Teaching appropriate technology to wild chimpanzees

I wrote several years ago about the idea that we could facilitate cultural transmission between chimpanzee groups. Another reason for doing that came to light earlier this fall - some chimps in Guinea have learned how to destroy wildlife snares set by poachers. These wire-loop snares set under tension can accidentally catch chimps by the hands and feet, leading to partial amputations, and some male chimps have learned to break the branch that's used to create the tension.

So the idea would be to teach other chimps hundreds of miles away the same technique. Exactly how to teach them is a little tricky. Maybe the handful of groups that are used to people can be shown a model snare and how to break it, or possibly even shown a video similar to the one at the link, showing other chimps breaking snares. The other trick is getting juvenile female chimps to learn the technique, because males stay with the group they grow up with, while females disperse to new areas and can take their knowledge with them.

I don't know, maybe it's not feasible. But just the fact that we can consider teaching chimps appropriate technology in a manner resembling the way we think human societies can be taught appropriate technology suggests that highly intelligent animals should be considered as having some kind of intrinsic moral value.

UPDATE (slightly related): a psychologist finds that human males are much less aggressive if shown pictures of meat. Chimps are somewhat similar - Jane Goodall wrote that the dominance structure breaks down in the aftermath of a successful kill by chimps that were hunting monkeys, and an otherwise-dominant male will beg for meat from a subordinate but won't attempt to take it away.

Chimp death, unpredictability of smart critters, and relative intelligence

Ed Yong has another fascinating post with videos showing how different chimps react very differently to death in their groups. Among other things, chimp mothers refuse to abandon dead babies, sometimes carrying them for days or weeks. Very difficult to guess what's going on in the mind of another species, but there's a clear recognition that something's happened, and somewhat flawed ways of handling it. Kind of like us.

Five years ago I wrote a post about chimp infanticide and added "Another interesting aspect is that chimp infanticide appears somewhat harder to explain with simple evolutionary principles than is the case with monkeys. That fits my own little theory that behaviour of smart animals is hard to predict...."

With my usual, blisteringly fast analytical skill, I've come up with another theory after five years. Chimp behavior isn't necessarily harder to predict than mouse behavior, it's just that it's harder for humans to predict chimps because the relative difference in our intelligence is much smaller. By analogy, a chess grand master (human) can easily predict the outcome of a chess move by a low-ranked player (mouse) but not so easily playing against a slightly less proficient chess master (chimp). They're a lot closer to our league.

All the more reason why we shouldn't treat chimps, other great apes, and maybe a few other animals as belonging in the same ethical category as mice.

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Unsettling video of a young chimp playing with the mummified body of an infant below. An adult is clearly disturbed and wants no contact with the corpse, and the mother eventually scares off the juvenile and takes back the corpse. If you ignore that macabre aspect, though, you'll notice the chimps using stone hammers and anvils to crack open nuts, one of the prime examples of chimp tool use and one of the few that many of us have done as well.

More Uganda

Felt like writing a little more about Uganda:

Gorillas are almost entirely herbivorous (they eat some insects, apparently).  We were watching the silverback try to eat a small green vine going up a 25-foot tree, but it snapped when he tried to pull it down.  No problem, though - he stood up and wrenched the whole tree down, putting the entire vine in easy reach.  Gorillas are like small elephants, changing the balance between trees and ground cover in the forest.

A lot of the gorillas spend a significant amount of time foraging in neighboring farms and not just the forest.  Understandable when Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is so small (about 20 by 15 kilometers) and the farmland used to be habitat, but you can also sympathize with subsistence farmers living on less than $2 a day when their tiny plots are torn up by gorillas.  The average woman has 7 to 9 children in her lifetime - they say they need to keep some children home from school to chase wildlife away from their fields.  The organization we volunteered with, Conservation Through Public Health, has a family planning program that attempts to persuade people that smaller families are better.  I've also thought that programs elsewhere to compensate people for damage to their farms, or to pay them to create buffer areas, could be good models to apply at Bwindi.

We did a river wildlife cruise at Queen Elizabeth National Park that was fantastic.  The birdlife in particular was amazing - I'm an indifferent birder overseas where I have no hope of absorbing much understanding, but these were great.

