Análisis funcional de los genes expresados diferencialmente (MapMan)

Silk and her ilk study monkeys not just because monkeys a

f

e interest­

ing in themselves, but because they are related to us, a beit more distantly than apes. The burgeoning of primatology in the, 1970S and 1980s laid bare a plethora of sophisticated social set-ups

tlh

^roughout

the family to which humankind belongs. Anybody who fhinks this is irrelevant to the study of human beings must be a M�rtian. We are primates, and we can learn about our roots by st�dying our

relatives. I

.� This premise can lead quickly to two fallacies. The

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rst is that primatologists are somehow claiming that human beiqgs are the same as monkeys in every respect and detail, which is dearly non­

sense. Each monkey and each ape has its own social syst

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^{m, unique}

to that species; but there are still common threads. Eac

1

species of monkey looks different from each other species yet it till makes sense to say that all species of monkey look rather like ach other, in comparison, say with all deer. Likewise, all primate sP

ef

ies behave in different ways, but in ways that are recognizably prirpate-like.

The second fallacy is to suppose that monkeys are more primitive than people socially. Monkeys are not

,

OUf any

[

T H E T R I B A L P R I M A T E S 155

more than we are theirs. We share a common ancestor with all monkeys, but we have altered the body plan and the social habits of that ancestor in idiosyncratic ways. So has each species of monkey.

Deriving lessons from nature is a tricky feat. You must steer your craft carefully between two terrifying temptations. On one side, Scylla cries out to you to look for direct animal parallels, ways in which we are just like our cousins. Thus Kropotkin argued that because ants were nice to each other, so must we be instinctively virtuous. Thus Spencer argued that because nature is a pitiless struggle, pitiless struggles must be virtuous. But we are not like animals in every respect. We are unique, we are different, just as every species is unique and different from every other; biology is a science of 'exceptions, not rules; of diversity, not grand unified theories. That ants are communitarian says nothing about whether man is virtuous. That natural selection is cruel says nothing about whether cruelty is moral.

Yet beware of steering your craft too far the other way. Charybdis cries seductively from that side to emphasize human uniqueness.

Nothing, she says, can be learnt from nature. We are ourselves, in the image of god or of culture (depending on taste). We have sex drives because we are taught to have them, not because of instinct.

We speak languages because we teach each other to speak. We are conscious, rational and free-willed, not like those inferior things called animals. Virtually every high priest of the humanities, of anthropology and of psychology preaches the same old, defensive sermon of human uniqueness that theologians clung to when Darwin first shook their tree. Where Richard Owen sought then desperately for proof in the hardware of the human brain for an object that was unique to humankind - and believed he had found it in the hippocampus minor, an odd little bump on the brain - so today anthropologists demand that the existence of culture, reason or language exempts us from biology.

The last bastion of this argument is that even if human beings have evolved natures, one can never be sure that one is seeing their instincts in action, rather than their conscious or cultural decisions.

Wealthy people favour their sons rather than their daughters, as do

156 T H E O R I G I N S O F V I R T U E

ma�y primates that find themselves high in social rank. B

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t this need not be a shared instinct between human beings and thonkeys. It might be that people have rediscovered the same logic by tonsciously deducing that sons can use wealth as a passport to gr

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ter repro­

ductive success than daughters. For human beings, you can never entirely reject the culture hypothesis. As Dan Dennett put it, in

Darwin's Dangerous Idea,

'If a trick is that good, then it will be rationally rediscovered by every culture without need of genetic

descent.'S i

But this argument CUtS both ways and inflicts a sharper wound on the orthodoxy of the environmental determinists than �hey realize.

For every time you see human beings behaving adaptiveiy, you may think you are seeing conscious or cultural decisions, but you might just be seeing evolved instincts. Language, for instance, Ilooks like a cultural artefact - after all it varies between cultures. But to speak enthusiastically, grammatically and with a large vocab .. lary is pre­

eminently an instinct of our species that cannot be �aught, only learnt.'

The study of animals has profound implications fo� our under­

standing of the human mind - and vice versa. As Helen4 Cronin has argued, 'to erect a biological apartheid of "us" and "th�m" is ^to cut ourselves off from a potentially useful source of explanatory prin­

ciples . . . Admittedly we're unique. But there's nothing unique about being unique. Every species is in its own way.'7 That w� now know how the complex societies of monkeys and apes wark is highly

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relevant to understanding our own society. An evolutioriary perspec­

tive inevitably eluded Hobbes and Rousseau; less for

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vably it still eludes some of their intellectual de�endants. The phildsopher John Rawls asks us to imagine how rational beings would c�me together and create a society from · nothing, just as Roussea

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imagined a solitary and self-sufficient proto-human. These were dnly thought­

experiments, but they serve to remind us

'before' society. Human society is derived from the soc',ety of Homo from the society of

AustralO11i.hecus,

Which is derived from the society of ^a long-extinct missing

J

ink between humans a'nd chimps, which in tum was derived from

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he society of

T H E T R I B A L P R I M A T E S 157

the missing link between apes and monkeys, and so on, back to an eventual beginning as some sort of shrew-like animals that perhaps genuinely lived in Rousseauian solitude. Of course, we cannot go back and examine the societies of

Australop;thecus,

but we can make some informed guesses based on anatomy and on modern parallels.

First, we can say that our ancestors were soci II primates are, even the semi-solitary orang-utans. econd, we can say that there was a within each group, a pecking order; that this hier­

archy more marked among males than females - these facts are true of all primates. But we can then say something rather interesting, albeit with less confidence: our ancestors' hierarchies were less rigid

)

and more egalitarian than those of monkeys. This is because we are apes, and cousins of chimpanzees in particular.

In monkeys, despite the invention of cooperation, weak and junior male monkeys still occupy lower rank and mate with fewer females than strong and senior ones. Brute force may not be as reliable as it is among sheep and elephant seals, but it is still highly influentia

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In the societies of chimpanzees, however, the importance of physicat , prowess is markedly less. The top male chimpanzee in a troop is not necessarily the strongest; instead, it is usually the one best at manipulating social coalitions to his advantage.

In the Mahale mountains in Tanzania lives a powerful alpha male chimpanzee called Ntogi, who frequently catches monkeys or ante­

lope for food. He shares the meat with his mother and his current girlfriends, as is normal (Chapter Five), but he also carefully supplies some males with meat as well. He gives it to middle-ranking males and older males. He never gives meat to young males or to senior ^I males. In other words, like ^a good client of Machiavelli, he cultivates his best constituency: the middle-management males on whom he relies to form coalitions against the ambitious young and his immedi­

ate rivals. The meat is the cutrency in which he pays his allies to keep him in power.

8

Unlike baboons, which form coalitions specially to steal females from other males higher in the hierarchy than themselves, chimps use coalitions to modify the social hierarchy itself. This has been observed in wild chimps in Tanzania, but the best-documented case

IS8 T H E O R I G I N S O F V I R T U E

comes from a group of ,chimpanzees living on a small island in a

In document Respuesta transcriptómica y celular a metales pesados de la simbiosis Medicago truncatula-Ensifer spp. (página 140-149)