The Infinite Monkey Cage - Are Humans Uniquely Unique?

Episode Date: July 14, 2014

Are humans uniquely unique?Robin Ince and Brian Cox are joined on stage by human and non-human ape experts Keith Jensen, Katie Slocombe and Ross Noble to ask whether humans are truly unique amongst animal species. They'll be looking at why studying our nearest relative, the chimpanzee, could reveal clues as to how humans evolved some of the traits that make us stand out, such as language, culture and truly altruistic cooperation, or whether these are traits that are now being uncovered in our primate cousins. They'll also be revealing why a chimpanzee could be classified as far more rational than its human counterpart.

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcast. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply.

Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio. Enjoy it. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. Today we're discussing human evolution. Or whether it indeed happened. Do humans have unique capabilities that set them apart from all other animals? Are all animals actually just unique in their own way? I mean, what right do I have to say that Brian is in any way superior to an octopus or some slime mould? Are humans the only animals to have language, display altruism and build complex social structures? Yeah, but then again, what is society anyway? What is language? Is there any point to it, really? I mean, in some ways, is the curfew tolls,

the knell of parting day, the lowing herd whines slowly over the lee, really any better than... HE LAUGHS Very much. APPLAUSE Classically trained by Chippington Circus. Very much. Classically trained by Chippington Circus. So, today we are asking the question,

are humans uniquely unique, or are they just chimpanzees with a little bit too much attitude? We have three experts on chimpanzees to join us, and we're going to get them to introduce themselves. So... My name is Katie Slocum and I'm an evolutionary psychologist from the University of York and my favourite chimp behaviour is watching infants playing and laughing. I'm Keith Jensen, I'm a developmental and comparative psychologist from the University of Manchester. My favourite human behaviour

is spite. I'm a Ross Noble, Britain's foremost Tiny Tim impersonator and my favourite chimp behaviour is in the spin-off Planet of the Apes show not the films where they help Birkin Burden build a glider And we'll be dealing with these subjects in increasing depth throughout the show. Marvellous, yes. That is our panel. Keith, if we could start with you, the first question, because you were saying there was actually a paper

about the uniquely uniqueness of human beings. And I wonder, isn't every species in its own way unique? Would you say that, you know, ring-tailed lemur is unique compared to a red-lipped batfish? A who's it? A red-lipped batfish. I didn't even know that one. If you don't know about red-lipped batfish, they really do live up to the name. They're fish, they look

a little bit like bats, they've got big red lips. Well done, scientists. Where would you find a batfish? They're normally just outside a new look or anywhere else. Because batfish, you see, like Batman, like he's a man that dresses up as a bat to fight crime. Yeah, this isn't a fish. It's like a spin-off where he goes,

quick, batfish! And the fish is really confused with, like, a cowl on that doesn't quite fit properly. And he goes, there's no crime in this rock pool. Yeah, you are right. Basically, it's about a fish whose parents were killed by an angry angler and the only way that it felt it could take revenge

was by living near the Galapagos Islands. It was a billionaire fish that had the money to make the fish gadgets, batfish gadgets. Sorry, go on. Keith, Keith, Keith! That was beautifully said in a level of desperation. What do we mean when we say humans are unique?

Well, it's the uniquely unique part. I guess it's kind of a very elitist, welcome to my club sort of thing, or don't welcome to my club, but lots of animals are unique, like star-nosed moles are unique in their electro-sensory abilities, elephants are unique because they can pick stuff up with their noses, we can't, you know, so animals are unique in many ways, they're fascinating, but

we can argue that we're uniquely unique because we can do a lot of those things too, we can pick stuff up an elephant can, not with our noses, but we can make a machine do that, or we can do electro-detection, we can do sonar, we can go into space, we can do all kinds of things, because we have culture, because we have this ability to amass information, step it up a bit, you know, ratchet it up, and build new things with ideas that no single person could have thought of of their own. And so this aspect of human society, this human sociality is really special. The interesting question for me is, how did we get to do that? You know, what allows us to ratchet up culture, if you will? So what's the least

unique species? And by it being the least unique, does that therefore become quite unique? The least unique? You mean the most boring, banal? Yeah. Is there any species where you, when you were kind of thinking early on, what am I going to study, and you went, well, that's straight off the list. Plants. I love it, because botanists get very, very angry. They make their own ink. They do. Well, my philosophy when I was an undergraduate student studying ecology is if it can't bite you or shit on you, why study it?

