Free Write

"Will Monkeys Take Over the World?"

Chimpanzees could pose stiff competition for humans. Pound for pound they’re much stronger than us puny Homo sapiens, and they’re extremely intelligent too; capable of complex problem solving, innovation and deception. Some of them have even invented the spear and started living in caves. And to make matters worse we're teaching some how to make fire. But could chimps ever make a serious bid for dominance of the earth, planet of the apes style?

I don’t think so, for one simple reason: the ratchet effect. This is a phenomena present throughout human cultures, but conspicuously absent in chimpanzees. It’s a fairly simple principle: somebody invents a tool, behavior or technique and other people copy them. Some of these people may figure out a better way of doing whatever it was that was invented. Maybe they find a way to make a spear deadlier, or require less raw material to create. Then people copy this better version; and it gets improved by others again. Ideas are built upon and improved, “ratcheting” up the overall technology of a group. It’s how we went from the first powered flight to landing on the moon in less than 100 years.

Now chimpanzees are smart and can innovate, as I said in the introduction. I wouldn’t lie to you lovely people after all. And ideas do spread from chimp to chimp. However, they spread in a slightly different way than in humans, and this really hampers their ability to ratchet up technology. Whilst humans tend to learn from another person, either by being taught or imitation, chimps appear to learn from the problem being solved. If you saw someone pick up a rock, rub it between their hands and then use it to crack a nut; you’d probably imitate every step if you also wanted to smash a nut (for revenge, nuts dishonored your family name).

Conversely, chimps see that there is a problem here (nut needs smashing, for honor) and that a rock is involved in it’s solution. Then they’d figure out a way to to smash the nut with a rock. In other words, they other individual is drawing their attention to a problem and it’s solution, which they then independently figure out. They don’t learn directly from the “teacher”. As a result they’d probably miss out any unnecessary steps (rubbing the rock) since they’re coming up with their own solution to the problem, rather than just imitating another.

Researchers have had a lot of fun with this fact, tricking humans into doing all sorts of unnecessary things to solve problems whilst a chimp will cut straight to the heart of the issue and solve it. And then maybe laugh at the silly humans, rubbing rocks for no good reason. Whatever next, dancing to try and cause rain? Although this does mean chimps will be very efficient, it also means that every innovation has to be independently re-invented by every chimp. So if it’s a chimp-genius (those do exist) whose figured out a new way of doing things, it won’t spread. Or if a chimp thinks of an extra step to make a solution more better, other chimps might not realize and copy it. After all, what if rock rubbing turned out to be useful? Maybe it heats up the rock, causing massive damage to those devious nuts!