Fw: CII HI - A Natural History of Peace

[Peggy Holman]

In a troop of baboons in which:

. Aggression was less
> frequent, particularly against third parties. And rates of affiliative 
> behaviors, such as males and females grooming each other or sitting 
> together, soared. There were even instances, now and then, of adult males 
> grooming each other -- a behavior nearly as unprecedented as baboons 
> sprouting wings.


See what "welcoming the stranger" can do?

In a typical savanna baboon
> troop, newly transferred adolescent males spend years slowly working their 
> way into the social fabric; they are extremely low ranking -- ignored by 
> females and noted by adult males only as convenient targets for 
> aggression. In Forest Troop, by contrast, new male transfers are inundated 
> with female attention soon after their arrival. Resident females first 
> present themselves sexually to new males an average of 18 days after the 
> males arrive, and they first groom the new males an average of 20 days 
> after they arrive (normal savanna baboons introduce such behaviors after 
> 63 and 78 days, respectively). Furthermore, these welcoming gestures occur 
> more frequently in Forest Troop during the early post-transfer period, and 
> there is four times as much grooming of males by females in Forest Troop 
> as elsewhere. From almost the moment they arrive, in other words, new 
> males find out that in Forest Troop, things are done differently.

from rainy Seattle,
Peggy


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tom Atlee" <cii at igc.org>
To: "hi list" <cii at igc.org>
Cc: <cbtanager at bigplanet.com>; <peggy at opencirclecompany.com>; 
<mbdowd at bigplanet.com>
Sent: Saturday, December 24, 2005 7:16 PM
Subject: CII HI - A Natural History of Peace


> <http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060101faessay85110/robert-m-sapolsky/a-natural-history-of-peace.html>
>
>
> A Natural History of Peace
>  By Robert M. Sapolsky
>
>  From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2006
>  Summary: Humans like to think that they are unique, but the study of 
> other primates has called into question the exceptionalism of our species. 
> So what does primatology have to say about war and peace? Contrary to what 
> was believed just a few decades ago, humans are not "killer apes" destined 
> for violent conflict, but can make their own history.
>
>  Robert M. Sapolsky is John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of 
> Biological Sciences and Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences 
> at Stanford University. His most recent book is "Monkeyluv: And Other 
> Essays on Our Lives as Animals."
>
> THE NAKED APE
>
>  The evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky once said, "All species 
> are unique, but humans are uniquest." Humans have long taken pride in 
> their specialness. But the study of other primates is rendering the 
> concept of such human exceptionalism increasingly suspect.
>
>  Some of the retrenchment has been relatively palatable, such as with the 
> workings of our bodies. Thus we now know that a baboon heart can be 
> transplanted into a human body and work for a few weeks, and human blood 
> types are coded in Rh factors named after the rhesus monkeys that possess 
> similar blood variability.
>
>  More discomfiting is the continuum that has been demonstrated in the 
> realm of cognition. We now know, for example, that other species invent 
> tools and use them with dexterity and local cultural variation. Other 
> primates display "semanticity" (the use of symbols to refer to objects and 
> actions) in their communication in ways that would impress any linguist. 
> And experiments have shown other primates to possess a "theory of mind," 
> that is, the ability to recognize that different individuals can have 
> different thoughts and knowledge.
>
>  Our purported uniqueness has been challenged most, however, with regard 
> to our social life. Like the occasional human hermit, there are a few 
> primates that are typically asocial (such as the orangutan). Apart from 
> those, however, it turns out that one cannot understand a primate in 
> isolation from its social group. Across the 150 or so species of primates, 
> the larger the average social group, the larger the cortex relative to the 
> rest of the brain. The fanciest part of the primate brain, in other words, 
> seems to have been sculpted by evolution to enable us to gossip and groom, 
> cooperate and cheat, and obsess about who is mating with whom. Humans, in 
> short, are yet another primate with an intense and rich social life -- a 
> fact that raises the question of whether primatology can teach us 
> something about a rather important part of human sociality, war and peace.
>
>  It used to be thought that humans were the only savagely violent primate. 
