{類人猿和壽司大師：一個靈長動物學家的文化反思} 上海科學技術出版社，2005
『サルとすし職人──＜文化＞と動物の行動学』
フランス・ドゥ・ヴァール著纂、西田利貞・藤井留美訳、
原書房、本体2,200円
職人
CHAPTER ONE
The Ape and the Sushi Master
Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist
By FRANS DE WAAL
Basic Books
The Whole Animal
Childhood Talismans
and Excessive Fear
of Anthropomorphism
"Why do I tell you this little boy's story of medusas, rays, and sea monsters, nearly sixty years after the fact? Because it illustrates, I think, how a naturalist is created. A child comes to the edge of deep water with a mind prepared for wonder. He is given a compelling image that will serve in later life as a talisman, transmitting a powerful energy that directs the growth of experience and knowledge."
Edward O. Wilson, 1995
"Fear of the dangers of anthropomorphism has caused ethologists to neglect many interesting phenomena, and it has become apparent that they could afford a little disciplined indulgence."
Robert Hinde, 1982
Scientists are supposed to study animals in a totally objective fashion, similar to the way we inspect a rock or measure the circumference of a tree trunk. Emotions are not to interfere with the assessment. The animal-rights movement capitalizes on this perception, depicting scientists as devoid of compassion.
Some scientists have proudly broken with the mold. Roger Fouts, known for his work with language-trained chimpanzees, says in Next of Kin: "I had to break the first commandment of the behavioral sciences: Thou shalt not love thy research subject." Similarly, Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy, in When Elephants Weep, make it seem that very few scientists appreciate the emotional lives of animals.
In reality, the image of the unloving and unfeeling scientist is a caricature, a straw man erected by those wishing to pat themselves on the back for having their hearts in the right place. Unfeeling scientists do exist, but the majority take great pleasure in their animals. If one reads the books of Konrad Lorenz, Robert Yerkes, Bernd Heinrich, Ken Norris, Jane Goodall, Cynthia Moss, Edward Wilson, and so on, it becomes impossible to maintain that animals are invariably studied with a cold, callous eye.
I have met many other scientists who may not write in the same popular style—and who may not dwell on their feelings, considering them irrelevant to their research—but for whom the frogs, budgerigars, cichlid fish, bats, or whatever animals they specialize in hold a deep attraction. How could it be otherwise? Can you really imagine a scientist going out every day to capture and mark wild prairie voles—getting bitten by the voles, stung by insects, drenched by rain—without some deeper motivation than the pursuit of scientific truth? Think of what it takes to study penguins on the pack ice of the Antarctic, or bonobos in hot and humid jungles overrun by armed rebels. Equally, researchers who study animals in captivity really need to like what they are doing. Care of their subjects is a round-the-clock business, and animals smell and produce waste—which some of my favorite animals don't mind hurling at you—something most of us hardly think about until we get visitors who hold their noses and try to escape as fast as they can.
I would turn the stereotype of the unfeeling scientist around and say that it is the rare investigator who is not at some level attached to the furry, feathered, or slippery creatures he or she works with. The maestro of observation, Konrad Lorenz, didn't believe one could effectively investigate an animal that one didn't love. Because our intuitive understanding of animals is based on human emotions and a sense of connection with animals, he wrote in The Foundations of Ethology (1981) that understanding seems quite separate from the methodology of the natural sciences. To marry intuitive insight with systematic data collection is both the challenge and the joy of the study of animal behavior.
Attraction to animals makes us forget the time spent watching them, and it sensitizes us to the tiniest details of behavior. The scientific mind uses the information thus gathered to formulate penetrating questions that lead to more precise research. But let us not forget that things did not start out with a scientific interest: the lifeblood of our science is a fascination with nature. This always comes first, usually early in life. Thus, Wilson's career as a naturalist began in Alabama, where as a boy—in an apparent attempt to show that not all human behavior is adaptive—he used his bare hands to pull poisonous snakes from the water. Lorenz opened his autobiographical notes for the Nobel Committee with "I consider early childhood events as most essential to a man's scientific and philosophical development." And Goodall first realized that she was born to watch animals when, at the age of five, she entered a chicken coop in the English countryside to find out how eggs were made.