True. Now, put your hands up. Who thinks that's going to make the edit? But we're on after gardeners. Question time as well, aren't we, sometimes? We're going to get absolute hate mail from people with trowels. So, Katie, I wondered if you could explain... First of all, just because we are going to be talking about humans, is the line of the tree of life where we start to see the primates

and the branching off from our common ancestor? Yeah so chimpanzees are of real interest because they are the closest model we have of what our last common ancestor might have been like. So about six million years ago we shared a common ancestor with the chimpanzees. We then diverged off in our route and the chimpanzees went off on their branch and then two million years ago they split into the common chimpanzee and the bonobo if you go further back than that still you then meet our common ancestor with the gorilla further back still you get our common ancestor with the orangutan so that's the last of the great apes further back still we then get the lesser apes and then you get into the monkeys So we last shared a common ancestor with the Old World monkeys

about 30 million years ago. And then, Keith, if we come to Homo sapiens, could you describe a little bit the... So beyond that common ancestor, so we go chimpanzees to humans about 6 million years ago. When do we emerge? What is it, a couple hundred thousand years, give or take, for modern humans? But then before that, you have Homo erectus.

It's all muddled up because there's so few specimens of these fossils, it's even unclear, do you have different variations of the same species? So this whole, as you said, this cultural ratchet, I mean, that occurs, that's only 20,000 years, I suppose, isn't it? Human culture emerges. Yeah, I guess it depends on how broadly defined culture, because Katie might talk in defense of chimpanzee culture, depending on how broadly you want to define it, because they have stone tools of sorts as well. But when you start

developing from the Paleolithic stone tools that can be modified to spears and hand axes. So those hand axes persisted for about a million years. You if you had an iPhone 1 for a million years. At some point you'd be ringing up Steve saying, come on, get it on, we want new ones. So things are ratcheting really quickly right now, but it was a bit of a slow start. Monkeys with axes, that's what I want to say. I'm writing a screenplay about that right now.

It's just called Monkeys with Axes. Are they monkeys with axes for good, or are they out to kill people? You don't know till they get close. Are you here to clear a small coppice, or are you here to kill me? Ooh! Monkeys with axes!

That's the theme song. Sorry, go on. No, I was going to say, you're someone who travels around the world, you're someone who sees, also, you know, you've gone to all manner of different cultures. What do you think? You were going to say, you've been to every safari park in Britain. No, I want to say what you think does make human beings unique,

from your experience. Well, I mean, if you look at the difference between, obviously, the chimp and the human, I mean, the thing that makes us unique is that we are able to dress those chimps up. And that is, that's why I'm interested in, you know,

if it had developed differently and we'd have evolved into some sort of, like, super monkey, not human, but, like, just stayed proper monkey-like, would those monkeys... Shut your face, I could hear that. Somebody genuinely in the back of the room went... Like that.

Which was a sigh and a laugh at the same time. Would... At what point would the... At what point would the monkeys then dress up the other monkeys in order to sell tea? I don't know. Well, that is one of the problems, isn't it? Yeah. Over a brief period of the 1970s, we did believe we could use chimpanzees for furniture removal, and then we found the older they got,

the more violent they got with their pianos. So there are issues, aren't there? Yeah, that is true, but I do quite like that. I quite like the fact that every documentary you see about chimps, they're really turned, aren't they? They're properly turned. And that's why I think that rather than stopping those ads, the PG Tips

ads, they should have continued them until one was just a full-on bloodbath. Where they turned on, you know, Mr. PG. Monkeys with Axes sponsored by PG Tips. Katie, so to carry on this conversation, so your

favourite animal, you spend your career studying chimps. So why, is the first question. So you're trying to learn about human behaviour, that's also your interest. Why study chimps? So I think for me they're just fascinating because they are intelligent and there's so much going on with them, but also because they do provide this fantastic model

for what that last common ancestor might have been like that lived six million years ago. So when it comes to trying to understand the evolution of the mind, fossil remains don't really help us. We can estimate roughly how big our brain was, but beyond that, in terms of thinking, how do you communicate, how do you think, what kind of social system do you work in?

Do you have culture? These kind of questions, when it's really about behavior in the mind, when they leave no fossil remains, actually studying our living primate relatives and then trying to use those to estimate what our last common ancestors with them might have been capable of, is just one of the best ways to tackle that question. And I think looking for the similarities and differences between us and the chimps, again, I just think is fascinating. Because I think we've debunked a lot of the things that we thought were unique to humans. Actually, we're seeing an increasing amount of similarities

the more we understand about chimps. So I suppose the assumption or the educated guess is if we share a trait with the chimps, then our common ancestor would likely have had that trait. And of course, it's only ever going to be an estimate. So unless we can build a time machine and actually go back and study that creature 6 million years ago, it's only ever going to be an estimate. But it's one of the best ways we have of making those kind of guesses.

