Monkey Business - Robin Dunbar, Dave Gorman and Jo Setchell

Introduction

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Host Introduction

1:53Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince. And this is the monkeyest infinite monkey cage yet. It's key childhood memory for many to be walking around the zoo and getting to the monkey enclosure and then seeing that something is going on. You're just a young, innocent child and you say, Mummy, what's that monkey hanging in that tyre doing? And she goes, look away, Brian, look away. There's nothing of interest here. But, Mum, I'm really interested. There's all things going, no, let's go to the chinchilla enclosure.

2:25But, Mother, I'm left with questions unanswered that might damage me in the future. And I'll only be able to deal with particles, not living things.

Psychotherapists' Views

2:40Psychotherapists actually do believe that it is this experience that Brian and so many of you have had in the zoo that can lead to a rubber fetish. Though, only if the rubber has a six-inch tread.

2:53But today... Oh, I love the way that rippled around because people were reading different images in and surprising yourselves. I think most people are just questioning a six-inch tread. That's enormous. What kind of tyre is that? That's just a tractor, isn't it? Oh, not six inches. That's two or three inches at most. No, I don't. I don't know anything about cars.

3:17This is going to make no sense now, but anyway.

Beyond the Tyre

3:20But today we're looking beyond the tyre. Or indeed... We're going through the tyre, which was one of Lloyd Grossman's less successful animal-based shows. Because we're going to look at what we can learn from, and I will use more Radio 4 language than my colleague here. We will be asking about the monogamy of the mandrel, the gregariousness of the gibbon, and the temptation of the tamarind. Do monkeys appear to fall in love?

3:51How does sibling bonding vary? What gets a monkey hot under the furry collar? And how often do we see them exhibit same-sex behaviour? Ultimately, what do we learn about ourselves? By learning about the love life of monkeys. To aid and abet us, we are joined by a psychologist, an anthropologist, and a cruciverbalist. And they are. Hello, I'm Robin Dunbar. I'm a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford. And I've spent most of my life studying monkeys and humans and feral goats.

4:24And I think the most surprising thing that I've seen, really, with monkeys is just how Machiavellian and scheming they can actually be. They really are like watching humans. Hello, I'm Jo Setchel. I'm a professor of anthropology at Durham University. I study mandrills, who are a very large, very colourful species of monkey that live in the rainforest of Gabon in Central Africa. And the most peculiar thing that I have learned from studying those monkeys is that they use their vibrant colour to avoid conflict.

5:01And that they have a scent gland on their chest, which they rub against trees to advertise who they are, how high-ranking they are, and even their DNA. My name's Dave Gorman. I am what I am. And what I am needs no excuses. I've just learned that a mandrill is a type of monkey and not a euphemism. And the thing I found most edifying from watching monkeys

5:33is the knowledge that they are literally too busy singing to put anybody down.

Panel Introduction

5:39And this is our panel.

5:47Let's first of all just start off, Jo, in terms of what is the kind of variety of, I suppose, well, romantic relationships that we see in monkeys, or sexual? It's hugely varied. So if we think about primates, all of the primates, it can be from a long-term bond that lasts decades through to a relationship that lasts seconds. The cutest relationship, I think, is the titi monkey. So they're one of the ones that form very, very long-term pairs. And as far as we know, which is not very far, but as far as we know,

6:22they're relatively monogamous in those pairs. And they sit in trees and twine their tails around one another. Yeah, that's a romantic relationship. They sit together and twine their tails around each other. They're a very cryptic species, which means they hide a lot. So they hide in tangles of vines in the trees. But they always forget their tails. So you walk a lot around in the forest and just see these two tails hanging out of the forest. And you know where the titi monkeys are. I think you're imposing some sort of cultural paradigm where you say they twine their tails and that's romantic.

6:55Because you might also say, that's jealous and possessive. Yeah, total control. That's I always know where you are. And also, if you always forget your tail, to combine your tail with someone else's tail will improve the likelihood of remembering your tail. Yeah. I just don't know what's going on there. Absolutely. Robin, what about for you in terms of looking at what we might see? Let's say romantic. Because even defining that can be quite difficult, can't it? We project something of ourselves onto that behaviour. Yeah, it's actually much easier to define friendships in monkeys.

