The Age of Empathy (38 page)

104
hominid was recently found in the Caucasus
: A 1.8-million-year-old fossil discovered by David Lordkipanidze and colleagues (2007).

104
Madame Bee
: Jane Goodall (1986, p. 357).

105
handful of stories
: The best-known anecdote, captured on video, is the rescue of a human child at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. On August 16, 1996, Binti Jua, an eight-year-old gorilla, saved a three-year-old boy who had fallen eighteen feet into the primate exhibit. The gorilla sat down on a log in a stream, cradling the boy in her lap, giving him a gentle back-pat before she continued on her way. This act of sympathy touched many hearts, making Binti a celebrity overnight
(Time
elected her one of the “Best People” of 1996). The number of similar anecdotes keeps growing. I have been trying not to repeat stories used before, such as in
Good Natured
(1996) and
Bonobo
(1997). A systematic overview has been put together by Sanjida O’Connell (1995).

105
Chimp Haven
: The relation between chimpanzees Sheila and Sara was described to me by Amy Fultz, who works at Chimp Haven, located near Shreveport, Louisiana. Amy also described one chimp going out of her way to bring food to another who was incapacitated by kidney disease. For more on Chimp Haven (with which I am involved) and how to support it, see
www.chimphaven.org
.

106
apes on islands
: The suggestion that animals never take serious risks on behalf of one another was made by Jeremy Kagan (2000). Examples of apes jumping into water to save another come from Jane Goodall (1990, p. 213) and Roger Fouts (1997, p. 180), including a rescue by Washoe of another female that she had known for only a few hours. The mother-son drowning occurred at the Dublin Zoo
(Belfast News Letter,
October 31, 2000).

100
hydrophobia cannot be overcome
: Helping behavior may have evolved in the context of kinship and reciprocity, but there is little evidence that chimpanzees actually count on return favors (chapter 6). Even for humans, who
are
capable of such anticipation, it is questionable that anyone would run into a burning building or jump into water with return favors in mind. The impulse is likely emotional. Again, the actor’s reasons for a behavior do not need to overlap with the reasons for its evolution, which may indeed be self-interested (chapter 2).

107
leopard attack
: Christophe Boesch (personal communication) has documented regular predation on chimpanzees in Ivory Coast. Chimps help one another against leopard attacks, thus taking grave risks on behalf of one another.

108
Children read “hearts”
: Children pass the traditional theory-of-mind tasks, which focus on beliefs, around the age of four. But they appreciate the feelings, needs, and desires of others much earlier, usually at the age of two or three (Wellman et al., 2000). The trouble older children have with the Little Red Riding Hood story seems due to emotional identification, which interferes with the attribution of beliefs (Bradmetz and Schneider, 1999).

110
Social scratching
: Primate customs and traditions, also known as “cultural primatology,” are the subject of
The Ape and the Sushi Master
(de Waal, 2001). For details on the social scratch of the Mahale chimpanzees, see Michio Nakamura and co-workers (2000).

112
understand when one among them is hungry
: There is little evidence that monkeys appreciate the knowledge or beliefs of others, but this doesn’t keep them from appreciating another’s attention, intentions, or needs. Conducted by Yuko Hattori, our food-sharing experiment tested responses to partners who had just eaten, or not, and included a control condition in which the partner had been behind an opaque panel, so that subjects could not know about its previous food consumption.

113
monkeys favor sharing
: The prosocial choices in capuchins disappeared if the partner was either a stranger or out of sight (de Waal et al., 2008; chapter 6). Similar prosocial preferences have been demonstrated in monkeys by Judith Burkart and co-workers (2007) and Venkat Lakshminarayanan and Laurie Santos (2008).

113
“Chimpanzees Are Indifferent”
: This is the actual title of a scientific article by Joan Silk and co-workers (2005). A similar outcome was
reported by Keith Jensen and co-workers (2006). It is almost impossible to interpret negative findings, however (de Waal, 2009). A common problem is that animals may fail to fully understand the task. If they develop a blind routine, for example, or are too far apart to notice what happens to their partner, their choices may appear socially indifferent yet are in fact better described as statistically random. 115
rewards made no difference
: Felix Warneken and co-workers (2007) included conditions with and without rewards. Since these conditions had no effect, the chimps’ helping behavior did not seem to be driven by expected payoffs.

