Empathy for one's fellow chimp

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Empathy for one's fellow chimp
Experts now think the apes may relate to each other in very human ways
By Jeremy Manier
Chicago Tribune staff reporter
March 23, 2007

If chimpanzees truly followed what humans call "the law of the jungle," a mentally disabled chimp named Knuckles would never stand a chance.

Yet Knuckles has found acceptance and perhaps even sympathy from his fellow chimps in Florida, making him an unlikely star of Lincoln Park Zoo's international Mind of the Chimpanzee conference.

The meeting, which runs Friday through Sunday with 300 researchers from around the world, is billed as the first major conference devoted to chimp cognition and the first academic chimp conference at the zoo since 1991.

Although much of the meeting will examine the impressive intelligence of humanity's closest living relatives, Knuckles offers unique insight as the only known captive chimp with cerebral palsy, which immobilized one arm and left him mentally unable to follow the intricate protocols of chimp society.

Normally, older chimps would put on intimidating displays with a juvenile male such as Knuckles, screaming, grabbing and biting the youngster to put him in his place, said Devyn Carter, who has studied Knuckles and is presenting his research at the Lincoln Park Zoo conference. But even the dominant alpha male tolerates and gently grooms Knuckles.

"To my knowledge he's never received a scratch," said Carter, a research assistant at Emory University's Yerkes National Primate Research Center. "They seem to sense somehow that he's different."

Such behavior touches on a central theme of many presentations at the conference: How well do chimps understand what other chimps know, feel and perceive?

Some experts believe chimps and other higher primates have genuine empathy, the ability to imagine themselves in another animal's place. And that may be the first step in the evolution of morality.

Chimps may use their empathic skills for good, but also to manipulate others. Researchers have found that chimps have a talent for deception, which requires mental sophistication, said conference co-organizer Elizabeth Lonsdorf, director of the zoo's Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes.

"Lying and deceiving means you have to know what another individual thinks is the truth and act in such a way to work around that truth," Lonsdorf said. "It takes complex information processing."

A different approach

The way scientists deal with such questions has changed dramatically since the Lincoln Park Zoo held its previous chimp conferences, in 1991 and 1986. Twenty years ago, researchers still considered it taboo to use the terminology of human thoughts and emotions to describe animal behavior. The famous field scientist Jane Goodall, who will deliver a public lecture at Navy Pier on the meeting's last day, once was ridiculed by other scientists simply for giving names to the chimps she studied.

But a consensus is slowly building that traits such as empathy not only apply to humanity's ape relatives, but may have guided the evolution of our extended family of primates.

"I think empathy has great adaptive advantages," said conference participant Frans de Waal, a professor of psychology at Emory and director of the Living Links Center at Yerkes.

De Waal has written extensively about how the moral behavior of non-human primates sheds light on humanity's evolutionary roots, in books with provocative titles like "Chimpanzee Politics" and "Our Inner Ape." Along with many other primate experts, he believes the complex social lives of chimps offer evidence that human intelligence evolved not to help our ancestors get food, but primarily as a way of handling social challenges and figuring out other humans.

"Lots of animals pick fruits and don't have brains like ours," de Waal said. "But once you live in groups, you have to deal with group life, and that takes tolerance and compassion and also competition."

A key unsolved question is whether chimps possess what psychologists call a "theory of mind"--the knowledge that individuals see the world in different ways. Human children don't develop that awareness until age 4 or so; for example, a toddler who sees a toy being hidden has trouble grasping that other people don't know where it is.

Testing that ability in chimps is difficult because of the language gap, but some scientists at the conference believe chimps have a true theory of mind, said Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a primate researcher at Kyoto University who first proposed that the zoo host this year's chimp meeting.

"Maybe half of the people here would answer yes," Matsuzawa said Thursday at a kickoff event for the meeting.

Matsuzawa said the hard evidence is not in, though chimps' ability to deceive suggests an awareness of how other minds work. He showed a video of a chimp mother in the forests of Guinea tricking her 9-year-old son into grooming her so she could nab the rocks he was using to crack open some palm nuts. The video shows the mother flashing the chimp version of a smile as she grabs the rocks for herself.

Remarkable memory

But Matsuzawa's most remarkable footage is of a 5-year-old captive chimp male named Ayumu, who seems capable of memory feats far beyond what most people could do.

In one task, Ayumu sees a sequence of numbers from one to nine scattered randomly on a computer screen. The numbers appear for less than a second, barely enough time to see them all, before being replaced by nine white squares. Ayumu's job is to remember where the hidden numbers were, and to touch their squares in sequence from one to nine.

He succeeds immediately, almost every time, touching the squares casually but quickly. It is a task that looks nearly impossible, and Matsuzawa's video shows human subjects barely passing the test with just four or five numbers. Nine numbers are too much for their brains to handle. "No graduate student of Kyoto University can do it," Matsuzawa said.

Once again, Matsuzawa said, the demands of social life may help explain the chimp's precocious abilities. In the wild, chimps need to remember where each member of the group is at all times, in part to defend against possible challenges by someone else in the hierarchy.

Ayumu's unreal skill at the computer game may also hold a profound lesson for scientists tempted to see chimps and other apes as mere forerunners of humanity's more perfect genius.

"The chimpanzee is not a subset of the human mind," Matsuzawa said. "The chimpanzee has its own universe, as do humans."

Sometimes, though, the parallels are hard to miss.

At a Thursday news conference about the meeting, held at the zoo's chimp habitat, the first person to speak was zoo Vice President Steven D. Thompson, an accomplished silver-haired animal researcher. Directly behind Thompson was Hank, the habitat's majestic silver-haired alpha male, who sat on the highest perch to watch over his group as well as the odd-looking primates on the other side of the glass.