Closeness to animals creates the desire to understand them, and not just a little piece of them, but the whole animal. It makes us wonder what goes on in their heads even though we fully realize that the answer can only be approximated. We employ all available weapons in this endeavor, including extrapolations from human behavior. Consequently, anthropomorphism is not only inevitable, it is a powerful tool. As summed up by Italian philosopher Emanuela Cenami Spada:
Anthropomorphism is a risk we must run, because we must refer to our own human experience in order to formulate questions about animal experience.... The only available "cure" is the continuous critique of our working definitions in order to provide more adequate answers to our questions, and to that embarrassing problem that animals present to us.
The "embarrassing problem" hinted at is, of course, that we see ourselves as distinct from other animals yet cannot deny the abundant similarities. There are basically two solutions to this problem. One is to downplay the similarities, saying that they are superficial or present only in our imagination. The second solution is to assume that similarities, especially among related species, are profound, reflecting a shared evolutionary past. According to the first position, anthropomorphism is to be avoided at all cost, whereas the second position sees anthropomorphism as a logical starting point when it comes to animals as close to us as apes.
Being a proponent of the second position creates a dilemma for an empiricist such as myself. I am not at all attracted to cheap projections onto animals, of the sort that people indulge who see eats as having shame (a very complex emotion), horses as taking pride in their performance, or gorillas as contemplating the afterlife. My first reaction is to ask for observables: things that can be measured. In this sense, I am a cold, skeptical scientist. With my team of students and technicians, I watch primates for hundreds of hours before a study is completed, entering codes of observed behavior into handheld computers. We also conduct experiments in which chimpanzees handle joysticks to select solutions to problems on a computer screen. Or we have monkeys operate an apparatus that allows them to pull food toward themselves, after which we see how willing they are to share the rewards with those who assisted them.
All of this research serves to produce evidence for or against certain assumptions. At the same time that I am committed to data collection, however, I argue for breathing space in relation to cognitive interpretations, don't mind drawing comparisons with human behavior, and wonder how and why anthropomorphism got such a bad name. Anthropomorphism has proven its value in the service of good, solid science. The widely applied vocabulary of animal behavior, such as "aggression," "fear," "dominance," "courtship," "play," "alarm," and "bonding," has been borrowed straight from language intended for human behavior. It is doubtful that scientists from outer space, with no shared background to guide their thinking, would ever have come up with such a rich and useful array of concepts to understand animals. To recognize these functional categories is the part of our job that comes without training and usually builds upon long-standing familiarity with pets, farm animals, birds, bugs, and other creatures.
In my own case it began with a love for aquatic life.
Zigzag through the Polder
Almost every Saturday when I was a boy, I jumped on my bike to go to the polder, a Dutch word for low-lying land reclaimed from the water. Bordering the Maas River, our polder was dissected by freshwater ditches full of salamanders, frogs, stickleback fish, young eels, and water insects. Carrying a crudely constructed net—a charcoal sieve attached to a broomstick—I would jump over ditches, occasionally sliding into them, to get to the best spots to catch what I wanted. I returned in a perilous zigzag, balancing a heavy bucket of water and animals in one hand while steering my bike with the other. Back home, I would release my booty in glass containers and tanks, adding plants and food, such as water fleas caught with a net made out of one of my mother's old stockings.
Initially, the mortality in my little underwater worlds was nothing to brag about. I learned only gradually that salamanders don't eat things that don't move, that big fish shouldn't be kept with little ones, and that overfeeding does more harm than good. I also became aware of the ferocious, sneaky predation by dragonfly larvae. My animals started to live longer. Then one day—I must have been around twelve—I noticed a dramatic color change in one of my sticklebacks in a neglected tank with unchecked algae growth. Within days, the fish turned from silvery to sky blue with a fiery red underbelly. A plain little fish had metamorphosed into a dazzling peacock! I was astonished and spent every free minute staring into the aquarium, which I didn't clean on the assumption that perhaps the fish liked it better that way.
This is how I first saw the famous courtship behavior of the three-spined stickleback. The two females in the tank grew heavy bellies full of roe, while the male built a nest out of plant material in the sand. He repeatedly interrupted his hard work by performing a little dance aimed at the females, which took place closer to the nest site each time. I did not understand everything that was going on, but I did notice that the females suddenly lost their eggs, whereupon the male started moving his fins rapidly (I later learned that his fanning served to create a current to send additional oxygen over the eggs). I ended up with a tank full of fry. It was an exhilarating experience, but one that I had to enjoy all by myself. Although my family tolerated my interests, they simply could not get excited about a bunch of tiny fish in one of my tanks.