It's easy to think of human evolution as being something to do, something mechanical. So we see these jumps in brain size over the last few million years or so. But you seem to be suggesting that there's significantly more to it than that, and culture or the interaction between individuals is as important, that would be the question, as the individual, I suppose the evolution of the machinery itself. Yeah, so, you know, some people call this gene culture co-evolutions. And this is a very important part of humans because we have this really amazing ability for culture

that people call cumulative culture. So not only do we innovate, we also take other people's innovations, copy it with some fidelity, and then expand on it, modify it, and then that gets passed on. And this seems to be something that maybe only humans do. I say maybe because there's always going to be somebody who finds a fish or a bird or a monkey or something that proves us wrong. Kate?

Well, I was going to say, Katie, because when we look at chimpanzees in particular, which basic elements of human culture, I suppose, or the behaviour that leads to culture do you see? So we know that they're certainly capable of learning from others. So there's very good evidence that they'll learn kind of how to get food out of a tricky box that you build them. And so they can definitely learn from observing others and they can imitate actions. But as Keith said, I think the real crucial difference is they can kind of learn to do that

and then they can pass that on by them watching each other but it tends to be relatively simple actions so you don't get kind of not too much evidence that you copy you copy what you've seen another chimp do but then you also innovate a bit more on that to kind of make it a bit more complex and then you pass that one on to the next one and then they innovate it a bit more so it's that kind of cumulative ratcheting it up that we don't see in chimps but the basic imitation is there and are they uh teaching in the technical sense which is altruistic in a way are they saying i would like this baby or this this child of mine to learn or is it purely mimicry um so as far as I'm concerned there's no good evidence for teaching in chimps so the mothers

are very tolerant of their infants and so they allow their infants to be very close to them and so they're watching whilst they're doing things and in terms of food kind of extraction, so with nut cracking for instance, the mothers will allow the infants to scrounge some of the nuts so they get kind of rewarded for watching

but there's very, very few... There's literally one or two anecdotes of a mother actually actively repositioning a rock to help an infant more successfully hammer a nut. So they seem to be... It's a free show, anyone can watch, but there's no active changing of the behaviour to make it easier for a youngster to learn. Which is remarkable, too, because you look at meerkats, which are really distantly related, kind of active, kind of changing the behaviour to make it easier for a youngster to learn. But Keith...

Which is remarkable, too, because you look at meerkats, which are really distantly related, cute little guys, and what they'll do is they'll actually provide injured scorpions for their young to eat. And so they don't give them a live scorpion, here, eat this, it might kill you, but, you know, good luck with that. So, you know, they'll bite the stinger off and mangle the little scorpion and bring back this twitching little mangled corpse, which is, you know, sweet. And it's a tender

moment. And then the baby chomps on it. And then as the kids get older, the meerkats get a little bit less rough on the scorpions and eventually bring back scorpions that are downright dangerous. So they progressively ramp up the difficulty. And a really clever study looked at this. One of the things they did is they had a playback speaker. And so then clever study looked at this. One of the things they did is they had a playback speaker. And so then they had the playbacks of, so the pups had grown up, they were big, they knew how to handle scorpions. Then they played back the sounds of young hungry pups again. And the helpers would run away and grab scorpions and mangle them all up and bring back this twitching little mangled heap to the speaker. So on one hand, it was very clever, like, wow,

you're teaching, but you're feeding a box. So in that sense, it wasn't clever. Chimps don't do anything like that, so they're more closely related to us, but they don't teach in the way that, say, meerkats do. That's made me completely rethink my car insurance. I'm not having that. I'm not having it.

Just one very quick question on the bonobo, which is, I don't know if this is true or not, but I was once told that the bonobo was the only other creature that had a fashion sense, that if they found a dead rat or a bug, they would often place it on their head like a sort of hat and parade around, showing off to each other like a rather less unpleasant version of Ascot.

Have you been watching the same films as Ross? No, no, mine are all about fashion. His are about axes and death. But it's interesting. That was just something that I read once. But you were talking about chimpanzee behaviour, and, of course, there have been great observers. You go out in the field and you observe.

And Jane Goodall, I mean, we should really mention her because her work over the last 50, almost 60 years, I think now, where she stayed with chimpanzees, watched chimpanzees, and it seems to be... I wonder if you can tell me about the changes in our belief about their behaviour, where at one point they seemed that they were quite pleasant, fruit-eating, happy. And then there was a point in the 1970s

where she suddenly saw incredible violence and, indeed, things like cannibalism amongst chimpanzees. So I wonder if you could give a little bit of a history in the last 50, 60 years of our understanding of chimpanzee culture yeah and i think you're right i think jane goodall completely revolutionized our understanding of them um so kind of she went into the field with a very different attitude to studying animal behavior so she gave all the chimps names which at the time you know her supervisors were horrified about it was terribly unscientific and they should all be known

by 0431. Instead she called them Louis. So she kind of took a really different approach to it and really immersed herself in their world. But at the beginning, yes, she was the first to see them using tools, so she was

