Time Magazine 7/3/05: Honor Among Beasts

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TIME MAGAZINE

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1079521,00.html

 

Sunday, Jul. 03, 2005

Honor Among Beasts

Think altruism, empathy and a sense of fair play are traits only

humans possess? Think again

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

 

Anyone who has owned dogs or spent much time watching them is

familiar with the posture: hind end up, chest down on the ground,

forelegs stretched forward, an eager expression on the face. It's

obviously a friendly, playful gesture, and for most dog lovers,

that's all you need to know. Ethologists--animal-behavior experts--go

a step further. They call this move the " play bow " and know it's used

not just by dogs but also by wolves and coyotes to signal an interest

in the romping, pretend-fighting sort of games that canines of all

kinds seem to love.

 

But Marc Bekoff, an ethologist at the University of Colorado, always

suspected there was something more going on. True, the posture

happens most often at the beginning of a bout of canine play. But it

also happens in the middle, and not randomly. And the more closely

Bekoff observed dog behavior, the more he began to recognize other

ritualized motions and postures--some of them so fleeting that he

couldn't really keep track. So he began making videotapes, then

playing them back one frame at a time. " The more details I saw, the

more interesting it got, " he recalls. " It wasn't just dogs playing;

it was also dogs exchanging an incredible amount of information as

they played. "

 

In short, Bekoff was able to show--after at least a decade of

painstaking observation and analysis--that canine play is actually a

complex social interaction in which the participants constantly

signal their intentions and check to make sure their behavior is

correctly interpreted. Dogs that cheat--promising a playful bite but

delivering a harsh one, for example--tend to be ostracized.

 

That understanding is nothing short of revolutionary. Only a decade

or so ago, scientists were arguing vigorously over whether animals

had emotions: just because a dog looks sad or a chimp appears to be

embarrassed doesn't mean it really is, the skeptics said. That

argument is pretty much over. The idea of animal emotion is now

accepted as part of mainstream biology. And thanks to Bekoff and

other researchers, ethologists are also starting to accept the once

radical idea that some animals--primarily the social ones such as

dogs, chimps, hyenas, monkeys, dolphins, birds and even rats--possess

not just raw emotions but also subtler and more sophisticated mental

states, including envy, empathy, altruism and a sense of fairness.

" They have the ingredients we use for morality, " says Frans de Waal,

a professor of primate behavior at Emory University in Atlanta,

referring to the monkeys and chimps he studies.

 

That doesn't mean animals necessarily have a fully developed moral or

ethical sense. " I don't say dogs are fair the way you and I are fair,

or have the same moral systems, " says Bekoff. But it does mean that--

just as with so many other attributes once considered unique to

humans, including toolmaking and language--animals have at least

rudimentary versions of what we call morality. That would conform to

Darwin's ideas of evolution, and indeed, Darwin himself was convinced

this must be true. " It would be bad evolutionary biology, " says

Bekoff, " to assume that moral behavior just pops on the scene only

with us. "

 

Study after study bears him out. In one of De Waal's experiments at

Atlanta's Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, for example, pairs

of capuchin monkeys (the species favored by organ grinders) have to

cooperate in dragging a heavy tray so they can get the food on it.

They quickly figure out how to do so, sharing the effort and the

food. But when the food is placed on one side of the tray, giving

only one monkey access to it, they still share. " There is no need for

the one who gets all the food to do it, " says De Waal. " He could sit

in the corner and eat all by himself. "

 

In another experiment, De Waal and his students reward two monkeys

for a task by giving them cucumber. It's not a favorite food, but

they happily go on doing the task anyway. Then the scientists begin

giving one of the monkeys grapes--like caviar for a capuchin. At that

point, the monkey that is still getting cucumber refuses to play.

Says De Waal: " It's like me discovering my colleague, who works just

as hard as I do, gets a salary that is twice the size of mine. I was

perfectly happy before. "

 

Both those results can be explained in part by self-interest. But De

Waal has also observed behavior that can be seen only as empathetic.

When a male loses a fight and sits on the floor screaming, the other

chimps will comfort it. " They come over to these distressed

individuals and embrace them and kiss them and groom them, and try to

calm them down, " De Waal says. True, there's an implied benefit for

the comforters--the hope that others will do the same for them if

they end up in that situation--but that's a level of emotional

abstraction that would once have been presumed impossible.