7:25Because their friendships are very similar to our kind of friendships. The way they set them up. I guess romantic relationships, they kind of look the same. But I mean, it does vary enormously from species to species and even within a species. Well, just like humans, I suppose. Different individuals, you know, have different intensities of relationships. There are introverts and extroverts. From an evolutionary perspective, Joe. So you talked about this whole variety of relationships, polygamy, monogamy.

7:56Is there anything that's favoured evolutionarily? Can we say, well, it would be better if a species only had monogamous relationships, long-term relationships, or what would you say, a large number of two-second relationships? They're all favoured evolutionarily, which is why they exist. But the kind of boring ecological answer is that it depends on the distribution of food. And it depends how many females can live in a group. And how many females can live in a group determines how many males can be added to that group.

8:26So if there's enough food for just one animal, then a female has to live on her own. She might, or she'll have her kid with her, but no one else. If anyone else tries to join her, make a group, then there wouldn't be enough food. It does get more complicated than this, but that's the basic. Then if you can have two females living together, then they might allow a male to join them. There are advantages to having a male join you. You avoid harassment from other males. You probably do better in terms of protection from predators eating you.

8:58But at the same time, the bigger the group, the more likely the predator is to find you. And then if there's plenty of food, then you can have a large group of animals. And when there's a large group of females, no one male can control access to them. It's complete chaos. It is complete chaos, exactly. With a bit of order underneath. Is monogamy more prevalent in a smaller group or in a larger group? In a small group. So where you have just one female, she might choose to share her area, we call it home range, with one male.

9:29And she might also choose to only reproduce with that one male. But she could also share her home range with one male and reproduce with other males. Okay. So Robin, you were just mentioning there the chaos. Do you find yourself sometimes, say you're out on a Friday night and you look out the streets and you think, how much am I learning about the monkeys by watching the humans? In the same way as I learn about humans from watching the monkeys. Actually, to be fair, a lot of the stuff that we've spent the last 20 years doing has been on humans in order to understand monkeys better.

10:03Because you can do things with humans that you can't do with monkeys. You can stick humans in neuroimaging machines and stuff like that. And you can ask them questions. Give me an example of one experiment. You might think, right, if we do that to some humans, that will help us understand this particular group of monkeys more. Okay, so the number of friends you can have is limited, basically, by the size of your brain. That's a generic relationship across mammals as a whole, basically. But in primates, it takes a very quantitative form.

10:35What we were able to do with humans originally was to look at your personal social network and tie that to the size of different bits of your brain. So it's a very, very strong relationship. So we don't actually need to ask you how many friends you've got, Robin. We just need to look at your brain and tell you. This is one of your most famous and most quoted pieces of research. So tell us, yes, that it is known as Dunbar's number. Dunbar's number, yes, yes.

11:05That's the limit on the number of meaningful relationships you can have, friends and family. And that's about 150 in humans. That actually consists of a series of layers of friendship, of greater and greater intimacy as they come in towards you. You've got a small group of very close intimate friendships and then bigger and bigger circles of less intimate friendships. So the average is 150. But how you are between 100 and 250 correlates with the size of particularly this part of your brain, but also bits around here.

11:40That's the frontal cortex. Yeah, it's prefrontal cortex, but also the temporal lobe. And then inside that, there's this massive wiring connection and there's the default mode neural network. And they called it the default mode neural network because they had no idea what it did. But when you put people in the scanner, brain scanner, and told them to relax and not do anything, then this network became very, very active. And being as though a neuroscientist, apologist and neuroscientist in the audience, and didn't actually know what was going on inside people's heads.

12:15They thought it must be the brain daydreaming. And it's turned out basically, when you're put in that sort of situation, what do you do? You think about friends, family, relationships, the social network. So the thing is going crazy because it's thinking about the network. And then since we did those originally, there have been about 25 studies now showing this in humans, neuroimaging experiments have been done on three groups of monkeys. So the same effect being shown at the individual level.

