Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • So you get some big male, who loses a fight,

  • and chases a sub-adult, who bites an adult female,

  • who slaps a juvenile,

  • who knocks and infant out of a tree - all in fifteen seconds.

  • So, in so far as a huge component of stress is

  • lack of control, lack of predictability, you're sitting there, and you're just

  • watching the zebra,

  • and somebody else is having a bad day, and it's your rear end that's going to get slashed:

  • so tremendously psychologically stressful

  • for the folks further down on the hierarchy.

  • One of Robert's early revelations was identifying the link

  • between stress and hierarchy in baboons.

  • Some baboon troops are over one hundred strong.

  • Like us, they have evolved large brains to navigate

  • the complexities of large societies.

  • Survival here requires a kind of baboon political savvy,

  • with the most cunning and aggressive males

  • gaining top rankand all the perks.

  • Females for the choosing, all the food they can eat,

  • and an endless retinue of willing groomers.

  • Every male knows where he stands in society:

  • who can torture him, whom he can torture,

  • and who in turn the torturee can torture.

  • It sounds like a terrible thing to confess after thirty years,

  • but I don't actually like baboons all that much.

  • There's been individual guys over the years who I absolutely love,

  • but they are these schemy, backstabbing,

  • Machiavellian bastards, they are awful to each other.

  • so they are great for my science, I mean I'm not out here

  • to commune with them, they are perfect for what I study...

  • 22 years ago, at the age of 30, Sapolsky's landmark research

  • earned him the McArthur Foundation's Genius Fellowship.

  • His early work,

  • measuring stress hormones from extracted blood, led to two remarkable discoveries.

  • A baboon's rank determined the level of stress hormone in his system.

  • So if you're a dominant male, you can expect your stress hormones to be low.

  • And if you're submissive, much higher.

  • But there was an even more revealing find.

  • In Sapolsky's sample, low rankers, the "have-nots",

  • had increased heart rates and higher blood pressure.

  • This was the first time anyone

  • had linked stress to the deteriorating health

  • of a primate in the wild.

  • Basically, if you're a stressed, unhealthy baboon in a typical troop,

  • high blood pressure, elevated levels of stress hormones,

  • you have an immune system that doesn't work as well,

  • your reproductive system is more vulnerable to being knocked out of whack,

  • your brain chemistry is one that bears some similarity to what you see

  • in clinically depressed humans,

  • and all that stuff, those are not predictors of a hale and hearty old age.

  • Twenty years ago, Robert got a shocking preview of this idea.

  • The first troop he ever studied, the baboons he felt closest to

  • and had written books about, suffered a calamity.

  • It would have a profound effect on his research.

  • The Keekorok group is the one I started with thirty years ago.

  • And they were your basic old baboon troop at the time, which means

  • males were aggressive and society was highly stratified and

  • females took a lot of grief - your basic, off-the-rack baboon troop.

  • And then about by now almost twenty years ago,

  • something horrific and scientifically very interesting happened to that troop.

  • The Keekorok troop took to foraging for food in the garbage dump

  • of a popular tourist lodge.

  • It was a fatal move.

  • The thrash included meat tainted with tuberculosis.

  • The result was that nearly

  • half the males in the troop died.

  • Not unreasonably, I got depressed as hell and pretty damn angry about what happened,

  • you know, when you're thirty years old you can afford to expend a lot of emotion on a baboon troop,

  • and there was a lot of emotion there.

  • For Robert, a decade of research appeared to have been lost.

  • But then he made a curious observation

  • about who had died and who had survived.

  • It wasn't random who died. In that troop, if you were aggressive,

  • and if you were not particularly socially connected,

  • socially affiliative, you didn't spend your time grooming and hanging out:

  • if you were that kind of male, you died.

  • Every alpha male was gone.

  • The Keekorok group had been transformed.

  • And what you were left with was twice as many females as males,

  • and the males who were remaining were, you know, just to use scientific jargon,

  • they were good guys. They were not aggressive jerks,

  • they were nice to the females, they were very socially affiliative,

  • it completely transformed the atmosphere of the troop.

  • When males baboons reach adolescence,

  • they typically leave their home troop and roam,

  • eventually finding a new troop.

  • And when new adolescent males would join the troop, they'd come in just as jerky

  • as any adolescent males elsewhere on this planet,

  • and it would take them about six months to learn:

  • "We're not like that in this troop. We don't do stuff like that. We're not that aggressive,

  • we spend more time grooming each other, males are calmer with each other,

  • you do not dump on a female if you're in a bad mood."

  • And it takes these new guys about six months,

  • and they assimilate the style, and you have baboon culture,

  • and this particular troop has a culture of very low levels of aggression

  • and high levels of social affiliation, and they're doing that twenty years later.

  • And so the tragedy had provided Robert with a fundamental lesson,

  • not just about cells,

  • but how the absence of stress could impact society.

  • Do these guys have the same problems with high blood pressure?

  • Nope. Do these guys have the same problems with brain-chemistry

  • related to anxiety, stress hormone levels? Not at all.

  • It's not just your rank, it's what your rank means in society.

  • So what do baboons teach the average person in there?

  • Don't bite somebody because you're having a bad day,

  • don't displace on them in any sort of manner,

  • social affiliation is a remarkably powerful thing,

  • and that's said by somebody who lives in a world

  • where ambition and drive and type-A-ness and all of that sort of thing dominates.

  • Those things are real important, and one of the greatest forms of sociality

  • is giving rather than receiving,

  • and all those things make for a better world.

  • Another one of the things that baboons teach us is

  • that if they are able, in one generation, to transform what are supposed to be

  • textbook social systems sort of engraved in stone,

  • we don't have an excuse when we say there are certain inevitabilities about human social systems.

  • And so, the haunting question that endures from Robert's life's work:

  • are we brave enough to learn from a baboon?

  • The Keekorok group didn't just survive without stress:

  • they thrived.

  • Can we?

So you get some big male, who loses a fight,

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it