Are Humans Uniquely Unique?

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Hello, I'm Robin Entz.

And I'm Brian Cox.

And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio.

Enjoy it.

Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

Today we're discussing human evolution.

Or whether it indeed happened.

Do humans have unique capabilities that set them apart from all other animals?

Are all animals actually just unique in their own way?

I mean, what right do I have to say that Brian is in any way superior to an octopus or some slime mold?

Are humans the only animals to have language, display altruism, and build complex social structures?

Yeah, but then again, what is society anyway?

What is language?

Is there any point to it really?

I mean, in some ways, is the curfew tolls, the knell of parting day, the lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lee, really any better than

classically trained by Chippington Circus.

So, today we are asking the question: Are humans uniquely unique, or are they just chimpanzees with a little bit too much attitude?

We have three experts on chimpanzees to join us, and we're going to get them to introduce themselves.

So,

my name is Katie Slocum, and I'm an evolutionary psychologist from the University of York.

And my favourite chimp behaviour is watching infants playing and laughing.

I'm Keith Jensen.

I'm a developmental and comparative psychologist from the University of Manchester.

My favourite human behaviour is spite.

I'm Ross Noble, Britain's foremost tiny Tim impersonator.

And my favourite chimp behaviour is in the spin-off Planet of the Apes show, not the films where they help Burke and Verden build a glider.

And we'll be dealing with these subjects in increasing depth throughout the show.

Marvellous, yes.

That is our panel.

Keith, if we can start with you, the first question, because you were saying there was actually a paper about the uniquely uniqueness of human beings.

And I wonder, isn't every species in its own way unique?

Would you say that, you know, a ring-tailed lemur is unique compared to a red-lipped batfish?

A who is it?

A red-lipped batfish.

If you don't know about red-lipped batfish, they really do live up to the name.

They're fish.

They look a little bit like bats.

They've got big red lips.

Wow.

Well done, scientists.

Where would you find a batfish?

They're normally just outside a new look or anywhere else that might happen in that range.

Because batfish, you see, like Batman, like he's a man that dresses up as a bat to fight crabs.

This is a fish.

This is like a spin-off where he goes, quick bat fish, and a fish is really confused with like a cowl on that doesn't quite fit properly.

And this goes, there's no crime in this rock pool.

Yeah, it is, you are right.

It's basically about a fish whose parents were killed by an angry angler, and the only way that it felt it could take revenge was by living near the Galapagos Islands.

It was a millionaire, a billionaire fish that had the money to make the fish gadgets.

Batfish gadget.

Sorry, quad fish.

Kinkies, kinkies.

That was beautifully said in a level of desperation.

What do we mean when we say humans are unique?

Well, it's the uniquely unique part.

I guess it's kind of a very elitist welcome to my club sort of thing, or don't welcome to my club.

But lots of animals are unique, like star-nose moles are unique in their electrosensory abilities.

Elephants are unique because they can pick stuff up with their noses, we can't.

You know, so animals are unique in many ways, they're fascinating, but we can argue that we're uniquely unique because we can do a lot of those things too.

We can pick stuff up an elephant can, not with our noses, but we can make a machine do that.

Or we can do electro detection, we can do sonar, we can go into space, we can do all kinds of things because we have culture, because we have this ability to amass information, step it up a bit, you know, ratchet it up, and build new things with ideas that no single person could have thought of of their own.

And so this aspect of human society, this human sociality is really special.

The interesting question for me is, how did we get to do that?

You know, what allows us to ratchet up culture, if you will.

So, what's the least unique species?

And by it being the least unique, does that therefore become quite unique?

The least unique.

You mean the most boring, banal?

Yeah, is there any species where you, when you were kind of thinking early on, what am I going to study?

And you went, well, that's straight off the list.

Plants.

Oh, I love it because botanists get very, very angry.

They make their own ink.

They do.

Well,

my philosophy when I was an undergraduate student studying ecology is is if it can't bite you or shit on you, why study it?

True.

Now, put your hands up.

Who thinks that's going to make the edit?

But we're on aftergardeners' question time as well, aren't we, sometimes?

We're going to get absolute hate mail from people with trowels.

So, Katie, I wondered if you could explain, first of all, just because we are going to be talking about humans, is the kind of the line of the tree of life where we start to see the primate and the branching off from our common ancestor?

Yes, so

chimpanzees are of real interest because they are the closest model we have of what our last common ancestor might have been like.

So, about six million years ago, we shared a common ancestor with the chimpanzees.

We then diverged off in our route, and the chimpanzees went off on their branch.

And then, two million years ago, they split into the common chimpanzee and the bonobo.

If you go further back than that, still, you then meet our common ancestor with the gorilla.

Further back still, you get our common ancestor with the orangutan.

So that's the last of the great apes.

Further back still, we then get the lesser apes, and then you get into the monkeys.