I had a similar experience years later, when I was a biology student at the University of Nijmegen. In a welcome departure from the usual emphasis on physiology and molecular biology, one professor gave a lecture on ethology—the naturalistic study of animal behavior—featuring detailed drawings of the so-called zigzag dance of the stickleback. Because of the work of Niko Tinbergen, a Dutch zoologist, the stickleback's display had become a textbook example. The drawings of my professor were wonderful, showing the male pushing out his red belly, with spines pointing outward, then leading the female to the nest while performing abrupt back-and-forth movements in front of her. When I nudged my fellow students, excitedly telling them that I knew all this, that anyone could see it in a small aquarium at home, once again I met with blank stares. Why should they believe me, and what was the big deal about fish behavior, anyway? Didn't I know the future was in biochemistry?
A few years later, Tinbergen received a Nobel Prize: the stickleback had won! By that time, however, I had already moved to Groningen, a university where ethology was taken more seriously. I now study the behavior of monkeys and apes. This may seem incongruent given my early interests, but I have never had a fixation on a particular animal group. There simply weren't too many chimpanzees in the polder; otherwise I would have brought them home as well.
One thing bothered me as a student. In the 1960s, human behavior was totally off limits for the biologist. There was animal behavior, then there was a long time nothing, after which came human behavior as a totally separate category best left to a different group of scientists. This way we kept the peace, because the other scientists were—to borrow a concept from animal behavior—pretty territorial. Popular books by Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape) and Lorenz (On Aggression) were extremely controversial because they voiced continuity between human and animal behavior. If young students of animal behavior now look down upon these authors, seeing themselves as far more sophisticated, they forget how much they owe them for knocking down the walls well before the sociobiological revolution came along. I wasn't able to judge the scientific merit of their work then, but something about these ethologists felt absolutely right: they saw humans as animals. It is only in reading them that I realized that this was the way I had felt for as long as I could remember.
Pecking Orders in Oslo
It is hard to name a single discovery in animal behavior that has had a greater impact and enjoys wider name recognition than the "pecking order." Even if pecking is not exactly a human behavior, the term is ubiquitous in modern society. In speaking of the corporate pecking order, or the pecking order at the Vatican (with "primates" on top!), we acknowledge both inequalities and their ancient origins. We also slightly mock the structure, hinting that we, sophisticated human beings that we are, share a few things with domestic fowl.
The momentous discovery of rank orders in nature was made at the beginning of the twentieth century by a Norwegian boy, Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, who fell in love with chickens at the tender age of six. He was so enthralled by these sociable birds that his mother bought him his own flock at a rented house outside of Oslo. Soon each bird had a name. By the age of ten, Thorleif was keeping detailed notebooks, which he maintained for many years. Apart from keeping track of how many eggs his chickens laid, and who pecked whom, he was particularly interested in exceptions to the hierarchy, so called "triangles," in which hen A is master over B, and B over C, but C over A. So, from the start, like a real scientist, he was interested in not only the regularities but also the irregularities of the rank order. The social organization that he discovered is now so obvious to us that we cannot imagine how anyone could have missed it, but no one had described it before.
The rest is history, as they say, but not a particularly pretty one. The irony is that the discoverer of the pecking order was himself a henpecked man. Thorleif the boy had a very domineering mother, and later in life he ran into major trouble with the very first woman professor of Norway. She supported him initially, but as an anatomist she had no real interest in his work.
After Sehjelderup-Ebbe received a degree in zoology, he published the chicken observations of his youth while coining the term Hackordnung, German for pecking order. His classic paper, which appeared in 1922, describes dominants as "despots" and demonstrates the elegance of hierarchical arrangements in which every individual has its place. Knowing the rank order among 12 hens, one knows the dominance relation in all 66 possible pairs of individuals, It is easy to see the incredible economy of description, and to understand the discoverer's obsession with triangles, which compromise this economy.
At about the time that the young zoologist wanted to continue his studies, however, a malicious but well-written piece in a student paper made fun of his professor. An enemy then spread the rumor that the anonymous piece had been written by Schjelderup-Ebbe, who was indeed a gifted writer. Even though the piece was actually written by Sigurd Hoel, later to become one of Norway's foremost novelists, irreparable damage had been done to the relationship with his professor. She withdrew all support and became an active foe. As a result of lifelong intrigues against him, Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe never obtained a Norwegian doctorate, and never received the recognition he deserved.