the first to really start to say, hang on, there really is some clever stuff going on here. But then, as she said, the more she saw them, then the more aggressive side of their nature became apparent. So yes, the group that she studied in Gombe had fairly horrific inter-community encounters. So chimps are incredibly xenophobic. So they will react very negatively to any intruders

that are strangers that they don't know coming in from other communities so if two chimp communities meet they will fight and fatalities are pretty common in that and they really do it in a very nasty way so they will kind of rip each other's faces off particularly with the balls males they'll go straight for their balls so yeah they really are fairly unpleasant. I hope you picked up that sigh of terror. And you're right she also witnessed quite a lot of infanticide so killing of infants and then eating of infants and not only by other males there was a particular female and her daughter in Gombe that would actually attack other females infants and then eat them and they did that repeatedly so they do have a very aggressive and violent side to them. So where does this leave us on the planet the apes question which is essentially my field of expertise.

Should the gorillas, strictly speaking, are the gorillas equally as aggressive, or should it be switched so that the chimp-like characters are the ones that are the aggressive ones, and the gorillas are the doctors? Yeah, I would say there's far more violence in chimp society than

in gorilla society. I mean, you know, I wouldn't want to far more violence in chimp society than in gorilla society. I mean, you know, I wouldn't want to take on a big silverback gorilla, but I would equally not want to take on a fully grown male chimp either. So, actually, given the choice, I don't know, I might go for the gorilla. It is nice to know that you are so determined to make a scientifically accurate version of a clothed talking monkeys film. And apes, come on. And apes, yeah. Planet of the Apes, not Planet of the Monkeys.

Come on, let's keep it scientific. In what sense, then, should we... Talking about chimpanzees as our closest... Well, our closest relatives in the sense that you trace the common ancestor back, and it's not longer, it's three million... About six. Six million years. So in what sense should we

describe them as intelligent if we're talking about um intelligence cultural intelligence individual intelligence what are the what are the key things we should know um so i think for me one of i mean so i think kind of in terms of their understanding of the physical world um they're pretty sophisticated so they can use tools. Like Keith said, they understand the mechanics of how the world works pretty well. They do pretty well on those kind of tasks. But for me, the most remarkable thing about them is really their social intelligence. When you go and study them in the wild,

really seeing the intricacies of those relationships between individuals. Chimps seem to have a very human-like desire for power. So a male chimpanzee spends his entire life trying to desperately climb up the dominance hierarchy. So he'll groom individuals above him to try and curry favour with him, and then he'll make friends with another one to try and form an alliance so if there's any sign of weakness in one above them, they can take him on and topple him and get one rank Machiavellian in a sense yes um so yes they spend a huge amount of their time it seems um just trying to kind of get into more powerful positions and this is this is not just physical in the way that you'd have in a pride of

lions this is actually a complex as i said a machiavellian sort of power and you can be so i mean if i look at kind of who was high ranking in the community i studied in the wild it wasn't necessarily the most physically strong individuals who end up at the top it's the it's the clever ones who manipulate others and kind of form tactical alliances with others that are you know that perhaps are stronger but a bit more stupid to kind of you know get a henchman on your side useful in a fight um and so you know or just our guys that just a very we did have a couple who were just really good and basically groomed their way so they got to the top just by being terribly nice to everyone so

so keith there's a sense then in which cooperative behavior is is one of the defining characteristics of humans and our close ancestors right so by there's a lot of very interesting examples of cooperation in nature like bees and ants and so on but most of that can be explained by kin selection so basically doing well nepotism, so basically doing things that propagate your genes, usually through your kin, your cousins, your uncles, your aunts, your kids, the old guys you don't care about because they're on their way out. But you invest in the younger ones who share copies of your genes,

but they don't have to be direct descendants. It's just any percentage of copies of genes, and you invest in that. So nepotism. Nepotism. So like in a beehive, a worker might sacrifice her life for the good of the hive i say her because the males don't do anything useful but the worker might sacrifice her life for the benefit of the hive but they're all her sisters and her mom is the queen so it's genetically based whereas humans a lot of people make a special case about human cooperation because we do it on a large scale with unrelated individuals, on a very large scale.

So, for instance, Katie was talking about chimps grooming and stuff, and they'll help each other and they'll groom each other, they'll form alliances and fights, they'll go into neighbouring territories, very dangerous activity, just to fight for territory. But they'll do this with non-kin. The males will actually cooperate more with non-kin than kin, which is itself rather interesting.

But they don't do it on the scale that we do. So we can argue that we just do more of a good thing. We help strangers, we interact with strangers, we don't kill strangers who walk into our group. If somebody walked in the room right now, we wouldn't all just pounce on them and kill them because they're not part of our group membership. It's Jeremy Vine, but he's from Radio 2.

