Lessons in Altruism from Geneticists and Baboons

Radiolab, WNYC’s Friday afternoon radio program, which blurs the boundaries between science, philosophy, and the human experience, asked a very important question earlier this month: Will humankind ever change?

In three segments, co-hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, along with some profound guests, searched for an answer. Two narratives grabbed my attention: How a troupe of innately violent baboons lost their aggressive nature and how a Darwinian geneticist selectively bred out the hostility from a contained group of silver foxes.

Before tracing the studies of primates and canines, the duo interviewed science writer John Horgan. Horgan conducted a street survey, asking Hoboken residents, “Will humans ever stop fighting wars?” The answer seemed universal: No. The reason: Human nature. Most felt that violence was ingrained in our DNA.

But then Radiolab introduced Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist and primatologist at Stanford University, who, as a young graduate student doing fieldwork in Kenya, studied his first of many baboon troupes. Sapolsky considers baboons to be “the textbook example of a highly aggressive male-dominated hierarchal society.”

The troupe he began observing exhibited typical baboonish aggression. But the troupe’s behavior changed once tourism came to their region. The tourist lodge started dumping its half-eaten food and assorted trash in the backyard of these primates. The animals no longer foraged, but feasted on the delicacies in the dump. Years later, however, the baboons had caught tuberculosis from some infected meat they ate from the trash heap. TB has disastrous effects in non-human primates. It wipes them out rapidly. First the baboons watched their hands rot away, and eventually the alpha males were dead.

With most of the alpha males gone, strange things happened to Sapolsky’s troupe. In contrast to baboon culture, the remaining males changed: they began reciprocating when females groomed them and even weirder, males groomed males. Sapolsky said, “if you were a baboonologist it would have been less shocking if these guys had wings or were photosynthetic.” Sapolsky, however, troubled by the TB horrors and the loss of half the study’s subjects, left the peaceful troupe. He would return six years later.

What Sapolsky noticed upon his return was that only one male from the original troupe remained, which meant that all the other males in the troupe had come from the outside world. When young baboon males near puberty they leave their troupe and search for a new one. Consequently, they bring with them their violent culture. Usually, the experience of joining a new troupe requires such brutality. It’s comparable to fraternity hazing. The rushee is attacked by the males and ignored by the females. The only way in is to fight. Sapolsky imagined that these new entrants seeking acceptance, would follow their innate proclivity toward violence, which in turn would destroy the tranquility of this troupe; but these new arrivals did not. They adopted the group’s nonviolence.

They unlearned their “innate” aggression. Without alpha males launching attacks on the incoming young males, the baboon sisterhood accepted these new arrivals and groomed them in six days as opposed to waiting three months, common to troupes beleaguered by alpha males. What was key to keeping the peace was early female intervention. They got to the pre-pubescent males before these young outsiders could reinstitute traditions of violence.

The other Radiolab segment flashed back to 1959, when Russian geneticist Demetri K. Belyaev took the Trans-Siberian Railroad from state-controlled Moscow to the opposite side of the continent. Belyaev started a fake fox farm in the guise of raising the creatures for fur. But Belyaev’s actual plan was to test ways to eliminate the silver fox’s evil gene.

For over forty years, Belyaev, his team, and successors selected 5 percent of the most “tamable” of some 45,000 foxes over thirty-five successive generations. Scientists would approach the fox cage and if the creature cowered in the corner, shrieking like a banshee, then the animal would be turned into a coat, while the more approachable foxes-the tame ones-would be bred.

The Darwinian geneticist, in his god-like role, by breeding nice foxes and killing off evil ones, was effectually speeding up the long and complex evolutionary process of domestication, which should have taken thousands of years. He transformed the once malignant hen-house hunter that had no qualms about attacking a human, into a tail-wagging, face-licking version of man’s best friend in only ten years. Not only did the animals become domesticated, but their physical traits morphed as well, from facial structure to tail rigidity. Cell migration during embryonic development slowed too, most notably it decelerated the development of the adrenal glands. These glands signal to the animal when to be afraid. In essence, Belyaev bred out fear, keeping these foxes forever in their juvenility.

