Jane Goodall

Sometimes Boys Are Like Girls and Girls Are Like Boys, so What’s the Difference Again?

That’s pretty much what the history of gender difference science has told us, according to a new book by British science journalist Angela Saini.

Credit: archivesnz/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

In the introduction chapter of Inferior, the British science journalist Angela Saini says very poignantly that at the heart of her book is a “hushed uncertainty… a dark, niggling feeling that we aren’t the same”. The dangerous part of letting such uncertainties fester is that, once in a while, this delicate equilibrium gets messed up – as it was very recently by James Damore. In his now infamous ‘Google memo’, the former Google employee made an impassioned plea to the company to stop being in denial of what science tells us about biological differences between the sexes. To spare us the trouble of finding out what these differences are, he lists them out himself:

Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things,
Women on average are more cooperative,
Women on average are more prone to anxiety,
Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average,
Women on average are more gregarious than assertive,
Women on average are more agreeable.

In all likelihood, Damore meant well. He genuinely felt that there was something revolutionary in his ideas that could improve the future of his company. There have been plenty of clever rebuttals to Damore’s memo, which he’d titled ‘Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber – How bias clouds our thinking about diversity and inclusion’. But the perfect and most comprehensive one was coincidentally published shortly before he even wrote it. One may speculate that if only Damore had got himself a copy of Angela Saini’s book, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting The Story, in time, the painful ‘Google memo’ may never been written.

Inferior, Harper Collins, 2017

Damore’s memo advocates paying more attention to the science investigating sex differences and Saini does exactly that in her book. The results are not always what you’d expect or what you’d want them to be. Stories behind the scientific studies that form the basis of most stereotypes are more complex than we think. Oft-seen headlines like ‘men are biologically built to cheat’ actually might be a gross extrapolation of an experiment involving fruit flies in a lab.

More interestingly, Saini also delves into the lives of the people behind this research and their inherent biases. “Having more women in science is changing how science is done,” she says, and she illustrates these with stories historical and contemporary. A perfect example of this is the case of primatology – the study of primates. Until the 1970s, the field of primatology was male-dominated. But only when women finally entered the field did many important phenomena to come to light.

For example, it took Amy Parish’s observations for it to be recognised that bonobos, which, along with chimpanzees, are humans’ closest primate relatives, live in communities where females dominate, have multiple sexual partners and often attack males. These had been documented by zoos and vets all over but Parish found that each observer had thought of this as a freak incident. “We built all of our models of evolution based on a chimp model. Patriarchal, hunting, meat-eating, male-bonding, male aggression towards females, infanticide, sexual coercion. Bonobos turned all this on its head,” Parish tells Saini in the book. Today, primatology is seen as a female-dominated field, with big names like Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey having made significant contributions.

The other great value in Saini’s book is how she goes into not just landmark studies but also their aftermath and attempts to replicate them. Shockingly, quite a few of these major studies have been followed by similar studies where the initial results could not be reproduced. In some cases, contrasting results were observed. We all have it drilled into our brain that “science says” that men are more naturally promiscuous but how many of us know that the very experiment that this saying is based on was later replicated to show that females are just as promiscuous? Saini is disheartened to find out that scientists themselves are sometimes so attached to their own principles that they don’t even bother reading replication studies, which have shown up serious gaps in many experiments.

Even though scientific research is what takes this book forward, the themes are universal enough for anybody to get hooked. And it’s less than 250 pages long. It helps that Saini frequently draws parallels to topics of current relevance, like the Delhi gang-rape and female genital mutilation.The quantity of information packed in the book is tremendous and it could have been really easy for discontinuities and rambles to slip in, but if they did, I didn’t notice. Saini manages to tell the story without losing her eye on the plot.

The book will provoke readers to rethink assumptions about gender that we have knowingly or unknowingly taken refuge in for most of our lives. It exposes serious flaws in the scientific method when it comes to gender differences, and that scientists and the media need to be much more discerning. The only thing that science has definitively told us so far is that binary notions of ‘the average woman’ and ‘the average man’ are far too simplistic to describe the phenomenon of gender. So Saini’s investigation is proof that Damore is guilty of the very accusation that he places on Google: of being in denial of what science tells us about biological differences between the sexes.

