In Primate’s Memoir, biologist/neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky shares his experience studying baboons in Africa from the late 1970s – early 1990s. Just as significantly, Sapolsky shares his reflections on human life and human nature.
Sapolsky opens with the following premise:
“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—few of us are getting hypertensive from physical stressors, none of us are worrying about famines or locust plagues or the ax fight we’re going to have with the boss out in the parking lot at five o’clock. We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress. Just like these baboons.”
How much time do humans spend on survival, versus self-inflicted psychosocial nonsense? Sapolsky’s colorful tour of baboon life, bush life, and modernizing/urban life help reflect on this.
Baboon Life
Baboon life is characterized by power struggles, sex, and social rank. Just like in humans, baboons have unique personalities, but for the most part, they are all engaged in this ongoing game – fighting for rank, food, and mates.
The “alpha” baboon is typically quite selfish, and looking out for themselves rather than the wellbeing of the troop. Alphas reign until they are eventually overthrown by a challenger, or a team of challengers.
Higher ranking members of a troop have lower stress, and are therefore generally healthier. Low ranking members, subjected to ongoing stress from higher ranks, have more health problems.
“[Lower ranks] had elevated levels of a key stress hormone all the time, indicating that everyday life was miserable enough to activate a stress response. Their immune systems didn’t seem to function as well as did those of dominant animals. They had less of the good version of cholesterol in their bloodstreams, and I had indirect evidence that they had elevated blood pressure.”
Shit Rolls Downhill – “Displaced Aggression”
The struggle for dominance is constant. Often, when one baboon is defeated, they take it out on weaker baboons – called “displaced aggression”. In one vivid example, when an alpha male named Solomon was defeated, he took out his anger by raping a lower ranking female named Devorah. In another example, the weakest member of the troop – named Limp – was constantly beaten up by stronger males. One day, an even weaker baboon – named Gums – joined the troop. Limp had no mercy:
“Gums wound up being slightly lower ranking than poor beaten Limp, who immediately lost any sympathy he may have engendered previously, by beating up on Gums whenever he had the chance.”
Human Bush Life
While studying baboons, Sapolsky interacted with many local communities across Africa – scattered pastoral societies who are not integrated into modernizing African cities and culture.
“In the parts of the country often regarded as open, howling wastelands are the nomadic pastoralists. Wanderers, contemptuous of hunting, contemptuous of farming, those in the north living off the blood and milk of camels and goats, and in the more benign southern grasslands of my baboons, off of the blood and milk of their cows. It is a pattern repeated throughout Africa—the Watutsi of Rwanda, the Dinkas of Sudan, and, as the most likely to grace the cover of some Out of Africa coffee table book, the Masai of my neck of the woods.”
While not quite as cutthroat as baboons, we see recurring themes around dominance and mating:
“Kipkoi [an alpha-like figure] had fourteen children; he would typically depart from each leave home with one of his three wives pregnant. Of the fourteen, he could barely recognize or be recognized by thirteen. But Wilson, the first son, was raised with him.”
Describing elders of one local Masai community:
“Each was in the market for a new wife, and these old lifelong comrades at arms had come up with the fine scheme of each giving their youngest daughter to the other. Naturally, the daughters were not consulted, nor were their first wives (i.e., the mothers of these kids), but wailings and beatings were reported before everyone compliantly went about marrying.“
Unlike baboons, we see an overlay of language and ideas. This strengthens the ability to cooperate and align behavior around shared myths, rituals, and scared beliefs – e.g. seeing cows as sacred, and willingness to die protecting them. It also allows for gossip and superstition to run rampant. This provides a glimpse into their psyche and worldview:
Gossip
“Rhoda [a local Masai woman] and the women also now made daily appearances to fill Lisa [Sapolsky’s wife] in on gossip that I hadn’t had an inkling of—who was sleeping with whom, who wasn’t sleeping with whom when you would have guessed them to, which man was spending each night rushing from the hut of one of his wives to that of another and another, convinced he was finally going to catch one of them with another man…”
Outlandish Speculation
In one situation, locals were trying to explain why one man – named Joseph – went missing. Someone speculated Joseph went mad. Another, was convinced he turned into a hyena:
“But Joseph said he was not frightened of that shaman, so the shaman cannot curse him.” “Of course he can. The shaman can do it. He can change you into a hyena if he wants, he can make your penis fall off,” said Charles.
As it turns out, Joseph was merely on vacation.
Outlandish Speculation Part 2
In another funny scene, locals were trying to make sense of a tourist who was speaking through an electronic voice box. They were convinced he was a robot, telling each other how the robot worked with complete confidence:
“That old white man has no throat, so now it is just a machine. I think he must have been in a car accident, or someone chopped at his neck with a machete, and he had no throat left, so the white doctors put a machine there. When he needs to speak, he takes the other machine, in his hand, and he puts it into his throat, so that the throat machine will work. That is why he has that beard, to hide the machines there, so that his wife will not be upset to look at him.”
Human Modernizing/Urban Life
Sapolsky’s experience in modernizing/urban areas of Africa (mainly Nairobi) is characterized by scams, corruption, aggression, and apathy. Sapolsky is careful to emphasize, this is not reflective of African values necessarily, but extreme economic instability and aftershocks of colonialization (among other complex factors).
