The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates

304 Pages·2013·1.04 MB·English

by  Frans de Waal

THE BONOBO
and
THE ATHEIST
In Search of Humanism
Among the Primates
FRANS DE WAAL
with drawings by the author
DEDICATION
For Catherine, my favorite primate
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
CHAPTER 1: EARTHLY DELIGHTS
CHAPTER 2: GOODNESS EXPLAINED
CHAPTER 3: BONOBOS IN THE FAMILY TREE
CHAPTER 4: IS GOD DEAD OR JUST IN A COMA?
CHAPTER 5: THE PARABLE OF THE GOOD SIMIAN
CHAPTER 6: TEN COMMANDMENTS TOO MANY
CHAPTER 7: THE GOD GAP
CHAPTER 8: BOTTOM-UP MORALITY
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Picture Section
Copyright
Also by Frans De Waal
Chapter 1
EARTHLY DELIGHTS
Is man only a blunder of God? Or is God only a blunder of man?
—Friedrich Nietzsche1
I
was born in Den Bosch, the Dutch city after which Hieronymus Bosch named
himself.2 This doesn’t make me an expert on the painter, but having grown up with his
statue on the market square, I have always been fond of his surrealist imagery, his
symbolism, and how it relates to humanity’s place in the universe under a waning
influence of God.
His famous triptych in which naked figures frolic around, The Garden of Earthly
Delights, is a tribute to paradisiacal innocence. The middle tableau is far too happy and
relaxed to fit the interpretation of depravity and sin advanced by puritan experts. It
shows humanity free from guilt and shame either before the Fall or without any Fall at
all. For a primatologist like myself, the nudity, the allusions to sex and fertility, the
plentiful birds and fruits, and the moving about in groups are thoroughly familiar, and
hardly in need of a religious or moral interpretation. Bosch seems to have depicted us in
our natural state, while reserving his moralistic outlook for the right-hand panel, in
which he punishes not the frolickers from the middle panel but monks, nuns, gluttons,
gamblers, warriors, and drunkards. Bosch was no fan of the clergy and their avarice,
which explains a small detail in which a man resists signing his fortune away to a pig
veiled like a Dominican nun. The poor figure is said to be the painter himself.
Five centuries later, we remain embroiled in debates about the place of religion in
society. As in Bosch’s day, the central theme is morality. Can we envision a world
without God? Would this world be good? Don’t think for one moment that the current
battle lines between fundamentalist Christianity and science are determined by
evidence. One has to be pretty immune to data to doubt evolution, which is why books
and documentaries aimed at convincing the skeptics are a waste of effort. They are
helpful for those prepared to listen, but fail to reach their target audience. The debate is
less about the truth than about how to handle it. For those who believe that morality
comes straight from God the creator, acceptance of evolution would open a moral
abyss. Listen to the Reverend Al Sharpton debating the late atheist firebrand
Christopher Hitchens: “If there is no order to the universe, and therefore some being,
some force that ordered it, then who determines what is right or wrong? There is
nothing immoral if there’s nothing in charge.”3 Similarly, I have heard people echo
Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, exclaiming, “If there is no God, I am free to rape my
neighbor!”
Perhaps it’s just me, but I am wary of any persons whose belief system is the only
thing standing between them and repulsive behavior. Why not assume that our
humanity, including the self-control needed for a livable society, is built into us? Does
anyone truly believe that our ancestors lacked social norms before they had religion?
Did they never assist others in need, or complain about an unfair deal? Humans must
have worried about the functioning of their communities well before current religions
arose, which occurred only a couple of millennia ago. Biologists are unimpressed by
that kind of timescale.
In the lower right-hand corner of The Garden, Bosch depicted himself resisting a pig dressed like a nun, who tries to
seduce him with kisses. She is offering salvation in return for his estate (hence the pen, ink, and official-looking
paper). The Garden was painted around 1504, about a decade before Martin Luther galvanized protest against such
church practices.
The Dalai Lama’s Turtle
The above introduced a blog entitled Morals without God? on the New York Times’
website, in which I argued that morality antedates religion and that much can be learned
about its origin by considering our fellow primates.4 Contrary to the customary blood-
soaked view of nature, animals are not devoid of tendencies that we morally approve of,
which to me suggests that morality is not as much of a human innovation as we like to
think.
This being the topic of the present book, let me lay out its themes by describing the
week that followed my blog’s publication, including a trip to Europe. Right before this,
however, I attended a meeting between science and religion at Emory University, in
Atlanta, where I work. The occasion was a forum with the Dalai Lama on his favorite
theme: compassion. Being compassionate seems to me an excellent recommendation
for life; hence I welcomed the message of our honorable guest. As the first discussant, I
was seated next to him surrounded by a sea of red and yellow chrysanthemums. I had
been instructed to address him as “your holiness,” but to speak of him to others as “his
holiness,” which I found sufficiently confusing that I avoided all forms of address. One
of the most admired men on the planet dropped his shoes and folded his legs under him
in his chair, put on a huge baseball cap color-matched to his orange robe, while an
audience of over three thousand people hung on his every word. Before my
presentation, I had been appropriately deflated by the organizers’ reminding me that no
one had come to hear me speak, and that all those people were there only for his pearls
of wisdom.