So we've talked about empathy, altruism, the development of, I suppose, the beginnings of information transfer, as you said, the beginnings of culture. But I suppose one of the defining characteristics characteristics of humans is language complex language so so do we see any signs of the origins of of language in the lower primates and chimpanzees yes so i would i would argue we see kind of the the precursors to some of our linguistic abilities, but for me, humans are the only species with language. So language is a uniquely human thing. Our communication system is far more complex

than any other communication system we know about in the living world. And how do you define language? Because chimpanzees have sounds for different things. Yeah, so I would say... All animals virtually have a communication system, but our communication system has the label language. And I think that, you know,

our communication system in its complexity is qualitatively different from what we see in any other animal communication system based on our knowledge at the moment.

Maybe there are intricacies which we don't know about yet. So that may change. But currently, I think language is very different from the communication systems of any other animals. It seems to me then that you tend to think, or you can look at evolutionary history as some kind of continuum and there's some sort of gradual transition that you can see.

But in this case, the question question are humans unique? It seems the answer is yes. There seems to be a step change in abilities. I mean, what you've described chimpanzees can do is very, very basic. And there's nothing in between, really. They're just chimpanzees and humans. Is that

a fair characterization? It may be very well a fair characterization. Two authors, I can't pronounce the first guy's name, Zathmer something or another, and Maynard Smith, talked about major evolutionary transitions, you know, from the coding of information that allowed, for instance, the formation of DNA to allow information to be transmitted, or the evolution of eusociality was a major transition in language,

and also with this culture is another transition. This is a major milestone in evolution. This is a big leap forward, if you will. Could you tell us more, though? Because you've done specific research looking at, for instance, different fruits that may be eaten, the sound of them. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what that research entails. Yes. So although I think language is uniquely human,

I think we see some really important kind of precursors of some of the really key elements of language in chimps. So one of the things that we thought kind of ages ago was uniquely human was our ability to refer to things in the world with our words. So banana, glass, table, microphone, they all mean very specific things. And so but it's actually become apparent that that kind of communication is actually quite right widespread in the primates so monkeys will have different alarm calls for different types of predators so they'll have a different sound meaning snake versus eagle versus leopard and when other monkeys hear those sounds they react in a way that indicates they understand what that

sound means so when they hear an eagle, they'll kind of dive for cover, get out of the tops of the trees. When they hear a leopard call, they'll get up off the ground and go up into the trees. And so my own work with chimps, I've looked at instead of kind of predator context, we've looked at whether they can communicate information about the food that they've discovered.

And so we found that they give a whole range of calls when they discover food, but they're kind of using these systematically, and they're kind of labelling the value of the food. So when they come across something that they really love, so a really high-quality food, they'll give these kind of grunts. And then if it's food that's okay, but it's not nearly as high quality, it'll be a much gruffer kind of grunt. And then we've played those sounds back to other chimps. And again, we found that the other chimps actually understand the meaning of those calls.

So if a chimp hears a one, it'll go and look for the high value food. So again, they do seem to really be communicating about something external to them. Pretend. That'd be brilliant, wouldn't it? If it was making the low-quality food noise when, in fact, it was sat there with a feast. Can I keep these things? I just love the fact that you're basically teaching them

to order off a menu. And then does that mean that the next step is to get them to work in drive-thrus it are either though i mean in terms of the limits of communication you were talking there about if the leopard on the ground or an eagle coming from the air now i know this is going to sound a preposterous question but if a leopard is dropped from you know so a leopard now are they then making the noise for uh-oh it's an eagle? Or are they going, it's a leopard? And I don't quite know how this has happened.

No. So in terms of the content of the message, how much content can there be? Well, we have tried. I mean, obviously not gone as far as actually dropping a leopard out of the sky. But researchers have tried to tackle those kind of questions. So they've put speakers up in trees and played kind of eagle noises from up above the monkeys and eagle noises from down below the monkeys. And it actually depends on the species of monkey that is being studied.

So if you've got a really highly specific alarm call system, they stay kind of true to the type of predator that they're labelling. So it doesn't matter whether it's coming from above or below or it's far away whether it's coming from above or below or it's far away or it's really urgent, they'll still actually label that predator really consistently. Other animals, perhaps where they've got a more similar escape strategy for lots of different predators, it will be much less specific.

So then they'll just give information on how urgent is it that you need to get yourself out of danger. So something like a ground squirrel that just has one reaction to danger, and that is get in your hole, then all the alarm calls are really saying is, get in your hole sometime, or get in your hole now! And so it really depends on what's adaptive for the animal as to how specific the information that they're communicating is.

And Heath, there are two things you need for language. There's the, I suppose, the mental ability to begin to construct sentences and to build grammar and to have a vocabulary, but there's also the physical apparatus necessary so we can vocalise. Do we have any insight to which came first? Did they come together? Was the mental capacity there, and that drove the physicality of being able to speak? I don't even know how much is known about the early origins of human language.