Regardless of this sad ending, the beginning of the story goes to show how a child who takes animals seriously, who considers them worthy of individual recognition, and who assumes that they are not randomly running around but, like us, lead orderly lives, can discover things that the greatest scientists have missed. This quality of the child, of unhesitatingly accepting kinship with animals, was remarked upon by Sigmund Freud:
Children show no trace of the arrogance which urges adult civilized men to draw a hard-and-fast line between their own nature and that of all other animals. Children have no scruples over allowing animals to rank as their full equals. Uninhibited as they are in the avowal of their bodily needs, they no doubt feel themselves more akin to animals than to their elders, who may well be a puzzle to them.
The intuitive connection children feel with animals can be a tremendous source of joy. The unconditional love received from pets, and the lack of artifice in the relationship, contrast sharply with the much trickier dealings with members of their own species. I had an animal friend like this when I was young; I still think fondly of the neighbors' big dog, who was often by my side, showing interest in everything I did or said. The child's closeness to animals is fed by adults with anthropomorphic animal stories, fairy tales, and animated movies. Thus, a bond is fostered with all living things that is critically examined only later in life. As explained by the late Paul Shepard, who like no one else reflected on humanity's place in nature:
Especially at the end of puberty, the end of innocence, we begin a lifelong work of differentiating ourselves from them [animals]. But this grows from an earlier, unbreakable foundation of contiguity. Alternatively, a rigorous insistence of ourselves simply as different denies the shared underpinnings and destroys a deeper sense of cohesion that sustains our sanity and keeps our world from disintegrating. Anthropomorphism binds our continuity with the rest of the natural world. It generates our desire to identify with them and learn their natural history, even though it is motivated by a fantasy that they are no different from ourselves.
In this last sentence, Shepard hints at a more mature anthropomorphism in which the human viewpoint is replaced, however imperfectly, by the animal's. As we shall see, it is precisely this "animalcentric" anthropomorphism that is not only acceptable but of great value in science.
(C) 2001 Frans de Waal All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-465-04175-2
April 8, 2001
Frans de Waal portrays altruistic apes and magnanimous monkeys.
Related Link First Chapter: 'The Ape and the Sushi Master'
By DOUGLAS FOSTER
 THE APE AND THE SUSHI MASTER Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist. By Frans de Waal. Illustrated. 433 pp. New York: Basic Books. $26. |
The laughter depends on the underlying assumption that while apes may look like humans, akin even to the most powerful leader in the world, there still must be a quantum leap from them to us. But the laughter grows thinner by the year as one by one the supposed bellwether differences between apes and humans, like toolmaking, fall away. Chimpanzees use leaves as seats, as it turns out; they fashion a kind of footwear to protect themselves from thorns; they ''fish'' for termites with twigs and reeds they strip and cut for the occasion.
But surely culture itself remains impregnable, a fortress where the superiority of human beings, steeped in teaching, learning, language, art and cuisine, still resides. Let Bonzo try to get a table at Elaine's.
Now along comes one of the world's most distinguished primatologists, intent on breaching this last bastion of anthropocentrism. A professor of primate behavior at Emory University and the director of the Living Links Center, de Waal draws on more than 30 years of his own research among captive monkeys, bonobos and other chimpanzees, as well as on studies of wild primates by colleagues around the world, to poke ''a maximum number of holes in the nature/culture divide.''
Culture -- behavior learned from others -- was long vaunted as inimitably human. But de Waal points out how tired this presumption is. Monkeys teach their siblings how to wash sweet potatoes in the ocean; chimpanzee mothers show their young how to use stones to crack nuts; apes learn to medicate themselves with herbs. In 1999, an international survey of wild chimpanzees published in Nature described 39 distinct behavior patterns. In other words, separate communities of chimpanzees, even in the same environment, develop different social customs.
''The question whether animals have culture is a bit like whether chickens can fly,'' de Waal writes. ''Compared to an albatross or falcon, perhaps not, but chickens do have wings, they do flap them, and they do get up in the trees.'' He suggests that we'd learn far more by fully exploring the rich array of varied behaviors among nonhuman primates than continuing to quibble over categorical distinctions, a stance he chalks up to ''anthropodenial.''
