Animal Social Complexity: Intelligence, Culture, and Individualized Societies. Frans B. M. de Waal and Peter L. Tyack, eds. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003. 640 pp., illus. $49.95 (ISBN 0674009290 cloth).
This multiauthored volume is derived from a “two-tiered” conference that took place in Chicago in August 2000. Part of the conference was concerned with social complexity and intelligence in animals, and part was a “celebration of 40 years of research by Jane Goodall and her group at Gombe.” The resulting symposium volume has all the strengths and weaknesses common to the genre. On the one hand, it is stronger than some symposium collections both in the excellence of its contributors and in the intrinsic interest of the material discussed. On the other hand, it includes little in the way of new theory, and the loosely defined themes that serve to organize the volume result in breadth rather than depth of coverage of most issues.
The stated goal of the editors, Frans B. M. de Waal and Peter L. Tyack, in bringing together this diverse collection of essays is to explore some of the many forms of social and behavioral complexity in animals. De Waal is director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University; he is the author of several highly visible books on primate social behavior. Tyack is senior scientist and Walter A. and Hope Noyes Smith Chair in the Biology Department of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and an expert on dolphin communications. Together they bring a formidable expertise to the symposium volume they have edited.
The book is divided into five sections, each with a brief introduction provided by one of the editors: “Life History and Brain Evolution,” “Evolution of Cooperative Strategies,” “Social Cognition,” “Communication,” and “Cultural Transmission.” An interesting and largely successful idea is the inclusion of 11 brief “case studies,” written mostly by relatively junior investigators, that complement the 18 lengthier reviews provided by more senior authors.
The chapters themselves provide readable, concise summaries of important, though familiar, research on the social behavior of mammals, including hyenas (Drea and Frank), elephants (Payne), and dolphins (Wells, Tyack), and on the traditions and culture of chimpanzees (Boesch, Matsuzawa, Nishida, McGrew), cetaceans (Whitehead), and cowbirds (West et al.). There are also chapters on social knowledge and communication in primates (Seyfarth and Cheney, de Waal), cetaceans (Schusterman et al.), parrots (Bradbury), and bats (Wilkinson). Chapters by Creel and Sands on the relative social stress experienced by subordinate and dominant animals and by van Hooff and Preuschoft on the evolution of laughter and smiling, however, seem somewhat out of place.
Animal Social Complexity is largely concerned with primates and carnivores. However, it includes material on a few less charismatic and less cognitively sophisticated creatures that also live in social groups whose members respond to one another as individuals. This comparative material provides a forceful reminder that life in societies, even societies in which individuals are recognized and responded to differently, and the emergence of traditions in animals may not require particularly complex cognitive processes. Indeed, a surprise to me, given the book's subtitle, was the general lack of support provided by the authors for the “Machiavellian intelligence” hypothesis (Byrne and Whiten 1988), which suggests that the evolution of higher cognitive abilities has been driven by the need for animals living in social groups to compete, cooperate, deceive, and so on.
In the book's opening chapter, van Schaik and Deaner provide comparative analyses of potential correlates of brain size and find that, across mammalian orders other than bats, a slow life history rather than a complex social life predicts increased encephalization. Wilkinson's analysis later in the book suggests that in bats, the outliers in van Schaik and Deaner's broader analysis, group stability is more important than colony size, mating behavior, or echolocation in shaping neocortical volume. Three excellent contributions on spotted hyenas provide ample evidence that a social life comparable in complexity to that of many primates is possible without primate levels of encephalization. These discussions of hyena social life also provide an interesting counterpoint to de Waal's insistence on the “exquisite” social knowledge and “remarkable social complexity of primates” (p. 237).
In their brief general introduction to the volume, the editors suggest that social complexity, intelligence, and culture are somehow interrelated, though they acknowledge that all three terms are difficult to define and that correlations among them remain obscure. As Seyfarth and Cheney discuss briefly in introducing their chapter on the structure of social knowledge in monkeys, “the same bit of behavior can be explained equally well in many different ways—some cognitively complex, others less so” (p. 208). Or, as Engh and Holekamp put the matter in discussing the relative intelligence of hyenas and cercopithecine monkeys, “although coordinated hunting behaviors in hyenas and other carnivores appear to require complex mental processes, these behaviors can be explained more easily with a few simple rules of thumb” (p. 152). The contrast with Boesch's description of a chimpanzee hunting red colobus monkeys—the chimpanzee “not only anticipated the action of the prey, but also the effect the action of other chimpanzees would have on future movements of the colobus” (p. 101)—is striking. The implicit tension between simple and complex explanations of behavior is apparent throughout the book and serves as a reminder that relatively rich or lean styles of explanation may offer as much insight into an author's cognitive style as into the minds of the animals whose behavior is being discussed. Whatever your own preferred approach, you will find both congenial and irritating contributions in de Waal and Tyack's volume.
The section on cultural transmission is perhaps the most strongly biased toward rich interpretations of data, with four of five chapters considering, to a greater or lesser extent, the largely semantic and anthropocentric issue of whether chimpanzees or whales should be considered bearers of culture. Only one chapter in the section is devoted to analyses of behavioral processes supporting the social transmission of behavior and traditions in animals.
Evidence of differences in the behavioral repertoires of chimpanzees living in different areas in Africa is surely convincing, and Nishida's chapter adds to the catalogue. However, we still know almost nothing about how such differences in behavior develop in natural circumstances. The field experiments that Matsuzawa describes suggest that appropriate developmental studies may be possible in the wild, and the chapter by West and colleagues describes the type of analysis of traditions in birds that may, in time, become available for primate traditions. Once such research is under way, we can look forward to less concern with semantic issues in the “culture wars” that McGrew discusses in a chapter that is both erudite and amusing.
Some 40 years ago, when I was a graduate student, my classmates and I took it for granted that the more intrinsically interesting the animal, the less interesting the available data. The contributors to Animal Social Complexity make clear that we have come a long way in intervening decades. Extended field studies of chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants, and hyenas (and of other primates, cetaceans, and large carnivores, both social and solitary) have provided a wealth of descriptive data and the beginnings of an understanding of how these enthralling animals function in a complex and challenging social world. However, considerably more progress seems to have been made in describing and analyzing social complexity than in understanding the cognitive processes underlying social life. This may be because long-term, systematic observation of the behavior of members of a social group can result in much progress in understanding social life, whereas observation alone seldom provides equally convincing insight into cognitive processes.
Animal Social Complexity provides readable, concise reviews of a wealth of material concerning animals living in individualized societies. At the same time, the collection makes evident the challenges still to be overcome in developing a full understanding of the relationships (if any) between life in complex social groups, the evolution of intelligence, and the emergence of culture. Professionals will probably want to look at more extended treatments of the many issues addressed in Animal Social Complexity rather than these relatively brief, data-free presentations, concise and readable though many may be. The volume could, however, serve as a useful starting point for a senior undergraduate or graduate seminar, providing useful introductions to relevant literature that students could consult in preparing oral or written presentations.