Our society has a lot of understanding to gain by reading Inferior. It is a book that is definitely worthy of being translated into many other languages.

Donald Trump, Primate President

A rough measure of dominance in ground-living primate groups is which animal is the centre of attention. The leader is usually at the physical centre of the group and the others glance at him as often as every 20-30 seconds.

A rough measure of dominance in ground-living primate groups is which animal is the centre of attention. The leader is usually at the physical centre of the group and the others glance at him as often as every 20-30 seconds.

President-elect Donald Trump arrives for the inauguration ceremonies swearing him in as the 45th president of the United States on the West front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., January 20, 2017. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

It should have been clear to any open-minded primatologist that the candidacy of Donald Trump had more to do with the turbulent liquidity of primate politics than the hard management of tough systems of power. His remarkable inaugural speech drastically enhances his isolation from all other primate/politicians in a manner difficult to comprehend using conventional tools of analysis. His political explosion has turned virtually the entire lordly once-confident commentariat into a glum and petulant knot.

For quick remedy, they should turn to the tightest analysis of what is an intensely elemental and biologically primitive process. The key piece of writing is from 1966. Its British author was an eccentrically brilliant University of Birmingham biological scientist, Michael M.R.A. Chance. The paper was called “Attention Structure and Primate Rank Orders”. It appeared in MAN:The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

The message of the analysis is that a rough measure of dominance in ground-living primate groups is which animal is the centre of attention. The leader is usually at the physical centre of the group and his subdominant fellows glance at him as often as every 20-30 seconds. He orients their collective action and stimulates them to forage, attack an enemy, protect group members – he’s the leader and they seem to feel good about him, if occasionally also resentful and rebellious. That’s all, and it’s enough.

That offers a realistic way to understand President Trump’s sashay to success. It had – at the outset, and still – little or nothing to do with political philosophy, articulated moral principles, commitment to religion or science and even, startlingly, to political parties. Scholars will puzzle for years about how a loner troubadour managed to climb above two extraordinarily wealthy, adept, and historically rich American political parties with such seeming ease and without the bag of tricks politicians are supposed to carry into battle.

Trump was far more elemental and personal than that. Instead, he was operatic and theatrical and the central fact is that people like looking at Trump because he appears to many to provide a comforting, even stimulating, sense that he has the remedy for what ails them. What he said during the campaign may have been meaninglessly florid, proudly even fatuously egotistical, a-historical, brazenly contradictory or simply wrong, or immune to subtlety. Yet voters – enough voters – suspected that actual leadership may be in his room and in their future. They suspect Trump sees around corners, or at least will know quickly what to do when he makes the turn.

How did this happen?

In the primaries, Trump was unburdened by the scary, self-righteous, and mysterious religiosity of his lingering challengers. The United States is not ISIS and the naïve effort of his opponents to elide political competence and faith backfired while Trump slid along in the real world everyone lives in – this one. Certainly the inaugural contained disappointing if pro forma reference to a generalised divine insurance policy. However it appeared not to matter because everyone was having fun.

And in the election, his highly-experienced and gifted opponent laboured under a mixed-message: her triumphant entry into the Javits arena in New York to claim her victory was to have featured a fake-glass ceiling which would shatter. But she was running for the presidency and not only the women’s vote. The surprising 53% of white women who voted for Trump may have noticed this division in her dreams of power and contribution. And they cared that their husbands may not have worked for a decade and they wanted them out of the house. Who promised that most convincingly?

Oddly, Trump and his leadership style remind me of Kwame Nkrumah’s. Nkrumah was the first leader of a free African country and I was there in 1960 when Ghana became itself and no longer the British Gold Coast. He came to Government House from jail where he had been installed by the same colonial officers who now, suddenly, became his civil servants. I was doing my doctoral dissertation on the sociologist Max Weber’s classical theories of political legitimacy. These were either traditional (obvious), rational-legal (bureaucratic) or charismatic (swirly and elemental). Weber, the profound thinker, said of charisma (from the Greek concept of “grace”) that it was “only understandable with an imperceptible transition to the biological”. So Nkrumah became and was the electrifying leader instead of a member of the traditional ruling groups of his country – represented. for example, by Kofi Annan who was the U.N. secretary-general for some years.

