So those are details of the discussion about the evolution of language and apes are very good at hand gestures. There are not many animals who can do this. And so they, if you see, for example, young children play with apes which I've seen in the past, nowadays of course they usually don't mix children and apes anymore, but there was a time when people did those things and it's just remarkable how well children get along with apes that they play with because they understand just in the way that you can send your child to a French school and before you know it your three, or four year old child will get along with children there because of the facial expressions and the hand gestures.
They may not understand each other, but they have lots of other ways of communicating. That's also what happens between children and apes. It's truly remarkable how well they understand each other.
R.K.: So I am going to conclude then that these moral tendencies, the empathy and the fairness, even sacrifice, those are behaviors that evolved before language.
F.W.: Yeah. That's certainly a good point. So for example, fairness- we test it in our primates and so we do an experiment in which, now all over the internet, we put two monkeys side by side. We give one of the monkeys for a simple task, we give them pieces of cucumber and the other monkey, for the same task, we give them grapes and grapes are far better than cucumber and so we do that kind of experiment where we then see the one that gets cucumber gets very upset and so he would not be upset if the other one gets cucumber also.
If they both get the same everything is fine and they will perform the task many times, but if the other one gets much better food they become very upset and they start to refuse their cucumber slices. So we do these kinds of tests on fairness and we have found that that's actually something that can be found in many species. There's also now recently an experiment on dogs that was done and so, that's all before language.
So you can have a sense of fairness before you even have language and you can have empathy before you have language and you can follow rules. The reason the dog is man's best friend is because it's a species that comes from originally a society in which rules are applied. Wolves and dogs apply rules to each other and so they also obey rules that we apply to them. That's one of the things we like about dogs, actually, is that you can tell them to behave and much of the time, not all of the time, they will follow the rules that you impose on them.
R.K.: Now, when you talked about the study with the monkeys getting grapes, or cucumbers and the way the monkeys showed their sense of fairness, you referred to Occupy Wall Street protestors. Can you talk about that?
F.W.: Well, the Wall Street protest was all about the bonuses of the bankers and the one percent who gets all the money and we are very sensitive to inequity, just like those monkeys and that's actually a very important problem in society is that one of the speculations about human health in this country for example has to do with inequity.
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