 

At TerraMar Research on Bainbridge Island, Wash., animal behaviorist

Toni Frohoff has also observed dolphins behaving with what appears to

be altruism--although not predictably. In one case, she recalls, she

and her colleagues watched a group of dolphins assemble around a

female swimmer the researchers later learned was exhausted to the

point at which she was afraid for her life. " Conversely, " Frohoff

says, " I have been 'abandoned' [by dolphins], where all of a sudden

they'd disappear and I'd see a shark. "

 

Does that mean the supposed altruism of dolphins--not just in

Frohoff's studies but also in anecdotal reports of the animals'

rescuing sailors--is a myth? No, she says: " The mythology in some

cases is true. " But dolphins have adapted so long in such a different

environment to humans that there's reason to suppose that their

ethics might be equally different to ours.

 

Dolphins, dogs and primates are the usual suspects when scientists

talk about higher mental functions, but fairness, at least, extends

even deeper into the lower animal kingdom. If you watch rats wrestle,

says Steven Sivy, a biologist at Gettysburg College, you'll see that

the bigger rat lets the smaller rat win every now and then so that

the smaller rat will keep playing. That, he says, could be

interpreted as a sense of fair play, although he emphasizes that a

rat's behavior is probably Darwinian--based not on thoughtful

consideration but on what has worked in the past to keep species

alive. " I can't see a rat sitting around and contemplating the

ethical consequences of what it's doing, " he says.

 

At Bowling Green State University in Kentucky, psychologist Jaak

Panskepp is similarly leery of using words like morality and ethics

to describe animal behavior. He is sure that rats and other animals

do experience joy, sadness, anger and fear--because the wiring of the

brain is set up to generate those feelings. (Actually, Panskepp

discovered a few years ago that rats chirp in laughter, albeit in

response to tickling, and in a register too high for the human ear to

detect.) Nobody has yet found the neurocircuits for ethics or

morality, however, so Panskepp is reluctant to comment about those

qualities. But he does accept that some animals have strict rules of

behavior. " Cockroaches probably don't have a sense of justice, " says

Panskepp. But dogs and rats, which are social animals, clearly do.

 

So do birds, says Dan Blumstein, a former student of Bekoff's, now

studying animal behavior at UCLA. While he hasn't addressed the

question through formal research, Blumstein has seen hints of

behavioral rules in songbirds. A given species tends to have similar

songs but with local " dialects " that vary from one territory to

another. If a bird sings with a nonlocal accent, he says, " everybody

knows: 'Oh, my God, there's an invader.' Then they get upset and kick

it out. " The question, Blumstein says, is whether that's a sign of

ethics or just instinct.

 

While some behaviors are obviously instinctive, Bekoff is convinced

that others are not. " If you study animals in the complex social

environments in which they live, " he says, " it's impossible for

everything they do to be hardwired, with no conscious thought. It

really is. " And once again, he cites play as perhaps the most obvious

example. Play between dogs involves extremely complex, precise

behavior, he says. " They're really close, they're mouthing, but they

don't bite their own lips; they almost never bite the lip of the

other animal hard, nor the eyes, nor the ears. " And that requires

communication and constant feedback. " Just think of basketball

players faking left and going right, " says Bekoff. " There's no way

you could be doing that by pure instinct. "

 

As for the play bow, his guess that it meant more than just " Let's

play " turned out to be correct. " It says, 'I want to play with you'

but also 'I'm sorry I bit you so hard' or 'I'm going to bite you

hard, but don't take it seriously.' " It even works between species:

Bekoff has seen wild coyotes bow to dogs--and vice versa--before they

engage in something like play. " At least they don't fight, " says

Bekoff. " The play bow changes the whole mood. "

 

Meanwhile, dishonesty is punished across all canid species. " I know

coyotes best, " says Bekoff. " Coyotes will signal play and then try to

fight or mate with others, but if they do that enough, they can't get

other animals to play. " Does that behavior rise to the level of

ethics or morality? If morality is simply living by the rules of a

society, says hyena expert Christine Drea of Duke University, then

yes, animals do that. But just because animals have rules and bad

things can happen when those aren't followed, she says, " doesn't mean

they're ethical creatures. "

 

But while animals may not possess true ethics or morality, Bekoff, De

Waal and a growing number of their colleagues think fairness and

cooperation may be the forerunners of those qualities, just as the

apelike brain of our distant ancestor Lucy was the forerunner of our

own, much more sophisticated minds. After all, Lucy was no

Einstein-but without her, the leap from the tiny brains of primitive

mammals to the subtle intelligence of an Einstein could never have

occurred. --Reported by Dan Cray/Los Angeles and Wendy

Grossman/Houston

 

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