Games Primates Play: An Undercover Investigation of the Evolution and Economics of Human Relationships

by Dario Maestripieri

  Spanish painter Pablo Picasso took advantage of his fame and artistic talent to sleep with almost every woman he met in his adult life (including a seventeen-year-old model he met when he was forty-five and with whom he later had a child). According to biographer Patrick O’Brian, Picasso married twice and had four children by three different women, and regardless of his marital situation, he always kept several mistresses in the background.1 Picasso was a tremendously productive artist—his oeuvre comprises more than fifty thousand paintings, drawings, and sculptures—but work was clearly not the only thing he had on his mind. In that respect, he is in good company. Hundreds of thousands of men who have achieved fame through art, music, science, or other intellectual activities also cheated on their wives and used their fame to maintain harems of women to satiate their voracious sexual appetites.

  Just as some great minds are susceptible to the temptations of promiscuous sex, others are lured by the prospect of political power. To give one example close to my professional home, Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who won a Nobel Prize in 1973 for his research on animal behavior, was unpopular with many of his colleagues and for a long time could not find an academic job in his country, confirming the Latin proverb Nemo propheta in patria, loosely translated as “Nobody is appreciated in his homeland.” Science historian Richard Burkhardt—author of the 2005 book Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology—believes that Lorenz joined the Nazi party in 1938 so that he could secure an academic job in Germany, which he did: in 1940 the Nazi regime arranged a professorship for him at the University of Königsberg.2 Lorenz was not the first intellectual to strike a deal with a dictatorial regime—or more generally, to align himself with political power to advance his own career. He followed an illustrious tradition that originated in the ancient world and became well established in Europe during the Renaissance: scientists, artists, and musicians seeking patronage from emperors, kings, and popes and often not only obtaining employment, support, and protection in the process but also amassing a great deal of political power themselves.

  Finally, many spiritual and religious leaders who encouraged their followers to live a virtuous life simultaneously showed a keen interest in the material benefits of this world. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, an Albanian Roman Catholic nun who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and was declared a saint by Pope John Paul II in 2003, did not hesitate to support wealthy and corrupt individuals, including Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and former financial executive and white-collar criminal Charles Keating, to gain millions of tax-free dollars from them. In his 1997 book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, author and columnist Christopher Hitchens argues that Mother Teresa was less interested in helping the poor than in stashing away vast amounts of cash with which to fuel the expansion of her fundamentalist Roman Catholic beliefs.3

  Clearly, exceptional individuals—people with superior education, intelligence, artistic talents, or religious and moral principles—share many traits with the rest of the human race: social and political ambitions, greed for money, rivalries with contemporaries, unrestrained sexual appetites, and marital problems. In many cases, there seems to be a sharp disconnect between the intellectual or spiritual achievements of these famous individuals and the content and quality of their social lives. Why this disconnect?

  The answer, I think, is that human social behavior comes with a heavy load of evolutionary baggage—we all have strong biological predispositions to behave in certain ways and to pursue similar goals in our personal lives. In the end, we all want the same things: money, power, fame, sex, love, and children. In contrast, our intellectual potential is almost infinite and can be realized in a thousand different ways—or not realized at all. What we do with our intellect has little to do with our evolutionary past and our biological predispositions and a lot more to do with our environment, our education, and the opportunities that our lives present to us. In theory, given the right environment, anyone can become an accomplished painter, musician, philosopher, or theoretical physicist. Some exceptional individuals advance and specialize so much in these domains that laypeople can’t even begin to understand their accomplishments. How many of us can confidently state that we fully appreciate the extent of Albert Einstein’s contributions to physics or those of Ludwig Wittgenstein to philosophy? However, all it takes to fully understand the social lives of many Nobel laureates is some knowledge of primate social behavior. The social behavior of intellectual and spiritual leaders (as well as that of kings and emperors, politicians and army generals, and rock-and-roll, movie, and sports celebrities) is generally similar not only to the behavior of non-achievers but also to that of monkeys and apes and other animals as well.

  Anthropocentrism and Free Will

  A friend of mine who read my book Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World and didn’t know much about the social behavior of rhesus macaques beforehand had the following reaction: “Wow, these monkeys really behave like people. They are people!” To which I replied: “No, it’s people who really behave like other primates. People are primates.”

  Our species, Homo sapiens, belongs to a group of mammals called primates and, more specifically, to a subgroup of primates called great apes. There used to be many species of great apes on our planet, but many of them have gone extinct. The remaining great apes are the chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans. Our closest relatives are chimpanzees and bonobos, which share with us about 98 percent of their genetic material. Closely related to us and the other great apes are the lesser apes—gibbons and siamangs—and Old World monkeys such as macaques and baboons, which share with us about 95 percent of their genetic material. Studies of fossils and comparisons of DNA between different species suggest that our hominid ancestors split from the ancestors of the other great apes between 5 and 6 million years ago, from those of gibbons and siamangs about 10 million years ago, and from those of macaques and baboons about 25 million years ago.