12:45So through neuroimaging of like Dave or Brian or Joe or me, would we be able to see how shallow our friendship was? Yes, exactly. Yes. Or even if you have any. So how does that scale? So if you go to, I don't know, let's say a macaque or pick a species, then how does it change? Does it change in a linear fashion if it's twice this? So you'll like this little bit because it's mathematical. And by the way, if you want any evidence of how actually functional that is, that it really exists, this number.

13:17Somebody did an analysis of 61 million Facebook pages, counting all the friends on each of these 61 million Facebook pages. The average was 149.

13:29They've made the great mistake there of assuming that the people I'm Facebook friends with are people I'm friends with.

13:36In general, they are. Your 150 friends, as I mentioned earlier, are divided up into a series of layers. Those layers have very, very specific numbers. They're 5, 15, 50 and 150. So the 5 is what we call your shoulders to cry on friends. They're the ones that will, you know, when your world falls apart, they will drop everything and come pick you up again. Turns out that those numbers are optimal for the efficiency with which information flows through networks.

14:07And what's more, those are the numbers you find not only between species of primates, but also within primate groups. The structure of primate groups has exactly those numbers as well. So they don't run to the 150 because they don't have as big a brain as us. But for those species like baboons and macaques and chimpanzees that live in groups of, you know, 40 or 50 individuals, they're substructured in exactly the same way as human social networks are.

14:37What are the other forms of behavior that we might expect to be different depending on the cognitive ability to have that many kind of social connections? You've got what I call the line dancing problem. You imagine you're in a group, you're foraging through the grasslands or the woodlands of the savannah or the forest or whatever it is. You know, how many people can you have in a group and still have the people at either end in time on a line dance? And the answer is without music, very small.

15:09And that's this problem. It's the synchrony problem of moving in the same direction. It's really hard work for monkeys and apes and the few other species of mammals that have stable groups to try and keep the group together. And initially they do it just by sort of keeping track of their neighbor and keeping going. But that will only really allow you to work with up to a group of about 15 maybe maximum. And that'll be about five females and maybe three males, something of that sort of size.

15:42And then the rest are kids. And you have to break through what's a glass ceiling at that point and produce something else. Producing something else has to do with grooming bonds. So at that point they start to invest very heavily in social grooming to create this really intense friendships, bonded relationships that keep individuals together. So your friends will keep checking on you as well as you keep checking on them. And that'll do you up to about 30, groups of 30. And after 30 there seems to be another glass ceiling and you have to go through that.

16:15And that's when they start to use serious cognition. The brain really starts to produce major new kinds of cognitive strategies which allow them to figure out who's doing what with who. I think I've just realized why S Club 7 split up. Because each of them realized that only five of the others would pick them up when they were down and resented the other two. Although I am assuming they were all capable of serious cognition.

16:47So maybe that's not right. How much does that affect say the Osmonds? Because there also you've got an actual genetic link as well which will probably change the relationship wouldn't it? Well how much does it affect all family bonds if only five people are allowed in that inner circle? The minute you've got a six person family someone's in trouble. The way we've talked about it so far is quite mathematical it seemed to me. But when we talk about of course human relationships there's a large amount of choice involved. So I suppose I'm asking questions like is there a pin-up monkey?

17:20Is there a handsome monkey that everyone would go for? Why are you bringing up is there a pin-up handsome monkey Brian? I just wonder if there's any self-interest here that we're watching. It's because it's written down here on the script. You wrote the question. You wrote that. I remember you doing that crossing out the other one. Is there a monkey that wears a card? And you went oh I don't want to do that. So when I started studying mandrels I was attracted to them because they're very colourful. And I wanted to know whether there's a pin-up effect.

17:52So whether the most colourful animal is the most impressive, perhaps attractive to females and so on. And I've been studying them now for decades. And initially I did discover that the pin-up animal, the most colourful animal, has the highest testosterone, is the highest ranking. And I thought oh yeah, so I'm really figuring out something here. He's probably the most important. And females do like to hang around the most colourful animal. But there are many other things that come into it too.