> "We are the only species that kills its own," one might have heard intoned 
> portentously at the end of nature films several decades ago. That view 
> fell by the wayside in the 1960s as it became clear that some other 
> primates kill their fellows aplenty. Males kill; females kill. Some kill 
> one another's infants with cold-blooded stratagems worthy of Richard III. 
> Some use their toolmaking skills to fashion bigger and better cudgels. 
> Some other primates even engage in what can only be called warfare --  
> organized, proactive group violence directed at other populations.
>
>  As field studies of primates expanded, what became most striking was the 
> variation in social practices across species. Yes, some primate species 
> have lives filled with violence, frequent and varied. But life among 
> others is filled with communitarianism, egalitarianism, and cooperative 
> child rearing.
>
>  Patterns emerged. In less aggressive species, such as gibbons or 
> marmosets, groups tend to live in lush rain forests where food is 
> plentiful and life is easy. Females and males tend to be the same size, 
> and the males lack secondary sexual markers such as long, sharp canines or 
> garish coloring. Couples mate for life, and males help substantially with 
> child care. In violent species, on the other hand, such as baboons and 
> rhesus monkeys, the opposite conditions prevail.
>
>  The most disquieting fact about the violent species was the apparent 
> inevitability of their behavior. Certain species seemed simply to be the 
> way they were, fixed products of the interplay of evolution and ecology, 
> and that was that. And although human males might not be inflexibly 
> polygamous or come with bright red butts and six-inch canines designed for 
> tooth-to-tooth combat, it was clear that our species had at least as much 
> in common with the violent primates as with the gentle ones. "In their 
> nature" thus became "in our nature." This was the humans-as-killer-apes 
> theory popularized by the writer Robert Ardrey, according to which humans 
> have as much chance of becoming intrinsically peaceful as they have of 
> growing prehensile tails.
>
>  That view always had little more scientific rigor than a Planet of the 
> Apes movie, but it took a great deal of field research to figure out just 
> what should supplant it. After decades' more work, the picture has become 
> quite interesting. Some primate species, it turns out, are indeed simply 
> violent or peaceful, with their behavior driven by their social structures 
> and ecological settings. More important, however, some primate species can 
> make peace despite violent traits that seem built into their natures. The 
> challenge now is to figure out under what conditions that can happen, and 
> whether humans can manage the trick themselves.
>
>  PAX BONOBO
>
>  Primatology has long been dominated by studies of the chimpanzee, due in 
> large part to the phenomenally influential research of Jane Goodall, whose 
> findings from her decades of observations in the wild have been widely 
> disseminated. National Geographic specials based on Goodall's work would 
> always include the reminder that chimps are our closest relatives, a 
> notion underlined by the fact that we share an astonishing 98 percent of 
> our DNA with them. And Goodall and other chimp researchers have carefully 
> documented an endless stream of murders, cannibalism, and organized group 
> violence among their subjects. Humans' evolutionary fate thus seemed 
> sealed, smeared by the excesses of these first cousins.
>
>  But all along there has been another chimp species, one traditionally 
> ignored because of its small numbers; its habitat in remote, impenetrable 
> rain forests; and the fact that its early chroniclers published in 
> Japanese. These skinny little creatures were originally called "pygmy 
> chimps" and were thought of as uninteresting, some sort of regressed 
> subspecies of the real thing. Now known as bonobos, they are today 
> recognized as a separate and distinct species that taxonomically and 
> genetically is just as closely related to humans as the standard chimp. 
> And boy, is this ever a different ape.
>
>  Male bonobos are not particularly aggressive and lack the massive 
> musculature typical of species that engage in a lot of fighting (such as 
> the standard chimp). Moreover, the bonobo social system is female 
> dominated, food is often shared, and there are well-developed means for 
> reconciling social tensions. And then there is the sex.
>
>  Bonobo sex is the prurient highlight of primatology conferences, and 
> leads parents to shield their children's eyes when watching nature films. 
> Bonobos have sex in every conceivable position and some seemingly 
> inconceivable ones, in pairs and groups, between genders and within 
> genders, to greet each other and to resolve conflicts, to work off steam 
> after a predator scare, to celebrate finding food or to cajole its 
> sharing, or just because. As the sound bite has it, chimps are from Mars 
> and bonobos are from Venus.
