New Podcast Release: Christine Webb

In our conversation, Christine reflects on her early experiences in the Namib Desert with a baboon named Bear, encounters that challenged scientific assumptions about the kind of thoughts that monkeys are capable of. She also talks about her path into primatology, from reading Darwin in high school to her time working in a Columbia University lab, where she struggled with the ethics of keeping monkeys inside a building, in solitary confinement.

We discuss her book The Arrogant Ape and the deeply ingrained belief in human exceptionalism, exploring whether humans are truly as different from other animals as we assume. Christine also shares what her research has taught her about intelligence, culture in chimpanzees and bonobos, empathy, and what it means to live well in closer connection with the more-than-human world.

Below are some highlights from our conversation, edited for clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.

The Baboon “Apology”

Kasia: At the beginning of your book The Arrogant Ape, you describe an encounter in a desert in Namibia with a baboon. This encounter changed your entire view of animals and what they are capable of. Tell us about it and why it was so significant for you.

Christine Webb: Sure. So this baboon’s name is Bear, and at the time he was a juvenile baboon. Like many young males, he was causing difficulties in his group and with us, the researchers. He would climb up our legs, try to steal our backpacks, and never showed any signs of remorse.

One day he instigated a mobbing event. All of these other baboons surrounded my colleague and began hitting her, slapping her legs, barking. She was terrified, and so was I. It was so intense we considered stopping the field season altogether. The next day, keeping my distance, I saw Bear marching over the ridge with six or seven baboons behind him. They were heading straight towards us. My heart was racing, but when he got close, he put his arm between my boots and bared his teeth into an awkward grimace.

As a primatologist, I knew this gesture as an appeasement behaviour, something baboons do after conflict. In that moment, Bear was trying to make amends for what had happened the day before. He turned my scientific training upside down. I had been taught that monkeys lack theory of mind — the ability to infer the mental states of others. But Bear not only showed theory of mind, he showed it across species.

Children and Human Exceptionalism

Peter: There’s a video of a Brazilian toddler, Louise Antonio, who refuses to eat octopus when he realises the animal was killed. Some people say this just shows children haven’t yet understood that we are very different from animals. How would you respond?

Christine Webb: Children don’t come into the world reasoning from an anthropocentric vantage point. They actually value the lives of other animals as much as the lives of humans. Developmental studies support what those videos show — that children start without prioritising humans over animals. The tendency to prioritise humans emerges with exposure to the many ways animals are exploited in our society, such as the casual consumption of other forms of life.

Working in a Lab with Monkeys

Peter: I’m curious what you thought of working in a Columbia University primate cognition lab, where monkeys were housed alone in cages and never got to go outside. Did you think we were learning something sufficiently important from this research to justify those conditions?

Christine Webb: No, at the time I knew something was very wrong. We were using touch screens to study numerical cognition, and I came to realise that these questions could be studied in the wild. The deprived conditions were compromising the science.

I dreaded going to work. It was painful. There was a monkey called MacDuff who would press his body against the mesh of the cage, inviting me to groom him. I would spend twenty or thirty minutes doing that, and those were some of the most meaningful moments. It felt like a true interaction, but the sadness was that the only contact he had was through that wire mesh. Looking back, I see how contradictory it was to tell myself this was necessary, but at the time I thought it was the only way to move forward in science.

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What Counts as Intelligence

Peter: You say we’ve internalised exceptionalism so thoroughly we regard it as fact, yet you refer to our “supposedly superior intellect.” Do you really deny that our intellect is superior to that of any other species?

Christine Webb: I don’t deny that humans are unique in some ways. But it depends what we mean by intelligence. There are so many different forms — emotional intelligence, visual-spatial intelligence, creativity. Sure, there is a particular kind of intelligence we might call human intelligence, but I don’t think it is categorically more advanced than other forms of intelligence that other animals display, which may be advanced and unique in their own right.

I often ask my students, who is more intelligent: the Dalai Lama or Stephen Hawking? Immediately they respond, it depends what kind of intelligence we are talking about. It’s the same when we talk about the rest of the living world.

Culture in Chimpanzees and Bonobos

Peter: Are the behavioural differences between chimpanzees and bonobos biological or cultural? I’m asking because we often think that we are the only ones who have culture.

Christine Webb: On average there are species differences, but the variation within species is greater than we long assumed. Some chimpanzee groups look more bonobo-like, more tolerant, less aggressive. Some bonobo groups look more chimpanzee-like. Even the stereotype that bonobos resolve conflict through sex is more complicated — male chimpanzees engage in socio-sexual behaviour far more frequently than was believed.

I think the most straightforward explanation is that these are cultural differences. We used to focus on material culture like tool use. But social culture — group differences in norms and behaviours — is now becoming more of a topic of study, and it’s something I’m really interested in.

Unlearning Human Exceptionalism

Peter: Do you think we will gain if we unlearn the bias of human exceptionalism? Not only in how we treat animals, but also for our own survival and wellbeing?

Christine Webb: A paper I cite says arrogance is a vice because it prevents true friendships and deprives us of self-knowledge (Valerie Tiberius and John Walker, “Arrogance,” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 35 (1998). If we extend that to the more-than-human world, arrogance prevents us from forming friendships with other beings. Those friendships can enrich our lives and also act as a mirror onto our own souls.

There is so much to gain by unlearning the myth of human exceptionalism: richer relationships with other forms of life, deeper self-knowledge, and perhaps a chance to stop destroying the planet we all share.