I think the hyoid bone is considered evidence of, for instance, a descended larynx, and that shows up in Neanderthals. We don't know if Neanderthals talked. They didn't record much. And did they have the vocal apparatus for talking? But they did seem to have material culture of some sort, and so they might have had something

that allowed them to transmit this information, so maybe they did have some kind of vocal language or some sort of language system. I think it's a bit conjectural. It's also way out of my domain, but we'll say that I don't know which would have come first i would you know did the language allow us to have the mental abilities to transmit information and so on or did we actually use thought was language some kind of did it arise out of thought that we could reflect and so on and then language emerged from that

no i was just and the other thing we really don't know is what kind of form language took originally so um it could actually have been that we start to communicate more with gestures um and so i mean in modern day language it's not just speech so most people use speech but sign languages are full-blown languages as well um and so we kind of need to look at kind of all modalities um when we're thinking about language. And so in terms of speech, actually we know that humans are really special in that we have the apparatus and the control over our faces to produce speech, and we don't see that in any other primate. So all other primates seem to be born with quite a fixed,

genetically determined repertoire of sounds that they can make. So the chimps that I study in Uganda can make the same range of noises as the chimpanzees that I've studied in Leipzig Zoo, in Edinburgh Zoo, which makes it great for me as a researcher. It's much easier. But humans seem to be really unique in this ability to actually imitate sounds and to change sounds, generate new sounds. So we know that that change that allowed us to have speech

was really special to humans, but it doesn't mean to say that we couldn't have had a language-like system before speech that was more noise and gesture-based. How annoyed do they get after you've... Like, after you play the thing that says cheetah or whatever, how annoyed do they get when they go, oh, it's her's a speaker in a tree

is there a well i don't know with the monkeys but the uh the the chimps that when i that i worked with at the zoo when i was doing the food playbacks with them um so i never rewarded them on any trial so actually when i was doing a playback with them there was never any food available and towards the end the one of the young males I was testing did then used to kind of have a slight tantrum so he used to actually kind of stamp his foot and kind of arm raise at me as if to say oh god. Keith you had you had something. Yes sorry I was just thinking in terms of early emergence or early abilities for language. A lot of the work we do, we compare chimps and kids, never simultaneously.

You guys go at it. But, you know, we look at certain abilities that are similar or different, and with really small infants, they really have some amazing abilities, but they don't talk yet. But they understand, for instance, pointing. So if you point somewhere, a child or young child

will look where you're pointing. With a chimpanzee, for instance, if you hide food under one of two cups and the chimp doesn't know where the food is, you point to where the food is, the chimp will choose randomly. It just doesn't pick up on the fact. In fact, I've even tried this with bonobos.

I'll be like, the grape is here. The bonobo will be there. And I'll be like, no, no, really, the grape is here. Trust me, the grape is in this cup. And I'm very persistent, and the bonobos i'll be like the grape is here the bonobo will be there and i'll be like no no really the grape is here trust me the grape is in this cup and i'm very persistent and the bonobo's like you know i want that one whereas dogs can do this maybe for different reasons but it seems that some of the abilities that allow us to scaffold with language emerge very early with things like pointing gaze following some of these things seem to be very important and this is something we can look at in our closest relative.

Keith, you've done work into kind of game theory, haven't you, in terms of... Yeah, so game theory is kind of fun. So when I was doing my PhD in postdoc in Germany, they had a great ape research facility there, and Katie worked there as well. It's a really fantastic place to work. I was basically doing aponomics, you know, economics for apes. Game theory, it's a nice tool that's used in

economics and evolution in different ways, but they come down to the same issues. Evolution is kind of the same as an economic model. You say, well, here's a problem. What kind of solution can you arrive at? And so you provide a problem. In this case, you have a resource that needs to be divided. And game theorists have certain predictions based on assumptions of rationality. And usually that means personal self-interest or gain. So if it comes to money, what do you do if you've got some money to play with? And what would be the rational, self-interested thing to do?

And from an evolutionary point of view, this also makes sense because you've only got so many genes that you can pass on to the future. You want your genes to do well. So you do the thing that's the most rational from an evolutionary perspective. And so game theorists often use little tools, little games to play this. And a classic game is the ultimatum game. Well, we can run through this. We've got Brian and Ross sat next to each other and they've got 10 bananas. So I've handed the banana, there are the bananas. So, would you run through using

Brian and Ross as your apes? Hang on. Can I just check? This doesn't involve maths in any way, because if that's the case, I can't have a feeling that it's not going to be fair. Okay, and this is an experiment I did with

chimpanzees and variations with bonobos as well, but here's the basic idea. You've got yourself did with chimpanzees and variations with bonobos as well. But here's the basic idea. You've got yourself in a chimpanzee's frame of mind. And, Ross, because you don't want to do maths, I'm going to give you a simple version of this game because there's the ultimatum game and then there's what's called the mini-ultimatum game,

where I'm just going to give you a very simple choice. So I've got... I think it should be the most complex version. No, let's not go there, maths boy. Yeah, but wouldn't it be a delight if he got it wrong? OK, so, Ross, you've got ten bananas. Yeah. And you can share those with Brian in any way that you like.