>
>  All is not perfect in the bonobo commune, and they still have hierarchies 
> and conflict (why else invent conflict resolution?). Nonetheless, they are 
> currently among the trendiest of species to analyze, a wonderful antidote 
> to their hard-boiled relatives. The trouble is, while we have a pretty 
> good sense of what bonobos are like, we have little insight into how they 
> got that way. Furthermore, this is basically what all bonobos seem to be 
> like -- a classic case of in-their-nature-ness. There is even recent 
> evidence for a genetic component to the phenomenon, in that bonobos (but 
> not chimps) possess a version of a gene that makes affiliative behavior 
> (behavior that promotes group cohesion) more pleasurable to males. So -- 
> a wondrous species (and one, predictably, teetering on the edge of 
> extinction). But besides being useful for taking the wind out of 
> we-be-chimps fatalists, the bonobo has little to say to us. We are not 
> bonobos, and never can be.
>
>  WARRIORS, COME OUT TO PLAY
>
>  In contrast to the social life of bonobos, the social life of chimps is 
> not pretty. Nor is that of rhesus monkeys, nor savanna baboons -- a 
> species found in groups of 50 to 100 in the African grasslands and one I 
> have studied for close to 30 years. Hierarchies among baboons are strict, 
> as are their consequences. Among males, high rank is typically achieved by 
> a series of successful violent challenges. Spoils, such as meat, are 
> unevenly divided. Most males die of the consequences of violence, and 
> roughly half of their aggression is directed at third parties (some 
> high-ranking male in a bad mood takes it out on an innocent bystander, 
> such as a female or a subordinate male).
>
>  Male baboons, moreover, can fight amazingly dirty. I saw this happen a 
> few years ago in one of the troops I study: Two males had fought, and one, 
> having been badly trounced, assumed a crouching stance, with his rear end 
> up in the air. This is universally recognized among savanna baboons as an 
> abject gesture of subordination, signaling an end to the conflict, and the 
> conventional response on the part of the victorious male is to subject the 
> other to a ritualized gesture of dominance (such as mounting him). In this 
> instance, however, the winner, approaching the loser as if to mount him, 
> instead abruptly gave him a deep slash with his canines.
>
>  A baboon group, in short, is an unlikely breeding ground for pacifists. 
> Nevertheless, there are some interesting exceptions. In recent years, for 
> example, it has been recognized that a certain traditional style of 
> chest-thumping evolutionary thinking is wrong. According to the standard 
> logic, males compete with one another aggressively in order to achieve and 
> maintain a high rank, which will in turn enable them to dominate 
> reproduction and thus maximize the number of copies of their genes that 
> are passed on to the next generation. But although aggression among 
> baboons does indeed have something to do with attaining a high rank, it 
> turns out to have virtually nothing to do with maintaining it. Dominant 
> males rarely are particularly aggressive, and those that are typically are 
> on their way out: the ones that need to use it are often about to lose it. 
> Instead, maintaining dominance requires social intelligence and impulse 
> control -- the ability to form prudent coalitions, show some tolerance of 
> subordinates, and ignore most provocations.
>
>  Recent work, moreover, has demonstrated that females have something to 
> say about which males get to pass on their genes. The traditional view was 
> based on a "linear access" model of reproduction: if one female is in 
> heat, the alpha male gets to mate with her; if two are in heat, the alpha 
> male and the second-ranking male get their opportunity; and so on. Yet we 
> now know that female baboons are pretty good at getting away from even 
> champions of male-male competition if they want to and can sneak off 
> instead with another male they actually desire. And who would that be? 
> Typically, it is a male that has followed a different strategy of building 
> affiliative relations with the female -- grooming her a lot, helping to 
> take care of her kids, not beating her up. These nice-guy males seem to 
> pass on at least as many copies of their genes as their more aggressive 
> peers, not least because they can go like this for years, without the 
> life-shortening burnout and injuries of the gladiators.
>
>  And so the crude picture of combat as the sole path to evolutionary 
> success is wrong. The average male baboon does opt for the combative 
> route, but there are important phases of his life when aggression is less 
> important than social intelligence and restraint, and there are 
> evolutionarily fruitful alternative courses of action.
