Reading Nature's Tea Leaves

Natural History, Dec, 2000 by Frans de Waal

Our ideas about nature reveal as much about ourselves and our cultures as they do about the world around us.

A journalist once told of being sent into the office of Konrad Lorenz, the famous Austrian ethologist, with assurances that he was expecting her. His office appeared to be empty. Asking around, however, she was told that Lorenz had never left. Eventually she discovered the Nobelist partially submerged in an enormous aquarium that was built into the office wall.

This is how we like our biologists: as close to their animals as possible. Our expectations go with their special status as society's high priests of nature, the intermediaries between us and where we came from. Mathematicians, chemists, and astronomers can be greatly admired, yet the task of putting us in touch with our creaturely past and reflecting on the human condition falls to the biologist. It is an ancient function once fulfilled by stories such as the fables of Aesop and La Fontaine. Moralizing accounts are still with us, but scientists are gaining the upper hand because they supposedly tell us the unvarnished truth about the animal world and, by extension, about ourselves.

It would be naive, though, to think there is no connection between a scientist's social, cultural, or moral outlook and the way he or she sees nature. As has been pointed out many times, Darwinism, with its premise that competition drives the evolutionary process, arose while English society was moving toward capitalism. Similarly, in the early part of the last century, both postrevolutionary Russia and the United States--two cultures with faith in the ability of humans to control their own future--emphasized the power of learning and behavioral modification of the sort championed by Ivan Pavlov and B. F. Skinner. At about the same time, in more conformist Europe, ethologists such as Lorenz became enamored of the concept of instinct and the behavioral constancy it implied.

Even those who view people as fundamentally distinct from animals--claiming, for example, that animals are enslaved by instinct whereas humans are entirely driven by culture--are themselves projecting cultural prejudices onto nature. In reality, the relationship between nature and culture is much like the situation of the elephant and the mouse walking side by side over a rickety wooden bridge. Above the noise, the mouse shouts, "Hey, listen to us stamping together!" People who claim that humans have left behind their biology suffer from the same delusions of grandeur as the mouse. They barely realize they are walking next to human nature, the elephant that sets the tone of everything we do and are. Consequently, naturalists' contribution to humanity's "Know thyself" mission can be understood only in the context of the tinted glasses through which each one stares into nature's mirror. Removing these glasses is next to impossible, so the next best thing is to compare the view through an alternative pair.

A little-known but telling example is that Western and Eastern scientists once held contrasting views about our closest animal relatives, the great apes. The Western view was Rousseauian: like noble savages, apes were seen as self-sufficient--free of social ties and obligations. To field biologists who encountered them in the forest, the parties of chimpanzees traveling in apparently haphazard combinations from one fruit tree to the next seemed to confirm the lack of a coherent group life.

In the 1960s, however--at the same time that Jane Goodall, working in the Gombe Stream Reserve in Tanzania, speculated that females and their dependent offspring might be the only bonded units in chimpanzee society--a Japanese team studying chimpanzees a mere eighty miles away was operating under a quite different assumption: that these apes, which supposedly filled the gap between ourselves and other animals, must have a complex social life. Eventually, through persistent field observations, the team, led by primatologist Junichiro Itani, showed that chimpanzees do in fact live in large communities with stable memberships. Today the communal life of the chimpanzee is taken for granted--we have abundant evidence for territorial warfare between different communities and for group-specific social traditions--but the initial finding came out of a conviction on the part of Japanese researchers that chimpanzees could not be as individualistic as Western science had made them out to be. Their own culture's emphasis on the individual as part of the group had put Japanese researchers on the right track for making this discovery.

My goal here is not to propose some sort of cultural relativism of knowledge, as if everything depends on the investigator's background. The beauty of science is that it has rules of evidence that allow us to sort through various perspectives until we find the one most consistent with the data. Conflicting ways of looking at nature enrich this process: culturally or even ideologically charged theories are fine so long as they can be tested against reality. This is what distinguishes science from storytelling.