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[Alexandra Ringe <aringe AT modernhumorist.com>]

http://www.theatlantic.com/cgi-bin/o/unbound/interviews/int2001-04-25.htm

From the Atlantic, April 25, 2001

OF MONKEYS AND MEN
Robert Sapolsky talks about his years spent with a troop of baboons—and what
they've taught him about people

.....



A Primate's Memoir
by Robert M. Sapolsky
Scribner
304 pages, $25


"I joined the baboon troop during my twenty-first year. I had never planned
to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I
would become a mountain gorilla." So begins Robert Sapolsky's new book, A
Primate's Memoir, about the time he spent in Kenya's Serengeti over the past
twenty years, researching a troop of baboons. While an undergraduate at
Harvard, Sapolsky decided to study the relationship between stress and
social hierarchy in primates—Who gets sick from stress-related disease and
why?—to see what that could tell us about stress in human beings. The
Serengeti baboons, unlike mountain gorillas, were perfect for his research:
Baboons live in big, complex social groups, and the population I went to
study lived like kings.... The baboons work maybe four hours a day to feed
themselves; hardly anyone is likely to eat them. Basically, baboons have
about a half dozen solid hours of sunlight a day to devote to being rotten
to each other. Just like our society.... We live well enough to have the
luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.
But this is no dry academic treatise on observing animals in the wild.
Sapolsky gave each baboon a name out of the Old Testament according to its
personality, and in his telling, the story of the baboons he's followed so
carefully over the years reads almost like a soap opera—albeit a kooky one.
Will Solomon ward off the depredations of Uriah and remain king of the
troop? Will Bathsheba survive her clash with the vengeful Nebuchanezzar?
Will Joshua's love for Ruth be reciprocated? (In this last case, yes. Joshua
and Ruth produce Obadiah, whom Sapolsky describes as "one weird-looking kid.
He had a narrow head and long stringy hair that formed an elongated wing in
the rear; he looked like a dissipated fin de siècle Viennese neurotic.")

Sapolsky's daily interactions with the baboons center on his quest to dart a
baboon a day with anesthetic, so he can take its blood pressure, test its
level of cholesterol and stress hormones, and so on. But the baboons have a
wily intelligence, and Sapolsky is forced to spend much of his time and
ingenuity devising ways to hide his intentions. He takes to wearing what he
calls Southern sheriff glasses to hide his eyes. He dons ski masks and
Halloween disguises. He camouflages his blow gun as a walking stick. As he
writes with his customary verve,
You find yourself, a reasonably well-educated human with a variety of
interests, spending hours each day and night obsessing on how to outmaneuver
these beasts, how to think like them, how to think better than them. Usually
unsuccessfully. Your mind runs wild with unlikely schemes, using hang
gliders, hot air balloons, mannequins, being wheeled through the forest
hidden in a perambulator.
But the book is about much more than Sapolsky's encounters with the baboons.
He writes about his run-ins with local Masai warriors; about life in the
African bush, chasing off elephants who tromp through his camp and nibble on
his lean-to; and about the changes wrought on the Serengeti by
tourism—changes that indirectly result in the deaths of several of his
baboons.

Along with his work as a primatologist, Sapolsky is a professor of biology
and neurology at Stanford University, where he runs a lab that researches
the effects of stress on brain cells. He is a recipient of a MacArthur
Foundation grant, and is the author of two previous books aimed for a lay
audience, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, a look at the science of stress, and
The Trouble With Testosterone, essays on various aspects of behavioral
biology, including the political and social implications of new discoveries
in the field. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children.


—Katie Bacon



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One of the things that sticks in my mind from reading A Primate's Memoir is
the antic sense of fun—your descriptions of debating with Masai warriors,
the scams you fell prey to, and especially the constantly entertaining
interactions among the baboons. Could you talk about what it was like to
spend years of your life following the baboons so closely?

I've now spent more than half my life connected with them. It's a funny
mixture. It's one of the emotional foundations of who I am. The baboons
remain endlessly interesting. Nonetheless, insofar as they're very familiar
to me by now, they have somewhat of a family feeling—here I am back with
them again, I know how everybody here behaves. The continuity is
incredible—the notion that I look at one of these baboons, and I saw her
grandmother do something by that same tree twenty-two years ago. Their life
history is truncated enough that within twenty years of my life I've seen
generations of them, so I can have this epic schlocky novel sort of thing
covering four generations of some particular heroic family.

What do you think the baboons think of you?

To the extent that they have any opinion about me, I'm clearly just a
pathetically low-ranking baboon. The way I can tell is that there's this
gesture that males will give if somebody is about to beat up on them. They
make a solicitive gesture with their face to some other male, trying to get
him to join in a coalition, as if to say, Can somebody help me out here? And
what's clear over the years is that they will try to get me to join, but I
am absolutely their last resort. I mean, if nobody else is around, they'll
decide I'm worth a try. I think in that regard I count pretty low on their
priority list of primates whom they want to have backing them up in a fight.