  The taxonomic classification of human beings was established on the basis of anatomical similarities long before genetic data were available and long before Darwin published his evolutionary explanations for these similarities. The taxonomic classification of human beings is not particularly controversial. Even creationists who believe that evolution is just a theory (it’s not: evolution is a fact, as nicely illustrated by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 2009 book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution) don’t seem to challenge our taxonomic status as a primate species.4 Who cares about taxonomy anyway? It’s just a bunch of labels, isn’t it?

  But we do care about other aspects of our “humanness.” My friend’s surprised reaction upon discovering the similarities between human and rhesus macaque behavior is representative of the way a lot of people think about themselves and their behavior. First, there is the “they are like us” versus “we are like them” issue. This has to do with anthropocentrism—the idea that humans are at the center of the universe and everything else revolves around them. Telling some people that there are primates out there, such as rhesus macaques and chimpanzees, that are very similar to us in behavioral terms is like telling Ptolemy that two new planets have been discovered in the Earth’s orbit. Our solar system becomes a little larger, but we are still there, right in the center of it. We are the sun, and all the others are planets, regardless of how many of them there are out there.

  Anthropocentrism is stronger for some human traits than for others. People’s faces and bodies resemble the faces and bodies of other animals, but when it comes to these similarities, no one cares about the distinction between stars and planets. The Walt Disney Corporation and toy manufacturers around the world have made billions of dollars exploiting animal-human similarities for their cartoons and stuffed animals. Not everyone may know that our bones, muscles, skin, hearts, lungs, and stomachs and intestines work exactly like those of other anima
ls, but I am pretty sure that many people given this news would shrug their shoulders and say, “Okay, so what?” When we discover similarities in behavior, however, our anthropocentrism kicks in. We are not like them. They are like us. Maybe.

  Similarities in behavior between humans and other animals are a source of endless controversy. People generally have a different view of their behavior than they do of their faces and bodies—as if bodies are biological but behavior is something special, something nonbiological. I suspect that one of the factors at play is the question of free will. We were born with our particular faces and bodies, and until the advent of plastic surgery there was nothing we could do about it. Now, as long as we can afford it, we can have almost any face or body we want. We don’t need any professional nip and tuck for our behavior, however, because we perform our own cosmetic surgeries every day. We wake up in the morning and make plans for the day. Then we change our minds and make different plans, sometimes more than once. Everything we do we think about first, and then we do it. Thinking is the cause and behavior is the effect—or so we believe. We make hundreds of conscious decisions about our behavior during the course of a day. How can this be affected by millions of years of evolution? How is it possible that the product of free will ends up resembling what monkeys and apes in the jungle have been doing for millions of years?

  Free will and anthropocentrism go hand in hand. The seventeenth-century French philosopher Descartes, who came up with the brilliant phrase Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”), believed that humans are unique in possessing free will and that all other animals act like robots. Accordingly, Descartes placed humans right at the center of the universe. Many embraced Descartes’s view, including the psychologist William James, who wrote in 1890 that the whole “sting and excitement” of life comes from “our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.”

  Well, for over two centuries people have had to disabuse themselves of the notion that humans are fundamentally different from other animals. Beliefs about the uniqueness of human behavior might well be the last bastion of our superiority complex, but even this redoubt may be crumbling. As for free will, experiments in psychology and neuroscience suggest that—to paraphrase The Princess Bride—“I don’t think it is what you think it is.”

  In a 2007 New York Times article entitled “Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t,” science columnist Dennis Overbye (currently the deputy science editor of the Times) reported on interviews with two scientists—Benjamin Libet, a former physiologist at the University of California–San Francisco (he died in 2007), and Daniel Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard University—who have done research on the issue of free will.5 In the 1980s, Libet conducted experiments in which he asked volunteers to choose a random movement with their hand, such as pressing a button or flicking a finger, while he recorded electrical activity in their brains through an electroencephalogram. Libet asked the subjects to watch the second hand of a clock and report its position at exactly the moment they felt they had the conscious will to move. The experiments showed that a spike of electricity occurred in the neurons in the brain that control hand movement approximately half a second before the subjects consciously felt that they had decided to move their hand. In other words, it appeared that the brain unconsciously controls behavior before a conscious decision is made. The perception of an action makes an individual conscious of it, and this after-the-fact consciousness generates the illusion that our behavior is the result of a decision and not the other way around. Libet’s experiments suggested that free will is an illusion—a trick played on us by our own minds. His results have been replicated by other neuroscientists (although, as usual, some skeptics have criticized them), while experiments by Daniel Wegner, summarized in his 2002 book The Illusion of Conscious Will, have shown that people can be easily fooled into believing that they cause and control their own actions when in fact they don’t.6

  In the interviews for the New York Times article, Libet said that his results left room for a limited version of free will in the form of veto power over what we sense ourselves doing—we can choose to inhibit our behavior once we become conscious of it—while Wegner commented on the potential consequences of exposing free will as an illusion. Some people worry, he said, that the death of free will could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility: people might feel that they are no longer responsible for their actions. Wegner believed, however, that in reality exposing free will as an illusion probably would have little effect on people’s lives or on their feelings of self-worth. Most people would remain in denial. “It’s an illusion, but it’s a very persistent illusion; it keeps coming back,” he said, comparing free will to a magician’s trick that has been seen again and again. “Even though you know it’s a trick, you get fooled every time. The feelings just don’t go away.”

