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If baboons ran schools - Cafe Technos - primatologist Robert M. Sapolsky - Interview
Technos: Quarterly for Education and Technology, Winter, 2001 by Thom Gillespie
... was my working title for this article. It started last summer when my wife, Doris, gave me a copy of A Primate's Memoir by Robert M. Sapolsky. Doris is always giving me books to read. I read few of them because her reading taste is much higher brow than mine is. I never miss Buffy or Angel; I always read the comics after the sports and before world news. Doris reads the Sunday New York Times even if it takes her a week; I skim it in 45 minutes or less. But hey, I was going on a three-week trip to Alaska, and Doris was not happy to be left behind, so in the interest of marital tranquility I said, "Love to read it." I figured that with luck, three weeks, and two long flights, maybe I'd get halfway through the book before I returned and I could fake it when she asked me if I liked the baboon book. I figured I could say, "Loved it. Did I get any good mail while gone?"
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The problem began just after lift-off. I started to read A Primate's Memoir, and I started to laugh. At first it was just a chuckle, but before we cleared Nebraska I had tears in my eyes, was almost doubled up, and was trying frantically to muffle belly laughs. The flight attendants came over to me three times to see if they could help. They thought I was in pain. And I was, but the pain was not being able to share this amazing book that talked of real science with real life in real situations in the bush, in towns in Africa and in New York City. It was real primatology; some wore clothes and some didn't. The book I thought I wouldn't finish in three weeks was actually finished before I landed in Seattle.
Who Is This Guy?
For the past 20 years Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, has been spending about 25 percent of his time in Kenya studying baboons to better understand the neurobiology of stress in human beings. Robert studies baboons because they have obsessions similar to their primate cousins, humans. They worry about their status in society; they worry about how to climb the ladder of baboon society. Some are more successful than others. Once at the top, they worry about who below them are hell-bent on catching up. Some in the middle are quick to duck and cover when things get weird with Shakespearean maneuverings. Basically, armed with a couple of sacks of beans for meals, some darts for tranquilizing, equipment for extracting blood samples and taking blood pressure and cholesterol measurements--and almost ethnographic notations of the baboon troop's maneuvering--Robert studied the effects of stress in a primate society very similar to the ones found in Palo Alto, California, and at university faculty meetings all across North America.
It also seemed pretty obvious to me that there are a lot of similarities between baboon troops, human gangs, and K-12 education these days: lots of stress and lots of aggression. I was hoping to correspond with Robert via email about these topics, but just as I was about to send my questions to him, I received a notice that he would be speaking at the Butler University science writers series in Indianapolis, a mere hour's drive from Bloomington. I decided to see Robert in action, and as a gesture of gratitude to my wife for introducing me to his book, I took her along. I'm glad I did. Robert is an exceptional writer, but he may be an even better public speaker. I don't remember ever having been at a science talk where the speaker got a standing ovation and I was left wondering if they are going to start shouting, "Encore, encore! More!"
The Interview
Do you think there are parallels between human and baboon society?
Definitely. Which is what I keep telling the people who fund my work. We are social primates. We are not baboons. We are quite different from them as far as primates go. But, the common themes are this tremendous combination of competition and cooperation, altruism and sociality--this incredible emphasis on social connectiveness and this ability to generate psychological states out of thin air, which baboons are some of the only ones out there who are smart enough to do the same. The big difference is that they need to be comforted by someone grooming them, and we can be comforted by a letter from someone on the other side of the planet. They can invent stressors built around "Imagine I'm going to bite you in 2 seconds"; and we can invent stressors built around events 20 years in the future. The scales on which we do it are far more dramatic but the underlying primate principles are the same.
I thought it was a joke when they introduced you as studying the biology of religious belief.
I'm actually quite interested in that. The aspect that fascinates me--and I am an utter card-carrying atheist who was once very orthodox--is the very solid literature showing that your health is very much better if you are religious, and not just because you are less likely to smoke, and not just because you get a social community. Religious belief, in and of itself, seems to be extremely protective of health, and that fascinates me.
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