18:22So there is his colour. There's also how nice he is. So if a male is brightly coloured but horrible, females are just not interested. And it turned out much later, when I looked at their genetics, what they're really interested in is genes. And it's got nothing to do with the colour. So it's the males that are colourful? Males and females. So males are incredibly colourful. So we focus on that. But if you didn't look at a male mandrel and you just saw a female mandrel, you'd notice that she was very pretty and very pink coloured. So pink nose, blue facial stripes, very pretty.

18:56And is it the females that are primarily making the choices? It's both. So yes, females definitely choose. Females have the advantage of being much smaller than males, which means that they can get around a lot more easily. I've seen males mate guarding a tree, thinking that their female is up the tree, when the female has jumped out of the tree about 10 minutes ago and has run down, jumped into another tree, run down, run out of sight and turns up later with another male.

19:27So the male, the through line we see is that the male remains the idiot.

19:33I'm a female primatologist. So yeah, that's the conclusion I thought. And remembers to lift the tail up so it's not dangling down to give away where it is. So that's...

19:43So mandrels don't have that problem because their tail is only a few inches long. And you mentioned genetics. So in terms of the traits that will be attractive beyond the colour, what are the traits that the females are looking for? Immune genes. So the strength of the immune system, but not actually that. How do they gauge that? Through smell. So there's a link between the immunity genes and the smell of the animal. And they're partly looking just for a good immune system, but they're really looking for a match between their immune system and the male's immune system.

20:16Actually, this works both ways. Males also base their mating decisions on the female's genetic makeup. And in the end, the point is to make a better quality immune system in the baby. Has that changed in terms of the understanding of humans, though? Because I remember when we had Matthew Cobb on a while ago, and he was saying that actually the olfactory senses in humans during kind of dating-mating is not quite what we thought it was before. Ah, so I think it's changed our understanding of humans

20:47in that we're not consciously aware of odour, but we're very unconsciously aware of odour. So it affects us enormously. It brings back memories to us instantly. But we don't necessarily think that we're influenced by it. So perhaps what we know now about primates and other mammals has influenced what we know about humans. But we're the ones who shower and put scent on and do stuff. So we're messing with a system to try and game it, when actually, if we left alone,

21:18we'd probably mate more successfully with people who were better fit for our immune system. Not entirely, because your choice of... Well, I don't say your choice of perfume, but in general, women's choice of perfume, but I guess that applies to aftershaves in the case of men, is directly correlated with your natural smell from your immune system. So you like the perfumes, which actually enhance your natural odour. So is that what... This is why, if I may give you some belated advice, Dave,

21:52don't buy perfume for your girlfriend. Yeah, you're saying it's too late for him now.

21:57Because you'll buy something you like, not the one she likes. OK. Well, thank you for giving me a retrospective excuse. I'm never buying perfume for my wife. I've got to be honest with you, Dave. I remember when you gave her a box set of Lynx Africa. She was not overly happy. Are you improving your chances when you choose your perfume and you're saying this will be kind of matching with the smell?

22:27Is that improving the chance? In a way, possibly. But there are other ways in which we also can pick up on our genes. So one is in the odour that we have on our body. Another is in the mouth when we kiss, for example. So you might wear some fabulous perfume that is created to attract the opposite sex, but it won't take you as far as kissing. Well, obviously, I didn't kiss my wife until she was my wife, and it was a bit late then.

22:58I remember that moment, you opening your mouth, going, better have fresh breath, Lynx Africa. And this leads us on neatly to the next question. It doesn't, though. Because it does. Because as we've just discussed, sexual behaviour in humans is extremely complex. Do we see such complexity in the sexual behaviour? We see lots of different sexual behaviours, so definitely, yes, both across species and within species. And also, simply, diversity of partner choice.