According to a guest primatologist on the program, Richard Wrangham, humans have also undergone this domestication: Our teeth have been shrinking and are bones have narrowed over the last tens of thousands of years. But with our society inundated with war and violence, we have a ways to go before we’re puppy-like.

I’m sure these segment descriptions made some of you squirm as you considered the grimmest solutions. Even host Jad Abumrad jokingly asked, “We should just kill the football players?” But mass murdering our population and poisoning our alpha males is not where I’m going.

It’s not about killing our population; it’s about killing our culture. We are a culture that foments xenophobic “patriotism” (thanks in large part to mainstream media). Our borders are packed with self-proclaimed alpha males armed and ready for Mexicans. We are a culture that breeds violence. Look at cities like Chicago. The New York Times reported that since the 2007-2008 school year, 67 young Chicagoans have died in violent attacks, while hundreds of other school children in the city have survived gunshots and beatings.

Change is necessary. Chicago Public Schools are implementing a $60 million plan to help predict characteristics of future victims. They want to inundate these students with adult attention, paid jobs, and 24-hour phone support. Although this may protect the most vulnerable, it fails to address the bigger issue-the criminals are still out there, they will just change their targets.

First, we need to refocus the objectives of law enforcement and pull them away from policing lesser crimes and direct their efforts toward the dangerous offenders. We also need to relieve our prison systems of petty wrongdoers. Although this is a bit oversimplified, we can only begin the process if we clean up our neighborhoods first. (Incarceration is not the only means. Funding community programs and using police officers to discourage criminal behavior are some of the many possibilities). We need to emulate those female baboons and get to the pre-pubescent youngsters early on; otherwise we’ll be raising another generation living by the old world order.

According to the research of psychologist and co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Michael Tomasello, children are inherently altruistic, but as they grow up, they tend to shift away from these feelings of empathy. Therefore, a need for reinforcement exists. The best way to achieve this is through education. Schools should offer mandatory classes on empathy and altruism.

Over the past few years, Long Island, which consists of Nassau and Suffolk Counties, has seen an increase in hate-crimes. In Nassau County there were a number of hangman’s nooses found in government facilities in 2007, while Suffolk County has experienced a dangerous rise in hate-crimes, sadly underlined by the murder of Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero back in November, 2008. The increase in violence against immigrants in this region even prompted a six-page Southern Poverty Law Center report.

As a result of these incidents, Long Island is taking measures to educate their youth. Newsday reported that schoolchildren across Nassau County will watch a video called “Hate-Crossing the Line.” The 12-minute video can be supplemented with a suggested curriculum to help educate students about hate. This curriculum, albeit voluntary, is a small step forward. Suffolk County is also distributing anti-hate videos and has sent hate-crimes units to middle and high schools for presentations.

However, anti-hate education needs to be consistent and permanent; it cannot be instituted solely as a public relations effort. Educators seeking material have access to a wide variety of resources on the Internet. Additionally, Southern Poverty Law Center distributes anti-bias media kits and a magazine titled Teaching Tolerance, which promotes diversity and equity in replicable ways.

During the trial to bring those accused of murdering Marcelo Lucero to justice, Rosario Lucero, the victim’s mother, was face to face with the teens charged in the death of her son. “They’re so young-they’re babies,” Newsday reported Ms. Lucero saying in Spanish. “The parents of these children must be feeling a sense of loss, too,” she added, empathizing with the mothers and fathers of those responsible for her son’s death, “seeing their children in these circumstances.”

Rosario Lucero’s words echo what we as a society have failed to see. Children need guidance. They need to be taught empathy and be exposed to the importance of humanity. Like Belyaev and his silver foxes, we need to breed the hate out of our children’s culture.

Photo by Chadica