They do know what humans are by now, and they do some amazing stuff
cognitively in terms of dealing with humans. They know Masai versus other
humans, by the bright-red clothing that Masai have, and they're terrified of
the Masai, because the Masai have dogs that chase the baboons, and because
some of the Masai kids practice on the baboons with their spears. So I never
wear anything red and neither do my field assistants. The baboons definitely
understand us as something separate from the trees, and something separate
on a fundamental level from baboons. At the beginning of each season they
keep me within their range of peripheral vision, but within a few days they
habituate again, and they basically ignore me.

Twenty or so years ago you set out to study how stress affects baboons'
health—and what that could tell us about humans. Now it's accepted that
stress can play a role in hardening our arteries or raising our blood
pressure, but what was the thinking when you started your research?

Much the same. People already recognized the effects of stress on disease.
People had much less of a sense of individual differences—why some
individuals are more vulnerable to stress-related disease than others. I
think the baboon work has had some impact in that area, showing what stress
has to do with social status and the society in which it occurs, with
personality, with patterns of social affiliation.

And why study stress in baboons rather than humans?

Okay, here's an example that shows the advantages: one of the classic
stress-related disease links in humans is that if you have this certain
personality profile that we call Type A personality, you're more at risk for
cardiovascular disease. Maybe the higher risk has something to do with
personality and stress, but maybe it has something to do with personality
and how likely you are to drink or eat a lot of saturated fats or smoke too
much. The trouble is, in the whole health-psychology field, all the links
between a personality state or experiential state in humans and a disease
outcome have all of these lifestyle confounds gumming things up. Baboons
don't smoke, they don't drink, they all have the exact same diet, they're
all lean, they're all healthy. So if you go and see the same relationships
between stress and disease in baboons, without the lifestyle stuff
intervening, that's the clearest demonstration you can get that there are
direct links between the personality and the physiology.

What would happen if you were studying a troop of baboons that wasn't in the
Serengeti, where presumably it's easier for them to get food, and they have
a less stressful existence because they're in a protected place?

That's the advantage of studying these guys—they're privileged enough that
they don't have a whole lot of physical stressors except for occasional
droughts and things like that. Their stress is entirely socially generated,
so they really are good models for us. Study some marginal baboon population
in some dying ecosystem and it would not be anywhere near relevant to making
sense of which middle-aged executive gets heart disease. Our stress is
created by our privileged cocooning from ecological stressors; likewise
these baboons.

How does your work with the baboons relate to what you're working on in the
lab?

We have no primates in the lab, we almost never have a whole rat in there.
Most of what we do is single neurons growing in dishes, so it's very far
afield from the baboon world, although there is a connection. My lab looks
at the ability of stress hormones to kill brain cells, and basically we are
trying to understand on a molecular level how a neuron dies after a stroke,
a seizure, Alzheimer's, brain aging, and what these stress hormones do to
make it worse. Our goal is to design gene-therapy strategies to save a
neuron after one of these disasters. So it's very molecular stuff which will
hopefully turn into something clinically useful at some point.

Are there ways that human behavior could be changed to avoid some of the
social stresses that you've seen?

Yes, there's enormous potential. That's what stress management is about,
that's what psychotherapy is about, finding religion, or finding your loved
one or your hobby—any of those, they give you more outlets, more of a sense
of control, more of a sense of predictability, of social support. They give
you the means to psychologically finesse ambiguous outside reality. There
are exceptions to this, of course: terminal cancer or being a refugee are
things that cannot be psychologically finessed, and it winds up bordering on
scientific offensiveness to preach stress-management techniques for them.
But for people with middle-class neurotic problems, these are problems that
increase your risk of disease because you interpret ambiguous external
events in a way that makes you feel hopeless and helpless and unconnected.
Psychological manipulations that push you in the opposite direction do
wonders.

So the work that you're doing in the lab, on neurons dying because of
stress, can be applied to the types of social stresses we're talking about?

Absolutely. What we and others are beginning to learn is that stress
probably has some relevance to why some of us lose more neurons during brain
aging than others, as well as to the effects on brain aging of a lifelong
problem with major depression, and to what things like post-traumatic stress
disorder do to the brain—those all wind up fitting very much into this
framework we've been working on.

How would you respond to someone who's critical of anthropomorphizing? Does
it help us understand baboon behavior if it's described in human terms?

