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Sunday Morning News

Primatologists Learn How Monkeys Transmit Culture

Aired March 11, 2001 - 8:45 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Now for something really different, scientists are getting closer to understanding how the animal kingdom works, especially in terms that are familiar to humans.

Frans De Waal is a primatologist at Emory University here in Atlanta. His newest book is "The Ape and the Sushi Master," provocative title, indeed. There you see a kind of faint image off of our computer of it. He joins us this morning to explain more about it.

Good to have you with us, Dr. Waal.

FRANS DE WAAL, EMORY UNIVERSITY, PRIMATOLOGIST: Well, I'm glad to be here.

O'BRIEN: All right, tell me exactly -- the title is provocative. I want you to tell me the story about that in a moment. But basically the premise of all of this is that there -- I suppose we as humans make the assumption that animals operate strictly on instinct. You, in observing primates, have come to a different conclusion, haven't you?

WAAL: Well, we have concluded that they transmit a lot of knowledge and habits to each other, just as we do, and that's why we call it cultural. So there's a lot of behavior that they learned from others and they even survive with that sort of behavior. So if you take, for example, a chimpanzee and you raise him at home and you release him in the forest, he can't even survive. So there's a lot of learning that takes place.

O'BRIEN: So it's kind of a nature versus nurture argument in some sense.

WAAL: Yes.

O'BRIEN: There are traditions, then, among animals, and does this apply to all animals or are we just talking about, say, mammals here?

WAAL: I think it applies to many animals. For example, song birds learn songs from each other. There's many animals -- even fish can imitate each other to some degree. But I think chimpanzees and dolphins and sort of the higher mammals, they are definitely the most cultural of all. O'BRIEN: Tell us the aha moment when you had the inspiration for this thesis.

WAAL: Well, I think the high moment was 50 years ago. It was not my moment. It was a moment in Japan where Iminishi (ph), a Japanese primatologist, proposed that animals may have culture and two years later his students started to discover that there was a transmission of a habit, which was potato washing, among the monkeys on an island in Japan.

O'BRIEN: So wait a minute, the monkeys actually watched humans washing potatoes...

WAAL: No, no, no...

O'BRIEN: Explain how this worked.

WAAL: The humans gave them potatoes in order to habituate them and one of the young monkeys took a potato which was dirty and took it to the water and washed it. And very soon thereafter her mother was doing it. And very soon thereafter her peers were doing it. And then it transmitted. The last ones to learn it, some of them never learned it, were the older males. So it transmitted to the whole group except the old males. They hang onto the old habits that they have.

O'BRIEN: All right, well, you have definitely brought us to the discussion of the title. Tell us what that is all about.

WAAL: The title has to do with, in Japan, the sushi master has an apprentice and the apprentice watches the sushi master. He's not allowed to touch any sushi for a couple of years. He's just hanging around him and watches him, mops the floor and all of this and after three years he's supposed to make -- be able to make sushi. And so it's an observational learning setup and that's why I compare them, because I think many primates do the same thing. They watch their mother. They watch the older chimpanzees in the group, they watch them do things, and after a couple of years they can do the same things.

O'BRIEN: So do you get the sense that -- perhaps this isn't the case for you, but that most of us are way underestimating what animals are capable of?

WAAL: I think so. I think we have a tendency to say we are cultural beings, we have left nature behind -- which, of course, is nonsense -- we cannot leave nature behind -- and that animals are stuck in nature, they are stuck with their instincts. But that's not the case at all.

O'BRIEN: So what, then, is the lesson for us?

WAAL: The lesson for us is that the divide between culture and nature that we have created is completely artificial. It doesn't exist for us, really, because there's continuity between the two, and it doesn't exist for other animals.

O'BRIEN: So we are much closer to the primates than we'd like to think, perhaps, on a day to day basis?

WAAL: Oh, I think so.

O'BRIEN: Is there anything wrong with that?

WAAL: No. I think we are primates so, yeah, it's logical to think like that.

O'BRIEN: All right, Frans De Waal, who is at Emory University and is out with a fascinating new book, "The Ape and the Sushi Master," which is available, by the way, if you go to the Emory Web page, www.emory.edu/living_links. That's an underscore in between the two. Check out the library section and you'll be able to find this very interesting new book.

Thanks for being with us on CNN SUNDAY MORNING.

WAAL: Yeah, thank you.

O'BRIEN: We appreciate it.

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