So we last shared a common ancestor with the old world monkeys about 30 million years ago.

And then, Keith, if we come to Homo sapiens, could you describe a little bit the so beyond that common ancestor?

So we go chimpanzees to humans about six million years ago.

When do we emerge?

What is it, a couple hundred thousand years, give or take?

Yeah, for modern humans, but then before that, you have Homo erectus, and then all it's all muddled up because there's so few specimens of these fossils it's even unclear do you have different variations of the same species so that this whole as you said this cultural ratchet I mean that occurs that's only 20,000 years I suppose isn't it human culture emerges yeah I guess

it depends on how broadly define culture because Katie might talk in defense of chimpanzee culture depending on how broadly you want to define it because they they have stone tools of sorts as well but when you start developing from the Paleolithic stone tools that can be modified to spears and hand axes, so those hand axes persisted for about a million years.

You know, imagine if you had an iPhone 1 for a million years.

I mean,

at some point, you'd be ringing up Steve saying, come on, get it on.

We want new ones.

So, you know, things are ratcheting really quickly right now, but it was a bit of a slow start.

Monkeys with axes.

That's what I want to say.

I'm writing a screenplay about that right now.

It's just called monkeys with axes.

Are they monkeys with axes for good, good, or are they out to kill people?

You don't know until they get close.

Are you here to clear a small coppice?

Are you here to kill me?

Ooh.

Monkeys with axes.

That's the theme song.

Sorry, go on.

No, I was going to say, I mean, do you, as you're someone who travels around the world, you're someone who sees also, you know, you've gone to all manner of different cultures.

What do you think?

I think you were going to say you've been to every safari park in Britain.

Yes.

No, I want to say what you think does make human beings unique from your experience.

Well, I mean, if you look at the difference between obviously the chimp and the human, I mean, the thing that makes us unique is that we are able to dress those chimps up.

And that is, that, that's why I'm interested in, you know, if it had developed differently and we'd have evolved into some sort of like super monkey, not human, but like just stayed proper monkey-like, would those monks shut your face?

I could hear that.

So Somebody genuinely in the back of the room went

like that, which was a sigh and a laugh at the same time.

At what point would the monkeys then dress up the other monkeys in order to sell tea?

I don't know.

Well, that is one of the problems, isn't it?

Yeah.

Over a brief period in the 1970s, we did believe we could use chimpanzees for furniture removal, and then we found the older they got, the more kind of violent they got with their pianos.

So there are issues, aren't they?

Yeah, that is true, but I do quite like that.

I quite like the fact that know that every

documentary you see about chimps, they really turn, don't they?

They properly turn, and that's why I think that rather than stopping those ads, the PG Tips ads, they should have continued them till one was just a full-on bloodbath.

They turned on, you know, Mr.

PG.

Katie Punches with Axe is sponsored by PG Tips.

Katie, so to carry on this conversation, so your favourite animal, you spend your career studying chimps.

So, why is the first question?

So, you're trying to learn about human behavior, that's also your interest.

Why study chimps?

So, I think for me,

they're just fascinating because they are intelligent and there's so much going on with them, but also because they do provide this fantastic model for what that last common ancestor might have been like that lived six million years ago.

So, when it comes to trying to understand the evolution of the mind, you know, fossil remains don't really help us.

We can estimate roughly roughly how big our brain was, but beyond that, in terms of thinking, well, how do you communicate?

How do you think?

Do you, you know, what kind of social system do you work in?

Do you have culture?

These kind of questions, when it's really about behaviour and the mind, when they leave no fossil remains, actually studying our living primate relatives and then trying to use those to estimate what our last common ancestors with them might have been capable of is just one of the best ways to tackle that question.

And I think looking for the similarities and differences between us and the chimps, again, I just think is fascinating.

Because I think we've debunked a lot of the things that we thought were unique to humans.

Actually, we're seeing an increasing amount of similarities the more we understand about chimps.

So, I suppose the assumption or the educated guess is if we share a trait with the chimps, then our common ancestor would likely have had that trait.

And of course, it's only ever going to be an estimate.

So, unless we can build a time machine and actually go back and study that creature six million years ago, it's only ever going to be an estimate.

But it's one of the best ways we have of making those kind of guesses.

It's easy to think of human evolution as being something to do, something mechanical.

So we see these jumps in brain size over the last few million years or so.

But you seem to be suggesting that there's significantly more to it than that, and culture or the interaction between individuals is as important

as the individual, I suppose the evolution of the machinery itself.

Yeah, so you know, some people call this gene culture co-evolutions.

And this is a very important part of humans because we have this really amazing ability for culture that people call cumulative culture.

So not only do we innovate, we also take other people's innovations, copy it with some fidelity, and then expand on it and modify it, and then that gets passed on.

And this seems to be something that maybe only humans do.

I say maybe because there's always going to be somebody who finds a fish or a bird or a monkey or something that proves us wrong.

