The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee Read online

  At this point, we may seem to be light-years removed from elephant art. Elephants are not even closely related to us evolutionarily. Much more relevant to us are the artworks that were produced by two captive chimpanzees named Congo and Betsy, a gorilla called Sophie, an orangutan named Alexander, and a monkey named Pablo. These primates variously mastered the media of brush or finger-painting and pencil, chalk, or crayon drawing. Congo did up to thirty-three paintings in one day, apparently for his own satisfaction, as he did not show his work to other chimps and threw a tantrum when his pencil was taken away. For human artists, the ultimate proof of success is a one-man show, but Congo and Betsy were honoured by a two-chimp show of their paintings in 1957 at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art. The following year, Congo had a one-chimp show at London’s Royal Festival Hall. What is more, almost all of the paintings on exhibit at those chimp shows sold (to human buyers); plenty of human artists cannot make that boast. Still other ape paintings were surreptitiously entered into exhibits by human artists and were enthusiastically acclaimed by unsuspecting art critics for their dynamism, rhythm, and sense of balance.

  Equally unsuspecting were child psychologists who were given paintings by chimps from the Baltimore Zoo and were asked to diagnose the painters’ problems. The psychologists guessed that a painting by a three-year-old male chimp was instead by an aggressive seven-or eight-year-old boy with paranoid tendencies. Two paintings by the same one-year-old female chimp were attributed to different ten-year-old girls, one painting indicating a belligerent girl of the schizoid type, the other a paranoid girl with strong father identification. It is a tribute to the psychologists’ insight that they intuited the artist’s sex correctly in each case; they were only wrong about the artist’s species.

  These paintings by our closest relatives do start to blur the distinction between human art and animal activities. Like human paintings, the ape paintings served no narrow utilitarian function of transmitting genes, and were instead just produced for satisfaction. One could object that the ape artists, like the elephant Siri, made their pictures just for their own satisfaction, while most human artists aim to communicate to other humans. The apes did not even keep their paintings to enjoy themselves but simply discarded them. Yet that objection does not strike me as fatal, since the simplest human art (doodling) is also regularly discarded, and since one of the best pieces of art I own is a wood statue carved by a New Guinea villager who discarded it under his house after carving it. Even some human art that later became famous was created by artists for their private satisfaction: the composer Charles Ives published little of his music, and Franz Kafka not only did not publish his three great novels but even forbade his executor to do so. (Fortunately, the executor disobeyed, thereby forcing Kafka’s novels to take on a communicative function posthumously.)

  However, there is a more serious objection against claiming a parallel between ape art and human art. Ape painting is just an unnatural activity of captive animals. One might insist that, since it is not natural behaviour, it could not illuminate the animal origins of art. Let us therefore turn now to some undeniably natural and illuminating behaviour: bowerbirds’ building of bowers, the most elaborate structures built and decorated by any animal species other than humans.

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  If I had not already heard of bowers, I would have mistaken the first one I saw for something man-made, as did nineteenth-century explorers in New Guinea. I had set out that morning from a New Guinea village, with its circular huts, neat rows of flowers, people wearing decorative beads, and little bows and arrows carried by children in imitation of their fathers’ larger ones. Suddenly, in the jungle, I came across a beautifully woven, circular hut 8 feet in diameter and 4 feet high, with a doorway large enough for a child to enter and sit inside. In front of the hut was a lawn of green moss, clean of debris except for hundreds of natural objects of various colours that had obviously been placed there intentionally as decorations. They mainly consisted of flowers and fruits and leaves, but also some butterfly wings and fungi. Objects of similar colour were grouped together, such as red fruits next to a group of red leaves. The largest decorations were a tall pile of black fungi facing the door, with another pile of orange fungi a few yards further from the door. All blue objects were grouped inside the hut, red ones outside, and yellow, purple, black, and a few green ones in other locations.

  That hut was not a child’s playground. It had instead been built and decorated by an otherwise unimpressive jay-sized bird called a bower-bird, a member of a family of eighteen species confined to New Guinea and Australia. Bowers are erected by males for the sole purpose of seducing females, who then bear the sole responsibility for building the nest and rearing the young. Males are polygamous, try to mate with as many females as possible, and provide the female with nothing except sperm. Females, often in groups, cruise around the bowers and inspect all the ones in the vicinity before selecting one at which to mate. Human equivalents of such scenes are played out every night on Sunset Strip, a few miles from my home in Los Angeles.

  Female bowerbirds select their bedmate by the quality of his bower, its number of decorations, and its conformity to local rules, which vary among species and populations of bowerbirds. Some populations prefer blue decorations, others red or green or grey, while some replace the hut with one or two towers, or a two-walled avenue, or a four-walled box. There are populations that paint their bowers with crushed leaves or else with oils that they excrete. These local differences in rules appear not to be hard-wired into the birds’ genes. Instead, they are learned through younger birds observing older birds during the many years that it takes a bowerbird to reach adulthood. Males learn the locally correct way to decorate, while females learn those same rules for the purpose of choosing a male.