>
>  Even within the bare-knuckle world of male-male aggression, we are now 
> recognizing some surprising outposts of primate civility. For one thing, 
> primates can make up after a fight. Such reconciliation was first 
> described by Frans de Waal, of Emory University, in the early 1980s; it 
> has now been observed in some 27 different species of primates, including 
> male chimps, and it works as it is supposed to, reducing the odds of 
> further aggression between the two ex-combatants. And various primates, 
> including male baboons, will sometimes cooperate, for example by 
> supporting one another in a fight. Coalitions can involve reciprocity and 
> even induce what appears to be a sense of justice or fairness. In a 
> remarkable study by de Waal and one of his students, capuchin monkeys were 
> housed in adjacent cages. A monkey could obtain food on its own (by 
> pulling a tray of food toward its cage) or with help from a neighbor (by 
> pulling a heavier tray together); in the latter case, only one of the 
> monkeys was given access to the food in question. The monkeys that 
> collaborated proved more likely to share it with their neighbor.
>
>  Even more striking are lifelong patterns of cooperation among some male 
> chimps, such as those that form bands of brothers. Among certain primate 
> species, all the members of one gender will leave their home troop around 
> puberty, thus avoiding the possibility of genetically deleterious 
> inbreeding. Among chimps, the females leave home, and as a result, male 
> chimps typically spend their lives in the company of close male relatives. 
> Animal behaviorists steeped in game theory spend careers trying to figure 
> out how reciprocal cooperation gets started among nonrelatives, but it is 
> clear that stable reciprocity among relatives emerges readily.
>
>  Thus, even the violent primates engage in reconciliation and 
> cooperation -- but only up to a point. For starters, as noted in regard to 
> the bonobo, there would be nothing to reconcile without violence and 
> conflict in the first place. Furthermore, reconciliation is not universal: 
> female savanna baboons are good at it, for example, but males are not. 
> Most important, even among species and genders that do reconcile, it is 
> not an indiscriminate phenomenon: individuals are more likely to reconcile 
> with those who can be useful to them. This was demonstrated in a brilliant 
> study by Marina Cords, of Columbia University, in which the value of some 
> relationships among a type of macaque monkey was artificially raised. 
> Animals were again caged next to each other under conditions in which they 
> could obtain food by themselves or through cooperation, and those pairs 
> that developed the capacity for cooperation were three times as likely to 
> reconcile after induced aggression as noncooperators. Tension-reducing 
> reconciliation, in other words, is most likely to occur among animals who 
> already are in the habit of cooperating and have an incentive to keep 
> doing so.
>
>  Some deflating points emerge from the studies of cooperation as well, 
> such as the fact that coalitions are notoriously unstable. In one troop of 
> baboons I studied in the early 1980s, male-male coalitions lasted less 
> than two days on average before collapsing, and most cases of such 
> collapse involved one partner failing to reciprocate or, even more 
> dramatically, defecting to the other side during a fight. finally, and 
> most discouraging, is the use to which most coalitions are put. In theory, 
> cooperation could trump individualism in order to, say, improve food 
> gathering or defend against predators. In practice, two baboons that 
> cooperate typically do so in order to make a third miserable.
>
>  Goodall was the first to report the profoundly disquieting fact that 
> bands of related male chimps carry out cooperative "border patrols" -- 
> searching along the geographic boundary separating their group from 
> another and attacking neighboring males they encounter, even to the point 
> of killing other groups off entirely. In-group cooperation can thus usher 
> in not peace and tranquility, but rather more efficient extermination.
>
>  So primate species with some of the most aggressive and stratified social 
> systems have been seen to cooperate and resolve conflicts -- 
> but not consistently, not necessarily for benign purposes, and not in a 
> cumulative way that could lead to some fundamentally non-Hobbesian social 
> outcomes. The lesson appears to be not that violent primates can transcend 
> their natures, but merely that the natures of these species are subtler 
> and more multifaceted than previously thought. At least that was the 
> lesson until quite recently.
>
>  OLD PRIMATES AND NEW TRICKS
>
>  To some extent, the age-old "nature versus nurture" debate is silly. The 
> action of genes is completely intertwined with the environment in which 
> they function; in a sense, it is pointless to even discuss what gene X 
> does, and we should consider instead only what gene X does in environment 
> Y. Nonetheless, if one had to predict the behavior of some organism on the 
> basis of only one fact, one might still want to know whether the most 
> useful fact would be about genetics or about the environment.