Ross.

Well, I was going to say, Katie, because

when we look at chimpanzees in particular,

which basic elements of human culture, I suppose, are the behaviour that leads to culture, do you see?

So, we know that they're certainly capable of learning from others.

So, there's very good evidence that they'll learn kind of how to get food out of a tricky box that you build them.

And so, they can definitely learn from observing others and they can imitate actions.

But, as Keith said, I think the real crucial difference is they can kind of learn to do that, and then they can pass that on by them watching each other, but it tends to be relatively simple actions, so you don't get kind of

too much evidence that you copy, you copy what you've seen another chimp do, but then you also innovate a bit more on that to kind of make it a bit more complex, and then you pass that one on to the next one, and then they innovate it a bit more, so it's that kind of cumulative ratcheting it up that we don't see in chimps, but the basic imitation is there.

And are they uh teaching in the technical sense, so which is altruistic in a way?

Are they saying, I would like this baby or this child of mine to learn, or is it purely mimicry?

So, as far as I'm concerned, there's no good evidence for teaching in chimps.

So,

the mothers are very tolerant of their infants, and so they allow their infants to be very close to them, and so they're watching whilst they're doing things.

And they would, you know, in terms of food kind of extraction, so with nut cracking, for instance, the mothers will allow the infants to scrounge some of the nuts, so they get kind of rewarded for watching.

But there's very, very few, there's kind of literally one or two anecdotes of a mother actually actively repositioning a rock to help, you know, an infant more successfully hammer a nut.

So they seem to be, you know, it's a free show, anyone can watch,

but there's no kind of active kind of changing of the behavior to make it easier for a youngster to learn.

But Keith.

Yeah, which is remarkable too, because you look at meerkats, which are really distantly related, cute little guys, and what they'll do is they'll actually provide injured scorpions for their young to eat.

And so they don't give them a live scorpion, here, eat this, it might kill you, but you know, good luck with that.

So

they'll bite the stinger off and mangle the little scorpion and bring back this twitching little mangled corpse, which is sweet.

And

it's a tender moment.

And then the baby chomps on it.

And then as the kids get older, the meerkats get a little bit less rough on the scorpions and eventually bring back scorpions that are downright dangerous.

So they progressively ramp up the difficulty.

And a really clever study looked at this.

One of the things they did is they had a playback speaker.

And so then they had the playbacks of.

So the pups had grown up, they were big, they knew how to handle scorpions.

Then they played back the sounds of young hungry pups again.

And the helpers would run away and grab scorpions and mangle them all up and bring back this twitching little mangled heap to the speaker.

So on one hand, it was very clever, like, wow, you're teaching, but you're feeding a box.

You know, so in that sense, it wasn't clever.

Chimps don't do anything like that, so they're more closely related to us, but they don't teach in the way that, say, meerkats do.

That's made me completely rethink my car insurance.

Just one very quick question on the bonobo, which is, I don't know if this is true or not, but I was once told that the bonobo was the only other creature that had a fashion sense.

That if they found a dead rat or a bug, they would often place it on their head like a sort of hat and parade around, showing off to each other like a rather less unpleasant version of Ascot.

Have you been watching the same films as Ross?

No, no, mine are all about fashion.

His are about axes and death.

But

it's interesting, that was just something that I read once.

But you were talking about chimpanzee behaviour, and of course, you know, there have been great observers.

You go out and field and you observe.

And Jane Goodall, I mean, we should really mention her because her work over the last 50, almost 60 years, I think now,

where she

stayed with chimpanzees, watched chimpanzees, and it seems to be, I wonder if you can tell me about the kind of the changes in our belief about their behavior, where at one point this seemed that they were quite, you know, pleasant, fruit-eating, happy thing.

And then there was a point in the 1970s where she suddenly saw incredible violence and indeed things like cannibalism amongst chimpanzees.

So I wonder if you could give a little bit of the history of our, in the last 50, 60 years, of our understanding of chimpanzee culture.

Yeah, and I think you're right.

I think Jane Goodall completely revolutionised our understanding of them.

So kind of she went into the field with a very different attitude to studying animal behaviour.

So she gave all the chimps names, which at the time, you know, her supervisors were horrified about because it was terribly unscientific and they should all be known by 0431.

Instead, she called them Louie.

So she kind of took a really different approach to it and really immersed herself, you know, in their world.

But at the beginning, yes, you know, she was the first to kind of see them using tools.

So she was the first to really start to say, hang on, there's, you know, there really is some clever stuff going on here.

But then, you know, as she said, the more she saw them,

then the kind of more aggressive side of their nature became apparent.

So, yes, I mean, the group that she studied in Gombe

had fairly horrific inter-community encounters.

So, chimps are incredibly xenophobic,

so they will react very negatively to any intrusors or strangers that they don't know coming in from other communities.

