The Next Frontier: Probing The Mind Of Another Species -- Ours; How Monkeys See Scientists

How Monkeys See Scientists Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, who are married to each other and have two daughters, received their Ph.D.'s at the University of Cambridge. They previously edited Primate Societies (University of Chicago Press, 1987). Cheney, 40, is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and Seyfarth, 43, is an associate professor of psychology there. The purpose of their research was to determine how the vervets related to each other, but in an interview conducted in Cheney's office, The Scientist asked Cheney and Seyfarth to narrow their focus on how monkeys see the world, in order to consider the question: How do monkeys see scientists? The two ethologists' work offers us the opportunity to consider the complicated relationships between scientists and their subjects. Rich in philosophical references, How Monkeys See the World provokes researchers into reconsidering what they do when they try to read the mind of another species. --K.K. Q In your acknowledgments section, you thank the Amboseli vervet monkeys, which were the subjects of your research. You write, "Although it cannot be said that they welcomed us into their lives, they tolerated us with apathetic aplomb." Just how apathetic are they? A Seyfarth: That's a difficult to answer, because one object of our research is to get the monkeys bored with us. A Cheney: But that is not always possible. For example, vervets have a call for strange humans, which they don't emit when familiar humans approach. They can identify individual humans, and they seem to have some sense of the relationships between them, or at least that certain humans belong together. A It's not clear whether this goes beyond seeing associations between people over time, or whether they understand that there's actual differences in the content of these relationships. They notice you. Very occasionally, they redirect aggression towards you. If they are threatened or angry, they will often redirect aggression to other members of their group. And, if you're familiar to them, sometimes they will come over and threaten you. Their view of you has changed. They get used to individual people. At the field site, the only people with whom they were in contact were either women or men under 5'8". One time, when we brought into the area a man with a beard who was six feet tall, they saw the difference. Another time we took our children out to see them, and the monkeys were intensely curious. A Seyfarth: We want them to be as apathetic as possible. We never tried to push that. Q At Amboseli you recorded vervet vocalizations meant to warn of specific predators and then played them back through hidden loudspeakers. What did the vervets think of these experiments? How easy was it to fool them? A Seyfarth: In some respect you don't know whether you've fooled them. A Cheney: They knew the speakers were in the bushes. A Seyfarth: So we wanted to spread out our calls, so over time if they heard the vocalizations from the speakers, it was not that unusual to them. A Cheney: We had a car and other stuff there, and they basically ignored it. They never showed any curiosity about our loudspeakers and other equipment. I think it's because we had taken steps to never make it intrinsically interesting to them--the speakers were out in the open most of the time, so they were part of the landscape. It only takes one careless person with a sandwich, and that screws up the whole experiment. Fortunately, our site was far away from tourist areas, where the animals would learn to be interested in cars. A Seyfarth: We're very comfortable saying that the generalizations we made about the vervets can also be made about other Old World monkeys. Q Much primate research is done on the hierarchical distinctions monkeys make in structured societies. For their part, do primates see any hierarchical distinctions between the researchers and their staff? A Cheney: Chimpanzees have been able to determine who was the teacher and the student, but this hasn't really been investigated with monkeys. The only thing that we can say from our experience is that the vervets learned who we are, and they began to treat us differently. Q Did what you learn in any way inform your views on the issues raised by the animal rights movement? A Cheney: One thing that is happening is not so much due to the animal rights movement. The knowledge that monkeys have structured societies has led scientists doing laboratory research on them to move them out of individual cages. They see it's important to keep them in a group environment. A Seyfarth: For example, if monkeys are housed alone, it depresses their immune system. And if you're doing research on their immune system ... A Cheney: It's good science to have animals that are psychologically normal. Q What lessons does your primate research hold for scientists outside your field? A Seyfarth: There's a large effort going on now in the cognitive sciences, to study the way people and children use language, and how it relates to their thought processes. Cognitive science hasn't really considered the other side of the coin, which is the complex social groups that exist without language. In cognition, is language the crucial variable, or is it something If you study monkeys alone, you can't learn much, but if you compare them with other groups, like apes or humans, you can get an idea of what it might be like if you don't have language. A Cheney: If people are interested in the human mind, one of the questions that might arise is how does our mind differ from other animals, and the second is what evolutionary pressures caused these changes? Q Toward the end of your book, you recall an incident in which you arrived at a place where some lions had killed a buffalo. "The lions had left the bloody, dismembered carcass in full view on the open plain and were resting, invisible from the road, in the shade of some dense acacia bushes about 20 meters away. As we sat in the car, deciding what to do next, a group of baboons began to approach. Although baboons normally give alarm calls when they see lions, and flee from them at close range, these baboons showed no apparent concern as they approached the carcass." Here, as in other incidents, you observe that the animals are apparently unaware of the signs that a predator may be near. They seem ignorant about many aspects of their environment. Is it simply that monkeys are bad scientists? A Cheney: Well, they are superb primatologists. They know a lot about members of their own species. A Seyfarth: But when it comes to other animals in their own environment, they seem to make poor naturalists. That's one of the things that we've been struck by: how much they know, and how little.

The Next Frontier: Probing The Mind Of Another Species -- Ours; How Monkeys See Scientists

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