Nature Cooperating & Laguna’s Bottlenose Dolphins

Dolphins helping fishermen catch mullet

A few posts back, I discussed the phenomenon called “endosymbiosis” by Dr. Lynn Margulis, who posited a cellular evolution based on ‘cooperation’ rather than simple ‘competition’ between viral or bacterial infection and host cell. This co-evolutionary behaviour runs counter to the traditional route of natural selection and contradicts the ruthless selfishness of Neo-Darwinian thinking. Such an evolving relationship between two different species of life, living together in a very close affinity of mutual benefit is, in fact, common in nature.

Co-evolution (and cooperation by default) is now an established theme in the biology of virus-host relationships. Relationships span from the complex interaction between arboviruses and their vector mosquitoes to the one between the malaria-causing plasmodium and humans or the hantavirus and the deer mouse. Virologist, Frank Ryan states that “today...every monkey, baboon, chimpanzee and gorilla is carrying at least ten different species of symbiotic viruses.”

Russian biologists, Andrei Famintsyn and Konstantine Merezhkovskii invented the term “symbiogenesis” to explain the fantastic synthesis of new living organisms from symbiotic unions. Citing the evolution of mitochondria and the chloroplast within a primitive host cell to form the more complex eukaryotic cell (as originally theorized by Lynn Margulis), Ryan noted that, “it would be hard to imagine how the step by step gradualism of natural selection could have resulted in this brazenly passionate intercourse of life!”

A new science is emerging that recognizes a far more intelligent (and cooperative means) evolution, aptly described by Margulis, "through the long-lasting intimacy of strangers." The fusion of symbiosis followed by natural selection leads to increasingly complex levels of individuality, Margulis suggested. She contended that evolution proceeds through cooperation, not competition: "Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by

networking."

Examples of such networking, including interspecies cooperation, mutualism and altruism abound in Nature.

In Africa birds called ox-peckers perch on the backs of large animals such as giraffes and cattle, and remove insects. The ox-peckers also warn of approaching danger through their cries and disturbed flight. Defenseless fish live unharmed amid the stinging tentacles of jellyfish, and birds such as the wheatear may nest in rabbit burrows. Many flowering plants are pollinated by insects, flitting from flower to flower for their nectar. Some flowers are shaped to suit a particular insect. Seeds are distributed by animals. Birds eat fleshy seeds and transport them. The burrs on plants such as burdock have hooks that may catch on to fur and feathers.

Enter the dolphin… Perhaps one of the best examples of interspecies cooperation (or mutualism and altruism). In 2008 Aubrey Manning (Emeritus Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University) wrote in the Daily Mail of a female dolphin who selflessly saved a beached mother whale and her calf off Mahia Beach in New Zealand. The bottlenose dolphins off Laguna in Brazil have developed a cooperative relationship with the local fishermen…  

"Through highly synchronized behavior with humans, cooperative dolphins in Laguna drive mullet schools towards a line of fishermen and 'signal,' via stereotyped head slaps or tail slaps, when and where fishermen should throw their nets," wrote lead author Fabio Daura-Jorge of the Federal University of Santa Catarina. The cooperation is helpful to both parties, he said.

New research has found that one local group of about 20 dolphins works with the fishermen, while other local dolphins don't cooperate, finding other sources of food. A study published in the latest Royal Society Biology Letters found that the most helpful ones are also particularly cooperative and social with each other.

About 200 local artisanal fishermen are almost entirely reliant on the dolphins for catching their fish," Daura-Jorge wrote. The fishermen only fish with the assistance of cooperative dolphins, recognized and named.

The cooperation behavior may be passed down from mother dolphin to her calves through social learning, reflecting how the trait is passed down by the fishermen: Elders in the community teach the younger fishermen how to work with the dolphins.

We tend to exclude the rest of animal and plant life from exhibiting the highest form of intelligence: that of cooperation and altruism. Many of us—if we even accept the existence of true altruism—consider it an exclusively human quality. This is a hubristic remnant of a “conquest” mentality in which humanity identifies itself as separate from Nature. It blinds us from a reality that lies right before us. We cannot see what we don’t look for; we can’t know what we don’t believe.

We rely on science to answer questions we already “know” the answers to, because we have lost a sense of Unity. And as Goethe said of conventional scientists, “Whatever you cannot calculate, you do not think is real.”