Upon arriving in Nairobi as a young student, Sapolsky immediately fell victim to numerous scams:
“It dawned on me as well that I had been ripped off repeatedly by the guy at the food kiosk where I had returned each day, and by the clerk with the imaginary government tax at the lodging place. All this swept over me in a sudden, sagging realization, this sense of, what the hell is with this place, is everything some sort of scam?”
Scams would haunt Sapolsky during his naive years, until his instincts finally hardened. One pivotal moment happened with a park ranger:
“Sometime during that sleepless night, it occurred to me that he was an asshole who was exploiting me, and that he was doing some sort of shakedown of the villagers to which I blithely squired him. As usual, he waved me down with his rifle, and in response to his demand that we leave immediately for that village, I took a deep breath and lied. In the careful, offhanded way that I had rehearsed half the night, I said that I had to do something first, and that I’d be back in a few minutes. And instead, I hightailed it through a back track up to my mountain where I sat, glowing with a sense of triumph.”
The Tragedy at Olemelepo
In the most gut-wrenching part of the book, a tuberculosis plague began mysteriously killing many baboons. It turns out, Olemelepo tourist lodge was illegally butchering contaminated cow meat to serve its guests, and if that weren’t bad enough, throwing scraps in an open dump, where baboons were scavenging from. These baboons were then developing tuberculosis and dying.
It took many painstaking weeks for Sapolsky to trace the root cause of this problem. But worse, once he began ringing alarm bells, everyone was either powerless or didn’t care enough to change anything. The local economy relied so heavily on the tourist industry, nobody wanted to touch it.
This story symbolizes both systemic corruption and fantastic irony. The very wildlife that tourists came to appreciate was being killed off by the industry – and nobody in charge cared.
“Never in my life have I felt closer to drowning in anger, felt more poisoned, more lost in a corrosive sense of betrayal.”
Big Idea 1: Evolution and Culture
Sapolsky’s journey feels like an evolutionary time machine.
First, with baboons, who are 94% genetically similar to humans and predate us by about 1.5 million years. It’s amazing to see them animated by the same basic desires, emotions, and social situations.
Next we fast forward to primitive human life. People living off the land, mostly occupying themselves with mating, attacking or defending themselves from neighboring communities, and shaping shared reality through myth and storytelling.
Next we fast forward to modernizing life. Wealth, government, and military create power and control, and haves and have-nots. The economic situation in Africa is particularly unstable, and everyone does what they can to survive, including scams and corruption.
Finally, most of us can compare our experience in advanced modern society. We have governments and communities with at least some semblance of integrity, some commitment to consensus truth, public safety, public services, and safeguards against corruption. Although, even here, things are imperfect and constantly vulnerable.
What Distinguishes Humans from Baboons?
Hardware (the brain).
The human brain supports language and complex symbolic thought, theory of mind (understanding what others think, such as beliefs), abstract and counterfactual reasoning (“what if…?”), long-term planning and delayed gratification.
And yet… the same basic survival drive and social complexity as baboons are present. And clearly, our abstract brain power is no surefire defense against our primal aggression, fighting for status, wildly inaccurate storytelling, manipulation, and other social maladies.
What Distinguishes Humans from Other Humans?
Software (culture).
Human culture supports rules, senses of right and wrong, norms, knowledge, information, wisdom, entertainment, stories, and ideas. Culture is not inherently good or bad, it is simply a constantly mutating conglomeration of abstraction, which gives rise to great privilege, but at the same time, great problems.
Big Idea 2: Irrevocable Ecological Impact
At two points in the book, we see how human activity impacted ecosystems in a way that can’t be reversed.
First, when Sapolsky fulfilled his lifelong dream of visiting mountain gorillas, he couldn’t help but notice their habitat was barely separated from human encroachment:
“I stayed another week, going back to the gorillas repeatedly. It was heaven, but with each day, I felt more depressed. The gorillas were wondrous, but the weight of what was gone, removed, unmentioned, unanswered, irrevocable, became heavier. You would watch a mother hold her child and nibble at bamboo, and all the while hear the farmers, their chickens, the school kids, 200 yards down the slope, where the slash-and-burning had finally stopped. On the miles and miles of empty rain forest paths aching with no more gorillas.”
Second was the multi-layered tragedy of Olemelepo, described earlier. Not only was this a mini ecological crisis, it was dwarfed by numerous larger humanitarian crises and conflicts occurring broadly throughout Africa.
Final Thoughts
Humanity is a force of nature.
We are billions of primates with complex brains and cognitive abilities who now dominate the planet, programmed by primal instincts and a hodgepodge of cultures.
From the imaginary perspective of our common primate ancestors, 25 million years ago, we can marvel at the biological and cultural complexity that gave rise to modern humanity. Baboons, among other primates, offer a window into our base instincts.
From the actual perspective of modern day humans, we can marvel at the consequences and tradeoffs of population explosion and resource extraction, and wonder about broad cultural discordance. As our ecological footprint grows, and our culture becomes increasingly vast and complex, we accumulate new challenges, even as we solve old ones.
In the end, Sapolsky’s story is not an indictment. His youthful frustration has dissipated in years of reflection and writing this book. He speaks of Africa, the baboons, and many of his relationships with love and admiration, despite any sense of sadness.
He offers this rare perspective for what it is. Each of us can take from it what we will.
Where will we take culture next?
Where will it take us?
Reading Club
Thanks to Lance, Lara, and Adit for joining this round of reading club. This article is reflective our group discussions, although, many themes are omitted for brevity. Sapolsky’s story is overflowing with hilarious and often life-threatening adventures. The full book is below.
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Discussion
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