take instead of a definition my take is that morality is a system of conflict resolution the whole world human world but also animal world is full of full of conflicting interests conflict between mates between parents and children between the rich and the poor between the individual in the community everywhere are conflicts but also shared interest the fact that we live in groups and the fact that chimpanzees live in groups or other animals live in groups means that there must be some advantage to living in groups and so there is a value attached to group life so even despite all these conflicting interest there's an interest in maintaining internal harmony so to speak to some degree and what we do in our moral systems is we search for solutions that satisfy most parties maybe not all parties but most parties that seem fair and we try to set rules of conduct that make a community worth living in and we call that your morality and so we say good behaviors what fits that sort of system and bad behaviors what doesn't fit that kind of system and these rules I think the specific rules are not dictated by biology I don't think you can derive norms directly from biology basically these rules are made amongst ourselves decided on the basis of the sort of situation we are in and so morality is different in peacetime than in wartime during starvation and during abundance and so morality follows the environment to some degree and because the rules are flexible to some degree then we internalize the rules and develop an autonomic conscience out of that now ethical debate and moral reasoning and a conscience are not necessarily things that I expect to find in the animal kingdom so I'm not claiming that there are any moral beings other than ourselves in the animal kingdom no my claim is a lot more modest than that I think that many social animals have inclinations and capacities without which we would never have been able to develop moral systems so things like sympathy and empathy forming social rules and forcing social rules reciprocity and the obligations associated with it conflict resolution equal distribution of resources all these issues can be found to some degree in a chimpanzee society and we would never have developed moral systems if we did not have similar sort of inclinations and so we did not start from scratch so to speak when we develop human morality but we had a lot of natural tendencies to work with this few places morality a lot closer to human nature than than calling it an innovation or a cultural product or a counter force is actually dead and so I view compassion and other tendencies related to that very much as part of what we are and as much part of what we are as competition and you may have noticed that there are social Darwinists and they're still basically among us to some degree who look at callousness as a natural hence perfectly okay tendency so let the poor fend for themselves that's how nature works is a bit that you can still hear from some politicians today and what I'm saying is that the natural world could equally well inspire if you look at non-human primates for example an ideology of social responsibility and just to make that comment in a political fashion let me show you the following cartoon let me read this for you this is of course binti here if a poor child fell through the welfare safety net which one would you trust to rush to his aid so if we look at our closest relatives without denying that they are very competitive without denying that they can be very violent and that there's lots of selfishness there it's actually rampant I would say there is an other side to these animals and I think that society has been overlooked for too long thank you once again we will invite questions from the audience listen to this tool well I have some questions and here come cards down the dial raise your hand we have about 15 minutes and you may forward your questions to the ushers and they'll get up here I wanted to start by asking if any of the panelists had responses or questions for dr. DeWall in a very influential paper which was written in the 1970s Robert Trivers talked about reciprocal altruism and the fact that under certain conditions this could increase delayed reciprocal altruism could increase the inclusive fitness of individuals so that's sort of I'd like you to comment on that and the second question that I have is in many societies nepotism seems to play a very important role in mediating morality and I'd also like your comments on that as well so you ask whether reciprocal altruism can increase inclusive fitness your observations of the chimpanzees well I'm personally not convinced that because often we sort of say it is either kin selection and or it is reciprocal altruism between non relatives I think these things often interact and overlap if that's what you mean is that you can have reciprocal deals between brothers for example and maybe their relationship would not work if there was not some form of reciprocity between them and some some people have even argued that kin selection was their first and the level of cooperation that it produced may then have been picked up by non related individuals in reciprocal altruism and that sort of kin selection produced the behaviors that were picked up by and then used in other cooperative systems nepotism is a word that I don't like using I can see why sometimes people would use it but of course if nepotism just means favoring kin in your cooperative behavior I think we should just call it favoring kin or kin bias or whatever nepotism has a very negative connotation and of course there's the morality and kinship are very closely intertwined in the sense that you have more obligations towards certain individuals certainly close kin than to watch other individuals and so altruism is not spread sort of randomly it's very focused usually and then there's sort of circle that goes out from and then you get the clan and then you get the larger group or community or whatever and so it is certainly not randomly distributed and such a thing as generalized altruism is nonsense from a biological perspective cannot exist really first question from the audience do your research and observations suggest that females tend to be the peacemaker more often supporting genuine sexual differences that might extend to humans please comment on gender differences in all forms of peacemaking and cooperative behavior well it's an interesting issue is that in that female chimps are actually worse at peacemaking among themselves than males and well before I get into the human literature on that there's very little of that what we see is that chimpanzee males have a lot more fights among themselves and females but also make make up much more readily than females if females have a fight it's usually very bad fight and takes them a long time if at all to reconcile and if you want to draw human parallels I can mention two things one is anecdotal the other one is a study anecdotally there was a Dutch swimming coach coach who was once who had coached girls for a long time for swimming team and had moved to the boys team and I read an interview with her and she explained at great lengths that if the girls in her team had a fight it would go on for months and months and months whereas if the boys had a fight you know the same evening they would make up have a beer and it would be over and so she didn't want to deal with that anymore as far as the research is concerned there was a Finnish team that has researched aggression levels at schools a school age children like 10 or 12 years old children and what they did is they asked the children after class whether they had a fight because as you all know if you watch children you will see the boys fight and you will hardly see any girls fight if you ask them afterwards what they found is the girls have as many fights as the boys do but they're much more subtle you don't notice them by observation then they asked them how long can you stay mad at your opponent and they asked it every day in all cases and they said the boys usually were very proud to say oh I can stay mad like half an hour or so you know but but the girls would say all my life they would say that and so I think in terms of my view of chimpanzees and I think by extension