So, if two chimp communities meet, they will fight, and fatalities are pretty common in that.

They really do it in a very nasty way, so they will kind of rip each other's faces off, particularly with the balls.

Males, they'll go straight for their balls.

So, yeah, they really are fairly unpleasant.

Home you picked up that sigh of terror.

And you're right, she also witnessed quite a lot of infanticide, so killing of infants and then eating of infants.

And not only by other males, there was a particular female and her daughter in Gombe that would actually attack other females' infants and then eat them, and they did that repeatedly.

So, they do have a very aggressive and violent side to them.

So, where does this leave us on the Planet of the Ibs question?

Which is essentially my field of expertise.

Should the gorillas, strictly speaking, are the gorillas equally as aggressive, or should it be switched so that the chimp-like characters are the ones that are the aggressive ones and the gorillas or the

docks?

Yeah, I would say there's far more violence in chimp society than in gorilla society.

I mean, you know, I wouldn't want to take on a big silver-backed gorilla, but I would equally not want to take on a fully grown male chimp either.

So

actually, given the choice, I don't know.

I might go for the gorilla.

It is nice to know that you are so determined to make a scientifically accurate version of a clothed talking monkeys film.

And apes, come on.

And apes, yeah.

Planet of the apes, not planet of the monkeys.

Come on, let's keep it scientific.

I mean,

in what sense then should we

talk about chimpanzees as our closest

well, our closest relatives in the sense that you trace the common ancestor back and it's not longer, it's three million six

six million years.

So, in what sense should we describe them as intelligent?

If we're talking about intelligence, cultural intelligence, individual intelligence,

what are the key things we should know?

So, I think for me, one of I mean, so I think kind of in terms of their understanding of the physical world, they're pretty sophisticated, so they can use tools and they, you know, they, like Keith said, they understand the kind of mechanics of how the world works pretty well.

They do pretty well on those kind of tasks.

But for me, the most remarkable thing about them is really their social intelligence.

And kind of when you go and study them in the wild, kind of really seeing the intricacies of those relationships between individuals, you know, they chimps seem to have a very human-like desire for power.

So a male chimpanzee spends his entire life trying to desperately climb up the dominance hierarchy.

So he'll groom individuals above him to try and curry favour with them, and then he'll make friends with another one to try and form an alliance.

So they can, if there's any sign of weakness in one above them, they can take him on and topple him and get one rank for him.

So they're quite Machiavellian in a sense.

Yes.

So yes, they spend a huge amount of their time, it seems, just trying to kind of get into more powerful positions.

And this is not just physical, in the way that you'd have in a Pride of Lions.

This is actually a complex, as I said, a Machiavellian sort of power.

And you can be, so I mean, if I look at kind of who was high-ranking in the community I studied in the wild, it wasn't necessarily the most physically strong individuals who end up at the top, it's the clever ones who manipulate others and kind of form tactical alliances with others that are, you know, that perhaps are stronger but a bit more stupid to kind of you know get a henchman on your side, useful in a fight.

And so, you know, or just our guys that are just a very we did have a couple who were just really good and basically groomed their way.

So they got to the top just by being terribly nice to everyone.

So Keith,

there's a sense then in which cooperative behaviour is one of the defining characteristics of humans and our close ancestors.

Right, so by cooper, there's a lot of very interesting examples of cooperation in nature, like bees and ants and so on, but most of that can be explained by kin selection.

So basically doing, well, family and nepotism, so basically doing things that propagate your genes, usually through

your kin, your cousins, your uncles, your aunts, your kids, the old guys you don't care about because they're on their way out.

But you invest in the younger ones who share copies of your genes, but they don't have to be direct descendants.

It's just any percentage of copies of genes and you invest in that.

Nepotism.

Nepotism.

So like in a beehive, a worker might sacrifice her life for the good of the hive.

I say her because the males don't do anything useful, but the worker might sacrifice her life for the benefit of the hive, but they're all her sisters and her mom is the queen, so it's genetically based.

Whereas humans, a lot of people make a special case about human cooperation because we do it on a large scale with unrelated individuals and on a very large scale.

So for instance, Katie was talking about chimps grooming and stuff, and they'll help each other and they'll groom each other, they'll form alliances and fights, they'll go into neighboring territories, very dangerous activity, just to fight other, you know, fight for territory.

But they'll do this with non-kin.

You know, the males will actually cooperate more with non-kin than kin, which is which is itself rather interesting.

But they don't do it on the scale that we do.

So we can argue that we just do more of a good thing.

We help strangers, we interact with strangers, we don't kill strangers who walk into our group.

You know, if somebody walked in the room right now, we wouldn't all just pounce on them and kill them because they're not part of our group membership.

It's Jeremy White, he's from Radio 2.

Kill them!

So we've talked about

empathy, altruism, the development of, I suppose, the beginnings of information transfer, as you said, the beginnings of culture.

