# sapolsky on alpha baboons **URL:** \ **Category:** Lounge\ **Created:** [July 7, 2007, 1:32pm UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/sapolsky-on-alpha-baboons/4527 "2007-07-07T13:32:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![PheroQuirk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/9e8a1a/32.png) [@PheroQuirk](https://pheromonetalk.com/u/PheroQuirk)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2007, 1:32pm UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/sapolsky-on-alpha-baboons/4527/1 "2007-07-07T13:32:03Z")
worth reading the whole article here [Edge: A BOZO OF A BABOON](http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/sapolsky03/sapolsky_p6.html) The typical male baboon career trajectory is to fight your way to the top while building some good coalitional skills. When you’re relatively high-ranking and if you’re going to stay up there, you switch from physical prowess to psychological intimidation and social skills. But eventually it catches up with you and you finally get into a key fight and get killed or crippled or are utterly defeated and you crash way down. However, every decade you’ll get some guy who’s fought his way up, and six months into his ascendancy suddenly decides, “Who needs this?” and voluntarily walks away from it. They seem to have some sort of epiphanal mid-life crisis and go on to spend the rest of their lives hanging out with infants and forming social attachments with females. Ten years ago the evolutionary community would have had a derisive response to this, saying that while this may be terrific, it’s not a very successful adaptive strategy because this guy is walking away from the competitive world of maximizing his reproductive success. Now, however, genetic studies are beginning to show that these guys out-reproduce the slash-and-burn competitive guys, because they last for years afterward without getting seriously injured and form this female affiliate. This is what happened to Benjamin, my bozo of a baboon, who during his brief ascendancy became a jerk. A terribly unlikely civil war had broken out in the troop and it was in the aftermath of every plausible candidate having been done in that he actually managed to stumble into the alpha position for about and was as incompetent as he could be. He had no idea what he was doing, he was anxious, and displacing aggression onto every possible innocent bystander. Then he had an experience that demonstrated exactly the cognitive limits in a baboon. They’re smart, but they’re not chimps. Benjamin was leading a procession as they were coming back at the end of the day along a path and through some bushes. He’s leading the way, proud as hell of himself. But the fact is alpha male baboons do not lead processions because they just joined the troop a couple of years ago and they have no idea where anybody’s processing – the 20-year old matriarchs do. But Benjamin just happened to be in front of the troop, heading toward the forest, marching along, never looking back. Unbeknownst to him, the matriarch, who’s two steps behind him, veers off into the bushes to the right, and 80 baboons follow her while he continues walking going straight forward. Eventually Benjamin stops, looks back and freaks out. His hair stands up, and he starts his wahoo calling, which is how he spent a large part of his adult life: “Where is everybody?!” And he then has a moment where you know exactly what he’s thinking. He walks over to my Jeep and looks underneath, like—are 60 baboons hiding under there waiting to surprise him? But no baboons. He sits down by the Jeep, looking really demoralized and vaguely humiliated. This is what he’s alpha for? Eventually he hears baboons burping nearby in the bushes and starts looking for them again—they’re underneath the car! once again he goes over to the jeep and bends over—in this ridiculous position his head between his legs, looking for his fellow baboons. It was a fabulous moment. For the humans who would like to know what it takes to be an alpha man—if I were 25 and asked that question I would certainly say competitive prowess is important—balls, translated into the more abstractly demanding social realm of humans. What’s clear to me now at 45 is, **screw the alpha male stuff. Go for an alternative strategy. Go for the social affiliation, build relationships with females, don’t waste your time trying to figure out how to be the most adept socially cagy male-male competitor. Amazingly enough that’s not what pays off in that system. Go for the affiliative stuff and bypass the male crap.** I could not have said that when I was 25. According to an unexpected finding called female choice it turns out that females have a hell of a lot of control over who they’re mating with, and, irrationally enough, they like to mate with guys that are nice to them! You see this dynamic when some guy from the male-male competitive world pops out and is supposed to be her mate. She wants to run off to the bushes with Alan Alda, and manipulates the social situation to pull this off. A handful of these guys simply walked away from it over the years. Nathaniel was one, and Joshua was another. They had the lowest stress hormone levels you’ve ever seen in male baboons, and outlived their cohorts. The fact that this alternative strategy is actually the more adaptive one is one of the good bits of news to come out of primatology in quite some time. If that’s the future of primates, this planet is going to be in great shape in a couple of million years. ---