Richard Tarnas, author of The Passion of the Western Mind posits that the evolution of the Western mind has been driven by a “heroic impulse to forge an autonomous rational human self—a transforming self—by separating it from the primordial unity with nature.” Tarnas suggests that it began four millennia ago, with the great patriarchal nomadic conquests in the Mediterranean. Conquests that embraced “the repression of undifferentiated unitary consciousness and the participation mystique with nature; a denial of the anima mundi, of the soul of the world, of the community of being, of the all-pervading, of mystery and ambiguity, of imagination, emotion, instinct, body, nature, woman.”

Goethe and others like him believed that the human mind is ultimately the organ of the world’s own process of self-revelation. In this view, Nature is not a separate, independent self-contained reality to be ‘objectively’ examined by humanity from without; rather, its unfolding truth emerges only with the active participation of the human mind. It is something that comes into being through the very act of human cognition.

Related Posts:

Co-evolution: cooperation & aggressive symbiosis

What Altruism in Animals can Teach Us About Ourselves

Margaret Atwood’s Wise Words About Debt & Altruism…”A Portrait of the Artist as a Real Hero”

Is James Bond an Altruist?

Gaia vs. Medea: A Case for Altruism

Rupert Sheldrake and the Physics of Angels

The Gaia Hypothesis

Spiritual Ecology and the Lesson of Crete

Choosing the Less Worn Path of Intuition

What Altruism in Animals can Teach Us About Ourselves

In spite of everything, I still believe that people really are good at heart – Anne Frank

In an article entitled “Human Morality: Innate or Learned” Rebekah Richards writes, “Morality, integrity, generosity, honor – these are concepts our society esteems, rewards, and expects. They are principles embodied by our cultural heroes, and values which we strive to develop in our children. But where do these qualities originate? Are we taught to be good, or do we possess innate virtue? Are we condemned to a constant battle against our ‘lower nature’?”

Richards cites scientists and philosophers from the fifth century to the present day (all male, I might add; like Augustine of Hippo, Michal de Montaigne, Thomas Henry Huxley to name a few) who had in common the notion that humankind’s goodness was just a veneer over a morality that was rotten and self-serving at its core. Some suggest that no act of “unsolicited pro-sociality” (“other-regarding preferences”) can be characterized as wholly unselfish. There is always something to be gained from the act, they insist, even if it is only to “feel good”.

At the other end of the spectrum of a similar prejudice, some anthropologists argue that morality and true altruism are qualities limited to humans as a result of learned behavior and cultural ethics. The inference here is that those qualities we may share with animals other than humans are base and those we do not share with them are elevated.

Other scientists argue for an alternative to anthropocentric hubris. They argue that altruism is an ancient impulse and an empathic instinct; something more primitive than culture and, in fact, considerably more ancient than the human species itself. They posit that altruism is deeply innate, predating the phylogentic split that occurred six million years ago. According to them selflessness is as natural as appetite.

It was the grace of altruism that allowed it all to happen in the first place.

It started with nineteenth century scientist Edward Westermarck who argued that morality involved both humans and non-human animals and both culture and evolution (de Waal 2006). Of course, he was met with much skepticism. In 1999 zoologist Brenda Bradley wrote, “Altruism is difficult to explain within traditional models of natural selection, which predict that individuals should exhibit behavioral traits adapted to promoting genetic self-interest”. She has a point; so why limit ourselves to a traditional model then? See my article on microbiologist Lynn Margulis, who explored a nontraditional paradigm based on cooperation.

Scientists have been demonstrating for years that cooperation among organisms and communities and the act of pure altruism (not reciprocal altruism or kin/group selection) is, in fact, more common in Nature than most of us realize.

Decades of experimentation suggest moral or altruistic qualities in non-human primates, and also provide support for the idea that human morality is innate. A 1964 study found that rhesus monkeys who could pull on a chain to acquire food would refuse to pull for days if doing so delivered a shock to another monkey; they were “literally starving themselves to avoid inflicting pain upon another” (de Waal 2006).

Chimpanzees, unable to swim, have drowned attempting to save the lives of their companions (Goodall 1990). Human children as young as just over one year old were observed comforting others; household pets also demonstrated a response to distress by attempting to comfort people (de Waal 2006).

However, some researchers in recent lab studies with chimpanzees, suggested a potential absence of “other-regarding preferences” in test animals and concluded that this confirmed that such preferences are limited to humans, who alone are sophisticated enough for cultural learning, theory of mind, perspective taking and moral judgment to convince them to perform an altruistic act.

