Originally seen on Pharylngula, but also part of National Geographic’s Visions of Earth 2009, here is Dorothy’s body, and her troop’s witness of her passing.

Although I still have trouble understanding why, it still seems contentious to interpret the stance of this gathering of chimpanzees as some set of feelings related to grief. I suppose it must be the implications of those apparently expressed beliefs that is so disturbing. If they have grief, for example, that means they know something about what death means, which, in its turn, means the gathered chimps have a capacity to understand and express consequences to not just self but the group, which is an ability to abstract, which leads to the idea that they have what we usually think of as morality.

I mean, it is possible that they have all lined up at the fence because the wheelbarrow normally contains bananas. It is also possible that they are all lined up like that for some chimp reason — maybe the fence just at that spot has some wonderful texture or smell. And maybe they are all just referencing a personal fear at change, and seeking comfort by bodily closeness to others and the first chimp just happened to be standing at the fence — which means we don’t need to attribute morality to them just a kind of behavouristic conditioned response – but couldn’t we say the same thing about human expressions of grief? How do you know that someone else feels anything apart from discomfort at change? You are, after all, attributing feelings based on how you would feel, or on how they look in their grief. How do you know you really feel that grief? Is it not possible that you are self attributing? OK snarky and silly, but really, what is so awful about attributing grief (and its implications) to chimpanzees?

I know we as humans tend to see our inner states as expressed by all and sundry. We are wired to do that and for good reasons, but we do need to be careful when reading a mountain’s looming stance as “menacing” or a natural catastrophe as a god’s fell hand. Mountain’s don’t have the necessary material organization to produce the intention to menace and the fell hands are almost always human. Still, we are on much firmer ground when we read other animals, especially animals that are so manifestly like us.

Bottom line, for me it seems far more in accordance with the law of parsimony to read something akin to our reaction into the chimps’ stance than to attribute something completely other. Unless, of course, one has a stake in not being related, but then that doesn’t require laws, or empirical evidence, or even common sense. All such a stakeholder’s position requires at that point is tenacity in the face of the aforesaid.

Having said that, we as humans do need to be aware that 1) we are in fact attributing our inner states to another, 2) that those to whom we attribute are “another” and not odd looking humans and 3) we need to assess our attributions with the lens of actual knowledge. That is, we need to continually reassess our conclusions about our own states, and the states of others using empirically-based knowledge.

For example, a human in grief has a series of feelings that are often associated with the thing we call grief, which makes grief not a simple feeling but rather a complex of feelings. What the chimps in the picture feel is almost certainly grief, but almost as certainly the content of their grief complex is not identical with the content of a grief complex in a comparable human grouping. From the point of our common ancestor, when our complexes would have been identical, we both, chimps and people, have evolved. While we are still very much the same in many ways, having come from the same stock not all that long ago in an evolutionary sense, we are still different. Humans have evolved some pretty interesting cognitive capacities for example, all of which are tied into the basal emotive states which generate the complexes we both feel ourselves and attribute to others. What this means is that when we feel grief, our particularly human self-referential cognitive capacities kick in. These will not be present in the chimps. They may have their own self-referential set but they will not be the ones that have evolved in us to meet our specific adaptive needs.

So, yes, they are sad at Dorothy’s death. They have lined up to witness her passing out of their lives. Some of the chimps will go sit where Dorothy used to sit; some of them will exhibit other mourning behaviours. I suggest we accept that these behaviours are in fact expressions of mourning and get on with assessing the implications of a general animal sensibility and, specifically, the implications of the fact that morality is an outgrowth of animal evolution.