De Waal shows how behavior among monkeys and apes depends heavily on social learning. He cites, for example, the research of a colleague who studied the responses of young monkeys when they were shown live snakes for the first time. These youngsters, raised in captivity, remained utterly unafraid of snakes -- until, that is, they were allowed to observe their parents, all born in the wild, reacting with fear. Ever after, the young monkeys expressed the fear they'd learned, not from any experience of their own but by emulating their elders.
In another study de Waal himself conducted, rhesus monkeys, which are characteristically combative, were placed with stump-tailed monkeys, a far more conciliatory species. The startling result was that the rhesus monkeys ''developed peacemaking skills on a par with those of their more tolerant counterparts.'' The rhesus monkeys, even after being segregated later, remained less quarrelsome than before their exposure to more peaceable cousins. So much for the unalloyed influence of physical prowess.
The current book builds on de Waal's four previous works -- Chimpanzee Politics,'' ''Peacemaking Among Primates,'' ''Good Natured'' and ''Bonobo.'' (In ''Bonobo,'' de Waal drew attention to the long-neglected simian whose female-dominated society and exuberant polymorphous sexual expression remain a source of fierce debate among scholars.) His own extensive research, on coalitions, conflict avoidance, mediation, reconciliation and consolation patterns among monkeys and apes, amounts to a career-long challenge to more traditional behaviorists fixated on male dominance and aggression.
De Waal names the big thinkers he is crossing. B. F. Skinner takes it on the chin for presenting animals as interchangeable. Freud and Lévi-Strauss get their lumps for posing a simplistic culture-versus-nature antagonism. Robert Ardrey is zinged for ''shoving the murderous side of chimpanzees into our faces.'' Well-known contemporaries of the ''selfish genes'' school get their comeuppance too.
By contrast, de Waal pays tribute to scores of other primatologists, particularly his Japanese contemporaries, for their painstaking, unblinkered chronicling of cultural differences among apes and monkeys. He also calls for a respectful revival of interest in long-eclipsed thinkers like Edward Westermarck and Kinji Imanishi, the pre-eminent Japanese primatologist and philosopher long denigrated in the West.
The author is no romantic contrarian, though. He's a hard-data biologist to the core. ''I am not at all attracted to cheap projections onto animals, of the sort that people indulge who see cats as having shame (a very complex emotion), horses as taking pride in their performance or gorillas as contemplating the afterlife,'' he points out a bit defensively. ''My first reaction is to ask for observables: things that can be measured.''
What's particularly bracing about this book is that this insistence on ''observables'' hasn't led de Waal to think small. His narrative, in the end, is a remarkable journey of discovery to the heart of a profound question: what can we learn about the evolution of our own cultures by studying the behavior of our primate cousins? He broaches the possibility that generous ''helping responses,'' observed among animals reliant on close-knit relationships, have evolved into something more refined -- authentically unselfish behavior. If he's right, this book is a step toward outlining the evolution of our own moral codes.
Not only does de Waal clear away layers of misconceptions in ''The Ape and the Sushi Master,'' but along the way he robs us of cheap laughs. ''Bush or Chimp?'' and ''The Chimp Channel'' just won't look the same after exposure to this deftly written, deeply reflective work.
Douglas Foster, an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow, writes about politics and science.
