The Arms Race Of The Mind

I have never been sure why, but we humans seem to find endless amusement in primates. The portia spider’s behavior is impressive, but let’s give our species some credit, too. Without question, our great capacity for mind reading makes us distinct from all of nature’s other liars. But the question of whether mind reading, to any degree of sophistication, is something humans alone can engage in is less clear. We dress chimpanzees up in tuxedos and laugh when they stick out their tongues. Images of monkeys adorn greeting cards and baby clothes. For years, my daughter asked for a pet monkey for her birthday. I don’t dispute that some monkeys are cute, of course. Andrews, in Scotland, have spent decades studying primate behavior. They have compiled a database of hundreds of incidents of monkeys and apes cheating, tricking, and manipulating one another. In some of these cases, their behavior seems to resemble very closely the less admirable habits of their more evolved relatives. For instance, male monkeys who live in social groups are generally ordered in strict hierarchies.

The Long Run

The dominant males control the access to females in the group. The clandestine lovers will even muffle the sounds of their copulation, in order to further hide their tryst. In a similar incident, a baboon was crafty enough to keep her head and shoulders visible to the dominant male in her group, while behind a rock, her hands were busy grooming a subordinate male. Whiten and Byrne recorded the story of one young baboon in the Drakensberg Mountains of southern Africa, whom primatologists called Paul. Paul noticed another baboon digging up a tasty plant bulb. Once the bulb was loose, young Paul let out a scream, and his frightened mother quickly came charging over, frightening away the baboon who’d been digging up the bulb. Paul was now free to take the bulb for himself. In another example, a Dutch primatologist, Frans Plooij, saw a chimpanzee come upon some food, only to hide it when another chimp appeared. The first chimp waited until the other had departed, sitting placidly as if nothing was out of the ordinary, before retrieving the food for himself. The complexity of the deception in these examples separates it from the reflexive, programmed deception of spiders and fireflies. Yet the question of whether any of these acts demonstrates mind reading, the hallmark of human deception, is the source of a heated debate among ethologists. In some cases, it certainly appears that apes and monkeys manipulate the thinking of others.

Watching The Wheels

When Paul cried out for his mother, he seemed to comprehend in some way what her response would be, and to exploit this comprehension to his own benefit. The female baboon who showed just enough of herself to convince the dominant male in her group that she wasn’t up to any illicit grooming did seem to have an awareness of what the dominant male might suspect and what he might be reassured by. Perhaps, for instance, Paul had noticed that calling for his mother often resulted in his getting food, and so his behavior was not so much manipulation of her reactions as a learned response drawn from other, similar situations. The question of whether baboons, chimps, or other of our closest animal relatives can read minds ultimately comes down to whether they understand what a mind is at all. Yet ascribing theory of mind to monkeys and apes may always be a matter of conjecture, since on some level it seems fundamentally impossible to know what any nonhuman creature is actually thinking. Their behavior may be indicative of theory of mind, but so then is the behavior of a portia spider. Yet even if we grant that monkey or ape methods of manipulation are less sophisticated than human methods, the fact that their deceptive behavior is so similar to ours offers some intriguing clues about the origin of lying. Indeed, these clues may take us beyond an understanding of the source of our deception and even offer insight into the source of humanity’s advanced intelligence in general. Some scientists believe that human deception is not only a function of evolution but also the driving force behind it. Lies, in other words, may have made us who we are today. We’ve been looking at some peculiar animal behavior. Now let’s look at an oddity among us humans.

Keep Talking

Every December, members of Homo sapiens adorn their homes in multicolored electrical lights, festoon their lawns with plastic likenesses of elves and reindeer, and sometimes go so far as to inflate enormous plastic depictions of a man in a red suit with a white beard. Now let’s look at another aspect of this behavior. And another neighbor we’ll call Nick has the same ambition. The principle at work is escalation. Each man raises the stakes for the other, and each responds by raising them again, in a cycle that spirals upward. Now let’s turn back to the question of deceit, and whether it can be considered a behavior humans developed as a product of evolution. As we’ve discussed, deception provides an advantage in survival and procreation to a myriad of creatures. Evolution is an ongoing process. If deception manifests itself as a trait that provides an advantage, the ability to detect that deception might be an advantageous trait, too. If a firefly has a better chance of survival by tricking other fireflies into thinking it wants to mate when it really wants to eat, a firefly who can tell the difference has a better chance of survival by avoiding that risk. This arms race conception of evolution, the same one mirrored in the decoration war between Kris and Nick, has recently been applied to humans and the development of their intelligence. A catalog of hundreds of instances of monkey and ape deceit, hypothesize that for early humans, deception and manipulation provided key advantages in survival. The first humans, many anthropologists agree, lived in social groups of shifting composition and frequently changing alliances too.