Machiavellian Primate
Other than in human societies, the tension between cooperation and competition shows up nowhere more clearly than in the primates – not surprisingly, as it is only six million years or so since our common ancestors were on the Earth. There are now many observations, especially on chimpanzees, which demonstrate the dilemma, and show how it is resolved in different ways in different situations. In one lovely example,37 chimpanzee A observes a keeper hang up a bunch of bananas in an inconspicuous place. Chimp B, however, is in the vicinity, and for as long as he remains, A potters about with a nonchalant air, completely ignoring the bananas. After a while, B leaves, apparently ‘taken in’ by A’s performance…but only apparently. He must have sensed that something was up, because he immediately finds a hiding place from which he can observe A without being seen. Sure enough, as soon as A ‘believes’ himself to be unobserved, he runs off and retrieves the bananas – only to be rapidly dispossessed by the larger B, whose patience and perceptiveness are finally rewarded.
A second example, worth quoting in full, comes from research by Frans de Waal.
Yeroen hurt his hand during a fight with Nikkie. Although it is not a deep wound, we originally think it is troubling him quite a bit, because he is limping. The next day a student, Dirk Fokkema, reports that in his opinion Yeroen limps only when Nikkie is in the vicinity. I know that Dirk is a keen observer, but this time I find it hard to believe that he is correct. We go to watch and it turns out that he is indeed right: Yeroen walks past the sitting Nikkie from a point in front of him to a point behind him and the whole time Yeroen is in Nikkie’s field of vision he hobbles pitifully; but once he has passed Nikkie his behaviour changes and he walks normally again. For nearly a week Yeroen’s movement is affected in this way whenever he knows that Nikkie can see him.
Interpretation. Yeroen was playacting. He wanted to make Nikkie believe that he had been badly hurt in their fight. The fact that Yeroen acted in an exaggeratedly pitiful way only when he was in Nikkie’s field of vision suggests that he knew that his signals would only have an effect if they were seen; Yeroen kept an eye on Nikkie to see whether he was being watched. He may have learnt from incidents in the past in which he has been seriously wounded that his rival was less hard on him during the period when he was (of necessity) limping.38
Such examples, of which there are now many, demonstrate the chimpanzees’ impressive ability to manipulate each other’s feelings, control their actions, and direct their attention – and to do so in ways that depend subtly on who they are dealing with. And the engine for this remarkable skill is their ability to observe each other closely, and to build the resulting brain-mind patterns into accurate working models of each other as individuals.39 When you live in a society where there are fine gradations of social status, and in which individuals whom you meet day after day have quite intricate ‘personalities’ and preferences, it pays you to develop a very sharp eye for behaviour, and to learn the non-verbal language of the culture, so that you too can play the games.
Nicholas Humphrey, the Cambridge parapsychologist, was one of the first to argue that the extraordinary developments in the mental abilities of human beings, over the other species (even the primates), was stimulated by just this need to be a skilled player of social games; and that, as each ‘move’ could potentially be met with a counter-move – as in the first example, where chimp B pretended to be fooled by chimp A’s attempt to put him off the scent of the bananas – so society became involved in an accelerating ‘arms race’ of social sophistication. ‘The formative years for human intellect were the years when man lived as a social savage on the plains of Africa’ says Humphrey.40 And:
It was…the circumstances of primitive man’s social life—his membership of a complexly interacting human community, his need to do well himself while at the same time sustaining others – which did more than anything to make man, as a species, the subtle and insightful creature we know today…If men were to negotiate the maze of social interaction, it was essential that they should become…capable of looking ahead to as yet unrealised possibilities, of plotting, counter-plotting and pitting their wits against group companions no less subtle than themselves.41
Even before the appearance of verbal language, the business of reading other people’s intentions – and broadcasting or concealing your own – via subtle variations in posture, behaviour and the direction of gaze was well developed. Indeed, many of these signals, and their responses, developed long enough ago to have become embodied in the genetic code.42 But genetics cannot prepare you for all the idiosyncrasies of the other members of your primate colony: for this learning is required, and preferably not just occasional observations and encounters, but sustained, close-quarters ‘getting to know you’ sessions. What better medium for these prolonged ‘conversations’ than mutual grooming? Chimpanzees and baboons, who live in groups of 50 or so, spend up to 20 per cent of their day in this activity, not only establishing ‘goodwill’ between each other, but inevitably, through spending so much time at close quarters, building up quite a detailed minitheory of each other’s preferences and dispositions. In groups of this size, and with a primate lifestyle, this amount of time can be devoted to fostering relationships without encroaching on other necessary activities.
However, as social groups get larger, and society even more intricate, so the amount of time required for physical grooming becomes a luxury that can no longer be afforded. Robin Dunbar of the University of London has suggested, on the basis of contemporary hunter-gatherer and simple horticultural societies, as well as archaeological evidence, that early human societies settled into groups of 120–150 people: considerably larger than the primate groups.43 To give the same amount of time to one-to-one grooming, in such a group, would require not 20 per cent but nearer 40 per cent of daily activity, a proportion that would jeopardize food-gathering and all the other jobs needed to service the community. Grooming becomes inefficient as a social adhesive because it is necessarily an activity between only two (or occasionally three or four) animals at a time, and you cannot get on with much else simultaneously. What is more, a three-fold increase in group size greatly increases the amount of social learning there is to do.
So Dunbar argues that there would have been an evolutionary pressure to devise an alternative form of communication that would enable individuals to get detailed information about each other rapidly, while preferably leaving your hands and feet free to get on with other tasks. Enter, finally, the spoken word, as the ideal solution to the ‘grooming’ problem.
It would of course make social learning very much quicker if people were able to tell each other, not just how they were feeling at the time – which their observers then had to distil inductively into tentative images of ‘character’ – but what kind of person they were. If people were able to gossip, as it were, about themselves, social cement would accumulate much faster. And if they were able to communicate generalized information about ‘third parties’, then individuals would be prepared (not always accurately or adequately, of course) to get along with characters whom they had not met before.
It is a commonplace that when a more sophisticated, but more recent (developmentally or evoiutionarily) strategy is proving inadequate, an animal or a person frequently reverts to an earlier or more primitive way of operating – even when that too may patently fail to meet the needs of the situation. As the evolutionary precursor of gossip was grooming, it would not be surprising to note this ‘need’ for physical contact reasserting itself, either in the face of loneliness or confusion, or in those special cases where words can never be enough. As Dunbar notes: ‘when it comes to really intense relationships that are especially important to us, we invariably abandon language and revert to that old-fashioned form of primate interaction – ‘mutual mauling’. But what form, in the modern world, with our smooth bodies, should this ‘mauling’ take? Should we be busy shampooing each other’s hair, or gently cleaning out the wax from our loved ones’