  I tested the males’ finickiness by moving decorations, whereupon the bower owner restored them to their original places. When I put out poker chips of various colours, the hated white chips were heaved off into the jungle, the beloved blue ones stacked inside the hut, and the red ones stacked on the lawn next to red leaves and fruits.

  At first, this system strikes us as absurd. After all, what a female bowerbird is trying to do is to pick a good mate. The evolutionary winner in such a mate-selection contest is that female bowerbird who picks that male bowerbird who makes it possible for her to leave the largest number of surviving offspring. What good does it do her to pick the guy with the blue fruits?

  All animals face similar problems of mate selection. I have already discussed our own problems and solutions in Chapter Five. Consider those species (such as most European and North American songbirds) whose males carve out mutually exclusive territories that each male will share with his mate. The territory contains the nest site and food resources for the female to use in rearing her young. Hence a part of the female’s task is to assess the quality of each male’s territory. Alternatively, suppose that the male himself will assist in feeding and protecting the young, and in hunting cooperatively with the female. Then the female and the male must assess each other’s parenting and hunting skills and the quality of their relationship. All these things are hard enough to assess, but it is even harder for the female to assess a male when he provides nothing but sperm and genes, as is the case with male bowerbirds. How on earth is an animal to assess a prospective mate’s genes, and what have blue fruits to do with good genes?

  Animals do not have the time to produce ten offspring with each of many prospective mates, and to compare the outcomes (the eventual number of surviving offspring). Instead, they have to resort to shortcuts by relying on mating signals such as songs or ritualized displays. As I shall discuss at more length in Chapter Eleven, it is now a hotly contested problem in animal behaviour to understand why, or even whether, those mating signals serve as veiled indicators of good genes. We have only to reflect on our own difficulties in selecting mates and in assessing the true wealth, parenting skills, and genetic quality of our various prospective p
artners.

  In this light, reflect what it means when a female bowerbird finds a male with a good bower. She knows at once that that male is strong, since the bower he assembled weighs hundreds of times his own weight, and since he had to drag some individual decorations half his weight from dozens of yards distant. She knows that the male has the mechanical dexterity needed to weave hundreds of sticks into a hut, tower, or walls. He must have a good brain, to carry out the complex design correctly. He must have good vision and memory to search out the required hundreds of decorations in the jungle. He must be good at coping with life, to have survived to the age of perfecting all those skills. He must also be dominant over other males – since males spend much of their leisure time trying to wreck and steal from each other’s bowers, only the best males end up with intact bowers and many decorations.

  Thus, bower-building provides a comprehensive test of male genes. It is as if women put each of their suitors in sequence through a weight-lifting contest, sewing contest, chess tournament, eye test, and boxing tournament, and finally went to bed with the winner. By comparison with bowerbirds, our efforts to identify mates with good genes are pathetic. We grasp at external bagatelles like facial features and ear lobe lengths (Chapter Five), or like sex appeal and Porsche ownership, which tell nothing about intrinsic genetic worth. Think of all the human suffering caused by the sad truth that beautiful sexy women or handsome Porsche-owning men often prove to have miserable genes for other traits. It is no wonder that so many marriages end in divorce, as we belatedly realize how badly we chose and how flimsy our criteria were.

  How did bowerbirds evolve to use art so cleverly for such important purposes? Most male birds woo females by advertising their colourful bodies, songs, displays, or offerings of food, as dim indicators of good genes. Males of two groups of birds of paradise in New Guinea go one step further by clearing areas on the jungle floor, as bowerbirds do, to enhance their displays and show off their fancy plumage. Males of one of those birds of paradise have gone still further by decorating their cleared areas with objects useful to a nesting female: pieces of snakeskin to line her nest, pieces of chalk or mammal faeces to eat for their minerals, and fruits to eat for their calories. Finally, bowerbirds have learned that decorative objects useless in themselves may nevertheless be useful indicators of good genes, if the objects are ones that were difficult to acquire and keep.

  We can easily relate to that concept. Just think of all those advertisements showing a handsome man presenting a diamond ring to a seemingly fertile young woman. You cannot eat a diamond ring, but a woman knows that the gift of such a ring tells far more about the resources that her suitor commands (and might devote to her offspring and herself) than a gift of a box of chocolates would tell. Yes, chocolates provide a few useful calories, but they are quickly gone and any idiot can afford to buy them. In contrast, the man who can afford that inedible diamond ring has money to support the woman and her kids, and also has whatever genes (for intelligence, persistence, energy, etc.) that it took to acquire or hold on to the money.

  Comparisons of different bowerbird species and their bowers show that male bowerbirds achieve through bowers what other birds achieve through bright plumage. Bowerbird species differ in the conspicuousness of adult male plumage. For example, males of the five species that build towers or huts sport brilliant yellow-orange crests, whose lengths vary among the species from 4 inches to nothing at all. The shorter the crest, the bigger the bower, and the more numerous and diverse its decorations. It makes sense that a male whose manly ornament is reduced to a runty 2 inches should go to great lengths to compensate in other ways.