Congo seems to be improving somewhat - we were right on the border and there's lots of traffic.  Rwanda is already open for tourists.  North Uganda, previously dangerous, is now settling down some.  Some good signs in this.  OTOH, we heard that Rwanda wasn't as careful as Uganda in controlling the level of exposure that gorillas, susceptible to human diseases, have to tourists.

Everyone in Uganda and Dubai seemed happy to see Obama as president, although many didn't expect great things either, just less war.

Uganda and Dubai

My wife and I took a long vacation to Uganda with a short side trip to Dubai.  In addition to the standard tourist things, we did some volunteer work with Conservation Through Public Health, a Ugandan/US non-profit that protects mountain gorillas and other wildlife by resolving conflicts with humans, particularly disease transmission and family planning issues.

CTPH is exploring a new kind of volunteer vacation experience where it utilizes the professional skills of short-term volunteers, rather than have them do the unskilled work that other volunteer vacations offer.  I highly recommend the experience to anyone who's interested.  We were the guinea pigs, so they're still working it out, and I'd be happy to talk to anyone who's interested.

As for seeing Uganda and the gorillas, I'll steal from Richard Dawkins who said of our California redwoods, "see them before you die."  Same is true with the gorillas.  It's right up there with the chance I had to see orangutans in Borneo in terms of seeing something of ourselves.  We also saw chimps in Uganda, but it's not the incredibly up-close experience that we had with the gorillas.

I've occasionally written about the Great Ape Project and how I distinguish that concept from animal-rights arguments for chickens and other unintelligent animals that I mostly disagree with.  These gorillas we saw were mountain gorillas, only 700 left in the wild, a breeding population much smaller than that, and no reproductive success in captivity.  It would be a tragedy to lose this relative, so I'm hoping for the best for the efforts of CTPH and others.

As for the rest of the tourist experience, Uganda was a great place to visit, people were extremely nice, and it doesn't have the unsafe feel of rampant crime of some other places, like the big cities in Kenya.

Dubai was a strange place, but worth a short visit.  I wonder if human mobility will mean that much of the world will be like it a century, where 90% of the residents in the country are non-citizen expatriates.  I tend to think of a country as being "for" its citizens, while expats on work visas are just in a commercial relationship with the country.  But when the expats are 90% of the people, have been there for decades, and have done at least 90% of the work of building the country, the question of who the country belongs to is a little muddled.  Anyway, if you go, check out the Sheik Mohammed Center for Cultural Understanding and their "cultural breakfasts," where you can eat excellent food, hear a little about the culture, and ask the women who run the program any questions you want about life and religion in Dubai.

Chimps like magic

Buzzfeed shows a highly entertaining snippet from Japanese television of a young chimp being given its own magic show. You could easily see the chimp's shocked reaction as some of the tricks blew its mind.

All very entertaining, but also a demonstration of the chimp's intelligence. It's easy to get a surprise reaction in animals by startling them, but I don't think a dog or horse has enough of a mental framework of the universe to notice that something had just gone very wrong in each of the tricks. Also worth noting how young the chimp is - I'd guess about three years old or so, and probably as far away from adult mental development for chimps as a six year old human would be from adult intelligence.

Entertaining and maybe enlightening. I guess I should also wonder though about what happens to the chimps when they're not so small and cute.

NY Times also flubs non-climate science

Below is a letter I wrote to the NY Times about their resurrection of the Noble Savage myth in a recent Science Times article, one that claimed that prehistoric humans were minimally violent:

To the Editor:

The Science Times article, "In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue," posits a false choice between two possible human evolutionary drivers: cooperative baby-rearing for in-group success, or social cohesion to overpower out-group rivals. Both forces could drive human evolution, and there may be little difference between them.

The article portrays Dr. Hrdy as supporting some version of the peaceful Noble Savage myth, and denying violence as a driving force. Scholarship such as that in the book "War Before Civilization" demonstrate otherwise, that violence between hunter-gatherer groups is and was much higher on a per capita basis than in large, organized societies.