>
>  The first two studies to show that primates were somewhat independent 
> from their "natures" involved a classic technique in behavioral genetics 
> called cross-fostering. Suppose some animal has engaged in a particular 
> behavior for generations -- call it behavior A. We want to know if that 
> behavior is due to shared genes or to a multigenerationally shared 
> environment. Researchers try to answer the question by cross-fostering the 
> animal, that is, switching the animal's mother at birth so that she is 
> raised by one with behavior B, and then watching to see which behavior the 
> animal displays when she grows up. One problem with this approach is that 
> an animal's environment does not begin at birth -- a fetus shares a very 
> intimate environment with its mother, namely the body's circulation, 
> chock-full of hormones and nutrients that can cause lifelong changes in 
> brain function and behavior. Therefore, the approach can be applied only 
> asymmetrically: if a behavior persists in a new environment, one cannot 
> conclude that genes are the cause, but if a behavior changes in a new 
> environment, then one can conclude that genes are not the cause. This is 
> where the two studies come in.
>
>  In the early 1970s, a highly respected primatologist named Hans Kummer 
> was working in Ethiopia, in a region containing two species of baboons 
> with markedly different social systems. Savanna baboons live in large 
> troops, with plenty of adult females and males. Hamadryas baboons, in 
> contrast, have a more complex, multilevel society. Because they live in a 
> much harsher, drier region, hamadryas have a distinctive ecological 
> problem. Some resources are singular and scarce -- like a rare watering 
> hole or a good cliff face to sleep on at night in order to evade 
> predators -- and large numbers of animals are likely to want to share 
> them. Other resources, such as the vegetation they eat, are sparse and 
> widely dispersed, requiring animals to function in small, separate groups. 
> As a result, hamadryas have evolved a "harem" structure -- a single adult 
> male surrounded by a handful of adult females and their children -- with 
> large numbers of discrete harems converging, peacefully, for short periods 
> at the occasional desirable watering hole or cliff face.
>
>  Kummer conducted a simple experiment, trapping an adult female savanna 
> baboon and releasing her into a hamadryas troop and trapping an adult 
> female hamadryas and releasing her into a savanna troop. Among hamadryas, 
> if a male threatens a female, it is almost certainly this brute who 
> dominates the harem, and the only way for the female to avoid injury is to 
> approach him -- 
> i.e., return to the fold. But among savanna baboons, if a male threatens a 
> female, the way for her to avoid injury is to run away. In Kummer's 
> experiment, the females who were dropped in among a different species 
> initially carried out their species-typical behavior, a major faux pas in 
> the new neighborhood. But gradually, they assimilated the new rules. How 
> long did this learning take? About an hour. In other words, millennia of 
> genetic differences separating the two species, a lifetime of experience 
> with a crucial social rule for each female, and a miniscule amount of time 
> to reverse course completely.
>
>  The second experiment was set up by de Waal and his student Denise 
> Johanowicz in the early 1990s, working with two macaque monkey species. By 
> any human standards, male rhesus macaques are unappealing animals. Their 
> hierarchies are rigid, those at the top seize a disproportionate share of 
> the spoils, they enforce this inequity with ferocious aggression, and they 
> rarely reconcile after fights. Male stump tail macaques, in contrast, 
> which share almost all of their genes with their rhesus macaque cousins, 
> display much less aggression, more affiliative behaviors, looser 
> hierarchies, and more egalitarianism.
>
>  Working with captive primates, de Waal and Johanowicz created a mixed-sex 
> social group of juvenile macaques, combining rhesus and stump tails 
> together. Remarkably, instead of the rhesus macaques bullying the stump 
> tails, over the course of a few months, the rhesus males adopted the stump 
> tails' social style, eventually even matching the stump tails' high rates 
> of reconciliatory behavior. It so happens, moreover, that stump tails and 
> rhesus macaques use different gestures when reconciling. The rhesus 
> macaques in the study did not start using the stump tails' reconciliatory 
> gestures, but rather increased the incidence of their own species-typical 
> gestures. In other words, they were not merely imitating the stump tails' 
> behavior; they were incorporating the concept of frequent reconciliation 
> into their own social practices. When the newly warm-and-fuzzy rhesus 
> macaques were returned to a larger, all-rhesus group, finally, their new 
> behavioral style persisted.