In my remarks, I reviewed the latest evidence for animal altruism. For example, apes
will voluntarily open a door to offer a companion access to food, even if they lose part
of it in the process. And capuchin monkeys are prepared to seek rewards for others, as
we see when we place two of them side by side, while one of them barters with us with
differently colored tokens. One token rewards only the monkey itself, whereas the other
rewards both monkeys. Soon, the monkeys prefer the “prosocial” token. This is not out
of fear, because dominant monkeys (who have least to fear) are in fact the most
generous.
Good deeds also occur spontaneously. An old female, Peony, spends her days
outdoors with other chimpanzees at the Yerkes Primate Center’s field station. On bad
days, when her arthritis is flaring up, she has trouble walking and climbing, but other
females help her out. Peony may be huffing and puffing to get up into the climbing
frame in which several apes have gathered for a grooming session. But an unrelated
younger female moves behind her, placing both hands on her ample behind to push her
up with quite a bit of effort, until Peony has joined the rest.
We have also seen Peony get up and slowly move toward the water spigot, which is at
quite a distance. Younger females sometimes run ahead of her, take in some water, then
return to Peony and give it to her. At first, we had no idea what was going on, since all
we saw was one female placing her mouth close to Peony’s, but after a while the pattern
became clear: Peony would open her mouth wide, and the younger female would spit a
jet of water into it.
Such observations fit the emerging field of animal empathy, which deals not only with
primates but also with canines, elephants, and even rodents. A typical example is how
chimpanzees console distressed parties, hugging and kissing them, which is so
predictable that we have documented literally thousands of cases. Mammals are
sensitive to each other’s emotions and react to those in need. The whole reason people
fill their homes with furry carnivores, and not with, say, iguanas and turtles, is that
mammals offer something no reptile ever will. They give affection, they want affection,
and they respond to our emotions the way we do to theirs.
Up to this point, the Dalai Lama had listened attentively, but now he lifted his cap to
interrupt me. He wanted to hear more about turtles. These animals are a favorite of his,
because they supposedly carry the world on their backs. The Buddhist leader wondered
whether turtles, too, know empathy. He described how the female sea turtle crawls onto
land to look for the best spot to lay her eggs, thus showing concern for future young.
How would the mother behave if she ever encountered her offspring? the Dalai Lama
wondered. To me, the process suggests that turtles have been preprogrammed to seek
out the best environment for incubation. The turtle digs a hole in the sand above the tide
line, deposits her eggs and covers them, packing the sand tight with her rear flippers,
and then leaves the nest behind. The hatchlings emerge a few months later to rush to the
ocean under the moonlight. They never get to know their mother.
Empathy requires awareness of the other and sensitivity to the other’s needs. It
probably started with parental care, like that found in the mammals, but there is also
evidence for bird empathy. I once visited the Konrad Lorenz Research Station, in
Grünau, Austria, which keeps ravens in large aviaries. These are impressive birds,
especially when they sit on your shoulder with their powerful black beak right next to
your face! It brought back memories of the tame jackdaws I had kept as a student: much
smaller birds from the same corvid (crow) family. In Grünau, scientists follow
spontaneous fights among the ravens and have seen bystanders respond to distress.
Losers can count on some cozy preening or beak-to-beak nudging from their friends. At
the same station, free-ranging descendants of Lorenz’s flock of geese have been
equipped with transmitters to measure their heart rate. Since every adult goose has a
mate, that offers a window on empathy. If one bird confronts another in a fight, its
partner’s heart starts racing. Even if the partner is in no way involved, its heart betrays
concern about the quarrel. Birds, too, feel each other’s pain.
If both birds and mammals have some measure of empathy, that capacity probably
goes back to their reptilian ancestors. Not just any reptiles, though, because most lack
parental care. One of the surest signs of a caring attitude, according to Paul MacLean,
the American neuroscientist who named the limbic system the seat of the emotions, is
the “lost call” of young animals. Young monkeys do it all the time: left behind by mom,
they call until she returns. They look miserable, sitting all alone on a tree limb, giving a
long string of plaintive “coo” calls with pouted lips directed at no one in particular.
MacLean noted the absence of the “lost call” in most reptiles, such as snakes, lizards,
and turtles.
In a few reptiles, however, the young do call when upset or in danger, so that mom
will take care of them. Have you ever held a baby alligator? Be careful, because they
have a good set of teeth, but they also utter throaty barks when upset, which may bring
the cow (mother) flying out of the water. That will teach you to doubt reptilian feelings!