You can divide them in any way that you like. Oh, but before you do that, there's a little catch. I know you're thinking of giving them... I don't know how much you were planning to give them, but I you do that, there's a little catch. I know you're thinking of giving him, I don't know how much you were planning to give him, but I'm going to put a little twist on this. This is where the ultimatum comes in. Brian can accept or refuse your offer. If Brian accepts your offer, you both get what you

proposed. If Brian rejects it, you both get nothing. Is this an ITV game show? I've seen this. Well, instead of the golden ball, it's the golden banana, but... Right, OK. So I can offer him...

Right. OK. So Ross has split them. Five to me and five to him. And I would accept that. Well done, you. You guys can both make banana sandwiches or whatever you wish, but I have a question.

Because of the sense of fairness there. Maybe. I'm still puzzled about Ross's motivations. In normal motivation, that would be a sense of fairness, but I'm curious about Ross. So, Ross, what would you... LAUGHTER In a normal person, that would be a sense of fairness.

That's what he said. Because he doesn't know that my ape army is behind the curtain. As soon as he reaches out, they'll be... So Ross did behave just like a normal person, which came as a surprise. But, Ross, if you... But, Ross, if you had... Why did I do that?

Because the bananas are poisoned. So what happens is he eats the poisoned bananas and then I feast on his flesh. Always thinking. Good motivation. But what would you have done if Brian had no choice and I just said, Ross, give Brian as many bananas as you want

and Brian, you're just stuck with that offer. How many would you have offered him before I told you that he could decide what to do? Oh, I see what you mean. I probably would have... Well, I could have offered him any, I'd probably have gone half. Because to be honest, I don't really like bananas that much. It's an interesting

question, because I was thinking, what would I do? In that case, I'd have probably gone for something like three. So I might have decided that because he had to accept them, I'd want to give him something. I'm just curious then, what if Ross had only offered you two bananas and he kept eight for himself,

would you have accepted? Two, I would have felt was... No. You would have rejected it. I think I may have rejected two. That's illogical. I know the logic is I should have something rather than nothing.

But there is a revenge element, isn't there? It's like, well, if you just offer me two bananas and you keep eight, then none of us are having anything. How would you feel? I know this sounds a bit touchy It's like, well, if you just offer me two bananas and you keep eight, then none of us are having anything. How do you feel? I know this sounds a bit touchy-feely. Well, that's what you said. It's spite, your favourite emotion. There you go. You would do it to spite him. Spite.

In your face. And is that the thing that is most uniquely human, you think? That's what defines us as being human. Well, hopefully not the only thing. Spite is irrational and it's puzzling for economists that people should do this. Chimps, by the way, are great, because chimpanzees would accept any non-zero offer,

as they would put it. So chimpanzees behave like economists. I mean... I'm not suggesting that the logical reverse is necessarily true, but, you know, it's irrational to do something like this, I'm not suggesting that the logical reverse is necessarily true. It's irrational to do something like this, but you get angry at this sense of unfairness. And I think this sense of unfairness, this anger, this spite,

is part of the same package that gives us altruism and empathy. The fact that we care for others, the fact that we feel into others, allows us to feel good about the happiness of others. There's a name for that, simhedonia, shared joy. But we also feel bad about the happiness of others. There's a name for that, simhedonia, shared joy. But we also feel bad about the happiness of others. So, you know, if Ross loves bananas, and he knows you love them even more, but he keeps them all for himself, you're not going to feel happy that he's happy. You're going to feel angry about that. You're going to be jealous, and you'll be spiteful, and you'll experience schadenfreude if something very bad happens to Ross, like if something

terrible happens to his bananas. You seem to be suggesting that irrationality is more interesting in a way than rationality. So rational behaviour can be understood, and you see it across the animal kingdom, you see rational behaviour. But irrationality is what you're suggesting, it maybe marks us out. I think it's one of the things

that does, and it's puzzling because evolution and game theory and all these things work on predictions of rationality or predictability or maximization optimization but then we have this irrational component which at least on the short term is completely suboptimal to use the jargon it's just it's just the wrong thing to do and there's this emotional part of it why do we even have these emotions why can't we just be purely rational and reason things through i think that often it seems to me that we talked about the uniqueness of humans and particularly traits that make us unique emotion irrationality as well as rationality um i was gonna ask ross

first actually looking at this story and looking at the seeming uniqueness of us on on our planet um we've talked about planets of apes planets of monkeys how fortunate do you think we are to to exist would you would you be surprised if you saw many other earth-like planets out there to find other civilizations uh would obviously yeah i think so i do genuinely think that there's too many things that have had to come together. And I just think that also, and this is where I'll start sounding like somebody

that's a bit stoned, but I also... Really? Just now? I also think there might be other creatures out there, but they're like gas beasts. Do you know what I mean? I think it's one of those things where if there's planets where it's all gas and everything's gas, you can probably shoot me down and explain why I'm an idiot.

