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Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind By Dorothy L. CheneyRobert M. Seyfarth ( University Of Chicago Press )
Release Date: 2007-05-15
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Product Description
In 1838 Charles Darwin jotted in a notebook, “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” Baboon Metaphysics is Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth’s fascinating response to Darwin’s challenge.
Cheney and Seyfarth set up camp in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, where they could intimately observe baboons and their social world. Baboons live in groups of up to 150, including a handful of males and eight or nine matrilineal families of females. Such numbers force baboons to form a complicated mix of short-term bonds for mating and longer-term friendships based on careful calculations of status and individual need.
But Baboon Metaphysics is concerned with much more than just baboons’ social organization—Cheney and Seyfarth aim to fully comprehend the intelligence that underlies it. Using innovative field experiments, the authors learn that for baboons, just as for humans, family and friends hold the key to mitigating the ill effects of grief, stress, and anxiety.
Written with a scientist’s precision and a nature-lover’s eye, Baboon Metaphysics gives us an unprecedented and compelling glimpse into the mind of another species.
“The vivid narrative is like a bush detective story.”—Steven Poole, Guardian
“Baboon Metaphysics is a distillation of a big chunk of academic lives. . . . It is exactly what such a book should be—full of imaginative experiments, meticulous scholarship, limpid literary style, and above all, truly important questions.”—Alison Jolly, Science
“Cheney and Seyfarth found that for a baboon to get on in life involves a complicated blend of short-term relationships, friendships, and careful status calculations. . . . Needless to say, the ensuing political machinations and convenient romantic dalliances in the quest to become numero uno rival the bard himself.”—Science News “Cheney and Seyfarth’s enthusiasm is obvious, and their knowledge is vast and expressed with great clarity. All this makes Baboon Metaphysics a captivating read. It will get you thinking—and maybe spur you to travel to Africa to see it all for yourself.”—Asif A. Ghazanfar, Nature
“Through ingenious playback experiments . . . Cheney and Seyfarth have worked out many aspects of what baboons used their minds for, along with their limitations. Reading a baboon’s mind affords an excellent grasp of the dynamics of baboon society. But more than that, it bears on the evolution of the human mind and the nature of human existence.”—Nicholas Wade, New York Times
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Thought provoking analysis of baboons
The team of Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth has collaborated on numerous publications, including a fine book, "How Monkeys See the World." This represents an ambitious addition to their body of work. A takeoff point is a quotation from Charles Darwin's notebooks, from 1838 (Page 1): "Origin of man now proved--Metaphysic must flourish--He who understands baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke." The authors use the Cambridge English Dictionary to define metaphysics (Page 2): "the part of philosophy that is about understanding existence and knowledge."
The authors have been studying baboons for many years. This book summarizes much of their work and indicates the ingenious experiments that they have devised to assess baboons' thought processes and to explore if they possess something like a "theory of mind." They consider, in the process, the extent of "social intelligence" in baboons. At the outset, they propose two general points that guide their analysis of "baboon metaphysics": (1) natural selection leads to a brain for any species that are specialized for the relevant survival needs; (2) baboons have great expertise in navigating social life, since they live in relatively complex social systems.
Key chapters in this volume:
Chapter 3: The dangerous world in which baboons live is well portrayed. Predators pose a danger. Another unfortunate factor of baboon life is infanticide. If a new male enters a troop and becomes dominant, for instance, he may try to kill all young baboons. In this manner, the new male is in a position to begin reproducing very soon with female baboons who lost their infants; he is able, as a result, to increase the amount of his genetic material in the troop through siring his own infants.
Chapters 4 and 5 are critical, as they lay out the very different social worlds of male and female baboons. In either sex, dominance hierarchies are central. Males strive to attain the alpha ranking, that is, being the most dominant male in the troop. Male hierarchies are unstable, leading to considerable social stress. Females' hierarchies are more complex and more stable. Among females, their lineage is important. Each lineage has its own ranking, so one is either born into a top ranking, middle ranking, or low ranking family. Successfully managing to thrive in this social order calls for a high level of social skills.
Baboons, as Chapter 6 emphasizes, have quite good "social knowledge." The understanding of how baboon society works is based on (Pages 118-119) ". . .an innate predisposition to recognize other individuals' ranks and social relationships." Chapter 7 builds on this with a discussion of the social intelligence of baboons, with the authors emphasizing the criticality of baboons' understanding of how to navigate complex social life in a way that facilitates their survival and successful reproduction. The chapter concludes with an interesting discussion of how baboons' social intelligence differs from that of other species, as a result of the evolutionary demands on baboons.
Chapter 8 focuses on the extent to which baboons have a "theory of mind," that is, understanding of the mental states of other baboons. The authors conclude that there might be (page 197) "vague intuition about other animals' intentions," but that there is nothing like a well formed ability among these animals to understand intentions and motivations of others.
The volume concludes in Chapter 12 with a summary discussion of "baboon metaphysics" and with speculation about the relevance of their research for understanding humans. With respect to the former, they conclude that baboons demonstrate that some animals can live in complex societies with a theory of mind and without language--if their mental abilities allow for "making sense" of how to navigate their complex social world. The latter discussion notes what differences could lead to humans having a theory of mind that baboons do not possess.