But I suppose one of the defining

characteristics of humans is language, complex language.

So so do we see any signs of the origins of language in the lower primates and chimpanzees?

Yes, so I I would I would argue we see kind of the the precursors to some of our linguistic abilities, but for me, humans are the only species with language.

So language is a a uniquely human thing.

It's our communication system is far more complex than any other communication system we know about in the living world.

And how do you d define language?

Because chimpanzees have sounds for different things.

Yeah, so I would say so so I think communica all animals virtually have a communication system,

but our communication system has the label language and I think that you know our communication system in its complexity is qualitatively different from what we see in any other animal communication system based on our knowledge at the moment.

Maybe there are intricacies which we don't know about yet, so that may change.

But currently, I think language is very different from the communication systems of any other animals.

It seems to me then that

you tend to think, or you can look at evolutionary history as some kind of continuum and there's some sort of gradual transition that you can see.

But in this case, the question, are humans unique?

It seems the answer is yes there seems to be a step change in in abilities here I mean what you've described chimpanzees can do is very very basic

and and there's no there's nothing in between really the the just chimpanzees and humans is that a fair characterization it may be very very well a fair characterization um two authors i can't pronounce the first guy's name zethm or something or another and Maynard Smith talked about major evolutionary transitions, you know, from the coding of information that allowed, for instance, the formation of DNA to allow information to be transmitted, or the evolution of eusociality was a major transition in language, and also with this culture is another transition.

This is a major milestone in evolution.

This is a big leap forward, if you will.

Could you tell us more, though, but because you've done specific research looking at, for instance, you know, different fruits that may be eaten, those sounds that I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about what that kind of research is.

Yes, so although I think language is uniquely human, I think we see some really important kind of precursors of some of the really key elements of language in chips.

So one of the things that we thought kind of ages ago was uniquely human was our ability to refer to things in the world with our words.

So, banana, glass, table, microphone, they all mean very specific things.

And so, but it's actually become apparent that that kind of communication is actually quite widespread in the primates.

So, monkeys will have different alarm calls for different types of predators.

So, they'll have a different sound meaning snake versus eagle versus leopard.

And when other monkeys hear those sounds, they react in a way that indicates they understand what that sound means.

So, when they hear an eagle call, they'll kind of dive for cover, get out of the tops of the trees.

When they hear a leopard call, they'll get up off the ground and go up into the trees.

And so, my own work with chimps

instead of kind of predator context, we've looked at whether they can communicate information about the food that they've discovered.

And so, we found that they give a whole range of calls when they discover food, but they're kind of using these systematically

and they're kind of labelling the value of the food.

So, when they come across something that they really love, so a really high-quality food, they'll give these

kind of grunts.

And then, if it's a food that they that it's okay but it's not nearly as high-quality, it'll be a much gruffer

kind of grunt.

And then we've played those sounds back to other chimps, and again, we've found that the other chimps actually understand the meaning of those calls.

So, if a chimp hears a

one, it'll go and look for the high-value food.

So, again, they do seem to really be communicating about something external to them.

Pretend, that'd be brilliant, wouldn't it?

If it was making the low-quality food noise when, in fact, it was sat there with the feast going on to keep these things.

I just love the fact that you're basically teaching them to order off a menu.

And then, does that mean that the next step is to get them to work in drive-thrus?

Are there though, I mean, in terms of the limits of communication, you were talking there about if there's a leopard on the ground or an eagle coming from the air.

Now, I know this is going to sound a preposterous question, but if a leopard is dropped from, you know, so a leopard, now, are they then making the noise for uh-oh, it's an eagle,

or are they going, it's a leopard, and I don't quite know how this has happened.

No, no, no.

So, in terms of the different content of the message, how much content can there be?

So, so they will, we have tried, I mean, obviously, not gone as far as actually dropping a letter out of the sky, but researchers have tried to tackle those kind of questions.

So, they've put speakers up in trees and played kind of eagle noises from up above the monkeys and eagle noises from down below the monkeys.

And it actually depends on the species of monkey that is being studied.

So, if you've got a really highly specific alarm call system, they stay kind of true to the type of predator that they're labelling.

So, it doesn't matter whether it's coming from above or below or it's far away or it's really really urgent, they'll still actually kind of label that predator really consistently.

Other animals, perhaps where they've got kind of a more similar escape strategy for lots of different predators, it'll be much less specific.

So then they'll kind of just give information on kind of how urgent is it that you need to get yourself out of danger.

So something like a ground squirrel that just has one reaction to danger and that is get in your hole,

then all the alarm calls are really saying is get in your hole sometime or get in your hole now.

And so that's kind of so it really depends on what's adaptive for the animal as to how specific that communicate the information that they're communicating is.

And Heath,

there are two

things you need for language.

