— A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons
Select Quotes
Part 1. The Adolescent Years: When I First Joined The Troop
1. The Baboons: The Generations Of Israel
dioramas, – Page 18
During one period, I became enthused with the collectivist utopian rants of my elderly communist relatives and decided that I would someday grow up to be a social insect. A worker ant, of course. I made the miscalculation of putting this scheme into an elementary-school writing assignment about my plan for life, resulting in a worried note from the teacher to my mother. – Page 18
I would marvel at the antiquity of it. Some years before, Jimmy Carter was jogging at the White House, people were buying Pet Rocks and trying to look like Farrah Fawcett-Majors, and the aging Leah was giving Naomi grief. Even further back, the My Lai massacre occurred, people were wearing cranberry bell-bottoms and dancing on waterbeds, and the prime-aged Leah was forcing Naomi to groom her. Further back, Lyndon Johnson was showing off his gallbladder scar while the adolescent Leah was waiting for Naomi to fall asleep during her midday nap before hassling her. And way back when people were still protesting the Rosenbergs’ being executed and I was positioned in my grandmother’s lap in her nursing home for us to be photographed with the Brownie camera, Naomi, the toddler, had to give the branch she was playing with to Leah. And now they were two decrepit old ladies still playing musical chairs in the savanna. – Page 24
2. Zebra Kabobs And A Life Of Crime
I will forever ache with the knowledge that I can never again spend my first weeks out in the bush—a first introduction to the baboons, a first afternoon spent meeting the nearby villagers, the first realization that behind every bush and tree there was an animal. Each night in my tent, I would fling myself down in exhaustion at all the novelty, with the fatigue of looking and listening and smelling at everything so intently. – Page 40
I was living on rice and beans and cabbage in camp, occasionally even managing to cook them adequately. I hadn’t a clue what to do with the zebra leg. – Page 44
There was no shortage of explanations for the endless scams and maneuvers and cheatings and victimizations amid a world of people of intense decency. The desperation of being desperately poor. The raw tribal animosities that made “us’s” and “them’s” in ways I couldn’t begin to detect. The most venal of corruption. A Wild West mentality, small-town boredom, unbridled selfish capitalism without even the pretense of regulations and restraint. Maybe this was how my own world worked, if I had ever bothered to experience anything outside of my ivory tower. Maybe this was also how the ivory tower worked, if I wised up a little there as well. – Page 47
Finally, a number of days into not eating, I made the decision to just plain steal. – Page 50
3. The Revenge Of The Liberals
You find yourself, a reasonably well educated human with a variety of interests, spending hours and hours each day and night obsessing on how to outmaneuver these beasts, how to think like them, how to think better than them. Usually unsuccessfully. – Page 59
The other night, I was at the movies and watched some matron amble down the aisle past me, and my first thoughts were “85-90 kilos, .9 cc’s of anesthetic. Go for her rump, lots of meat. Her husband will probably defend her when she goes down, but he has small canines.” – Page 63
4. The Masai Fundamentalist And My Debut As A Social Worker
(an old man here is anyone over twenty-five, an ex-warrior, and thus an elder likely to have recently married a thirteen-year-old. – Page 76
5. The Coca-Cola Devil
Finally, he mounted her and, in the throes of the unaccustomed excitement, threw up on her head. Such was Isiah’s farewell to the amorous life (as well as poor Esther’s introduction). – Page 79
senescent, – Page 81
I continue to swoon in the safe atmosphere. – Page 90
6. Teaching Old Men About Maps
aardvark – Page 91
7. Memories Of Blood: The East African Wars
Suddenly, he remembered his manners and felt vulnerable in the way that Kenyans feel in not being able to discern the nationality of white English speakers. “Uh, you are not British, are you?” he asked. No, American. He was delighted, roared, Then what am I telling you for? You Americans have fought the British also, you know about those people. He served up more tea, this graceful man with no fingernails. – Page 118
Decades later, in the neurobiology classes I teach, I always spend some lectures on the physiology of aggression. The hormonal modulation of it, the areas of the brain having some influence over it, the genetic components of it. Somehow, each year, it takes more and more lectures to cover the material. There aren’t a whole lot more facts known than about the neurobiology of schizophrenia or language use or parental behavior, just to name a few of the other topics I cover. But somehow, almost embarrassingly, I spend more and more time talking about aggression. I think each year I lecture longer because of that man with his head tied to the dam and because of how long I stood there looking at him, unable to leave. I think it is because of the ambiguity of aggression. It is the most confusing emotion to me, and with the defenses of an academician, I clearly believe that if I lecture at it enough, it will give up and go away quietly, its simultaneous attraction and repulsion will stop being so frightening to me. Parental behavior, sexual behavior, those are usually pretty unassailable positives. Schizophrenia, depression, dementia—definitely bad. But aggression. The same motor pattern, the same burst of viscera and neurotransmitters holding razors, and sometimes we are rewarded as with few other behaviors, and sometimes we have been unspeakably harmful. A just war, a nation freed, and a head jammed in the hole in the concrete. I stood watching for hours, mesmerized, as if to see how long it would take for this man to be washed away, bit by bit, into the Nile. – Page 126