- サルとすし職人 ＜文化＞と動物の行動学
（フランス・ドゥ・ヴァール（Frans de Waal）著 西田利貞・藤井留美 訳 原書房 2200円 ISBN 4-562-03588-9 原題：The Ape and the Sushi Master : Cultural Refelections by a Primatologist, 2001）- サルとすし職人 ＜文化＞と動物の行動学
- 日本とは違い西洋では、動物と人間の間には断絶があり、動物には意識や文化など全く存在しないという意識が強いらしい。そのため、人間の本性の由来を動物 の内に探る、といった内容の本では、動物と人間との連続性についてかなりの紙幅が割かれる。この本も例外ではない。そのへんは正直言ってくどく、鬱陶しく なってくる。だが英語圏では必要なことだったのだろう。本書では、著者自身の日本人研究者との交流模様を含め、日本人研究者たちのエピソードや研究内容が 多数紹介される。著者の経歴を踏まえながらローレンツや西田利貞など毀誉褒貶激しい人たちの業績の再確認、そして日本人研究者たちが類人猿の研究ひいては 動物の＜文化＞の研究において果たした役割が、これまでにはない独特の形式で紹介され、同時に、ヒトの本性や、文化の起源について考えをめぐらすことので きる一冊となっている。 モノクロ口絵１６ページ付き。
「サルとすし職人」とは、京大霊長研の松沢哲郎と著者との雑談のなかから生まれたものらしい。すし屋の見習いは板前の動きを目で見て、学ぶ。チン パンジーもまた、群れの仲間の行動を見て学ぶことができるのではないか。つまり、文化的学習の代表例である「すし職人」と、サル（本当はape）との間に 関連があるのか、それはいったいどういう関係なのか。そういったことの隠喩なのだ。
なお猿まねという言葉があるが、現在では「模倣」はかなり高度な行動だと考えられている。問題を把握し、手本となる相手の行動の目的や意図を理解し、その解決策をまねることが「模倣」であって、ただ単に似たような行動を行っても、それは模倣とは呼ばれない。
動物の安易な擬人化は危険だ。だが逆に、あまり線を引きすぎて人間と人間以外の自然界との連続性に目がいかなくなってしまうのもまたおかし な話である。ドゥ・ヴァールはこれからは「動物中心の」擬人化、人間の視点を動物の視点に置き換える逆の擬人化（むしろ人間の擬動物化）が価値を持ってく るという。そしてその前提で動物行動を研究すべきだという。まあ簡単にいってしまえば、無理に目をつぶるのではなく、物事をもっと素直に見ようではないか といったところか。
頭にも触れたがこの本の面白さは、ローレンツや今西の業績の再確認にある。一世代あるいは二世代前と違って、我々は彼らの仕事のインパク トをあまり知らない。ローレンツはナチの思想に荷担していたし、今西などは最近ではほとんど無視されるどころか、学問の進歩を遅らせた者とされることも多 い。ドゥ・ヴァールは彼らの業績をもう一度見直して、認めるべきところとそうでもないところを分かりやすく整理してみせる。それはもちろん彼自身のフィル ターを通したものなのだが、面白い。
後半はボノボの話のみならず、ニホンザルのイモ洗い行動の話なども出てくる。この話は有名だが、いまや半ば伝説と化しているところもあり、実際にはどういったものだったか、知らない人も多いと思う。一読をすすめたい。
後半ではもう一度、模倣という行動の意味や文化獲得の見方に対して考察がなされる。彼は模倣について、ある一つの見方を提案する。引用しよう。
……霊長類の社会的学習は、順応願望－－社会に属し、なじみたいという衝動－－に端を発しているのではないか。母親や同 年代の仲間など、特定の社会モデルが好まれていることを重視して、このプロセスに名前をつけるとすれば、「結びつきおよび同一化を基盤にした観察学習 （Bonding-and Identification-based Observational Learning）」、略してBIOLとでもなるだろうか。BIOLは、食べ物といった目に見える恩恵に頼らず、みんあのようになりたいという願望から生 まれる学習形態だ。社会モデルの模倣は、遊びの要素が入り、不完全で入門的な方になることが多く、見返りに結びつくかどうかは重要ではない。
文化というのは社会的な現象だ。習慣を文化として学習するためには他者の実例がまず必要で、それを模倣する、ただ模倣したいから模倣することで文化が発生する。あるいは、文化的学習が起こる。これが本書の主張だ。（中略）BIOLが持つ自己強化の特質は、ずっと見過ごされてきた。私たち人間は、成功した行動は強められるという効果の法則に縛られるあまり、 純粋に社会感情的な視点から模倣を見ることがなかなかできない。何にでも目的を探してしまい、見つからないとどこかがまちがっていると感じてしまう。仮に 模倣が、好きなモデルを熱心に見習おうという社会的な衝動から来ている行動だとしても、習慣やテクニックが集団全体に広がっていくという最終結果に変わり はない。