Dr. Hrdy may be referring to evidence of a genetic bottleneck in human prehistory in order to claim small populations didn't need to fight, but that one bottleneck doesn't mean populations were always below the carrying capacity of the habitat they used. Basic biological law known since Darwin states that species will quickly expand populations until they overfill their habitats, and then something decides which groups will survive. It was almost certainly violent choices in the past, but hopefully our big brains and modern tools give us a different options for the present and future.

To be fair to Hrdy, she's apparently referring to ancient hominids who might have been genetically/culturally different from modern hunter-gatherers, but I still doubt she's right. And when she claims "the average population size during the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution that preceded the Neolithic Age may have been around 2,000 breeding adults," I find it hard to believe a population that small could last that long and not wink out. Wiki thinks "as long as" 100,000 years, still an unlikely long time but short compared to hominid evolution. Even if it's true, that small population has to be kept small by something other than competition for habitat or intra-species violence, in order to resurrect the Noble Savage.

Anyway, I've been meaning to blog about the War Before Civilization book. It's excellent, if somewhat depressing about our past. Peace is possible without civilization, but it's not easy to keep. Afarensis did a great post about the book a while back for more info.

(And yes, this post falls into the "I read a book and now think I know more than an expert in the field" category. Oh well.)

UPDATE, Jan 2010: more evidence in support of Hrdy's position and against mine, this time that hominids had incredibly small populations dating back 1.2 million years. They also claim that chimps and gorillas had similarly-small populations despite the radically different habitat that they use. Weird. I'm not convinced, yet.

Notes on de Waal's "Tree of Origin"

Some random notes on Frans de Waal's "Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us about Human Social Evolution," a book I had mentioned briefly in another post.

• Page 47: says modern hunter-gatherer tribes rely more on plant foods, usually gathered by women, than by meat hunted by men. Vegetarians love to say this too. Maybe right today, but there's a bias in relying on modern tribes as a reference. They've been pushed out from the coasts and the most fertile hunting grounds by "advanced" groups, and have to make do with the wastelands. I'll bet most hunter-gatherers had more meat than modern groups did.
• 
  
• Page 64: contrasting human breeding patterns to chimps, it says "the nuclear family relies on paternity certainty." I think modern paternity testing plus the availability of abortion may change genes affecting human personality - the male genetic strategy of "cuckolding" without having to invest resources in the offspring works less well, the male strategy of monogamous investment in children no longer carries the risk of being cuckolded, and "straying" females are more likely to abort pregnancies that might be the result of a liason.
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• Page 143: in the last 1.9 million years, hominid sexual dimorphism has stayed roughly the same, despite massive changes in brain capacity. Gender dimorphism generally gives some clue about sexual relations. Our moderate level of sexual dimorphism suggests moderate polygyny, again very different from our chimp and gorilla relatives. Interesting that this has been stable through our ancestral species too.
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• Page 168: larger apes seem smarter than smaller monkeys, despite having similar neocortex/body size ratios. The book says that one explanation besides a better-wired brain is that "rather than relative neocortical enlargement, absolute size is what matters. When the total brain volume reaches a certain point, the ability to perceive and organize the structure of instrumental behavior emerges." My comment is, what about cetaceans? If only a small fraction of a sperm whale's 20-pound brain exceeds what's needed for body control, that's likely to be a scary amount of brain matter available for cognition. The author goes on to suggest that testing whales would be interesting, although I'd guess that experimental testing of adult sperm whales would be a challenge.
• 
  
• Pages 180-183: the most interesting part of the book. Neocortex/body size ratios for primates correlate positively along a line for each primate species typical group size. Applying the same neocortex ratio to humans gives a group size of 150, which the author argues fits well with the group size found for hunter-gather clans. Humans have other group sizes, he argues, but they're either much larger or much smaller than the 150 figure. And he claims modern groups fit similar size structures. The apogee of the neocortex ratio can be found with Neandertals, who could theoretically manage slightly larger groups than we can.

Like I said before, it's a good book and well worth reading.