  The Algorithms That Crowd Our Minds

  Many people reject the idea that human social behavior is hardwired in our brains and evolved by natural selection earlier in human evolutionary history or in the history of our animal ancestors. Some object on religious grounds, such as the creationists, many of whom believe that human beings were created by God, as described in the Book of Genesis. There are also intellectuals—some cultural anthropologists and psychologists—who dismiss biology and evolution as irrelevant to our understanding of human behavior; they argue that cultural influences on behavior override biological ones.

  Surprisingly, the idea that behavior evolves is also unpopular among evolutionary biologists who study genes, cells, or tiny insects called fruit flies. They keep hundreds of fruit flies in glass jars in their laboratories, induce some changes in their environment—such as turning the lights on and off for variable periods of time—and then look at how the fruit flies’ genes are affected by this as the bugs reproduce over many generations. These evolutionary biologists study evolution in their laboratory but not in the real world or with animals other than fruit flies. The scientific journal Evolution, for example, publishes many articles involving experimental studies of evolution conducted with fruit flies. I once submitted a manuscript to this journal reporting an evolutionary analysis of primate behavior, and the manuscript was immediately rejected on the ground that “primates are non-standard organisms for the study of evolution.” “I don’t think Charles Darwin would agree with you,” I replied to the journal’s editor.

  For some evolutionary biologists, evolution stays confined within the walls of their laboratory. For others, it stops at their doorstep: it can happen in the jungle, but they don’t want it in their house. They don’t want to hear about how evolution affects their own behavior. They are like those Catholics who go to Mass every Sunday but, forgetting all about religion once they’re outside the church, spend the rest of the week going about their business as usual. Surprisingly, among the skeptics are also some evolutionary psychologists who believe that natural selection shaped the human mind, yet maintain that what we do with our behavior has little to do with evolution. I for one have a hard time accepting the notion that natural selection has left its mark on human mental processes but not on contemporary human behavior. The latter happens to be the premise upon which this whole book is based! Before I address the position taken by evolutionary psychologists about the evolution of mind versus behavior, however, let me talk a bit more about evolutionary psychologists in general, and about how the human mind works.7

  Evolutionary psychologists don’t believe that the human mind is a tabula rasa—an empty container we fill with all kinds of information that we acquire from the environment with our amazing learning skills. Rather, they believe that the mind has some biological predispositions to produce specific emotions over others in response to particular situations, to learn certain things better than others, to solve problems in a certain way, and even to make certain mistakes in the perception and proces
sing of information from the surrounding environment. For example, children are biologically predisposed to learn languages until they reach puberty; after that, changes in their brain make it very difficult to learn a new language—as people who have learned a second language later in life know all too well. Studies by social psychologists have shown that people generally have a better view of themselves than others have of them. We see ourselves as being nicer, more intelligent, and more successful than others do. The human mind is the device that drives our bodies in the race for survival and reproduction, so it makes sense that it gives us the impression that we are at the center of the universe—anthropocentrism is a psychological adaptation—and that it has many mechanisms to protect us from the challenges, not only physical but also psychological, that come from the outside world. Sigmund Freud, a man with a brilliant intuition who had the bad luck of being ahead of his time, discovered many of these protective mechanisms, such as the repression of bad memories.

  Called algorithms by evolutionary psychologists, the human mind’s predispositions are akin to computer programs in that they were designed to solve particular problems or tasks. They have a significant genetic basis and evolved by natural selection, so that individuals with the genes for particular algorithms were more successful in survival and reproduction than the individuals without these genes. Algorithms represent solutions to the recurring problems that early humans and their ancestors were constantly confronted with in their environment, including: how to navigate and orient oneself; how to find food and discriminate between edible/nutritional substances and toxic/non-nutritional ones; how to detect predators and escape predator attacks (as well as avoiding dangerous animals such as venomous snakes and spiders); how to avoid a potentially deadly aggression from a member of another group or harmful and coercive behavior from a member of one’s own group; how to learn to communicate with members of one’s own community; how to discriminate family members from nonkin; how to make friends and practice important social skills with them; how to establish cooperative relationships with others based on reciprocation and how to identify and punish cheaters; how to make effective political alliances that allow one to outcompete other individuals and gain status; how to find and choose appropriate and willing mates for short-term sexual relationships; how to establish a long-term relationship with an opposite-sex individual that will lead to successful reproduction and child-rearing; how to support and shape children’s development so that they will become successful adults; and how to obtain assistance and support from caregivers early or late in life, periods when individuals cannot make it on their own.