Tale of Two Smiths

The famous Jane Goodall, the scientist who has been studying chimps most of her life in the jungles of Tanzania, has always been asked whether she loved chimps more than humans. To this, she always answered: "There are some humans whom I love better than some chimps, and some chimps whom I love better than humans." I could relate to that. I will choose a stray cat over any despot as a companion any time. And I don’t even like cats. I was a guest in a radio show a few months ago where I talked about the sense of wonder I find in science. Any self-respecting science-writer would, in cases like that, naturally talk about "evolution." Some angry listeners called in and remarked that I was delusional to believe that we humans shared the same ancestral origins with chimpanzees. These are from people who have never even spent an hour of their lives observing or studying another creature other than their own kind – people who spend their lives dreaming exclusively for their own species, and they call my views, grounded on the works of scientists like Jane Goodall who have spent 45 years observing chimpanzees first hand on the ground and up on the trees, delusional.

Julianna Kettlewell called it "a charmed ring" that we humans encase ourselves in, in her March 18 BBC article "Farm animals need emotional TLC" when she reported on a conference, Compassion in World Farming Trust (CIWF Trust), held recently, that called on people to be more compassionate with animals, especially with farm animals, those that we have increasingly looked upon as mere commodities, incapable of thinking thoughts or feeling emotions. Admittedly, I had to think hard to remember what TLC stood for and for those of you who are, like me, slow on the uptake on acronyms, it means "tender loving care" and not "total learning channel" as I first guessed. "A charmed ring around ourselves" means we modern humans like to think we are the pinnacles of creation, that it is only through our thoughts that the universe can think of itself. After all, we are the only creatures who have elaborate conservation, culinary, murderous or enslavement plans for creatures other than ourselves, backed up by politics, recipes, commerce or personal hobbies. Even scientists themselves are divided on this "animal sentience" issue. Some think we are just "anthropomorphizing," which means we are just giving human attributes to animals and some say that evidence suggests that animals do have feelings independent of our human projections.

I think the divide is more on the issue of "consciousness" and not "feelings." Anyone who has ever owned a pet or watched animals in the wild or even just through the National Geographic or Discovery Channel, would think twice before saying with finality that animals cannot feel. Whether or not this "feeling" extends to an awareness of being alive, of some cosmic joy or malaise that we humans express in the way we write, make films or plays or music, sing, dance or paint, is another matter. Maybe an animal’s sense of being alive does not extend that way because it does not need to. Maybe animals are already whole in their dynamic evolutionary niches doing what they do, thinking what they think and feeling what they feel. In any case, the "ring" we surround ourselves in can, indeed, be charming and in fact, "enabling," in cases where we find ourselves in a unique position to understand or worry about the world and do something about it. But when the ring gives us the illusion or delusion that we have to feel superior in order to feel alive, then it limits our understanding of ourselves, the world and our place in it, and the ring becomes more like a cage. And at times when I see it as such, I find my thoughts marching toward the ideas of scientists who leave the door open and who never throw away the key such as those of Frans B.M. De Waal, respected primatologist and professor at Emory University who wrote "How Animals Do Business" in the April issue of the Scientific American.

De Waal’s very interesting article read like a Tale of Two Smiths to me: one of Adam Smith’s and his famous theory of the "Invisible Hand," the one declaring self-interests balancing each other out in the arena of human economic exchanges, while on the other, sits the idea of Vernon Smith and Daniel Kanehman, the Nobel Prize economists of 2002, who offered a framework that focuses on evolutionary human behavior rather than abstract market forces fundamentally guiding economics. Early this month, a study conducted by Professor Doyne Farmer of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico simulated the London Stock Exchange on the condition that it would just be run by "zero-intelligence" traders, which meant it was to be mostly guided by random rather than some pre-designed strategy. This invited parallelisms with "zero-intelligence" being as good as "chimp intelligence" deciding on stocks which they, of course, the chimps don’t understand stocks and would rather lick them if they could. The surprising result was that the outcome ran by zero-intelligence approximated fundamental attributes of the London Stock Market. De Waal, Smith and Kanehman were probably among those who were not as surprised as the crisply suited men and women working for the stock market at the result of the study since evidence from their scientific studies suggest that the way we conduct business fundamentally stems from our evolutionary history and not as much as it does from heaving read the expensive book (and heavy, literally) on economics by Samuelson, and the deep philosophical foundations of political economy by Hobbes or Machiavelli.

Known as "behavioral economics," it tells us that we, like our evolutionary cousins, the chimps, engage in "reciprocity" and "mutuality" in favors we give and receive not simply for the bare material benefits but because we are evolutionarily endowed with "a strong desire to fit in and find partners to live and work with." Like in humans, they found that chimps and even capuchin monkeys do not keep a tight score on the favors and benefits they give and receive from blood relatives and "buddies" (those they are not related to but have spent a considerably long time with) but they do so with strangers. They also have found it very rare for chimps to snatch food from its possessor by force. They even found out that given two chimps, Sammy and Bias, Sammy will help Bias get food by pulling on to a tray that could not be pulled by just one chimp, even after Sammy had already gotten his share the first time. Reading this and recalling incidents in human history where human bullies disguised in pomp and armed with might snatched not just food from their prey but entire territories and vast resources from natives of their places, and even killed them off, I started to feel like we have not even gone past this evolutionary bar so ingrained in our closest biological kin, the chimps. We pride ourselves with having waved the "Invisible Hand" in what we thought was a uniquely human invention-economics – wholly cutting it off from natural history – but with which we have also seemed to have shot our "Visible Foot." Funny, we have based entire market economies firmly on something we all agreed was "invisible" and yet, we were still puzzled when studies revealed that stockbrokers with "chimp-intelligence" fared no better or worse than we did.

But what does this tell us aside from maybe a warning about dating stockbrokers? Were we duped by Hobbes and other "worldly" philosophers in telling us how this self-declared human territory of "economics" works? Hardly, I think. Our economics are as Machiavellian, Hobbesian and Smithy as it is Bias’ and Sammy’s. We are a melee of motives and strategies, visible and invisible, rational and irrational, and that is what makes us human and it is what makes "economics," a least favored mental discipline of mine.

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