>
>  This is nothing short of extraordinary. But it brings up one last 
> question: When those rhesus macaques were transferred back into the 
> all-rhesus world, did they spread their insights and behaviors to the 
> others? Alas, they did not. For that, we need to move on to our final 
> case.
>
>  LEFT BEHIND
>
>  In the early 1980s, "Forest Troop," a group of savanna baboons I had been 
> studying -- virtually living with -- for years, was going about its 
> business in a national park in Kenya when a neighboring baboon group had a 
> stroke of luck: its territory encompassed a tourist lodge that expanded 
> its operations and consequently the amount of food tossed into its garbage 
> dump. Baboons are omnivorous, and "Garbage Dump Troop" was delighted to 
> feast on leftover drumsticks, half-eaten hamburgers, remnants of chocolate 
> cake, and anything else that wound up there. Soon they had shifted to 
> sleeping in the trees immediately above the pit, descending each morning 
> just in time for the day's dumping of garbage. (They soon got quite obese 
> from the rich diet and lack of exercise, but that is another story.)
>
>  The development produced nearly as dramatic a shift in the social 
> behavior of Forest Troop. Each morning, approximately half of its adult 
> males would infiltrate Garbage Dump Troop's territory, descending on the 
> pit in time for the day's dumping and battling the resident males for 
> access to the garbage. The Forest Troop males that did this shared two 
> traits: they were particularly combative (which was necessary to get the 
> food away from the other baboons), and they were not very interested in 
> socializing (the raids took place early in the morning, during the hours 
> when the bulk of a savanna baboon's daily communal grooming occurs).
>
>  Soon afterward, tuberculosis, a disease that moves with devastating speed 
> and severity in nonhuman primates, broke out in Garbage Dump Troop. Over 
> the next year, most of its members died, as did all of the males from 
> Forest Troop who had foraged at the dump.[See Footnote #1] The results 
> were that Forest Troop was left with males who were less aggressive and 
> more social than average and the troop now had double its previous 
> female-to-male ratio.
>
>  The social consequences of these changes were dramatic. There remained a 
> hierarchy among the Forest Troop males, but it was far looser than before: 
> compared with other, more typical savanna baboon groups, high-ranking 
> males rarely harassed subordinates and occasionally even relinquished 
> contested resources to them. Aggression was less frequent, particularly 
> against third parties. And rates of affiliative behaviors, such as males 
> and females grooming each other or sitting together, soared. There were 
> even instances, now and then, of adult males grooming each other -- a 
> behavior nearly as unprecedented as baboons sprouting wings.
>
>  This unique social milieu did not arise merely as a function of the 
> skewed sex ratio; other primatologists have occasionally reported on 
> troops with similar ratios but without a comparable social atmosphere. 
> What was key was not just the predominance of females, but the type of 
> male that remained. The demographic disaster -- what evolutionary 
> biologists term a "selective bottleneck" -- had produced a savanna baboon 
> troop quite different from what most experts would have anticipated.
>
>  But the largest surprise did not come until some years later. Female 
> savanna baboons spend their lives in the troop into which they are born, 
> whereas males leave their birth troop around puberty; a troop's adult 
> males have thus all grown up elsewhere and immigrated as adolescents. By 
> the early 1990s, none of the original low aggression/high affiliation 
> males of Forest Troop's tuberculosis period was still alive; all of the 
> group's adult males had joined after the epidemic. Despite this, the 
> troop's unique social milieu persisted -- as it does to this day, some 20 
> years after the selective bottleneck.In other words, adolescent males that 
> enter Forest Troop after having grown up elsewhere wind up adopting the 
> unique behavioral style of the resident males. As defined by both 
> anthropologists and animal behaviorists, "culture" consists of local 
> behavioral variations, occurring for nongenetic and nonecological reasons, 
> that last beyond the time of their originators. Forest Troop's low 
> aggression/high affiliation society constitutes nothing less than a 
> multigenerational benign culture.