Weber was right, well before Jane Goodall sent dispatches from her primate colony in Gombe in Africa, and then other scientists revealed the internal systems of primate communities.We saw revealed the intricate structure of these lively and animated communities and especially the dramas of political dominance among the ground-living apes (which by the way we are – you too).

The Harris Tweed professoriate, coastal-city journalists, and the self-satisfied we-get-a-bag-of-money-by-the-year experts may have considered Trump and his disdain for PoliSci 101 and conventional political analysis wholly beyond the pale. However, he triumphed at the same time as he seemed to many to be merely that American Icon, a Big Blonde Starlet. He lives big too, which is improbably reassuring, and he enjoys the massive head start in his new career as president of not being a politician at a time when politicians are scorned by the voters and now by their President too. His inaugural speech was unlike any other.

He thinks like a First Responder. Can he perform that way?

Lionel Tiger is a Canadian-born, American-based anthropologist. He is the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and co-Research Director of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

Did Humans Learn to Eat Cashew Nuts from Capuchin Monkeys?

The long history of capuchins’ usage of stone hammers poses more questions about how tool use originated and spread in the New World.

A wild bearded capuchin using a stone tool to crack open cashew nuts in Serra da Capivara National Park in northeast Brazil. Credit: Michael Haslam/Primate Archaeology Project

Animals do the most amazing things. Read about them in this series by Janaki Lenin.

Evidence of the human use of tools stretches back three million years. For a long time, scientists believed the use of implements separated animals and humans. In the mid-19th century, naturalists reported that animals used objects as well. But it wasn’t until 1960, when Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees fishing ants with grass stems, that our view of the animal kingdom changed dramatically. Since then we know of a whole range of animals from crows to dolphins that use tools to get their way.

The bearded capuchin monkeys of Brazil hammer hard nuts with rocks to crack them open. They don’t just smash the nuts with all their strength. Instead, they take care to place the round nuts so they don’t roll away when struck and use large flat rocks as anvils. They hammer these nuts with moderate force, and by gauging the condition of the nut, they struck the next blow. Archaeologists recently discovered that the primates have been using this technique for hundreds of years. This is the first evidence of historic tool use by a non-human primate in the New World.

Cashew trees grow wild in Brazil. When they fruit, wild capuchins exploit the seasonal bonanza. The nuts are covered by a fibrous shell that exudes a caustic resin. When this substance touches the lips, it causes blisters. Humans char the shells before eating the kernels. Since capuchins haven’t figured out the use of fire, they developed different ways of dealing with the corrosive shells. At Fazenda Boa Vista, capuchins abrade a hole in fresh nuts, when the shells are spongy, by rubbing them on a rough tree branches. They smash dry nuts with stones.

However, the capuchins at Serra da Capivara National Park in northern Brazil use rocks to crack open the shells of fresh and dry nuts. Since the area doesn’t have stones of the size they need, the monkeys bring them from a dry streambed nearby. They choose specific types of stones for anvils and hammers and lug them back to the base of trees. After feasting on the nuts, they abandon their tools at the site and over time, piles of such rocks collected at these spots. When they need the tools again, the monkeys pick up their favourite stones from these piles.

How long have bearded capuchins used tools? Researchers from the UK and Brazil, led by primate archaeologist Michael Haslam, recently published the results of their investigation.

“We know so much about the technological evolution of humans but so little is known about the evolutionary history of other primates,” Lydia Luncz of the University of Oxford, U.K. and an author of the paper, told The Wire. “To find answers to the question – why are us humans so technologically advanced – we need to compare the evolution of our own behaviour with the evolution of other primates. We use stone tools as a window into past behaviour of wild primates.”

In May 2013, the researchers mapped four locations within Serra da Capivara National Park where capuchins had built up piles of discarded stone tools. The stones were larger than others, marked by dark residues, and worn from use. The monkeys don’t have a size preference alone. They choose particular kinds of rocks: smooth, hard quartzite for hammers and flat sandstones for anvils.