**Author:** ![PheroQuirk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/9e8a1a/32.png) [@PheroQuirk](https://pheromonetalk.com/u/PheroQuirk)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2007, 1:46pm UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/sapolsky-on-alpha-baboons/4527/2 "2007-07-07T13:46:12Z")
also … On the one hand there’s the view of someone like Robert Ardrey that primate social competition is all about, who’s got the biggest canines, the most muscle, and the biggest balls. This view is straight-ahead and deterministic. Later, a much more p.c. version came along that held that competition is all about social intelligence, forming coalitions, and being nice in your game theory. But what really happens is that you’ll get some baboon that’s absolutely physically adept and by Ardrey’s logic should be doing just fine. He also knows how to use social intelligence to form coalitions, and so by Howard Gardner’s reckoning he should also be doing fine. However, at a critical moment he just can’t stop himself from doing something stupid, impulsive, and disinhibited. **Amid the physical prowess and the social intelligence, you look at the baboons that are most successful, and not coincidentally pass on more copies of their genes, and they simply have more impulsivity control.** Here’s an example: When baboons hunt together they’d love to get as much meat as possible, but they’re not very good at it. The baboon is a much more successful hunter when he hunts by himself than when he hunts in a group because they screw up every time they’re in a group. Say three of them are running as fast as possible after a gazelle, and they’re gaining on it, and they’re deadly. But something goes on in one of their minds—I’m anthropomorphizing here—and he says to himself, “What am I doing here? I have no idea whatsoever, but I’m running as fast as possible, and this guy is running as fast as possible right behind me, and we had one hell of a fight about three months ago. I don’t quite know why we’re running so fast right now, but I’d better just stop and slash him in the face before he gets me.” The baboon suddenly stops and turns around, and they go rolling over each other like Keystone cops and the gazelle is long gone because the baboons just became disinhibited. They get crazed around each other at every juncture. A typical male baboon is too impulsive and can’t possibly do the disciplined thing. Baboons are far less disciplined than chimps and when you map their brain anatomy you notice that they don’t have a whole lot of frontal cortical function. Even though there are tremendous individual differences among the baboons, they’re still at this neurological disadvantage, compared to the apes, and thus they typically blow it at just the right time. They could be scheming these incredible coalitions, but at the last moment, one decides to slash his partner in the ass instead of the guy they’re going after, just because he can get away with it for three seconds. The whole world is three seconds long—they’re very pointillist in their emotions. Baboons know what they’re doing; they can play chess in their social landscape almost as well as chimps in terms of moving the right pieces around, but at the critical moment they simply can’t stop themselves from doing the impulsive thing. I once watched a Frans de Waal film, _Chimpanzee Politics_, at a primate conference, and I was sitting next to another baboonologist. There is a scene where some chimp had just pulled off a brilliant Machiavellian maneuver, and the guy next to me turned and said, “Christ, that is what a baboon would be like if it had a shred of discipline or gratification-postponement.” You’re watching a species where most of their social complexity and social misery is built around the fact that at every logical juncture there’s a pretty good chance that they’re not going to have enough frontal neurons to do the prudent thing, and instead they blow it. It’s amazing to study. ---
**Author:** ![Carrie](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/pheromonetalk.com/carrie/32/1537_2.png) [@Carrie](https://pheromonetalk.com/u/Carrie)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2007, 11:22pm UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/sapolsky-on-alpha-baboons/4527/3 "2007-07-07T23:22:43Z")
That is so fascinating. I love this part: “…this guy is running as fast as possible right behind me, and we had one hell of a fight about three months ago. I don’t quite know why we’re running so fast right now, but I’d better just stop and slash him in the face before he gets me.” now where have I seen this behavior recently? LOL ! ---
**Author:** ![nbully79](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/c68b51/32.png) [@nbully79](https://pheromonetalk.com/u/nbully79)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2007, 8:01pm UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/sapolsky-on-alpha-baboons/4527/4 "2007-07-08T20:01:58Z")
I just saw a program which said similar things. It was mentioned that while for lions it was the alpha male that was getting the most attention from females, in baboons the ones who were nice to females, babysitting them, helping them with grooming, sharing food with them were the ones who got more attention from females. ---