>
>  Continuous study of the troop has yielded some insights into how its 
> culture is transmitted to newcomers. Genetics obviously plays no role, nor 
> apparently does self-selection: adolescent males that transfer into the 
> troop are no different from those that transfer into other troops, 
> displaying on arrival similarly high rates of aggression and low rates of 
> affiliation. Nor is there evidence that new males are taught to act in 
> benign ways by the residents. One cannot rule out the possibility that 
> some observational learning is occurring, but it is difficult to detect 
> given that the distinctive feature of this culture is not the performance 
> of a unique behavior but the performance of typical behaviors at 
> atypically extreme rates.
>
>  To date, the most interesting hint about the mechanism of transmission is 
> the way recently transferred males are treated by Forest Troop's resident 
> females. In a typical savanna baboon troop, newly transferred adolescent 
> males spend years slowly working their way into the social fabric; they 
> are extremely low ranking -- ignored by females and noted by adult males 
> only as convenient targets for aggression. In Forest Troop, by contrast, 
> new male transfers are inundated with female attention soon after their 
> arrival. Resident females first present themselves sexually to new males 
> an average of 18 days after the males arrive, and they first groom the new 
> males an average of 20 days after they arrive (normal savanna baboons 
> introduce such behaviors after 63 and 78 days, respectively). Furthermore, 
> these welcoming gestures occur more frequently in Forest Troop during the 
> early post-transfer period, and there is four times as much grooming of 
> males by females in Forest Troop as elsewhere. From almost the moment they 
> arrive, in other words, new males find out that in Forest Troop, things 
> are done differently.
>
>  At present, I think the most plausible explanation is that this troop's 
> special culture is not passed on actively but simply emerges, facilitated 
> by the actions of the resident members. Living in a group with half the 
> typical number of males, and with the males being nice guys to boot, 
> Forest Troop's females become more relaxed and less wary. As a result, 
> they are more willing to take a chance and reach out socially to new 
> arrivals, even if the new guys are typical jerky adolescents at first. The 
> new males, in turn, finding themselves treated so well, eventually relax 
> and adopt the behaviors of the troop's distinctive social milieu.
>
>  NATURAL BORN KILLERS?
>
>  Are there any lessons to be learned here that can be applied to 
> human-on-human violence -- 
> apart, that is, from the possible desirability of giving fatal cases of 
> tuberculosis to aggressive people?
>
>  Any biological anthropologist opining about human behavior is required by 
> long-established tradition to note that for 99 percent of human history, 
> humans lived in small, stable bands of related hunter-gatherers. Game 
> theorists have shown that a small, cohesive group is the perfect setting 
> for the emergence of cooperation: the identities of the other participants 
> are known, there are opportunities for multiple iterations of games (and 
> thus the ability to punish cheaters), and there is open-book play (players 
> can acquire reputations). And so, those hunter-gatherer bands were highly 
> egalitarian. Empirical and experimental data have also shown the 
> cooperative advantages of small groups at the opposite human extreme, 
> namely in the corporate world.
>
>  But the lack of violence within small groups can come at a heavy price. 
> Small homogenous groups with shared values can be a nightmare of 
> conformity. They can also be dangerous for outsiders. Unconsciously 
> emulating the murderous border patrols of closely related male chimps, 
> militaries throughout history have sought to form small, stable units; 
> inculcate them with rituals of pseudokinship; and thereby produce 
> efficient, cooperative killing machines.
>
>  Is it possible to achieve the cooperative advantages of a small group 
> without having the group reflexively view outsiders as the Other? One way 
> is through trade. Voluntary economic exchanges not only produce profits; 
> they can also reduce social friction -- as the macaques demonstrated by 
> being more likely to reconcile with a valued partner in food acquisition.
>
>  Another way is through a fission-fusion social structure, in which the 
> boundaries between groups are not absolute and impermeable. The model here 
> is not the multilevel society of the hamadryas baboons, both because their 
> basic social unit of the harem is despotic and because their fusion 
> consists of nothing more than lots of animals occasionally coming together 
> to utilize a resource peacefully. Human hunter-gatherers are a better 
> example to follow, in that their small bands often merge, split, or 
> exchange members for a while, with such fluidity helping to solve not only 
> environmental resource problems but social problems as well. The result is 
> that instead of the all-or-nothing world of male chimps, in which there is 
> only one's own group and the enemy, hunter-gatherers can enjoy gradations 
> of familiarity and cooperation stretching over large areas.