By weighing these stones, the researchers estimated their average weights. Anvils weighed about 600 grams on average while hammers were 200 grams. The average weight of stones naturally strewn in the area was no more than 60 grams.

Five months later, the researchers excavated one of the four sites by hand, using trowels and shovels, to find ancient tools. They uncovered 69 stone tools within a 35-square metre hole that was 70 centimetres deep. Using gas chromatography mass-spectrometry, they confirmed the dark residues were derivatives of cashew resin such as cardanol 3 and cardanol 4.

Charcoal found with the stones was ideal for carbon-dating. There was no human activity at the site and the charcoal was a result of natural wildfires. The rock tools were of three distinct ages. Modern ones littered the surface. Below were stones dating as far back as the 17th century. Rocks from the 13th to 15th centuries lay buried at the bottom. The oldest rocks revealed a history of 600 to 700 years of tool use by capuchins. The monkeys were pounding cashew nuts with stones long before the European colonisation of South America. These are the oldest tools wielded by animals outside Africa.

Were the cashew trees so old that a hundred generations of capuchins returned to the same spot?

“Individual cashew trees don’t last that long,” replied another author, Tiago Falótico of University of São Paulo, Brasil. “We know from pollen evidence that cashew trees were present in that valley for at least 7,000 years. We assume that places with clusters of cashews in the present would be likely to have had cashews in the past too.”

Remarkably, a hundred generations of capuchins didn’t change the basic parameters of their tools. The oldest tools were of similar weight and material as modern tools. Just like chimpanzees, these capuchins are also conservative, reluctant to make any changes.

The team also dug at Fazenda Boa Vista, where the capuchins’ preferred method was rubbing cashew nuts on rough surfaces, but found little. “We believe that it has to do with the availability of suitable stone hammers,” says Luncz. “The capuchins there crack open hard oil palm nuts which require large tools to open them. Occasionally, they also crack open dry cashew nuts. Those tools are very rare in the landscape. Therefore, they are very valuable, get re-used intensively and never enter the archaeological record. We tried to excavate oil palm tools because this kind of behaviour occurs so much more often. However, we underestimated the re-use frequency of these tools.”

Another primate with a long tradition of using tools is the chimpanzee. Archaeologists excavated stones from sites in Côte d’Ivoire that had been used 4,300 years ago. Before hunter-gatherer humans settled in hamlets and began farming, chimpanzees started using these rocks to crack open nuts. After this discovery, scientists wondered if use of objects was invented by an ancestor of humans alone or a common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. Or did ancient chimpanzees watch humans and imitate them? Perhaps the use of technology evolved independently in primates and humans.

Only humans and bearded capuchins have figured out how to process cashew nuts. In Africa, chimpanzees entering cultivated cashew plantations eat the cashew apple but discard the nuts.

In Asia, long-tailed macaques of Thailand use stones to crack open oysters, marine snails, crabs, and nuts. In another recently published paper, Haslam and his team say the macaques choose their tools carefully too, sometimes using the same rock to open several oysters. However, these tools weren’t antiques; they were less than 50 years old.

The long history of capuchins’ usage of stone hammers poses more questions about how tool use originated and spread in the New World.

“This is an exciting, unexplored area of scientific study that may even tell us about the possible influence of monkeys’ tool use on human behaviour,” said Michael Haslam of the University of Oxford, and the main author of the paper, in a press release. “For example, cashew nuts are native to this area of Brazil, and it is possible that the first humans to arrive here learned about this unknown food through watching the monkeys and their primate cashew-processing industry.”

People living in the national park area ate cashews at least 7,000 years ago. To prove whether humans learned to open cashew nuts from watching monkeys, the team would have to find tools used by capuchins of even older provenance. As primate archaeology evolves as a field, it may reveal more surprises.

The study was published in the journal Current Biology on July 11, 2016.

Janaki Lenin is the author of My Husband and Other Animals. She lives in a forest with snake-man Rom Whitaker and tweets at @janakilenin.