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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
As a primatologist, would you say that warfare is part of an adaptive, protective technique or technology?
No, it is not necessarily adaptive. Look at mountain gorillas, who do something fairly awful and unpleasant called competitive infanticide, where males will kill each other's infants. There is a wonderful, clear, vicious Darwinian logic to this where you wipe out the reproductive success of your competitor and that is good for your genes because relatively you are doing better. This makes sense strategically. This is one variant of war violence, which has a payoff, but there are now only 500 mountain gorillas left on the earth. Amid many of the reasons why they are on the edge of extinction, this is one of the reasons: that infants get killed. In a case like the mountain gorilla it is definitely not adaptive. It is also the case that there are plenty of primates where there is no violence at all. Baboons happen to be extremely violent. There is no pattern that the more violent primates are more closely related to humans. There is no universal of organized warfare in humans, even though most human societies do have organized warfare--but there are exceptions. There is nothing to say that warfare is a universal primate or mammalian behavior.
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As a scientist, can you look at humans and see us ever getting past organized warfare?
It certainly is possible, to the extent that if you had a different disciplinary bent, you could construct just as much of a story built around the number of species out there who do slavery. They tend not to be mammals or primates. Slavery is very widespread in social insects. It has also been widespread throughout human history. Now in at least some pockets of Westernized human life, where it was once viewed as absolutely logical and natural and all sorts of cultural conventions such as religion were built around rationalizing slavery, it doesn't exist any more. It certainly exists in the Sudan, but at least in parts of the earth where slavery was once viewed as natural, inevitable, and universal, it no longer is.
So there might be hope?
There might be hope, but it sure does not look to be on the horizon at the moment.
Are there any lessons on aggression we can take from your studies of baboons and violence in children? If we look at events such as the shooting at Columbine High School, are there any lessons that can be learned from baboons?
It will not work to teach kids to be unaggressive because we do not have a society dominated by Quakers and pacifists. We have a society that loves aggression and rewards it enormously. The key thing is reward in context. I am certainly grateful for the enormous amount of aggression generated by America during World War II. So much of what socialization is about is not learning how much of a behavior to perform but instead learning the appropriate social context for it. When you look at the classic studies of Harry Harlowe's at the University of Wisconsin in the 1950s of raising primates in social isolation, you can see the ways in which they were screwed up as adults. They were not more or less violent than average; they were not more or less sexually active--they were inappropriate in all cases. They aggressed animals they had no business going near. They were terrified of tiny infants. They were attempting to mate with the wrong kind of animals or with inanimate objects. They did not have inappropriate levels of anything; they had inappropriate contexts.
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