There's the I suppose the mental ability to begin to construct sentences and to build grammar and to have a vocabulary, but there's also the physical apparatus necessary so we can vocalise.

Do we have any insight to which came first?

Did they come together?

Was it the

mental capacity there and that drove the

physicality of being able to speak?

I don't even know how much is known about the early origins of human language.

Like I think the hyoid bone is considered evidence of, for instance, a descended larynx and that shows up in Neanderthals.

We don't know if Neanderthals talked.

You know, they didn't record much.

And did they have the vocal apparatus for talking?

But they did seem to have material culture of some sort.

And so they might have had something that allowed them to transmit this information.

So maybe they did have some kind of vocal language or some sort of language system.

I think it's a bit conjectural.

It's also way out of my domain.

But we'll say that I don't know which would have come first.

Did the language allow us to have the mental abilities to transmit information and so on?

Or did we actually use thought?

Was language some kind of, did it arise out of thought that we could reflect and so on, and then language emerged from that?

And the other thing we really don't know is what kind of form language took originally.

So it could actually have been that we started to communicate more with gestures, and that so, I mean, in modern-day language, it's not just speech.

So, most people use speech, but sign languages are full-blown languages as well.

And so, we kind of need to look at kind of all modalities

when we're thinking about language.

And so, in terms of speech, actually, we know that humans are really special in that we have the apparatus and the control over our faces to produce speech, and we don't see that in any other primate.

So, all other primates seem to be kind of born with quite a fixed, genetically determined repertoire of sounds that they can make.

So, the chimps that I study in Uganda can make the same range of noises as the chimpanzees that I've studied in Leipzig zoo, in Edinburgh zoo, which makes it great for me as a researcher, it's much easier.

But humans seem to be really unique in this ability to actually imitate sounds and to change sounds, generate new sounds.

So, we know that that change that allowed us to have speech was really special to humans.

But it doesn't mean to say that we couldn't have had a language-like system before speech that was more

noise and gesture-based.

How annoyed do they get after you've like after you play the thing that says cheetah or whatever?

How annoyed do they get when they go, oh, it's uh with a speaker in a tree?

Is there a

well, I don't know with the monkeys, but the uh the chimps that I worked with at the zoo when I was doing the food playbacks with them, so I never rewarded them on any trials.

So, actually, when I was doing a playback with them, there was never any food available.

And towards the end,

one of the young males I was testing did then used to kind of have a slight tantrum.

So, he used to actually kind of stamp his foot and kind of arm raise at me as if to say, oh, God.

Keith, you had something to say.

Yes, sorry, I was just thinking in terms of early emergence or early abilities for language.

A lot lot of the work we do, we compare chimps and kids,

never simultaneously.

You guys go at it.

But

we look at certain abilities that are similar or different.

And with really small infants, they'd really have some amazing abilities, but they don't talk yet.

But they understand, for instance, pointing.

So if you point somewhere, a child or a young child will look where you're pointing.

With a chimpanzee, for instance, if you hide food under one of two cups and the chimp doesn't know where the food is, you point to where the food is, the chimp will choose randomly.

It just doesn't pick up on the fact.

In fact, I've even tried this with the bonobos.

I'll be like, the grape is here.

The bonobo will be there.

And I'll be like, no, no, really, the grape is here.

Trust me, the grape is in this cup.

And I'm very persistent, and the bonobo's like,

you know,

I want that one.

Whereas dogs can do this, maybe for different reasons.

But it seems that some of the abilities that allow us to scaffold with language emerge very early with things like pointing, gaze following.

Some of these things seem to be very important.

And this is something we can look at in our closest relative.

Keith, you've done work into kind of game theory, haven't you, in terms of...

Yeah.

Yeah, so game theory is kind of fun.

So

when I was doing my PhD in postdoc in Germany, they had a great ape research facility there, and Katie worked there as well.

It's a really fantastic place to work.

I was basically doing aponomics.

You know, it's economics for apes.

Game theory is it's it's it's a nice tool.

It's used in economics and evolution in different ways, but they come down to the same issues.

Evolution is kind of the same as an economic model.

You say, well, here's a problem.

What kind of solution can you arrive at?

And so you provide a problem.

In this case, you have a resource that needs to be divided.

And game theorists have certain predictions based on assumptions of rationality.

And usually that means personal self-interest or game.

So if it comes to money, what do you do if you've got some money to play with?

And what would be the rational, self-interested thing to do?

And from an evolutionary point of view, this also makes sense because you've only got so many genes that you can pass on to the future.

You want your genes to do well.

So you do the thing that's the most rational from an evolutionary perspective.

And so, game theorists often use little tools, little games, to play this.

And a classic game is the ultimatum game.

Well, we can run through this.

We've got Brian and Ross sat next to each other, and they've got ten bananas.

So, I've handed the banana, there are the bananas.

So, would you run through using Brian and Ross as your apes?

The scenario.