But I think out there, there's probably gas beasts roaming around that we don't understand. And when people go, ooh, have the aliens visited? Yes, but they've come down in smoke form. In balloons. Yeah, exactly, like helium is just... Yeah, that's them going back to their home planet. When you say gas beast, do you mean genies?

Yes, that's what I'm saying. Your years of watching panto as a kid have really affected your view of the universe, haven't they? The thing is, though, Yeah, like a scientist will see a planet that's made entirely of gas, you know, and there's all these gases and go, oh, that's a gas planet, but I think that's a genie base.

You see what I mean? So, Keith, genie bases. I'm glad we finally got to genie bases. We very rarely do on this show. Keith, I mean, what is your sense of how fortunate we are? Just at that moment you're going,

I think I can get it back, actually. I've got confidence. What's your watch? The next one of these wonders, the wonders of genies. That'll be next. I'm polishing this bottle filled with hope. I don't even know what my wishes will be. A bottle of Gatissauce.

That's ridiculous. That's not science. That's religion. You've moved it into a different area. I can't endorse that sort of carry-on. Keith. What's your sense of how fortunate we are to be here in this sense? Well, we are fortunate. I mean, intelligent beings, rational beings, these things can probably evolve again because it works.

You know, cumulative culture that allows us to transmit information with language is a system that works, and evolution just stumbles on things that work. So it could happen again, but it won't necessarily happen in the same way. And it's not gas beasts either, but it could be. But maybe the same way. And it's not gas beasts either, but it could be. But maybe the gas beasts just don't have feelings for other individuals. So you can have rational beings that transmit information culturally. They just don't care about it. They just don't care how others feel about it. You know, they're just a universe of psychopaths that, you know, they can cooperate because it's necessary, but they can't cooperate

because they care. Okay, so your final word on gas beasts. Oh, wow. Yeah, I think I agree with a lot of what Keith said. I think we are incredibly... We have a really fantastic kind of set of traits that have come together, that have obviously been adaptive through our evolutionary history

to kind of give us the intellectual power, the kind of, you know, understanding of both the physical world and our social world. And I think, again, I guess what I find most fascinating about the chimps, I also find most fascinating about humans, and that's actually their social interactions. And to me, everything comes from how socially intelligent we are. So the fact that we can communicate and we care about each other and we can have culture, that to me is the foundation of everything

that's come after. Aren't all those things also the things that could be our demise as well? Oh, we've got no time for that. So we always ask the audience a question. We ask the audience, what do you think is the best evidence to show human beings are just another ape? And Jenny says,

the squirrel monkeys at London Zoo took a selfie with my phone, something I still haven't grasped how to do. So... What do you think is the best evidence to show human beings are just another ape? They both like being watched by an audience. Ross,

you put your trousers back on. My parents love getting nits out of my hair as a social pastime. So if any of you are sitting next to Sarah, let's hope they've done a good job. So, thank you very much to our panel, Keith Jensen,

Katie Slocum and Ross Noble. And remember, as Ross said, it is very, very important that we do learn about ape behaviour because without learning about ape behaviour, what happens? Well, you know what happens, Ross. Get your hands off me. Get your dirty paws off me, you filthy ape.

Damn, damn dirty ape. That was Clint Eastwood. That was in the, yeah, Any Which Way But Loose. Goodbye. In the Infinite Monkey Cage. In the Infinite Monkey Cage. Doing that nice again. That was the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast.

I hope you enjoyed it. Did you spot the 15 minutes that was cut out for radio? Hmm. Anyway, there's a competition in itself. What, you think it's going to be more than 15 minutes? Shut up. It's your fault. You downloaded it.

Anyway, there's other scientific programs also that you can listen to. Yeah, there's that one with Jimmy Alka-Seltzer. Life Scientific. There's Adam Rutherford. His dad discovered the atomic nucleus. That's Inside Science. Inside Science. All in the Mind with Claudia Hammond.

Richard Hammond's sister. Richard Hammond's sister. Thank you very much, Brian. And also Frontiers, a selection of science documentaries on many, many different subjects. Science All in the Mind with Claudia Hammond. Richard Hammond's sister. Richard Hammond's sister. Thank you very much, Brian. And also Frontiers, a selection of science documents on many, many different subjects. These are some of the science programs that you can listen to. As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors. Like when our estrogen levels drop during menopause, causing the risk of heart disease to go up.

Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca. In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. you