A person can be a doctor because we call her doctor: a normative social role, only possible with language. But in a human tribe, the chief and the shaman are roles, distinguishable from the people who happen to occupy them at any given time. In a chimpanzee band, the alpha male is the individual who can intimidate all the other animals into paying obeisance to him. Language, in turn, allows people to generate what might be called social institutions and separable roles by enabling us to confer symbolic value on things. But I can write a few words and evoke in your mind the idea of pain without either of us having to suffer an iota of discomfort. When a chimpanzee howls in pain, she’s actually in pain. That’s because animal signals-such as grimaces, postures, and vocalizations-are tethered to the here and now. But only people can craft sentences that precisely describe future or counterfactual scenarios, and so export their dreams from one mind into the next. Other animals can plan for and imagine the future and remember the past. But again, incremental, seemingly minor enhancements to each of these skills suddenly make it possible for humans to do things that no other animal can: tell each other about the past, the future, and imagined things. Of course, basic building blocks for language are already present in chimps: highly articulate lips and facial muscles, vocal control, sociability. Even de Waal concedes that if there’s a single trait that differentiates people from other animals, this is it. Thus, while chimpanzees may seem wise to spurn the most impractical actions, it’s actually our human willingness to copy everything-even the most meaningless hand gestures-that enables us to develop and pass down game-changing technologies. You may not know why you’re supposed to hold your fingers this particular way when drawing the bow, but you do know that the best hunters all do it this way. Why do we copy pointless motions? As anthropologist Joseph Henrich points out, many complex technological skills must be learned in stages over long periods of time, requiring a high level of trust during the learning process. Chimpanzees quickly intuit that these extraneous actions aren’t necessary for getting the treat, and so they sensibly ignore them. But only human subjects will copy purposeless sequences of hand gestures before releasing the latch-for example, tapping the box three times and waiting five seconds before opening it. Both chimpanzees and human children quickly learn how to open a box to receive a treat by observing an experimenter do it first. We not only learn by watching each other, but we actively demonstrate skills to each other, slowing down and doing things step-by-step in order to make clear how exactly one carves a canoe, threads a needle, or hooks a fish.Įven more oddly, we faithfully copy even actions that seem to have no point at all. On the scale of social animals, chimpanzees are good-even excellent-imitators.īut human beings are another thing entirely. Sure, captive chimpanzees can learn to mimic hand gestures and other actions, and they learn tool use by watching each other. Three examples illustrate this nonlinear shift: Excellent mimicsįirst, our imitation and mimicry skills are significantly more complex than those of our simian brethren. But somewhere along the line, incremental increases in these abilities ignited a combinatorial explosion, producing an entirely new kind of animal. Chimps have intelligence, sociality, dexterity, and communication skills. The differences between humans and chimpanzees are like this. Add grains of sand one at a time to a sandpile, and at some point the sandpile will suddenly collapse-even though all you did was add one more measly grain. Chimps also console injured friends and grieve for the dead.īut biology is defined by nonlinear systems, in which small changes along one dimension produce radical jumps in another. Instead, chimps must learn them from each other, just as humans learn their own cultures’ techniques and norms. ![]() These culturally distinctive behaviors aren’t genetically programmed instincts. ![]() For example, different bands of chimps in the wild have different customs and patterns of tool use. In a recent interview for Nautilus magazine, de Waal argued that chimpanzees boast culture and moral emotions such as sympathy. Years of observing chimpanzees have convinced him that the gap between humans and their great ape cousins is thin and permeable-more a matter of degree than kind. Frans de Waal, one of the world’s foremost experts on chimpanzees, thinks not.
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