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最後は道徳の話題だ。ドゥ・ヴァールは道徳性も進化の原理から外れたものではないとし、道徳だけを特別扱いする者を撫で切りにする。彼は道徳感情は もともと動物が他者と共感する能力を持ったときから本性として存在しているものだという。まあこのへんはやや色んな考え方があるんじゃなかろうか、という 気もするが、著者の主張にも一理あるかなと思う。
ともあれ本書は、科学書好きならば色んなことを考えることができる良書である。読んで損はない。
今西・伊谷記念霊長類学講義標記のシンポジウムを，2002年2月17日（午後1時半より5時まで），京都の芝蘭会館において，京都大学霊長類研究所が主催しておこなった。経費 は，平成13年度教育改善推進費によるものである。共催は，第2回比較認知科学国際シンポジウム（京都大学教育研究振興財団），日本動物心理学会，今西錦 司生誕百年記念世話人会だった。
講演者は，フランス・ドゥ・ヴァール（リビング・リンクス，エモリー大学，米国）。講演題目は，「社会的認識に関する研究の興隆とその底流にある日本の霊長類学の影響」である。英文の題目は以下のとおりである。
Imanishi-Itani Memorial Lecture for Primatology
The Silent Invasion of Japanese Primatology and the Rise of Social Cognition
Studies by Frans de Waal (Living Links, Emory Univ., USA)
2002年は，故今西錦司博士の生誕百年にあたる。その百年の記念事業のさなかに，後継者のお一人である伊谷純一郎博士が逝去された。そこで，日本の 霊長類学を確立した今西錦司（1902-1992）と伊谷純一郎（1936-2001）両氏の先駆的業績を称えて，「今西・伊谷記念霊長類学講義」と題し た講演会をおこなうこととした。講演者のフランス・ドゥ・ヴァール博士は，チンパンジーをはじめとした霊長類の社会的知性の研究のパイオニアとして高名で ある。「政治をするサル」（平凡社），「仲直り戦術」（どうぶつ社），「利己的なサル，他人を思いやるサル」（草思社），「ヒトに最も近い類人猿ボノボ」 （ＴＢＳブリタニカ）といった本の著者としても一般に知られている。
また，2001年に出版された近著"The Ape and the Sushi Master"は，人間以外の動物における文化を論じた書であり，かつ今西錦司ら日本の霊長類学者の先駆的業績を高く評価し，欧米に広く知らしめることに なった。ドゥ・ヴァール博士の記念講義に先立って，西田利貞による「チンパンジーの文化の謎」，松沢哲郎による「ヒトとチンパンジーとサルにおける文化的 伝播の差異」と題した関連講演がおこなわれた。いずれも英語の講演で通訳はなかった。また記念講義に先立って，今西錦司生誕百年記念事業の紹介がおこなわ れた。すなわち，京大総合博物館において，今西錦司生誕百年を記念した企画展が開催された。また，霊長類研究所のホームページ（http: //www.pri.kyoto-u.ac.jp ）では，「伊谷純一郎アーカイヴス」と題して，故人が遺された霊長類学の草創期の貴重な画像・フィールド ノートなどを解説付きで公開している。参加者は約110名だった。
（文責：松沢哲郎）
『サルとすし職人──＜文化＞と動物の行動学』
フランス・ドゥ・ヴァール著纂、西田利貞・藤井留美訳、
原書房、本体2,200円
ちょっと変わったタイトルですが、原題を見ると The Ape and The Sushi
Master。動物にも「文化」がある、という主張のもとに、文化の起源につい
て考察した本。
もっとも日本人なら、動物にだってそりゃ「文化」はあるよ、と思うので
は？ しかし、本書でも触れられているとおり、西洋では「人間」と「それ
以外の動物」は「文化」の有無によってきっちりと線引きされる、という視
点が抜きがたくあるようです。
著者ドゥ・ヴァールは、人間を中心とした動物観を批判し、動物が「模倣」
を通じて文化を作る例をあげていきます。その代表例は、日本人が報告した
幸島のニホンザルによるイモ洗い行動。タイトルに「すし職人」とあるのも、
すし屋の見習いが、板前のまねを通じて、技術を身につけていくことを引き
合いに出しているから。（この比喩は、チンパンジー研究者の松沢哲郎さん
との会話の中で生まれたそうです。）
そして著者は、日本人による類人猿研究者との交流を語り、その研究を紹
介し、Ｋ．ローレンツや今西錦司の業績を再評価してみせます。さらには、
文化の起源から、道徳の起源の起源にまで考察は進んでいきます。
──と紹介すると、ずいぶんテツガク的な本のようですが、チンパンジー
やオランウータンはもちろん、モーツァルトの作品に影響を与えたというホ
シムクドリ、狩猟技術を伝承するというクジラ、タイの動物園でトラを育て
たイヌの話など、楽しく読める一冊です。
・原書房 http://www.harashobo.co.jp/
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