Baboons continue to teach. But do we learn?
If you have seen the 2008 National Geographic Video entitled “STRESS: POTRAIT OF A KILLER,” you learned that the Kikarock Troupe studied by renowned Stanford University Professor Dr. Robert Sapolsky did in fact have a lesson for us. Once the alpha males of the troupe died off from having eaten tainted food found in a garbage dump, those remaining who were more social transformed the character of the group. Those remaining acted more kindly towards each other. There was more mutual grooming and less “Machiavellian” backstabbing actions towards those lower in the troupe’s hierarchy. This persisted for over 20 years after the incident, which was originally thought to have wiped out a decade of research. Did this change in behavior result in any physiological advantage? It did. High blood and thus arteriosclerosis is down while other baboon troupes who maintained the alpha male hierarchy was high. You can streamline the entire video from National Geographic below.
Many of you who have seen our MYT “EQ not IQ is the Differentiator in Attaining Optimal Performance” workshop have seen excerpts from this video so you might reasonably ask: What is new? On the front page of the July 15th edition of the NY Times, there was an article entitled “Baboon Study Shows Benefits For The Nice Guys, Who Finish 2nd” by James Gordon. It opens with the sentence “At last, good news for the beta male.” Not surprisingly, Professor Sapolsky’s work was not only referenced but he was quoted in the article a number of times.
For those who are time constrained, here is the essence of the article. Gorman states that “It may now be time to take a step back from alpha worship. Field biologists, the people who gave the culture the alpha/beta trope in the first place, have found there can be a big downside to being No. 1.” He sites research done at Princeton University by research associate Laurence R. Gesquiere in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology and so captured in Science magazine. Their study, done over 9 years, with 5 troops in Kenya “showed very high stress levels, as high as those of the lowest-ranking males.” The suggested cause of this stress was the “demands fighting off of (territorial) challengers and guarding access to fertile females.” Not surprisingly, the beta males did not experience this stress and their mating opportunities were not nil but at a higher level than lower ranking males. Also not surprisingly female baboons do not have the same world to navigate. Many studies have shown that because there is a whole different system of rank inherited from their mothers, female baboons do not suffer physiologically as do their male counterparts.
“The new study showed that top-ranking males had higher levels of stress whether the social structure of their group was stable or in tumult. Researchers collected fecal samples to measure levels of stress hormones called glucocorticoids. Levels of stress are important partly because of the health effects of stress hormones. In the short term, in immediate fight-or-flight situations, the hormones work to energize the individual. Long-term stress levels are a different matter. In the long term you fall apart, or are subject to diseases, said Jeanne Altmann, an emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, and senior author of the new report.”
So what has all this to do with us primates? Well read the entire article and then watch Sapolsky’s video. You will see from both that these baboons are trying to teach us how to live better. The looming question remains from the video. Are we wise enough to learn from a baboon? Or as Sapolsky and Seyfarth say in this article “it certainly raises questions about possible (the) unstudied costs of being at the top.”
August 2011