Reviews: The Uplift Universe Trilogies, and "Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us about Human Social Evolution"

David Brin's Uplift Universe trilogies are some of the better "hard science fiction" that I've read, defined as sci-fi that cares about the "sci" part. And unlike most hard sci-fi, the writing's good and the plots move quickly. The two trilogies deal with a universe populated by warring, status-seeking alien species all uplifted to sapience by previous alien species, except for self-uplifted humans who have just genetically enhanced chimps and dolphins. The Earth species navigate through this minefield to survive in a dangerous galaxy cluster.

The ideas are fun, with a decent if speculative grounding in biology, and the first-person perspective for non-human species works well. The chimps in particular are the most engaging characters, with their wisecracking, playful, sporadic heroism. The books would make a great movie, I think.

Downsides are the somewhat repetitive, victory-is-only-achieved-at-a-cost format, and that the best book is The Uplift War, at the end of the first trilogy. I recommend reading the first series, and then if you really liked it, read the second set.

The Uplift Universe's focus on obligations between species influenced how I read the collection of science essays, "Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us about Human Social Evolution," edited by Frans de Waal. The essays are well worth reading, some more than others but you can skip the less interesting ones. I'll write more about it some other time, but I'm very interested in the discussion of chimpanzee culture (p. 248) and how different chimp groups have developed different tools. Chimps in west Africa learned to use stones to open nuts. Nothing stops other chimps from accessing the same food, except geographic barriers stop the spread of knowledge. Similarly, I also saw recently that other chimp groups use tools to extract ground tubers (via Afarensis).

I've argued recently against Denialism Blog that we have a special moral obligation not to harm intelligent species like chimps. Do we have any other obligations? Eli Rabett suggested that we might follow the Uplift Universe path and choose to genetically increase chimp intelligence, in the near future. My spin on all this is that we should, right now, teach wild chimps any tool using technologies currently used by other chimps in separate geographic areas. One could justify this as slightly balancing out all the harm we've done to them by enabling more of them to survive in the decreased habitat available. I don't think that's necessary though - it's justifiable on the basis that it makes their lives better.

What we can do beyond this, I don't know. I don't know if wild chimps could feasibly use or benefit from human-created techniques for improving their lives. Maybe chimps aren't even smart enough so that one group can master all the techniques used by all chimp groups. But then again, maybe they are, or at least can choose the best techniques.

I think this type of uplift is justified.

Denialism Blog can't face a fire in a fertility clinic

Mark Hoofnagle's Denialism Blog is a good blog I agree with 95% of the time (especially about bringing back the Office of Technology Assessment). But - the blogger license requires me to focus on disagreement, where Mark is wrong, wrong, wrong. So let's start.

Mark begins interestingly with a post praising Obama for his willingness to answer hypothetical questions. I agree that politicians should answer most hypos. It fits the rule that one should generally do the opposite of anything Bush does, for one thing. It's not clear that Obama actually follows the rule though, when he says things like this:

AP: Is there any circumstances where you'd be prepared or willing to use nuclear weapons to defeat terrorism and Osama bin Laden?

OBAMA: No, I'm not, uh, there has been no discussion of using nuclear weapons and that's not a hypothetical that I'm going to discuss.

Regardless of Obama though, where Mark goes off the rails is in denying there's any reason to treat especially intelligent animals like chimps as having some special moral value that relates to their intelligence. When asked whether a post-human evolved species could abuse us with moral impunity he says it's an impractical question, and therefore the response is "This is stupid. Fail. Try again." Mark should've just said, "I refuse to respond (and he did refuse to respond, we never got an answer) on the grounds that it's a hypothetical question."

Mark soon tries to rescue himself by saying that realistic hypotheticals must be answered, but it's fine for him to refuse to answer the unrealistic ones. This is where he can't face a fire in a fertility clinic.

The "Fire in a Fertility Clinic" hypothetical is a standard argument used against the people arguing that personhood begins at conception:

Probing the assumptions underlying the equal moral status view of the embryo, Sandel asks how a person holding that view would behave if confronted with a fire in a fertility clinic. Given a choice between saving a five-year-old girl or a tray of 10 embryos, which would one choose?

The right blogosphere has been fumbling with this one for years, with several unconvincing responses, but Mark's advice to them would be "Don't answer it! It's vanishingly unlikely! This is stupid. Fail. Try again."

