buddy they call Machiavellian intelligence why call it Machiavellian intelligence then and not just social intelligence well we're naming it after Machiavelli who as many people will know was an advisor to 16th century Italian princes and politicians of his day and the kind of advice he used to give and the reason Machiavellian scrapped into everyday language as meaning kind of somewhat underhand former social manipulation was to in the case of your subjects to really manipulate them often deceive them so really to be socially manipulative I suppose is what summed up by this notion of Machiavellian intelligence nine years old boy happened to come to the nut cracking site first and he picked up a pair of stones and start to crack open walnuts then the mother arrived already many chimpanzees started to crack open nuts so the mother did not found a good stones to crack open the nuts so what she did was as follows first she approached to the Sun and groomed very well and she stopped and stood for the pea dolly this posture means okay you should groom back so that the Sun stopped not cracking and turned to the mother and tried to start grooming and the mother suddenly took the stones that were used by the Sun and while taking the stones how face is like so definitely it's instance of deception in the world chimpanzees this kind of problem that you face in the social world can actually be so much more complex that that may have been what drove the evolution of intelligence as we see it particularly in the primates monkeys and apes they're social climbers as Machiavelli would have advised they try and make relationships with the more powerful useful individuals in the group for example they might do that by grooming them or helping them on on certain occasions in fights but then there may also be incidents where they appear to be making friends and they will switch in a rather what might strikers being anthropomorphic as being an underhand way not a very very friendly way and so some of the switches in the Alpha position can come about by one individual who might be called the kingmaker switching its allegiance within these sort of top two or three individuals within the group the term politics we started using for chimpanzees and other primates because they decide to dominant struggles by coalition's and so it's not just am i stronger than you or are you stronger than me it's who are my friends and who's willing to help me and how do I pay them back for the help that they give me and how do I prevent you from having friends that could endanger my position and and that's what chimpanzees are all doing the male sympathies are constantly in the business of preventing alliances that may damage them and building alliances that may help them and in that sense their deal makers and making transactions with each other and so on the very political features humans are very political of course and I think it's it's much more difficult to seat it in humans because there's so much tar going on and we get distracted by all their language that we see but if you if you were to turn off the sound on TV when you look at a debate between two political candidates you would see all the body language that's going on that's very similar to chimpanzee intimidation displays and stuff like that I think the issue of cooperation versus competition in chimpanzee daily life is an important one particularly for males and when you stop to think about it the same guys that save your life the last time you had a violent interaction with the neighbors are the same guys you're going to compete with tomorrow over the only swollen female in the group and so in your mind you've got to have a the social smarts to be able to say yesterday fred was my ally today fred is my competitor and yet you know we've got to somehow keep that all in balance because Fred and I are got to live together for the rest of our lives it's easy for this this notion of Machiavellian intelligence to be misunderstood as totally competitive and individualistic and and selfish but in fact even what Machiavelli talked about involved making friends cooperating with others and that's an important way in which chimpanzees and another primates are Machiavellian and I think when we come to look at human evolution and how a particular course of our history took a different line after we split from chimpanzees five million years ago then cooperation at higher levels was really important for our ancestors - in the particular kind of hunting and gathering which occupies so much of our evolutionary history the accepted wisdom of evolution is that animals act in the self-interest of the genes they carry altruism being nice to an unrelated individual at possible cost to yourself has always been seen as a uniquely and rather perversely human behavior under the benign influence of our higher civilization but now it seems altruism is breaking out all over a rash of ape anecdotes seem sharply at odds with supposedly selfish genes the idea that apes have a capacity for empathy is clear from the radio react to victims of aggression they embrace them and ruin them something that other animals don't do one of one of those anecdotes that exists out there which was filmed was this boy who fell into an enclosure at the Brookfield Zoo and was rescued by a gorilla female a six-year-old boy visiting Chicago Zoo fell into the gorilla enclosure panic ensued especially when an adult female gorilla lifted the unconscious boy and carried him off yet the gorilla not only didn't harm the boy she actually carried him over to the door where she knew the keeper would come the boy was indeed rescued and later recovered fully from his fall an ape had rescued a human and of course there was a lot of skeptical reaction by the scientific community to this but it ended up that this female actually paid attention to an unconscious boy and brought him to a place where people could take care of it and so there's many of that kind of anecdotes around and and people who know great apes people are know gorillas and chimpanzees they're not surprised by the actions of that female gorilla at all because if a female chimpanzee would obviously do that for a juvenile of its own species the only difference here was she was doing it for a juvenile of our species some people have depicted us and all other animals is inherently selfish but we have immediate impulses that are faster than we can control cortically so we cannot really control these impulses we have immediately impulses if we see someone in distress and so the whole idea that we are inherently selfish is not true because we are inherently also in touch with each other and affected by the emotions of others I tracked a group of gorillas into a small island of forests a small patch in the middle of a savanna and to get from this small patch of forest into the larger block of forest they had to cross an area of grassland open grassland and I hid behind a rock and and waited for them to cross what happened was most of the group crossed on a small path across the grassland into the main block the last two individuals to to cross the savanna were a silverback and a sub-adult this is an animal about 6 to 8 years old and the silverback it was obvious was either very old or very ill he was emaciated very thin and seemed to having a lot of trouble walking he was stopping every few steps looked very tired as if he was maybe arthritic which we know gorillas do can suffer from the sub-adult was for having very strangely he'd walk ahead of the silverback a few paces and then stop turn around and walk backwards in front of the silverback very slowly very carefully just a few paces ahead of the silverback and what we noticed was a gesture that somewhat out was making a sort of this kind of thing in front of the Silverbacks face very unused I've never seen that gesturing before and it looked