Part 2: The Subadult Years
8. The Baboons: Saul In The Wilderness
The strategy paid off in many ways. Yes, only a few of the young females conceived, but as the years passed, Isaac, still in fine shape, would be surrounded by their occasional offspring, eventually hordes of kids with flat foreheads, to whom he would be abundantly paternal. And by then, almost all of his peers were dead or decrepit, burned out by their more competitive lifestyle. And he just kept going. – Page 134
You’ll note that all of this depends on the actors being able to remember who mated with whom back when, what your species gestation period is, and so on. Not recommended for beginners or small-brained species. – Page 136
Sociobiology is often faulted for the Machiavellian explanations it gives for some of the most disturbing of social behaviors. And for the suggestion that some of those horrendous behaviors are highly rewarding to their skillful practitioners. Less noticed is that it also generates just as valid (or invalid) explanations for some of the most selfless, altruistic, caring of behaviors and shows the circumstances under which those are highly rewarding behavioral strategies to follow. Yet, nothing about that science at this stage can begin to explain the individual differences— – Page 138
9. Samwelly Versus The Elephants
The next day, while I was out with the baboons, Samwelly displayed his new skills in opening three months of cans of mackerel and plums. We ate like hogs that night and distributed the rest, and things were corrected after an extra resupply trip to Nairobi. – Page 153
Xanadu – Page 156
11. Zoology And National Security: A Shaggy Hyena Story
Field biologists are a fairly unruly lot They spend most of their time living alone, and they wind up pretty ill-mannered. They take on a lot of the traits of their animals. – Page 170
And besides, these colonels are greatly misinformed about cooperative hunting species—there are actually very few of them, most of the hunts are just uncoordinated free-for-alls, and we could happily do research on their bucks for years before telling them, sorry, they’re not very good hunters after all. – Page 173
12. The Coup
They were euphoric with the food, and thus so was I; there was something excitingly stoic about sharing the bits of food amid candlelight and distant gunfire. – Page 182
14. Sudan
The next desert trip I planned better, which is to say, I planned for a desert trip. – Page 194
I walked around, agitated, planning to catch desert rats and breed them for laboratory experiments, use my Swiss army knife to carve test tubes out of wood. – Page 202
A continuous plateau, thick, mist-filled rain forest forever, 10,000-foot granite peaks soaring out of the jungle, monkeys and hooting birds and bush buck and forest hunters, and every now and then, a break in the mountains, a pass, and a view of the pounding desert, 7,000 feet below. Like being on a huge, lush verdant ship, floating above the ocean of hell desert. – Page 212
I developed this pattern of hiking that decreased my anxiety about getting lost and disappearing in the forest. – Page 212
It had become one of the most ominous mountains I’d ever seen. Vast, looming, silent, craggy, dark magnificently complicated rock formations, rising up straight out of the jungle like some sort of citadel of the ruined jungle empire of Zinj. – Page 214
The Masai use them to suture people—bad cut, and someone grabs an army ant, holds the two sides of the cut together, lets the pissed-off ant sink its pincers in, and, quickly, twists off the body, leaving rows of ant head sutures in place. – Page 216
It’s some sort of logical adaptation of traditional desert nomadicism to a modern occupation. – Page 219
They only hit stalled vehicles or ones stopped for the night—thus explaining the frenetic, noncircadian pattern of driving. – Page 227
I suddenly decided I really wasn’t in a panic about dying, I was upset that I would never be found, my parents would never know what happened to me—I would just disappear, without a trace. – Page 228
Part 3: Tenuous Adulthood
15. The Baboons: The Unstable Years
“Chimps are what baboons would love to be like if they had a shred of self-discipline.” – Page 241
18. When Baboons Were Falling Out Of The Trees
As hunting wound down and was eventually banned in Kenya, a new piece of their mythology came to force. Old hunters don’t fade away: the profound respect for their worthy animal adversaries, accrued over the endless hunt, finally leads to a tiring of the killing, a desire to preserve. – Page 271
Every lodge and tourist camp thus had a resident troop of baboons living on the garbage. The animals would no longer go out to forage, but would sleep in the trees above the dump, snoozing late and waiting for the daily garbage drop. I had even studied the metabolic changes that the baboons living at another lodge had gone through as they became garbage eaters, feasting on leftover drumsticks, slabs of beef, rotting dollops of last night’s custard pudding. Not surprisingly, cholesterol, insulin, and triglyceride levels rose, other aspects of metabolism went to hell in the same way that ours does when we eat the stuff. – Page 274