  Thus, in the course of bowerbird evolution the less resplendent males have lured the female’s attention from ornaments that are permanent parts of the male’s body to ornaments that the male gathers. Whereas sexual selection in most species has produced differences between males and females in their bodily ornaments (Chapter Six), in bowerbirds it has shifted towards causing males to emphasize collected ornaments separate from their bodies. From this perspective, bowerbirds are rather human. We, too, rarely court (or at least rarely initiate courtship) by displaying the beauties of our unadorned naked bodies. Instead, we swathe ourselves in coloured cloths, spray or daub ourselves with perfumes and paints and powders, and augment our beauty with decorations ranging from jewels to sports cars. The parallel between bowerbirds and humans may be even closer if, as friends of mine who are into sports cars assure me, duller young men tend to decorate themselves with fancier sports cars.

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  Now let’s re-examine, in the light of bowerbirds, those three criteria supposedly separating human art from any animal production. Both bower styles and our art styles are learned rather than inherited, so that there is no difference by the third criterion. As for the second criterion (doing it for aesthetic pleasure), it is unanswerable. We cannot ask bowerbirds whether they get pleasure out of their art, and I suspect that many humans who claim to do so are just putting on cultural affectations. That leaves only the first criterion: Oscar Wilde’s assertion that art is useless, in a narrow biological sense. His statement is definitely untrue of bower art, which serves a sexual function. But it is absurd to pretend any longer that our own art lacks biological functions. Instead, there are several ways in which art helps us to survive and to pass on our genes.

  Firstly, art often brings direct sexual benefits to its owner. It is not just a joke that men bent on seduction invite a woman to view their etchings. In real life, dance and music and poetry are common preludes to sex.

  Secondly, and much more importantly, art brings indirect benefits to its owner. Art is a quick indicator of status, which – in human as in animal societies – is a key to acquiring food, land, and sexual partners. Yes, bowerbirds get the credit for discovering the principle that ornaments separate from one’s body are more flexible status symbols than ornaments that one has to grow, but we still get credit for running away with that principle. Cro-Magnons decorated their bodies with bracelets, pendants, and ochre; New Guinea villagers today decorate theirs with shells, fur, and bird-of-paradise plumes. In addition to these art forms for bodily adornment, both Cro-Magnons and New Guinea villagers produced larger art (carvings and paintings) of world quality. We know that New Guinea art signals superiority and wealth, because birds of paradise are hard to hunt, beautiful statues take talent to make, and both are very expensive to buy. These badges of distinction are essential for marital sex in New Guinea: brides are bought, and part of the price consists of luxury art. Elsewhere as well, art is often viewed as a signal of talent, money, or both.

  In a world where art is a coin of sex, it is only a small further step for some artists to be able to convert art into food. There are whole societies that support themselves by making art for trade to food-producing groups. For example, the Siassi islanders, who lived on tiny islets with little room for gardens, survived by carving beautiful bowls that other tribes coveted for bride payments and paid for in food.

  The same principles hold even more strongly in the modern world. Where we once signalled our status with bird feathers on our bodies and a giant clam shell in our hut, we now do it with diamonds on our bodies and a Picasso on our wall. Where Siassi islanders sold a carved bowl for the equivalent of twenty dollars, Richard Strauss built himself a villa with the proceeds from his opera salome and earned a fortune from Der Rosenkavalier. Nowadays we read increasingly often of art sold at auction for tens of millions of dollars, and of art theft. In short, precisely because it serves as a signal of good genes and ample resources, art can be cashed in for still more genes and resources.

  So far, I have considered only the benefits that art brings to individuals, but art also helps define human groups. Humans have always formed competing groups whose survival is essential if the individuals in that group are to pass on their genes. Human history largely consists of the details of groups killing, enslaving, or expelling other groups. The winner takes the loser�
��s land, sometimes also the loser’s women, and thus the loser’s opportunity to perpetuate genes. Group cohesion depends on the group’s distinctive culture – especially its language, religion, and art (including stories and dances), hence art is a significant force behind group survival. Even if you have better genes than most of your fellow tribesmen, it will do you no good should your whole tribe (including you) get annihilated by some other tribe.

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  By now, you’re probably protesting that I have gone completely overboard in ascribing utility to art. What about all of us who just enjoy art, without converting it to status or sex? What about all the artists who remain celibate? Are there not easier ways to seduce a sex partner than to take piano lessons for ten years? Is private satisfaction not a (the?) main reason for our art, just as for Siri and Congo?

  Of course. Such expansion of behavioural patterns far beyond their original role is typical of animal species whose foraging efficiency gives them much leisure time, and who have brought their survival problems under control. Bowerbirds and birds of paradise have much leisure time, because they are big and feed on wild fruit trees out of which they can kick smaller birds. We have much leisure time because we use tools to obtain food. Animals with leisure time can channel it into more lavish signals to outdo each other. Those types of behaviour may then come to serve other purposes, such as representing information (a suggested function of Cro-Magnon cave paintings of hunted animals), relieving boredom (a real problem for captive apes and elephants), channelling neurotic energy (a problem for us as well as for them), and just providing pleasure. To maintain that art is useful is not to deny that art provides pleasure. Indeed, if we were not programmed to enjoy art, it could not serve most of its useful functions for us.