115
“His euphoria produced”
: Quoted from Dolf Zillmann and Joanne Cantor (1977, p. 161). See also Lanzetta and Englis (1989).

116
how altruistic is altruism
: This has been explored empirically in Daniel Batson’s (1991, 1997) admirable work on the self- versus other-orientation behind human altruism. The debate about this issue is never-ending, though, because of the impossibility to extract the self from its relations with others, especially with regard to empathy (e.g. Hornstein, 1991; Krebs, 1991, Cialdini et al., 1997).

118
“Seeing himself in the mirror”
: Ladygina-Kohts (1935, p. 160).

119
Pliny the Elder
: From his
Natural History
(vol. 3, Loeb Classical Library, 1940).

121
predicted decades ago
: In 1970, Gordon Gallup, Jr., published his first study of mirror self-recognition (MSR), followed by speculations a decade later on how MSR correlates with other so-called “markers of mind,” including attribution and empathy. Gallup (1983) explicitly speculated that cetaceans and elephants show enough insightful social behavior that they probably also possess MSR.

122
arrive in drag
: As an undergraduate student, I worked with two young male chimpanzees. A male fellow student and myself wanted to know why these apes were sexually aroused by every woman in sight (e.g., secretaries, students), and especially how they told the human genders apart. So, we dressed up in drag and changed the pitch of our voices. But the chimps were not confused, least of all sexually.

123
co-emergence hypothesis
:
This hypothesis has its origin in the separate perspectives of Gordon Gallup on phylogeny and Doris Bischof-Köhler on human ontogeny, both of which link mirror responses to
social cognition. My own contribution is to combine these two perspectives into a single hypothesis.

123
When the same children
: Co-emergence in development of personal pronoun use, pretend play, and mirror self-recognition (MSR) was demonstrated by Michael Lewis and Douglas Ramsay (2004). Doris Bischof-Köhler has conducted the most detailed studies of the coemergence of MSR and empathy in children, suggesting an absolute link; that is, “empathizers” pass the rouge test in front of the mirror, whereas “non-empathizers” fail this test. This connection persists after correction for age (Bischof-Köhler, 1988, 1991) and has also been reported by Johnson (1992) and Zahn-Waxler et al. (1992).

124
neuroscience will one day resolve
: Neuroimaging studies on the role of the self in empathy are under way, following the ideas of Jean Decety (Decety and Chaminade, 2003). Advanced empathy is likely based on the perception-action mechanism combined with an increasing self-other distinction (Preston and de Waal, 2002; de Waal, 2008). In humans, the right inferior parietal cortex, at the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), helps distinguish self- from other-produced actions (Decety and Grèzes, 2006).

124
“Self-absorption kills empathy”
: Daniel Goleman in
Social Intelligence
(2006, p. 54).

125
ontogeny and phylogeny
: Even though modern biology rejects Ernst Haeckel’s recapitulation theory, it remains true that if an anatomical feature evolved before another, it generally also develops earlier in the embryo, and that shared ancestry among species is often reflected in the early stages of embryonic development. The coemergence hypothesis of mirror self-recognition and social cognition draws a parallel between ontogeny and phylogeny without implying an obligatory connection between the two. See also Gerhard Medicus (1992).

126
Even a goldfish will jump
: In an interview, Paul Manger claimed: “You put an animal in a box, even a lab rat or gerbil, and the first thing it wants to do is climb out of it. If you don’t put a lid on top of the bowl of a goldfish it will eventually jump out to enlarge the environment it is living in. But a dolphin will never do that. In the marine parks the dividers to keep the dolphins apart are only a foot or two above the water” (Reuters, August 18, 2006). Manger did not speculate that it may actually be smart for an animal to stay in a known environment rather than jump to an unknown one.