23:28So we have sexual behaviour between males and females, between males and males, between females and females. In some species, like the bonobo was famous for involving all the different age classes, too, which we don't do as humans, or at least legally, we don't do as humans. But is that right about... Because I know we're mainly talking about monkeys, but if we move on to apes as well, I remember being told a thing about the fact that bonobos would also have kind of a fashion sense, that they would sometimes pick up, like, say, a dead rat and wear it on their head

24:00and kind of parade around. And that's your idea of fashion. A parade scene. It fits, doesn't it? It does, yeah, yeah. So things like that, a kind of flamboyant display, which includes accessorising. I suspect that monkeys don't need that sort of accessory in the way that bonobos might, I don't know, because they have their own accessories. Like, they have bright red noses and blue stripes on their cheeks and colourful genitalia. Maybe they don't need a rat on their head. It's fascinating, so it's like there you're describing

24:31the difference between the mating technique of adamant and Rod Stewart.

24:41Oh, I've visualised it. Thank you for that.

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28:29The behaviors we've been talking about,

Intelligence and Social Structures

28:32so complex behaviors, but many of them driven by environmental factors and so on. How much can we read into the intelligence of the individual from the social structures and sexual behaviors that we see? Depends what you mean by intelligence. That sort of everyday physical world-type cognition, everybody has to do in order to live in the real world. You've got to be able to compute how far is it from here to where Dave is sitting over there, in terms of when I leap

29:02off this branch to that branch, to land in the right place and not land up on the floor. I love it when a bit of jeopardy is thrown into the show. But social intelligence, that's sort of separate. It exploits a lot of the same machinery, if you like, so causal reasoning and stuff. But the key to that seems to be that it involves what's become known as mentalizing. It's the capacity to understand what's going on in somebody else's mind, essentially, or at least to be able to predict how they're going

29:32to behave in the future and to manage and manipulate that to some extent. And that is extremely expensive in terms of neural processing time. And that's why you end up having to have this huge bit of the brain dedicated, essentially dedicated to managing social relationships. So if you have a bright red nose, you don't need any of that because you can just look at someone else's nose and say, oh, okay, I know what's going on. A bit of a sniff to figure out all the information.

30:03And that's the difference between herding species like feral goats who don't have stable relationships and don't have stable groups because there's no point in learning the ins and outs and foibles of a particular individual because you may never see them again. All you need to know is are they a bigger thug than you? Are they prettier than you? They've got a nice red nose or whatever the cues are. If you're in a stable group, you've got to do much more machinating really in order to keep everybody

30:33in the same place because the problem is, you know, as I'm sure you all know, you know, if you're too grumpy with your friends when you go out, you know, they'll abandon you. You know, so if you start sort of being too aggressive within the group, you destroy the group. It's the skills of diplomacy. So Joe, does it, monogamy, would that, when we see monkeys that are able to commit to monogamy, will we, again, will we presume that this shows

31:04various other forms of intelligence and indeed even possibly in terms of the rearing of the babies? So there's a lot of coordination involved, yeah, definitely. So if you're living just as two and you either spend all your time together, which can be involved with coordination and giving up what you wanted to do to coordinate with your pair partner or there are some species, lemurs actually, rather than monkeys where they coordinate within a home range but they're not together. They just keep in touch by yelling at each other.

31:36Vocalising. And the ones that have stable groups, stable monogamous groups as a pair, invariably have bigger brains than the ones that have a pair mating arrangement but don't live together. So long-term monogamous relationships and you said there's an increased brain size associated with that, does that imply that concepts, very human concepts, like love for example which you would associate with monogamy, are we allowed, is it appropriate

32:06to begin to think in those terms which are very anthropomorphic I suppose terms? I mean the answer is yes if you look at it, it looks very much like what humans do but I think there is an argument for saying actually the best way to study any system be it cosmology or physics or humans or animals is actually to immerse yourself in it so much that you actually understand it intimately from the inside yourself. Then you have a much better sense of

32:37how the thing works and that in some ways the argument that we should be back off from anthropomorphism wasn't a great idea because it divorced you from what the animals were actually doing. The trouble is it's just so hot inside that bonobo costume. Oh I know.