No doubt the question is prompted by how I present the baboons at points in
the book, and my answer would be, I'm completely opposed to
anthropomorphism—it's lousy science. That's why I'm not doing anything
anthropomorphic in my writing about the baboons. If it seems like there's
something relating to human attributes in there, it's because they're close
relatives. I am not ascribing anthropomorphic, or hominid-like traits to
them, but I sure am ascribing complex social primate traits to them, and
they seem familiar because they are familiar—they're our close relatives in
lots of ways. All this is said with the recognition that, nonetheless, I am
moving the narrative in my book along at various points by doing a parody of
anthropomorphizing (for example, discussing how the alpha male baboon was
originally thought to lead the hunts, protect against predators, change the
light bulbs, etc.). But hopefully it's obvious that this sort of thing is
meant to be tongue in cheek.

Some people are uncomfortable with the idea that these behaviors can be
shared, that you could use a word like "friend" to describe a relationship
between two baboons. Maybe people like to think that there's less of a
continuum between humans, baboons, and other primates.

That's absolutely valid, and it comes in all sorts of political stripes. A
right-wing version of that discomfort is that we're letting evolution in the
back door, letting our biological roots instead of our fundamentalist
God-given roots come to the forefront. A more leftist discomfort with that
is, What if some unpalatable biological proclivities come out of that
connectedness—proclivities that very much run counter to an optimistic,
infinitely malleable picture of humans. Control enough of the societally
engineered buttons, this thinking goes, and this can be a world without
aggression or domination or stratification. There's a lot of hidden-agenda
discomfort from both ends of the political spectrum.

In your previous book, The Trouble With Testosterone, you talk about issues
of behavioral biology, the interplay of nature and nurture, and the question
of how much volition we actually have in our behaviors. How has your study
of the baboons played into your thoughts on these issues?

One of the most frustrating things about the research I've done in the
Serengeti is that it's given me no insight at all into the nature-nurture
question, simply because having mostly studied males over the years, all of
the males that have become near and dear to me were born in some other troop
and grew up somewhere else, so I don't know who their mothers were, what
their childhoods were like, who the likely father was, anything like that.
The confound with the females is that they were born with a rank in a very
static hereditary system. Those born into a high-ranking lineage have the
best food from before they were born, so there may be all sorts of
biological factors, but from their first week of life they're already being
treated differently from the daughter of a low-ranking female. One of the
only ways to get at these issues is by doing "cross-fostering"
studies—basically the animal equivalent of adoption studies. Then you can
see where there's more commonality with the adoptive parent or the
biological parent, but that doesn't rule out environmental effects from
sharing the mother's bloodstream as a fetus, and things like that. It's a
terribly messy field to sort out.

To answer your question about how much volition we have, I don't believe in
free will. I think it is mostly a cognitively calming myth that we've had to
invent—or that most people have—which is protective against certain types of
depression and a pathological overabundance of facing reality. I clearly
think religion falls under the auspices of that. At the largest levels, at
the levels that get at the basic questions of existence, the room for
biological constraints is just so enormous—and this is not equating biology
with genetics, but rather recognizing that biology is the outcome of at
least as many environmental influences as genetic ones. The array of
incredibly subtle biological constraints and biological proclivities makes
the notion of volition as this separately floating, soul-like entity seem
like a creation myth to me.

So everything we do has to be connected with what the neurons are doing in
our brain?

Yes. It's not necessarily deterministic in a point-for-point sort of way, as
in, here is the neuron or the gene that got activated and caused that
behavior. The determinism is very often a more statistical sort of property,
something encompassed in fields like chaos and complexity theory, which
basically say that you get predictability coming out of whole systems of
complexity rather than being blueprinted down at the level of the single
cell or gene. Even if you cannot predict with any sort of scientific
accuracy what the weather is going to be nine days from now, there is a
deterministic science that tells you why on the average it's warmer during
the summer than during the winter, and why on the average ice ages only come
once every twenty or thirty thousand years.

So we probably aren't ever really going to know how a single neuron or gene
affects behavior.

Exactly, and that's one of the great false hopes of the Human Genome
Project—Aha, that's it, we've got the blueprint for everything now. That is
certainly not the case. The metaphor that's always used is, No amount of
reductive scientific knowledge can ever tell you what this one ant is going
to do in the next five seconds. But it sure can tell you with a lot of
predictive power how ant colonies act—what they'll start doing more of or
less of if you change the temperature this much and the humidity that much.
And if you think of a single ant as metaphorically being like the activity
of a single neuron, science will never get us to the point where you can say
what one neuron is going to do next, or which neuron is responsible for your
suddenly remembering you left the lights on in the car. Nonetheless, there
are emergent properties of the whole that give us a hell of a lot of
predictive power.

A Primate's Memoir is not only a portrait of the baboon troop you studied,
but also a glimpse into the African society that you were tangentially
connected to. How dramatically have things in the Serengeti changed since
you first started going there?