126
126
preen themselves before a mirror
: Mirror self-recognition is not a trained pet trick but rather a spontaneous capacity that some animals possess and others don’t. Training the criterion behavior (cf. Epstein et al., 1981) defeats the purpose of the rouge test and can only produce the sort of “trivial passing” that machines are also capable of. Moreover, when another research team tried to replicate the pigeon study, they failed miserably, resulting in a paper with the word “Pinocchio” in its title (Thompson and Contie, 1994).

127
Dolphins possess large brains
: The human brain weighs approximately 1.3 kilograms, the bottlenose dolphin’s 1.8, the chimpanzee’s 0.4, and the Asian elephant’s 5. If brain size is corrected for body size, the human brain is larger than that of any other animal, and cetacean brains are larger than those of nonhuman primates (Marino, 1998). Some analyses stress different parts of the brain, but in this regard human uniqueness is less striking. Contrary to general belief, the human frontal cortex is no larger than that of the great apes relative to the rest of the brain (Semendeferi et al., 2002).

127
rightly upset dolphin experts
: Manger’s (2006) article provoked a collective rebuttal by many of the world’s dolphin experts in an article titled “Cetaceans Have Complex Brains for Complex Cognition” by Lori Marino et al. (2007).

128
a stick of dynamite
: Drawing based on J. B. Siebenaler and David Caldwell (1956).

128
Reports of leviathan care
: Further examples have been provided by Melba Caldwell and David Caldwell (1966) and Richard Connor and Kenneth Norris (1982).

129
nudged to shore by a seal
: “Seal Saves Drowning Dog” (BBC News, June 19, 2002).

129
a female humpback whale …
: Incident reported by Peter Fimrite in
The San Francisco Chronicle
(December 14, 2005). Even though the report adds a condescending disclaimer (“Whale experts say it’s nice to think that the whale was thanking its rescuers, but nobody really knows what was on its mind”) it should be noted that for species with complex reciprocity, gratitude is an expected emotion (Trivers, 1971; Bonnie and de Waal, 2004).

130
website for a conference
: “What Makes Us Human,” held in April 2008 in Los Angeles.

130
“I always smile when I hear Garrison Keillor”
: From Michael Gazzaniga, “Are Human Brains Unique?”
(Edge,
April 10, 2007). The author
answers his own question as follows: “Something like a phase shift has occurred in becoming human. There simply is no one thing that will ever account for our spectacular abilities.” The vagueness of this answer amounts to an admission that the human brain is in fact
not
that unique. 132
six blind men from Indostan
: From the poem “Blind Men and the Elephant” by John Godfrey Saxe, published in 1873.

132
“Eleanor was found with a swollen trunk”
: The incident occurred on October 10, 2003, and was recorded and photographed by Iain Douglas-Hamilton and co-workers (2006).

133
a poacher’s bullet
: Example from Cynthia Moss’s (1988, p. 73)
Elephant Memories.
The bull spraying another with water is described in
African Elephants, A Celebration of Majesty
by Daryl and Sharna Balfour (1998), and the mud-hole scene was shown on
National Geographic’s
show
Reflections on Elephants
(1994). For a review of empathy-related behavior in African elephants, see Lucy Bates and co-workers (2008).

135
bigger than an earlier study
: A drawing illustrates the setup of Daniel Povinelli’s (1989) elephant experiment.

138
absent in all other primates
: Esther Nimchinsky and co-workers (1999) compared the brains of twenty-eight primate species, finding VEN cells only in the four great apes and humans. Only one bonobo specimen was available; its brain showed the most humanlike density and distribution of VEN cells, which is intriguing in relation to this species’ hypothetical status as the most empathic ape (de Waal, 1997).

138
special kind of dementia
: Human patients with frontotemporal dementia were studied by William Seeley et al. (2006), who found that three-quarters of all VEN cells in the anterior cingulate cortex were lost in these patients.

138
not limited to humans and apes
: Thus far, the connection seems tight: All mammals with MSR have VEN cells, and vice versa. But exceptions may yet be found, and the precise function of these cells remains a mystery. For VEN cells in nonprimates, see Atiya Hakeem and co-workers (2009).