Whenever I see a new baboon troop, visit some other researchers and see their animals, I feel something almost like irritation—I don’t know them, I have no idea who they are. – Page 275
“I think it was just a story he was saying about the baboons being sick. I think that man just likes to shoot baboons and wanted the warden to let him.” – Page 282
19. The Old White Man
“Yes, food gives you energy,” said Kasura, who had had a lot of schooling. “So the batteries will last longer.” – Page 284
Every African I’d ever seen in the bush is capable of picking up the hottest things imaginable without scorching their fingers—tea glasses, pieces of firewood, cooking pots—from years of handling hot things around the open cooking fires. But no one, no one, can tolerate very cold things—still too novel. – Page 286
20. The Elevator
So Richard was on the implausible mission of sojourning to the capital and its labyrinth of bureaucracy and incompetence to try to correct the name (unsuccessfully, naturally; Hillary thrives now with that appellation, and it occurs to no one, it seems, to simply defy the government and call the child Jesse anyway). – Page 293
21. The Mound Behind The 7-Eleven
But my interests shifted, behavior for its own sake somehow began to seem insufficient. “Isn’t this behavior miraculous?” became “Isn’t this miraculous, how does it work?” and I became interested in behavior and the brain, and soon I was interested in the brain itself, and soon how its functioning fails. – Page 296
My father was nearly half a century older than I. Once he was an artist, an architect, a dean of a school of architecture, a passionately complex, subtle, difficult man. But he sustained one of those neurodegenerative disorders, and there were times that he could not identify family members, or tell where he was, or experience any of the pleasures of living that require an active, pulsating, inquisitive mind. – Page 296
Part 4: Adulthood
24. Ice
Throw in the handful of dry ice. Bubbling smoke, pouring all over the table, the miracle of dry ice mixing with water that makes the most sophisticated scientists I know stop in their tracks and play happily for minutes – Page 343
Finally, by midafternoon, when it’s roaring hot and there’s never enough shade, the ices are ready. We each get our cup, spoon, and begin to scrape at the solid block of flavored ice. My god my god my god it is so good you want to scream, to never finish. – Page 344
26. The Wonders Of Machines In A Land Where They Are Still Novel: The Blind Leading The Blind
“You are Americans, you must speak German.” – Page 353
27. Who’S On First, What’S On Second
Good bush camp cook that he is, he knows about preserving meat, and after the hyena was driven off at midnight, he searched around in the grass with his flashlight, found his finger, and then proceeded to salt it. We break the bad news to him. Sorry, we don’t know how to put fingers back on. He takes it bravely—“ That is all right, can I have more tea?”—and puts his bag away. – Page 357
29. The Plague
The intestines, naturally, smell like feces with an odor so thick and goopy that you are sure that the shit smell is forming a precipitate on your eyelids. – Page 374
The difficulty revolved around one of the basic animosities in national parks the world over, namely between park officials and researchers. The two groups occupy fairly different worlds. The former are government bureaucrats who, when based in the field, wear uniforms or, when based in government offices, suits and ties; the latter, by contrast, tend toward torn jeans. The former think about issues like how to increase the flow of tourism in their park, while the latter would just as well get rid of those irritating tourists entirely, so that they can study their one species of ant in idyllic peace. The former tend to be pragmatic realists who function in a realpolitik world; the latter tend toward hysterics and causes and pride themselves on having no social skills. The former typically have wildlife management degrees, while the latter tend toward more prestigious degrees from fancy-ass universities and then, in a way that the former seem to find to be almost viscerally offensive, choose to live like Luddite pigs in leaky tents. And most of all, the former seem to exist merely to cite restrictive rules, while the latter seem to exist merely to shit on the spirit of every park regulation they can get away with. – Page 381
You don’t realize how well you know some baboons until you try to dart strangers. You don’t know their personalities—you don’t know who will jump up, look around, and sit back down again after darting, who is going to climb a tree or sprint a kilometer or try to kill you. You don’t know the grudges within the troop, who you have to protect from whom when they pass out. You don’t know their body weight or the vagaries of their metabolism when you are guessing how much anesthetic to put in the dart. You don’t know the neighborhood, where the buffalo or the snakes hang out. And the baboons don’t know you, so you can’t get as close. – Page 387
Both Ross and Suleman were sweet, jovial men whom I already liked, and they readily fell into the “gee whiz, lookie what a mess those lungs are” mode of scientists having a good, detached time. – Page 392
And despite still missing those baboons, the infinity of love I have now is for Lisa and our two precious children, our Benjamin and Rachel. – Page 409