Notes on the chacma baboon, from the book by Cheney and Seyfarth

(writing in progress)

Cheney and Seyfarth (2007) spent decades studying the chacma baboon (Papio ursinus) in the Okavango of Northern Botswana.

They compare the society of baboons with a Jane Austen saga. These animals are incredibly complicated in their social lives, considering that in ecological terms they are little more than an omnivore, and in terms of anti-predation they are unremarkable in their degree of adaptation.

Furthermore, the dizzying social interactions seem ultimately to be much ado about nothing. This is deep food for thought if one seeks to understand humanity.

The single biggest surprise to me, as a biologist, about baboons is that so much of their time and energy goes on their social life - something that should be a mere means to an end, but instead seems to have become the main agenda of their lives. They have an unexpected level of emphasis on intraspecific interaction – which seems to continue every waking hour of their lives – in disproportion to their modest role in Nature.

The main thing determining the survival of baboons (and their reproductive success) is predation. However, I have yet to find an aspect of their biology that seems particularly evolved as an anti-predator strategy or tactic.
 
It’s become clear to me that

It was William Hamilton III (https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/obituary-william-hamilton-uc-davis-ecologist-and-blackbird-expert) who started the four-decade study of a particular group of the chacma baboon in the Okavango. Cheney and Seyfarth inherited this study, and wrote a book about, called ‘Baboon Metaphysics’). In a phone conversation with me in 1989, Hamilton opined that the extremely-developed canines of males are all about sex and society, and not about anti-predation.
  
Here is an example of information I have gleaned from the book by Cheney and Seyfarth (2007).
 
A group of the chacma baboon encounters an individual of the leopard (Panthera pardus) and attacks it. What we would expect – if it were true that the canines have evolved as anti-predator defences, and it is the role of adult males to defend and protect their group from predation – that it would be males who did the attacking. Far from it. Every adult in the group participates close-up in the melee with a cornered leopard as if mad with rage. This includes not just females, but even females carrying infants. And females often get badly scratched by the leopard in the process.
 
As I have mentioned recently, it makes sense to me that if the masculine canines had evolved for anti-predation, females would have formidable canines too (which they do not). The fact that females are as defensive against the leopard as are males confirms that one would be mietaken to assume that the selective pressure producing these leopard-trumping canines has been predation. Obvious as that may seem on a superficial basis, it does not stand up to scrutiny.
 
The implication to bear in mind, when the reader next watches a group of squabbling, restless, bickering, noisy baboons: a species that has evolved a remarkably large brain mainly for the sake of ‘social complexity for its own sake’.
 
Bear in mind the following:
 
Baboons are incapable of using tools. They are not as intelligent in this way as apes, but more complex socially than any ape including the tool-using apes (chimpanzee and orang-utan). Baboons have remarkably large brains but most of their brain power goes into what seems like pointless social complexity-for-its-own-sake.
 
Baboons are incapable of detective work beyond the intraspecific (although really astute in the Jane Austen sense intraspecifically). Baboons coming across an impala carcase in a tree are so stupid that they don’t even take this as a clue to the potential presence of the leopard nearby. There is nothing particularly complicated or sophisticated about their foraging methods (and indeed a large part of their ecology is to be dumb grazers, a bit like sheep).
 
Baboons are extremely gregarious – which certainly must help anti-predation. However, they spend so much time distracted in their internal politicking and grooming that it is questionable that ‘safety in numbers’ has been the main selective pressure behind this gregariousness. It is equally plausible that their gregariousness arises mainly in their social emphasis, and that any benefit in terms of anti-predation is corollary to this.
 
Baboons are, in a sense, their own enemy. For example, males in certain circumstances commit infanticide. This makes little sense if the role of males is to protect the group from predation. And, even without infanticide, male baboons are typically such hooligans that it is far from clear that they ‘pay their way’ in any real sense, anti-predation. (There is no hint of any masculine contribution to the well-being of the group in terms of foraging).
 
Baboons do not cooperate well in dangerous situations. For example, when an individual gets lost and barks anxiously, others will only answer it if they are themselves also lost, and if the barker is a relative. There is minimal empathy, and hardly any spirit of altruism in the sense of anti-predation or safety. Even mothers will leave their own offspring behind, seemingly oblivious to the cries of distress receding into the background as they move on.
 
It is easy to assume that the main function of the ‘wahoo’ bark is as an anti-predator alarm. Not so. Adult males, particularly in the morning before setting out for the day, engage in ‘wahoo contests’ in which they bark loudly to show their macho.

It is plausible, again, that the main selective pressure behind the bark has been social/sexual/intraspecific, with the interspecific (anti-predation) function merely corollary. Never assume that a cacophany of ‘wahoos’ means ‘We’ve spotted you, leopard, and we’re letting each other know about you’. That would be naive. What is often really being said is: ‘I’m a hooligan with brawn and big teeth and my voicebox tells you that, you other motherfuckers in my group’.
 
Baboons spend an extreme amount of time and attention in grooming each other, but this cannot possibly be necessary in terms of anti-parasitism. Instead, once again it seems to be mainly about social complexity for its own sake.
 
The social structure of baboons is classist, which means that the social status of an individual is determined mainly by who his/her mother happens to be (a bit like artistocracy in humans although on a milder scale). The point is that this classism seems to confer negligible value in terms of survival. Cheney and Seyfarth found that social status affected survivorship little; the main risk to members of the group is predation (which is essentially random in terms of the social status of the predated individuals), followed by intraspecific infanticide (by randy males who want mothers to come back into oestrus).
 
So even the classism of baboons seems ‘ecologically pointless’ and a seemingly gratuitous system in terms of ‘anything real’.
 
Baboons are clearly sexist, and this seems not to have evolved for any real purpose in terms of food or anti-predation.
 
Baboons are mildly classist and this too, seems ultimately pointless; one can so easily envisage simpler and more direct ways of arranging a gregarious life w.r.t. the really important things in life such as food and anti-predation.
 
My main conclusion, beyond the sheer fascination with such improbable creatures, is that life as a baboon is disappointing to my set of values. I would not like to be incarnated as an animal that wastes its time and life on what seems to me like unpleasant bullshit. The biological reality of baboons is a disappointment also to the whole Darwinian idea (although experts like Cheney and Seyfarth – excellent scientists though they are in many ways – are far from intellectually honest enough to mention this, let alone discuss it in depth).

Baboons contradict ‘Darwinism’ because so little about them seems to have evolved along the principle of ‘natural selection’. It almost seems as if God thought: let’s see if we can create a type of animal that specialises in wasting its time and energy on pointless social intrigue, most of it unpleasant’, and came up with baboons (and the other Old World monkeys are not much different).
 
(writing in progress)

הועלה ב-יולי 5, 2022 09:13 לפנה"צ על ידי milewski