32:56Let alone how cramped it is if you want to be in a tt monkey costume. I would completely agree that we need to immerse ourselves into the lives of primates. It's not typical primatology. There are some people who do it and it's very useful. Then you have the opportunity to describe things like when partner loss for example. Say if a member of one of those long-term pairs dies you see in the other what is very obvious to us that we assume

33:26is grief. From a more natural science perspective it's difficult to know how you measure that but one thing we do measure is oxytocin and in those long-term pair bonds oxytocin is called a bonding hormone sometimes. We see that oxytocin is important in maintaining those bonds. It's also important in bonds even in species that don't have one-to-one bonds. So if you call oxytocin a love hormone which some people do then we can try to get hold

33:57of the idea of love but also I think there's always a really interesting contrast between what people present in academic conferences and what they talk about in the coffee break and in the coffee break yes they'll be talking about how their monkeys love each other because it's so obvious that they do. Last time I visited a facility one of my friends works with captive American monkeys these little calatricids and showed me around and I met all these pairs male and female male and female male and female

34:27and then finally we got to this cage and she said oh yeah this is the two boys they clearly chose each other and they're hanging out and they have these brilliant enclosures where they all live in jeans they love to live in jeans there's jeans hanging up in the enclosures and out of the two legs of these jeans popped out these two little male monkeys and they've lived together they just chose to live together they haven't got babies but she reckons that they would adopt if they were given the opportunity that is if Levi 501s

34:59don't relaunch with that is the most but I think at the end of the day one has to be a little I mean anthropomorphism is a two-edged sword is the risk because you can go overboard completely on it so we have to if you're going to study these things you have to be able to live in this sort of dual world as it were where you can exploit this kind of intuitive understanding that we have of how organisms relate to each other but at the same time step back and kind of look at it more hard-nosed

35:29and sharp and I suppose the hard-nosed and sharp in the end has to come down to I don't think we'll ever get at it studying it with behaviour maybe I don't know but my guess is we'll only really know if we can pick it up in the same bits of the brain firing up and the same surges of hormones in the system in the brain so things like oxytocin and endorphins and stuff and the way those flood the brain during the course of interactions and they are the same I mean the endorphin

36:00system and the oxytocin system are the same in monkeys and humans so you're saying a new technique a new frontier of knowledge would be to really to look at the brain of a monkey let's say and see so we want to see how the neurons fire if the patterns are the same the regions of the brain that are stimulated are the same as a human that would be the final the proof is strong evidence that they're thinking in the same way and experiencing

36:30the same feeling closing the gap but I don't think you'll ever get to that final point where you know what's going on I use the word feelings there so that's the point isn't it the root of it yeah because I mean bear in mind at the end of the day we have this problem with ourselves yeah in other words we tend to see the world as being populated by people like me and I understand because that's the only reference point I have is how I think and feel inside me and we kind of generalize

37:01that onto other people and assume they're operating in the same way but Joe you said you don't think we'd ever get to that point where we'd say that the map is now so obvious let's say you had a family group and you see exactly how the brains are operating then the patterns in the brain are happening I just think we're still we might be happy with an explanation until we develop some new method and we could go further into trying to explain what's happening in the brain or what's happening in the endocrine system or anything else that you might be interested in and you

37:32suddenly realize that you had an approximation of an answer but there's still more to do and further to go even when I think when I say we might be closing the gap I think the gap is just there and it is that the fact that we have to eventually say well the patterns are the same so we are assuming that the experience is the same but we don't we'll never know if the experience is the same I think we've done a very English thing with this show which is we've somehow really dragged out the bit that has allowed us

38:02to avoid talking about sex in a desperate bid that we won't get to it but we promised this show would include monkey sex and so please welcome Anita and Bo no so to get now to that to the actual sexual behaviour the nitty gritties so the first thing is do we do we get a sense Jo that monkeys enjoy sex that this is fun yeah definitely so if we talk about females I'm female many female primates clearly show

38:32signs of orgasm so again if we assume that orgasm is fun because for individuals it seems to be fun then yeah they're having fun they also seek out sex both males and females seek out sex not all the time and it varies between the individuals but they seek it out which suggests that it's fun so there's not say a pattern in terms of the say the menstrual cycle of the monkey but or that they would be it's not merely oh hang on a minute I can have a baby now