**Author:** ![PheroQuirk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/9e8a1a/32.png) [@PheroQuirk](https://pheromonetalk.com/u/PheroQuirk)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2007, 12:39pm UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/sapolsky-on-alpha-baboons/4527/5 "2007-07-16T12:39:55Z")
a natural history of peace [Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky](http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060101faessay85110-p0/robert-m-sapolsky/a-natural-history-of-peace.html) … In the early 1970s, a highly respected primatologist named Hans Kummer was working in Ethiopia, in a region containing two species of baboons with markedly different social systems. Savanna baboons live in large troops, with plenty of adult females and males. Hamadryas baboons, in contrast, have a more complex, multilevel society. Because they live in a much harsher, drier region, hamadryas have a distinctive ecological problem. Some resources are singular and scarce – like a rare watering hole or a good cliff face to sleep on at night in order to evade predators – and large numbers of animals are likely to want to share them. Other resources, such as the vegetation they eat, are sparse and widely dispersed, requiring animals to function in small, separate groups. As a result, hamadryas have evolved a “harem” structure – a single adult male surrounded by a handful of adult females and their children – with large numbers of discrete harems converging, peacefully, for short periods at the occasional desirable watering hole or cliff face. Kummer conducted a simple experiment, trapping an adult female savanna baboon and releasing her into a hamadryas troop and trapping an adult female hamadryas and releasing her into a savanna troop. Among hamadryas, if a male threatens a female, it is almost certainly this brute who dominates the harem, and the only way for the female to avoid injury is to approach him – i.e., return to the fold. But among savanna baboons, if a male threatens a female, the way for her to avoid injury is to run away. In Kummer’s experiment, the females who were dropped in among a different species initially carried out their species-typical behavior, a major faux pas in the new neighborhood. But gradually, they assimilated the new rules. How long did this learning take? About an hour. In other words, millennia of genetic differences separating the two species, a lifetime of experience with a crucial social rule for each female, and a miniscule amount of time to reverse course completely. The second experiment was set up by de Waal and his student Denise Johanowicz in the early 1990s, working with two macaque monkey species. By any human standards, male rhesus macaques are unappealing animals. Their hierarchies are rigid, those at the top seize a disproportionate share of the spoils, they enforce this inequity with ferocious aggression, and they rarely reconcile after fights. Male stump tail macaques, in contrast, which share almost all of their genes with their rhesus macaque cousins, display much less aggression, more affiliative behaviors, looser hierarchies, and more egalitarianism. Working with captive primates, de Waal and Johanowicz created a mixed-sex social group of juvenile macaques, combining rhesus and stump tails together. Remarkably, instead of the rhesus macaques bullying the stump tails, over the course of a few months, the rhesus males adopted the stump tails’ social style, eventually even matching the stump tails’ high rates of reconciliatory behavior. It so happens, moreover, that stump tails and rhesus macaques use different gestures when reconciling. The rhesus macaques in the study did not start using the stump tails’ reconciliatory gestures, but rather increased the incidence of their own species-typical gestures. In other words, they were not merely imitating the stump tails’ behavior; they were incorporating the concept of frequent reconciliation into their own social practices. When the newly warm-and-fuzzy rhesus macaques were returned to a larger, all-rhesus group, finally, their new behavioral style persisted. This is nothing short of extraordinary. But it brings up one last question: When those rhesus macaques were transferred back into the all-rhesus world, did they spread their insights and behaviors to the others? Alas, they did not. For that, we need to move on to our final case. LEFT BEHIND In the early 1980s, “Forest Troop,” a group of savanna baboons I had been studying – virtually living with – for years, was going about its business in a national park in Kenya when a neighboring baboon group had a stroke of luck: its territory encompassed a tourist lodge that expanded its operations and consequently the amount of food tossed into its garbage dump. Baboons are omnivorous, and “Garbage Dump Troop” was delighted to feast on leftover drumsticks, half-eaten hamburgers, remnants of chocolate cake, and anything else that wound up there. Soon they had shifted to sleeping in the trees immediately above the pit, descending each morning just in time for the day’s dumping of garbage. (They soon got quite obese from the rich diet and lack of exercise, but that is another story.) The development produced nearly as dramatic a shift in the social behavior of Forest Troop. Each morning, approximately half of its adult males would infiltrate Garbage Dump Troop’s territory, descending on the pit in time for the day’s dumping and battling the resident males for access to the garbage. The Forest Troop males that did this shared two traits: they were particularly combative (which was necessary to get the food away from the other baboons), and they were not very interested in socializing (the raids took place early in the morning, during the hours when the bulk of a savanna baboon’s daily communal grooming occurs). Soon afterward, tuberculosis, a disease that moves with devastating speed and severity in nonhuman primates, broke out in Garbage Dump Troop. Over the next year, most of its members died, as did all of the males from Forest Troop who had foraged at the dump.