All in all, a remarkable book. It has value in helping us to understand baboons in their own terms; it helps think about the position of humans in nature and why we are unique (as all species are unique); it provokes reflection on the ability to reflect on oneself and others and try to understand why we behave as we do. Nice touches abound, as illustrated by a charming reference to characters from Jane Austen's novels to make points about individual baboons' behavior.
This is an ambitious work, and there will be questions. The authors seem to overreach when exploring a theory of mind. It's almost as if they are using a human orientation to study baboons rather than focusing on baboons themselves. In some ways, I'm not sure that the theory of baboons' minds is so crucial as the authors do. The social intelligence part of the picture seems to me more important. Finally, using the philosophical term metaphysics in a baboon context may represent another reach too far.
Nonetheless, these are relatively minor points. The bottom line? A terrific book. . . .
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 Uneven ( algo41 )
Chapter 3 is as good nature writing as I have ever read; it is not to be missed even if you do not read the rest of the book. The last chapter is nicely written, and a good summary of the author's views.
Most of the book is very uneven. Much of it reads like a Ph.D. thesis. It is often repetitive and unnecessarily hard to follow. At the same time, it is easy to reach false conclusions, and the authors try to be very careful, relaxing only when providing their more general speculative theses, such as that social requirements are the impetus for primate cognitive evolution, and that social concepts provide the basis for language and even grammar (for another view, see Jerome A. Feldman's "From Molecule to Metaphor"). The point they make about animal's much greater capacity for understanding language vs. producing language is well substantiated in the book, and it is a good way to think about much animal behavior such as that of dog.
Even readers like myself, who have read previous books about animal cognitive abilities and also child development (animals are frequently compared to young children of various ages), will learn things if they wade through all the book's pages. The authors point out that humans have different cognitive systems, so that people who are blind due to problems in the cortex, may be able to see even if they cannot consciously report on what they have seen, as proved by experiments. Well it turns out that the well known experiments showing the age at which children are first aware that others may have different beliefs than theirs, so that others may not know where something has been moved while the children were watching and they were not, is not the whole story. At younger ages, using different, evolutionary older cognitive systems, there is some awareness of other's beliefs, even if not conscious.
For whatever reason, the authors maintain a view that chimpanzees are not cognitively superior to monkeys, except for tool use. They do not even have as a reference any books by Franz de Waal, one of the leading authorities on chimpanzee mental abilities, and director of the "Center for the Advanced Study of Ape and Human Evolution". A good book by him is "Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals." There is also a terrible "typo". On p. 40, it is stated that infanticide accounted for "at least 53% of all infant deaths". On p. 57 it is stated that "53% of all infants born during our study" died as a result of infanticide. The latter is a much stronger statement, since if 200 infants were born, 100 died, and 53 were victims of infanticide, the first statement would be true, but the 2nd would not.
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Baboons and the Social Mind ( hsvishi2 )
This is a scholarly book which is simultaneously entirely suitable for the general reader. None of Baboons, psychology, or metaphysics are my fields but I was utterly fascinated by the authors' research and their contribution to the concept of the social mind as important in the evolution of the human species. READ THIS!
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Thought-provoking
This is a work of scientific rigor and intuitive leaps. It clearly describes the social order of baboon society and draws fascinating inferences about the possibility of baboon cognition. The parallels to the evolution of cognition in early hominids are inescapable.
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Party Animals? ( rpettyus )
Charles Darwin once wrote of his belief that if we would learn something very important if we could but understand the behavior of baboon.
The authors of this enthralling book are widely known for their studies of primate behavior in the Okavango in Botswana, and set out to do just that: understand how behavior baboons live and organize their lives.
Baboons live in groups of up to 150 individuals, which include a few males and eight or nine matrilineal families of females. The account of the daily life of the group reads like the script of Survivor!
There is a complicated mix of personal relationships ranging from short-term bonds for mating to long-term friendships that lead to cooperative rearing of the young. There are intrigues that may involve alliances of two or three individuals all the way up to battles that involve three or four extended families.
What this tells us is that the survival of an individual baboon and his or her family depends on an ability to predict the behavior of others and arrange to form the most advantageous relationships. So are these just reflexive behaviors, or do baboons form models of the world and their place in it? In such a fluid social environment, to what extent can they deduce the motives of other baboons?
This book sets out to discover the intelligence that underlies this social organization. In the process we learn a lot about ourselves.
The book is divided into twelve chapters:
1. The Evolution of Mind
2. The Primate Mind in Myth and Legend
3. Habitat, Infanticide, and Predation
4. Males: Competition, Infanticide, and Friendship
5. Females: Kinship, Rank, Competition, and Cooperation
6. Social Knowledge
7. The Social Intelligence Hypothesis
8. Theory of Mind
9. Self-Awareness and Consciousness
10. Communication
11. Precursors to Language
12. Baboon Metaphysics
These are followed by an appendix, references and a good Index.
The social lives of baboons are fluid and highly complex, and that reflects a complex and adaptable social intelligence. This will not surprise most people who live with animals: Many of them have quite elaborate social systems, sophisticated emotions and quite well developed concepts of social propriety and even of right and wrong.
The authors write very well indeed. They share their enthusiasm and the implications of their work.
This is a terrific book that deserves a very wide readership, not least because it helps put to bed the notion that humans are the only species with a complex social life.
Humans may be different, but we are not that different.
Highly recommended.
Richard G. Petty, MD, author of Healing, Meaning and Purpose: The Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life
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