Can I just check?

This doesn't involve maths in any way, because if that's the case, I can't help feeling that it's not going to be a fair

okay.

And this is an experiment I did with

chimpanzees and variations with bonobos as well, but here's the basic idea.

You've got yourself in a chimpanzee frame of mind, and Ross,

because you don't want to do maths, I'm going to give you a simple version of this game, because there's the ultimatum game, and then there's what's called the mini ultimatum game.

Okay, where I'm just going to give you a very simple choice.

So I've got

no,

let's not go there, maths boy.

Yeah, but wouldn't it be a delight if he got it wrong?

Okay, so Ross, you've got ten bananas.

Yeah.

And you can share those with Brian in any way that you like.

You can divide them in any way that you like.

Oh, but before you do that, there's a little catch.

I know you're thinking of giving him, I don't know how much you were planning to give him, but I'm going to put a little twist on this.

This is where the ultimatum comes in.

Brian can accept or refuse your offer.

If Brian accepts your offer, you both get what you proposed.

If Brian rejects it, you both get nothing.

Is this an ITV game, sure?

Should I have seen this?

Well, instead of the golden ball, it's the golden banana, but.

Right, okay.

So I can offer him.

Right.

Okay.

So Ross has split them: five to me and five to him.

And I would accept that.

Well done, you.

You guys can both make banana sandwiches or whatever you wish.

Because of the sense of fairness.

Maybe.

I'm still puzzled about Ross's motivations.

In normal motivation, that would be a sense of fairness, but I'm curious about Ross.

So, Ross, what would you.

A normal person that would have been a sense of fairness.

That's what he said, isn't it?

Because he doesn't know that my army is behind the curtain.

As soon as he reaches out, there'll be a lot of people.

So Ross did behave just like a normal person, which came as a surprise.

But Ross, if you if

Ross, if you had all.

why did I do that?

Because the bananas are poisoned.

So what happens is he eats the poisoned bananas and then I feast on his flesh.

Always thinking,

but always thinking.

But what would you have done if

Brian had no choice?

And I just said, Ross, give Brian as many bananas as you want.

And Brian, you're just stuck with that offer.

How many would you have offered him before I told you that he could decide what to do?

Oh, I see what you mean.

I probably would have done, well, I could have offered him any, I've probably gone half.

Because to be be honest, I don't really like bananas that much.

It's an interesting question, because I was thinking, what would I do?

And in that case, I'd have probably gone for something like three.

So I might have decided that because he had to accept them, I'd want to give him something.

I'm just curious then,

what if Ross had only offered you two bananas and he kept eight for himself?

Would you have accepted?

Two, I would have felt was

no.

You would have rejected it?

I think I may have rejected two.

That's illogical.

I know the the logic is I should have something rather than nothing.

But

there is a revenge element, isn't there?

It's like, well, if you just offer me two bananas and you keep eight, then none of us are right.

How do you feel?

I know this sounds a bit touchy.

Well, that's what you said.

Spite,

your favourite emotion.

There you go.

You would do it to spite him.

Spite.

In your face.

And is that the thing that is most uniquely human, you think?

That's what defines us as being human, isn't it?

Well, hopefully not the only thing.

Spite is irrational, and it's puzzling for economists that people should do this.

Chimps, by the way, are great because chimpanzees would accept any non-zero offer, as they would put it.

So chimpanzees behave like economists.

I mean,

I'm not suggesting that the logical reverse is necessarily true, but

it's irrational to do something like this, but you get angry at this sense of unfairness.

And I think this sense of unfairness, this anger, this spite, is part of the same package that gives us altruism and empathy.

The fact that we care care for others, the fact that we feel into others, allows us to feel good about the happiness of others.

There's a name for that, Simhedonia, shared joy.

But we also feel bad about the happiness of others.

So, you know, if Ross loves bananas and he knows you love them even more, but he keeps them all for himself, you're not going to feel happy that he's happy.

You're going to feel angry about that.

You're going to be jealous and you'll be spiteful.

And you'll experience Schadenfreud if something very bad happens to Ross, like if something terrible happens to his bananas.

He seems to be suggesting that irrationality is more interesting in a way than rationality.

So, rational behavior can be understood, and you see it across the animal kingdom.

You see rational behavior.

But irrationality is what you're suggesting.

It maybe marks us out.

I think it's one of the things that does, and it's puzzling because evolution and game theory and all these things work on predictions of rationality or predictability or maximization, optimization.

But then we have this irrational component, which, at least on the short term, is completely suboptimal, to use the jargon.

It's just the wrong thing to do.

And there's this emotional part of it.

Why do we even have these emotions?

Why can't we just be purely rational and reason things through?

I think that often.

It seems to me that we talked about the uniqueness of humans and particularly traits that make us unique, emotion, irrationality, as well as rationality.