[See Footnote #1] The results were that Forest Troop was left with males who were less aggressive and more social than average and the troop now had double its previous female-to-male ratio. The social consequences of these changes were dramatic. There remained a hierarchy among the Forest Troop males, but it was far looser than before: compared with other, more typical savanna baboon groups, high-ranking males rarely harassed subordinates and occasionally even relinquished contested resources to them. Aggression was less frequent, particularly against third parties. And rates of affiliative behaviors, such as males and females grooming each other or sitting together, soared. There were even instances, now and then, of adult males grooming each other – a behavior nearly as unprecedented as baboons sprouting wings. This unique social milieu did not arise merely as a function of the skewed sex ratio; other primatologists have occasionally reported on troops with similar ratios but without a comparable social atmosphere. What was key was not just the predominance of females, but the type of male that remained. The demographic disaster – what evolutionary biologists term a “selective bottleneck” – had produced a savanna baboon troop quite different from what most experts would have anticipated. But the largest surprise did not come until some years later. Female savanna baboons spend their lives in the troop into which they are born, whereas males leave their birth troop around puberty; a troop’s adult males have thus all grown up elsewhere and immigrated as adolescents. By the early 1990s, none of the original low aggression/high affiliation males of Forest Troop’s tuberculosis period was still alive; all of the group’s adult males had joined after the epidemic. Despite this, the troop’s unique social milieu persisted – as it does to this day, some 20 years after the selective bottleneck. In other words, adolescent males that enter Forest Troop after having grown up elsewhere wind up adopting the unique behavioral style of the resident males. As defined by both anthropologists and animal behaviorists, “culture” consists of local behavioral variations, occurring for nongenetic and nonecological reasons, that last beyond the time of their originators. Forest Troop’s low aggression/high affiliation society constitutes nothing less than a multigenerational benign culture. Continuous study of the troop has yielded some insights into how its culture is transmitted to newcomers. Genetics obviously plays no role, nor apparently does self-selection: adolescent males that transfer into the troop are no different from those that transfer into other troops, displaying on arrival similarly high rates of aggression and low rates of affiliation. Nor is there evidence that new males are taught to act in benign ways by the residents. One cannot rule out the possibility that some observational learning is occurring, but it is difficult to detect given that the distinctive feature of this culture is not the performance of a unique behavior but the performance of typical behaviors at atypically extreme rates. To date, the most interesting hint about the mechanism of transmission is the way recently transferred males are treated by Forest Troop’s resident females. In a typical savanna baboon troop, newly transferred adolescent males spend years slowly working their way into the social fabric; they are extremely low ranking – ignored by females and noted by adult males only as convenient targets for aggression. In Forest Troop, by contrast, new male transfers are inundated with female attention soon after their arrival. Resident females first present themselves sexually to new males an average of 18 days after the males arrive, and they first groom the new males an average of 20 days after they arrive (normal savanna baboons introduce such behaviors after 63 and 78 days, respectively). Furthermore, these welcoming gestures occur more frequently in Forest Troop during the early post-transfer period, and there is four times as much grooming of males by females in Forest Troop as elsewhere. From almost the moment they arrive, in other words, new males find out that in Forest Troop, things are done differently. At present, I think the most plausible explanation is that this troop’s special culture is not passed on actively but simply emerges, facilitated by the actions of the resident members. Living in a group with half the typical number of males, and with the males being nice guys to boot, Forest Troop’s females become more relaxed and less wary. As a result, they are more willing to take a chance and reach out socially to new arrivals, even if the new guys are typical jerky adolescents at first. The new males, in turn, finding themselves treated so well, eventually relax and adopt the behaviors of the troop’s distinctive social milieu. NATURAL BORN KILLERS? Are there any lessons to be learned here that can be applied to human-on-human violence – apart, that is, from the possible desirability of giving fatal cases of tuberculosis to aggressive people? …