I think the rest of us can see a value to the question that extends beyond its practicality - it helps us understand what we really believe to be ethical, regardless of what we tell people or tell ourselves about our beliefs.

But, if it's helpful to Mark to try something more probable than the specific fire in a fertility clinic scenario, I can come up with something regarding the treatment of intelligent beings. What if computers get smarter than us? Plenty of experts think that's possible in the next 50 years - some don't, but I think at our current state of knowledge, it meets the reasonable percentage probability that Mark demands. So what about it - okay for the smart computers to use us solely for their own ends?

Eli Rabett raised another sci-fi possibility in a comment, the possibility of "genetically modifying other terrestrial species (chimps/dolphins etc) to increase their intelligence to our level. It would make this a much more interesting place. This actually might be within reach." I agree that within 50 years this may be in reach, so what then? Should they be treated differently? What if we "overdo it" and make them superior - can they do what they want with us?

Finally, something I've not seen anywhere is a discussion about the ethical implications of intelligence distribution curves within a species, say for chimps. If they're like humans, a small percentage are likely to be much more intelligent than average. The tiny number of great apes taught sign language probably means we've never encountered individuals in the top 1% of their species for intellectual ability. What are they like? What can they do? If it's ethically disturbing (to me anyway, if not to Mark) to imagine killing Washoe in a medical experiment, what about a chimp that's twice as smart?

I don't think Mark's reason for refusing to answer an improbable hypothetical is right, and I think reasonably possible hypotheticals present themselves too. At some point, Mark says "I'm making a judgment, speciesist as it is, that human life is more valuable than the lives of other animals." I'll disagree with the first clause of that statement too - it's not a judgment, it's a fundamental assumption that he doesn't use logic to justify, and the only way to question such an assumption is to pose contrasting hypotheticals.

For my part, I'm a sapientist - smart creatures have moral value. There's lots of tricky gray areas that I haven't figured out with this, but I have more confidence with this approach for answering the hypotheticals.

(And yes, this is all about a post from months back. My typical quick response time.)

UPDATE: Mark and I have been emailing, and here's one response he sent me:

I still don't understand.  What is the use of a hypothetical if I can
just propose an alternate one that counters it?  They are
uninformative.  Surely you can see the difference between asking a
politician a question like, "If Roe v. Wade is overturned, would you
support legislation to guarantee or deny abortion rights?"  It's a
hypothetical, yes, but it's about a possible event, of relevance to a
political discussion.  Now, compare this to, "If space aliens came to
earth and enslaved us based on our moral code of speciesism, how would
you feel?"  Yeah I can answer it, but it's not a meaningful response
and has no business being used to justify a moral code.  It's based on
assumptions of the morality of non-existent aliens.  I could just as
easily propose that we get visited by the Klingons, and in their
contempt for our vegetarian/pacifist existence they making us slaves. 
What's the point of such stupid questions?

I'm not composing an argument for why I'm a speciesist based on this,
I'm just relating my contempt for the hypotheticals proposed by ARAs
like Singer, as if they are meaningful.  As long as someone can propose
another that is equally improbable and contrary to the first, they have
no value for a moral discussion. If you like publish this reply as a
discussion of that aspect of the conversation.

I also don't feel as if I have to justify the morality of animal
experimentation and using animals for human benefit.  I believe the
burden is on the ARAs to justify why we are the one species on the
planet that can not use or kill other animals.  Why are we the exception
to the rule?

I think he's missing the distinction between the outcome of a hypothetical versus the lesson we can learn from the hypo. If he can come up with an alternative hypo that teaches a different lesson that backs his moral position, let's hear it, regardless of how outlandish it is. And he hasn't responded to my more probable hypos.

As for why we have to obey morality while animals don't, I would guess that sufficiently intelligent animals may well be capable of right and wrong, something that an intellectually-negligible predator like a shark or crocodile wouldn't. I'll further guess that existing apes are in a gray moral area, whose limited intelligence results in at best, limited moral culpability, but I don't really know. Before Mark jumps on this with the question "Is it then immoral for chimps to attack neighboring chimp groups?" I'd guess the answer is that it's understandable, and the morality is a gray area.