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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
So, does this religious belief protect a person who is going on a suicide mission and will die shortly?
You have predictability. You have your situation improving by dying. You have attribution. If you can understand that there is a god with a rational mind who cares particularly about you and people like you, you have this whole attributional system to explain and predict why an unexplainable world makes sense. Religion absolutely taps into all the features of psychological stress.
Would you predict that the people in New York City who have strong religious beliefs are having less stress after September 11 than those who do not?
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Absolutely. The studies are clear, and atheists have much higher rates of clinical depression, astronomically high rates. It makes perfect sense in many ways.
Do you have researchers in your lab at Stanford researching the biology of religious belief?.
No, that is just one of my pet hobbies. In my lab, my research is oriented toward gene therapy and the nervous system, which in 5 to 10 years will either have worked and turned into clinical trials, which will be out of my hands, or won't have worked and we'll probably shut down as a field. My guess is that 10 years from now I am going to be working on the neurobiology of those issues--brain imaging, issues of religious belief, impulsivity, faith--stuff like that, which is not terribly accessible at this point but will be fairly soon.
Do you think there is anything we can learn from baboons today to deal with situations such as September 11th? I mean, how does a baboon deal with a traumatic situation in the troop?
If they are lucky enough to have an individual they are closely affiliated with, they go and sit and groom. It is a very concrete response. If they are female, it is likely to be someone who is a relative: a mother, a sister, a child. If it is a male and they are not in the 25 percent who have a close relationship with a female, they do not have that option. That makes a huge difference. I haven't done the research, but others have used telemetry devices to measure blood pressure, heart rate, and EKG even in fully ambulatory primates. It is exactly as you would expect. Someone loses a social interaction, a dominance interaction, up goes blood pressure and he walks over to the other side of the enclosure (these are all animals in capture) and he sits and starts to groom someone, and the blood pressure comes back down. Same way in humans.
If baboons had weapons of mass destruction, do you think they would use them on outside groups?
In a second. It would not be organized in a territorial troop way because they are not grouped in organized troops. They are all males who showed up and are not related. They would be more likely to try to use it on somebody in their troop as on somebody in another troop because of grudges.
Chimps have the reverse system, where it is females who change troops at puberty, so males spend all their lives with other males to whom they are related. So you suddenly have this very potent, dangerous situation of adult males who are related to each other and have been cooperating their entire lives. There you would get chimps happily using weapons of mass destruction to eradicate the neighbors. You get something resembling warfare in chimps. You get groups of related chimps controlling their territory, killing males from other groups that they encounter. It is not for nothing that all the warrior societies on earth, all the pastoralist-warrior societies were patri-local. Males stay where they grew up. So, men as adults are surrounded by their brothers and other relatives--that is the backbone of us-them warfare.
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