Exploits of a ‘hippie scientist’ in Africa
This book is supposed to be a study of the baboons in Africa
by a neuroscientist. The author ‘joins’ a troop of baboons in Kenya, gives them various names from the
old testament and monitors them closely. Joining is obviously an exaggeration
as the author is armed with his jeep and other accessories but more or less
camps closely to the troop and tracks the activities of the troop members. The
main objective of the study seems to be tracking the stress level of the male
members as they pass through the various hierarchical positions in the troop.
This is achieved by anesthetizing them occasionally using a blow dart gun and
then taking their blood samples. He also observes the social behavior of the
members including tracking ‘who is making out with who’.
Only less than 20% of the book cover the baboons while the
rest is spent on various adventures of the author in different African
countries, in the national parks as well as interactions with the ‘black’
natives. A typical western person’s view of African life is depicted in those
descriptions if one can suffer to read through all of it. How much of these are
‘hallucinations’ and what are real is difficult to make out.
I don’t think this book merits as a science book by any
standards – since very little of science (forget neuroscience) is covered.
Couple of chapters (one in the beginning and one towards the end) are
interesting from a view of understanding baboon group behavior. However the
author hardly seems to take into account the trauma he must have been imparting
on the group by walking around and darting them! He acknowledges that they
would run away from him and it was an uphill task for him to get close to them,
as time went along. It is a basic rule in science that the process of measuring
does affect the metric that you are trying to measure – but in this case the
stress level induced by the scientist would dramatically influence whatever he was trying to measure.
Maybe my criticism is unduly harsh considering that the
study was done many years back and the book itself was published in 2001.
Reading it in 2015, I would be looking at it from a much later perspective. But
still, it will be hard to deny the basic
facts that I have highlighted and I would not recommend anyone wasting time
with this book.