I was going to ask Ross first, actually,

looking at this story and looking at the seeming uniqueness of us on our planet, we've talked about planets of apes, planets of monkeys.

How fortunate do you think we are to exist?

Would you be surprised if you saw many other Earth-like planets out there to find other civilizations?

Would obviously, yeah, I think so.

I do genuinely think that there's too many things that have had to come together.

And I just think that also, and this is where I'll start sounding like somebody that's a bit stoned, but I also

really?

Just now?

I also think there might be other creatures out there, but they're like gas beasts.

Do you know what I mean?

I think it's one of those things where if there's planets where it's all gas and everything's gas, and this is you can probably shoot me down and explain why I'm an idiot.

But I think out there, there's probably like gas beasts rolling like roaming around that we don't understand.

And when people go, ooh, have the aliens visited, yes, but they've come down in smoke form and

balloons.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Like helium is just, they've, yeah, that's them going back to their home planet.

When you say gas beast, do you mean genies?

Yes,

that's what I'm saying.

Like, when your years of watching Panto as a kid have really affected your view of the universe, haven't they?

Yeah, like a scientist will see a planet that's made entirely of gas, you know, and there's all these gases and go, oh, that's a gas planet.

But I think that's a

genie base.

You see what I mean?

So, Keith, genie bases.

I'm glad we finally got to genie bases.

We very rarely do on this show.

Keith, I mean, what is it?

Your sense of how fortunate we are.

Just at that moment, you're going, I think I can get it back, actually.

I've got confidence.

What you watch the next genie.

The wonders of genies.

That'll be next.

I'm polishing this bottle filled with hope.

I don't even know what my wishes will be.

A bottle of water.

Because you've got your exact wishes.

That's ridiculous.

That's not science.

That's religion.

You've moved it into a different area.

I can't endorse that sort of carry on.

Keith,

what's your sense of how fortunate we are to be here in this sense?

Well, we are fortunate.

I mean, intelligent beings, rational beings, these things can probably evolve again because it works.

You know, cumulative culture that allows us to transmit information with language is a system that works, and evolution just stumbles on things that work.

So it could happen again, but it won't necessarily happen in the same way.

And it's not gas beasts either, but it could be.

But maybe the gas beasts just don't have feelings for other individuals.

So you can have rational beings that transmit information culturally.

They just don't care about it.

They just don't care how others feel about it.

You know, they're just...

a universe of psychopaths that you know they can cooperate because it's necessary but they can't cooperate because they care.

Katie, your final word on gas beasts.

Oh Oh, wow.

Yeah, I think I agree with it with a lot of what Keith said.

I think we are incredibly we have a really fantastic kind of set of traits that have come together that have obviously been adaptive through our evolutionary history to kind of give us the intellectual power, the kind of you know, understanding of both the physical world and our social world.

And I think, again, what I guess what I find most fascinating about the chimps, I also find most fascinating about humans, and that's actually the kind of their social interactions.

And to me, kind of everything comes from how kind of socially intelligent we are.

So, the fact that we can communicate and we care about each other and we can have culture, that to me is the foundation of everything that's kind of come after.

Aren't all those things also the things that could be our demise as well?

Oh, we've got no time for that.

So, we always ask the audience a question.

We ask the audience, what do you think is the best evidence evidence to show human beings are just another ape?

And Jenny says, The squirrel monkeys at London Zoo took a selfie with my phone, something I still haven't grasped how to do.

So,

what do you think is the best evidence to show human beings?

They both like being watched by an audience.

Ross, you put your trousers back on.

My parents love getting knits out of my hair as a social pastime.

So, if any of you are sitting next to Sarah, let's hope they've done a good job.

This is so.

Thank you very much to our panel: Keith Jensen, Katie Slocum, and Ross Noble.

And remember, as Ross said, it is very, very important that we do learn about ape behavior because without learning about ape behavior, what happens?

Well, you know what happens, Ross.

Get your hands off me, get your dirty paws off me, you filthy ape, damn dirty ape.

There is Clinton Eastwood.

That was in the yeah, any which weird butt loose.

Goodbye.

That's your trouble in the infinite monkey cage.

Got an out nice again.

That was the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast.

Hope you enjoyed it.

Did you spot the 15 minutes that was cut out for radio?

Hmm.

Anyway, there's a competition in itself.

What do you think?

It should be more than 15 minutes.

Shut up.

It's your fault.

You downloaded it.

Anyway, there's other scientific programmes also that you could listen to.

Yeah, there's that one with Jimmy Alka-Seltzer.

Life Scientific.

There's Adam Brother Ford, his dad discovered the atomic nucleus.

That's Inside Science, All in the Mind with Claudia Hammond.

Richard Hammond's sister.

Richard Hammond's sister.

Thank you very much, Brian.

And also, Frontiers, a selection of science documentaries on many, many different subjects.

These are some of the science programs that you can listen to.