to some degree humans also is that for the female the difference between a friend and an enemy is huge this is a friend and that's an enemy and there is nothing in between for the males these things are much more vaguely defined and so sometimes you may need your enemy for particular things you need to get along with him to some degree and your friend can become a rival very easily on particular issues and so they have a much more flexible opportunistic sort of system of fighting and reconciling that what the chimps females do in Arnhem the mediation process of course also a form of peacemaking but they're they making peace between others and they're very good at that and very diplomatic and skilled at that and do the same things they often do with their juveniles with the offspring and so I'm not saying that females don't understand the peacemaking process they are perfectly good at it but with their rival females they're not very good at it it reminds me of what Churchill said about nations that nations do not have friends or they only have allies one brief housekeeping note if Mr. Jim Egert is in the audience please report to the registration desk at the back of the arena mr. Jim Egert is that a question you're going to answer it's a question but it's it's written in Dutch that's probably why you're reading it not me if I'll translate it if you give three apes every day less food starting with a lot of food are they gonna fight after a couple of days or do they equally divide it well I think that will depend on how far you go in this whole experiment if you don't starve them you know if there is a decent amount of food I think they will stay they will remain distributing it among themselves I'm not sure what would happen if they're really gonna get starved I've never done that sort of experiments and I'm not you know this is not the first thing I'm gonna try I think another question from the audience is there an obvious system of laws that individuals in chimpanzee societies are punished for not following well obvious in the sense that it's the same for all chimps societies I don't think so I think each chimps society probably arrives at a sort of understanding between the individuals what a will accept from B and not and this may change over time depending on the different positions that individuals occupy but there are social rules of course in the sense that for example the alpha male will not allow an other male to mate with particular females and will interfere with that and these other males know that and seek ways to circumvent that particular rule and the females know it also very well and that's not necessarily the same in every group of chimpanzees and I've in monkeys for example I've seen we had such a contrast in Wisconsin we had one group of monkeys where the alpha male was like that and basically he was the only one who copulated in the daytime and at night this was probably a lot of other copulations going on because we found this paternity testing that he was certainly not the only one who sighed offspring in the other group that we had which was basically next doors we had five adult males who accepted to copulate with females in each other's view including the alpha male and including all the others and so the social rules so to speak for that group were very different than from the first group and I think the same variation probably exist in chimpanzee communities. Two questions related to your discussion of the experiment with the rhesus monkeys being placed in with the stump tails were the rhesus monkeys that learned reconciliation from the stump tails returned to a rhesus group and did they continue reconciliation behaviors at the same level if they were returned? Well unfortunately we had to break off the experiment as it usually goes at primates analysis that these monkeys are in demand for all sorts of things and so I could not keep them around for a long enough time to just these sort of assumptions. My bet would be that if you would reintroduce them to a regular rhesus group they would have to revert very quickly to a regular rhesus behavior otherwise their nicer tendency so to speak would get them into a lot of trouble probably if they had stayed among themselves then of course and that's a sort of experiment that we are planning now for the future if you keep them among themselves after exposure to another species and have them maybe even breed you can you can probably even see how they may transmit this tendency to their own offspring and so it would probably be retained for a much longer time. A related question it seems that when we expose immature human primates to a steady diet of violent TV characters we have created the rhesus stump tail experiments in reverse without controls do you agree what should we do about it and could you design an experiment that would more clearly show the relationship. Well yeah you know there's a lot of research on the effect of violence on TV I think that people do become immune to it and I don't think that's necessarily a good thing in the sense that I still cannot watch a lot of American movies because they're too violent for my taste because I was not I didn't grow up is the level of what is it 18,000 murders per year that you get on TV here so the diet of violence that you have on TV probably has an effect of making people not even reflect on violence because they are so used in seeing it I personally don't do research on that the only anecdote I can tell you of learned aggressive behavior so the opposite of peacemaking behavior is we had in the chimpanzee community in Arnhem we had a male being killed and castrated by two other males which was a horrible accident and it happened in the night cages and we knew this happened in 1980 we knew which other night cages had a view of what had happened so the females in because this all happened among males the females in those night cages had seen the incident for sure and had followed it then two weeks later I believe one of those females who had seen all this happen made an attack on a young adult male where she clearly went for his testicles and nothing happened it was he escaped but I was so struck by that because in six years of watching these chimps I'd never seen anything like that even remotely you know where they would be interested in that area of his body and she clearly was and I think this is something she may have picked up from that fight so observation learning is probably present in chimpanzees and this also makes you all the more worried about the violence levels that you see on TV do we have any final comments or reflections from the other panelists do you suspect that the ability of a species such as the chimpanzee and bonobo and gorilla to develop these kinds of systems that you've been talking about are and or provide the foundation for the kind of symbolic learning case a capabilities that we find representational capabilities of language capabilities of these animals well that's a complex question I think that that empathy if we take that particular characteristic where you sort of can look at the world from the perspective of someone else makes it a lot easier probably to understand what people may be talking about if they're talking with each other you see what I mean is if if kanzi or whoever in your group picks up an understanding of spoken language I it's hard to imagine how he can do that without also understanding a little bit about the intentions that people have an understanding intentions is of course related to empathy so I think the capacities involved in the things that I'm talking about are probably also involved in the things that you study to some degree and that may be why teaching language to a monkey is a lot more challenging because they may not have that level of understanding and nobody has gotten very far with the monkey and there has been one long-term concerted concerted study yet someone did a long-term project on monkeys a language project with monkeys yeah yes seagull at San Diego thank you we have coffee and other refreshments located out on Ekman Mall if you had just straight east outside the the arena up by Christchample feel free to help yourself to that that's for you and we reconvene back here at 3 30 thank you doctor to all and the other panelists