Enormously, at least in all sorts of superficial ways. The population
density of humans has gone way up and so has the habitat degradation.
Translated into more concrete terms, when I got there in 1978, the nearest
school was forty miles away, at the local Masai villages there was one
person who spoke English. Now the nearest school is across the river from my
camp; all the kids speak English; most of the kids are no longer wearing
traditional clothes; most of them are no longer living a traditional Masai
lifestyle of spending their days tending cows. It's a complete
transformation.

What is the change being driven by?

Tourism; the other, more Westernized tribes bordering Masai areas; the
number of Masai kids who have gotten some degree of Western education by
now. When I got there, what someone Masai who was oriented a bit toward the
outside world would most want was the means to get more of what Masai
traditionally valued. This was someone who was thinking, If I can get money
from tourists, if I can find a job cleaning camps, I'll be able to afford
more cows, I'll be able to be a more powerful or privileged version of a
traditional Masai. The transition now is desiring things that have nothing
to do with traditional Masaidom—a digital watch, a pair of blue jeans.

Having spent a lot of time in Africa, what do you think of the way it's
typically presented in the Western media?

I think it's appalling and built around the five-second attention span that
the media assumes most people have. The chaos there far too often gets
framed as, explicitly or otherwise, what your average reader sees as the
most salient feature of Africa—that these are people of a very different
race than your basic white-bread American. What's lost in the baggage is
that the tribal differences are as ferocious as Palestinians versus Israelis
or Serbs versus Croats. You look at Europe's history and they spent a
thousand years just savaging each other over tribal issues, and World War II
was the last, most bloody European tribal conflict. And what Europe and the
United States finally figured out is that there's a much better way to do
it: just have Third World countries be your surrogate states, and thus
instead of the U.S. and the Soviet Union having to have a war, we could play
it out between Ethiopia and Somalia or Namibia and South Africa. And if you
do it right, on top of it you can even sell your weapons for a profit.

There's also this attitude of, Hurray, colonialism is over with, they've had
forty or fifty years of freedom to get themselves up on their feet, come on
already get it together. But economic colonialism remains devastating
there—we sell and dump all of our pesticides there that we can't use. We do
the same thing with all of our medicines that are expired. Anybody who is
wealthy in a place like Kenya has every possible incentive to invest their
money in the West, which means that nothing gets fertilized back into their
own economy. And in terms of corruption, an affordable purchase of a rhino
horn for a wealthy Westerner is years' worth of salary for somebody
there—nobody can remain uncorrupted by that power of money. Africa is a mess
for lots of reasons, but we certainly have a lot to do with it, and that's
often underemphasized.

What inspired you to start writing for a lay audience?

I was not especially a writer back in college. I think my becoming a writer
had much to do with spending a chunk of each year sitting by myself out in a
tent without radio, without newspapers, without a whole lot of people to
interact with, without anybody having any sort of similar background to me.
I got my mail only once every two weeks, and I got pretty berserk about
trying to get letters. I would find during three- or four-month seasons out
there that I'd be corresponding with a hundred different people, dashing off
these one-page aerograms in the hope that anybody would write back. I'd have
a couple of hours between blood samples on a baboon, and I'd be sitting
around camp and would whip off eight aerograms of the same story over and
over. I think that got writing in my blood and taught me a lot about editing
and how to craft a story.

The writing's a blast, because it has such a different tempo from the lab
work. In the lab you get an idea, and you get twenty really good,
hardworking people researching it, and maybe a year later you get a hint as
to whether your idea actually works. Whereas with the writing, you write a
paragraph, and you know five minutes later whether it works. It's skimming
the surface for the fun stuff, and that's a nice parallel intellectual
venture to have while doing these multi-year holding-your-breath-type
studies.

Were there any models you followed in writing your memoir?

Presumably I'm supposed to start citing either Jane Goodall or Lewis Thomas.
But I suspect the writer who's had the most influence on me stylistically is
Tom Wolfe. I'm not crazy about his novels, but in his journalist days he had
amazing rhythm and voice. Something else I had in mind was a movie I saw
about fifteen years ago called Never Cry Wolf—it's about Farley Mowat coming
of age, doing his wolf research, and eventually something awful and corrupt
comes in there and wipes out a bunch of his animals, and he can't really
blame the people at the end, because they had their own economic pressures
for poaching wolves. The overall shape of that was very appealing.

Pauline Kael wrote a review of the movie, which said something like, The
problem with the movie is that you're watching this guy learn how to make a
fire out there or how to pee in the bushes without freezing, and it's all so
mundane—he was far less heroic than his surroundings. I remember thinking,
Bullshit, Pauline Kael! You clearly have never gone camping or done
fieldwork. That's the challenge. Forget the big, exciting challenges like
wrestling a bison stampeding through camp. No, the real challenge is how to
keep the matches from getting wet when the camp floods or how to keep the
bugs out of your food.