It is my opinion that these primate studies, which based their measures of “altruism” on food allocation, may have failed to demonstrate altruism due to the measure, compounded with the laboratory setting. Animals will not behave the same in their natural habitat as in a laboratory; their priorities will be different. I found it interesting that true altruism was demonstrated in life-threatening scenarios over less life-threatening ones, such as the experiments conducted in the lab by various anthropologists using food exchange. My opinion is corroborated by scientists, Keith Jensen and Felix Warneken, who concede that the distinction between food exchange and instrumental helping is a potentially crucial one.

Valid examples of true altruism in the wild in other species of the animal world do exist. The Vervet monkey is one example. This species has evolved a complex community that fosters the existence of an altruistic individual: the crier monkey.

Vervet monkeys give alarm calls to warn fellow monkeys of the presence of predators, even though by doing so they attract attention to themselves and increase their chance of being attacked. Biologists argue that the group that contains a high proportion of alarm-calling monkeys will have a survival advantage over a group containing a lower proportion, thereby encouraging this trait to continue and evolve among individuals. The Vervet monkey crier is Nature’s Hero. And Nature’s heroes are our real altruists.

de Waal explains that “evolution favors animals that assist each other if by doing so they achieve long-term benefits of greater value than the benefits derived from going it alone and competing with others” (de Waal 2006). The prevalent phenomenon of altruism is Nature’s answer to the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

“Empathy evolved in animals as the main ... mechanism for [individually] directed altruism," said deWaal. And it is empathy—not self-interest—that “causes altruism to be dispensed in accordance with predictions from kin selection and reciprocal altruism theory.” deWaal further proposed that the scientific community has become polarized between evolutionary biologists on the one side, and, on the other, a discrete group of economists and anthropologists that “has invested heavily in the idea of strong reciprocity,” which demands discontinuity between humans and all other animals.

“One of the most striking consequences of the study of animal behavior,” says anthropologist Robert Sapolsky, “is the rethinking that it often forces of what it is to be human.” He notes that “a number of realms, traditionally thought to define our humanity, have now been shown to be shared, at least partially, with nonhuman species” (Sapolsky 2006). This makes some of us uncomfortable. To some, it threatens to make us less special. The corollary is that this demonstrates that we possess intrinsic virtue, not something “painted” on through cultural teaching or diligent personal effort. Of course, it also means that all other beings possess intrinsic value too. In the final analysis, what we generally “know” is colored by what we believe and want to continue believing.

Harvard philosopher Christine Korsgaard reminds us that, “We eat nonhuman animals, wear them, perform painful experiments on them, hold them captive for purposes of our own – sometimes in unhealthy conditions – we make them work, and we kill them at will” (de Waal 2006).

The growing knowledge and eventual acceptance that animals and very young children possess truly altruistic behavior will have deep implications on how we interact with and treat each other, our animal world and Nature generally. Which brings me to ecology and its importance in our daily lives.

We have so separated ourselves from our environment that we no longer know how—or, more importantly, are not inclined—to interact with it. Separation from something that we are a part of creates a disconnect that makes it hard for us to respect or care for. This is what is at the root of altruism: intimacy and a sense of familiarity and identity that fosters empathy and nurtures compassion. Ecology provides an understanding of our natural world that will help us to respect it and everything that is a part of it, ourselves included.

p.s. This link provides a good example of an altruistic act by a "predator" toward a creature obviously not its "kin". Tell me what you think: http://www.korduroy.tv/2010/face-off-with-a-leopard-seal

References:
Bradley, Brenda. 1999 "Levels of Selection, Altruism, and Primate Behavior." The Quarterly Review of Biology 74(2):171-194.
De Waal, Frans, with Robert Wright, Christine Korsgaard, Philip Kitcher, and Peter Singer. 2006 Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Goodall, Jane. 1990 Through A Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Sapolsky, Robert M. 2006 "Social Cultures Among Nonhuman Primates." Current Anthropology 47(4):641-656.
Warneken, F. & Tomasello, M. 2006. “Altruistic Helping In Human Infants and Young Chimpanzees.” Science, 311, 1301–1303.
Warneken, F., Hare, B., Melis, A. P., Hanus, D. & Tomasello, M. 2007. “ Spontaneous Altruism By Chimpanzees and Young Children.” PloS Biology, 5(7), e184.
de Waal, F. B. M. 2008. “Putting the Altruism Back Into Altruism: The Evolution of Empathy.” Annu. Rev. Psychol., 59, 279–300.
de Waal, F. B. M., Leimgruber, K. & Greenberg, A. R. 2008. “Giving Is Self-rewarding for Monkeys.” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., USA. 105, 13685–13689.

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of novels, short stories and essays. She coaches writers and teaches writing at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For more about Nina’s coaching & workshops visit www.ninamunteanu.me. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for more about her writing.