>
>  The interactions among hunter-gatherers resemble those of other networks, 
> where there are individual nodes (in this case, small groups) and where 
> the majority of interactions between the nodes are local ones, with the 
> frequency of interactions dropping off as a function of distance. 
> Mathematicians have shown that when the ratios among short-, middle-, and 
> long-distance interactions are optimal, networks are robust: they are 
> dominated by highly cooperative clusters of local interactions, but they 
> also retain the potential for less frequent, long-distance communication 
> and coordination.
>
>  Optimizing the fission-fusion interactions of hunter-gatherer networks is 
> easy: cooperate within the band; schedule frequent joint hunts with the 
> next band over; have occasional hunts with bands somewhat farther out; 
> have a legend of a single shared hunt with a mythic band at the end of the 
> earth. Optimizing the fission-fusion interactions in contemporary human 
> networks is vastly harder, but the principles are the same.
>
>  In exploring these subjects, one often encounters a pessimism built 
> around the notion that humans, as primates, are hard-wired for xenophobia. 
> Some brain-imaging studies have appeared to support this view in a 
> particularly discouraging way. There is a structure deep inside the brain 
> called the amygdala, which plays a key role in fear and aggression, and 
> experiments have shown that when subjects are presented with a face of 
> someone from a different race, the amygdala gets metabolically active -- 
> aroused, alert, ready for action. This happens even when the face is 
> presented "subliminally," which is to say, so rapidly that the subject 
> does not consciously see it.
>
>  More recent studies, however, should mitigate this pessimism. Test a 
> person who has a lot of experience with people of different races, and the 
> amygdala does not activate. Or, as in a wonderful experiment by Susan 
> Fiske, of Princeton University, subtly bias the subject beforehand to 
> think of people as individuals rather than as members of a group, and the 
> amygdala does not budge. Humans may be hard-wired to get edgy around the 
> Other, but our views on who falls into that category are decidedly 
> malleable.
>
>  In the early 1960s, a rising star of primatology, Irven DeVore, of 
> Harvard University, published the first general overview of the subject. 
> Discussing his own specialty, savanna baboons, he wrote that they "have 
> acquired an aggressive temperament as a defense against predators, and 
> aggressiveness cannot be turned on and off like a faucet. It is an 
> integral part of the monkeys' personalities, so deeply rooted that it 
> makes them potential aggressors in every situation." Thus the savanna 
> baboon became, literally, a textbook example of life in an aggressive, 
> highly stratified, male-dominated society. Yet within a few years, members 
> of the species demonstrated enough behavioral plasticity to transform a 
> society of theirs into a baboon utopia.
>
>  The first half of the twentieth century was drenched in the blood spilled 
> by German and Japanese aggression, yet only a few decades later it is hard 
> to think of two countries more pacific. Sweden spent the seventeenth 
> century rampaging through Europe, yet it is now an icon of nurturing 
> tranquility. Humans have invented the small nomadic band and the 
> continental megastate, and have demonstrated a flexibility whereby 
> uprooted descendants of the former can function effectively in the latter. 
> We lack the type of physiology or anatomy that in other mammals determine 
> their mating system, and have come up with societies based on monogamy, 
> polygyny, and polyandry. And we have fashioned some religions in which 
> violent acts are the entrÈe to paradise and other religions in which the 
> same acts consign one to hell. Is a world of peacefully coexisting human 
> Forest Troops possible? Anyone who says, "No, it is beyond our nature," 
> knows too little about primates, including ourselves.
>
>  [Footnote #1] Considerable sleuthing ultimately revealed that the disease 
> had come from tainted meat in the garbage dump, which had been sold to the 
> tourist lodge thanks to a corrupt meat inspector. The studies were the 
> first of this kind of outbreak in a wild primate population and showed 
> that, in contrast to what happens with humans and captive primates, there 
> was little animal-to-animal transmission of the tuberculosis, and so the 
> disease did not spread in Forest Troop beyond the garbage eaters.
>
> www.foreignaffairs.org is copyright 2002--2005 by the Council on Foreign 
> Relations. All rights reserved.
> -- 
>
> ________________________________
>
> Tom Atlee * The Co-Intelligence Institute * PO Box 493 * Eugene, OR 97440
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