I mentioned this to the Dalai Lama, saying that we expect empathy only in animals
with attachments, and that few reptiles qualify. I am not sure this satisfied him, because
of course he wanted to know about turtles, which look so much cuter than those
ferocious toothy monsters of the Crocodilian family. Appearances are deceptive,
though. Some members of this family gently transport their young in their big jaws or
on their backs and defend them against danger. They sometimes even let them snatch
pieces of meat from their mouth. The dinosaurs, too, cared for their young, and
plesiosaurs—giant marine reptiles—may even have been viviparous, giving birth to a
single live offspring in the water, as whales do today. From everything we know, the
smaller the number of offspring an animal produces, the better it will take care of them,
which is why plesiosaurs are thought to have been doting parents. So, by the way, are
birds, which science regards as feathered dinosaurs.
Pressing me even further, the Dalai Lama jumped to butterflies and asked about their
empathy, upon which I couldn’t resist joking, “They don’t have time, they live just one
day!” The short life of butterflies is actually a myth, but whatever these insects feel
about each other, I doubt it has much to do with empathy. This is not to minimize the
larger thrust behind the Dalai Lama’s question, which was that all animals do what is
best for themselves and their offspring. In this sense, all life is caring, perhaps not
consciously caring, but caring nonetheless. He was getting at the idea that compassion
goes to the root of what life is all about.
Few reptiles have parental care, but the crocodile family does. A female alligator safely transports one of her young.
Greeting Mama
After this, the forum moved on to other topics, such as how to measure compassion in
the brains of Buddhist monks who have meditated on it all their lives. Richard
Davidson from the University of Wisconsin related how monks straight from Tibet
balked at his invitation to submit to neuroscience since, clearly, compassion didn’t take
place in the brain but in the heart! Everyone felt this was hilarious, and the monks in the
audience shrieked with laughter. But the monks had a point. Davidson subsequently
discovered the connection between mind and heart: compassion meditation brings about
a quicker heart rate upon hearing sounds of human suffering.
I had to think of the geese. But I also sat there wondering at this auspicious meeting of
minds. In 2005, the Dalai Lama himself had spoken about the need to integrate science
and religion, telling thousands of scientists at the annual meeting of the Society for
Neuroscience, in Washington, how much trouble society has in keeping up with their
groundbreaking research: “It is all too evident that our moral thinking simply has not
been able to keep pace with such rapid progress in our acquisition of knowledge and
power.”5 What a refreshing departure from attempts to drive a wedge between religion
and science!
This topic was on my mind as I prepared for Europe. I had barely received a blessing
and a khata (a long white silk scarf) around my neck, and seen the Dalai Lama off in his
limousine with heavily armed guards, and I was on my way to Ghent, a beautiful old
city in the Flemish part of Belgium. This region is culturally closer to the southern part
of the Netherlands, where I am from, than the part to the north that we call Holland. All
of us speak the same language, but Holland is Calvinist, whereas the southern provinces
were kept Catholic in the sixteenth century by the Spanish, who brought us the Duke of
Alva and the Inquisition. Not the silly “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” of
Monty Python, but one that would put actual thumbscrews on you if you so much as
doubted Mary’s virginity. Not allowed to draw blood, the inquisitors loved the
strappado, or reverse hanging, in which a victim is hung by wrists tied behind his back
and a weight is attached to his ankles. This treatment is sufficiently debilitating that one
soon abandons any preconceived notions about the link between sex and conception.
Lately, the Vatican has been on a campaign to soften the Inquisition’s image—they did
not kill every heretic, they followed Standard Operating Procedures—but the Jesuits in
charge surely could have used some compassion training.
This ancient history also explains, by the way, why one will look in vain for Bosch
paintings in the lowlands. Most hang in the Prado, in Madrid. It is thought that the Iron
Duke obtained The Garden when, in 1568, he declared the Prince of Orange an outlaw
and confiscated all of his properties. The duke then left the masterpiece to his son, from
whom it went to the Spanish state. The Spanish adore the painter they call El Bosco,
whose imagery inspired Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí. On my first visit to the Prado, I
could not really enjoy Bosch’s work, since all I could think was “Colonial plunder!” To
its credit, the museum has now digitized the popular painting at an incredibly high
resolution so that everyone can “own” it through Google Earth.
After my lecture in Ghent, fellow scientists took me on an impromptu visit to the
world’s oldest zoo collection of bonobos, which started at Antwerp Zoo and is now
located in the animal park of Planckendael. Given that bonobos are native to a former
Belgian colony, their presence in Planckendael is hardly surprising. Bringing specimens
from Africa, dead or alive, was another kind of colonial plunder, but without it we
might never have learned of this rare ape. The discovery took place in 1929, in a
museum not far from here, when a German anatomist dusted off a small round skull
labeled as that of a young chimp, which he recognized as an adult with an unusually
small head. He quickly announced a new subspecies. Soon his claim was
overshadowed, however, by the even more momentous pronouncement by an American
anatomist that we had an entirely new species on our hands, one with a strikingly
humanlike anatomy. Bonobos are more gracefully built and have longer legs than any
other ape. The species was put in the same genus, Pan, as the chimpanzee. For the rest