What We Can Learn From Baboons

So the other day I stayed up past 9 o clock and found an English-speaking channel on TV. It was playing some National Geographic docu called “Stress: Portrait of a Killer” which despite it’s Reader’s Digest headline of a name, I decided to watch (the only alternative being Thai soaps. There’s a lot of angry faces and crying and like no making out). I thought the film was going to talk about how you should eat more fish, stop drinking and exercise and other things that NO ONE EVER WANTS TO HEAR. But, it turns out that the film was riveting. And LIFE SAVING!
So, the film followed various neurologists who study stress levels in primates, both human and those on the more simian end of the DNA scale. SPOILER ALERT: we’re the same. Specifically, we both have wacky hierarchical systems that are run by alpha males who intimidate and terrorize their subordinates, and therefore vicious, emotionally (and physiologically!!!) taxing competition ensues. The neurologists found that the alpha males experienced much less stress than the subordinates (no shit), therefore living not only longer lives but healthier ones as well (seriously, primates can gain weight from stress too. And they look really funny when they're fat. THEY REALLY ARE JUST LIKE US!).

Two very important findings:
1. Stress itself causes plaque to build in your arteries, eventually leading to heart attacks (not a myth! a FACT!) Also, our chromosomes are capped with something called tinimeres (or something, I don’t feel like googling it) that effectively perform the functions that keep us young, or our actual age. Stress preoccupies your nervous system, robbing the tinimeres from the chromosomes to perform other duties, literally aging us. (hence the harried mom’s cry that her rambunctious kid is giving her gray hair-- he really is!). So stress will not only kill you but also make you look old on your way to a premature dirt nap.
2. The baboon tribe that a total badass of a neurologist named Robert Sapolsky (seriously, you should see this guy's hair, he looks like he drove a bus around the southwest and did a ton of acid from 1967-1982-- you can just see him telling the higher-ups at Stanford [where he's a professor] "f off bros, I have a MacArthur Genius Grant, I do what I want") had been studying the stress levels of for 10 years lost all of its alpha males after they ate tainted meat and perished from TB. Since then, the tribe consists of only “nice guys” (that’s a scientific term) and females, and the STRESS LEVELS OF THE ENTIRE TRIBE DROPPED! THEY’RE ALL HEALTHY (ie no plaque in arteries) NOW! Also, teenage male baboons leave their own tribes to look for new ones, and when they stumble upon this alpha male-less tribe, they’re shown the way of the stress-less lives and actually learn to assimilate after starting out like jerks and picking fights.

So clearly all the alpha males in our own society should just die of TB and we’d all be happy and healthy, enjoying life and picking the proverbial nits out of each others fur.
Oh, and back to the tinimeres: it’s been found that they can actually be REPLACED by an enzyme created from a reaction in the brain when we practice (get ready for it) COMPASSION AND GENEROSITY TO OTHERS.

So: cooperation + empathy = longer, healthier lives, happier individuals and a better society. I teared up as these neurologists waxed philosophical about the end of stress in our own hamster wheel of a society, leading us toward a more compassionate future. Oh, Robert. I believe you!

(unrelated except for embarrassing times at which to cry: I also almost cried (ie like, did) when I heard the Shakira world cup commercial, which pisses me off because it’s barely tries to be a song at all and instead just settles for being basically a pepsi ad with a caricature of “Africa!!!” as it’s color scheme, [plus Shakira, for all the hips not lying and what not, is the most wooden, least charismatic world-wide sensation imaginable] but maybe it’s because the line “this one’s for Africa” sort of makes it seem like We [humans in the world, collectively, as one] actually give a shit about the most criminally fucked example of the genocide we conveniently tie up as “wealth disparity” in the “civilized” modern world.)

Also discovered the Pin Ling reality channel on Thai TV: 24 hour coverage of a panda’s life in a zoo as it goes about its daily business of eating, sleeping, and doing nothing exciting like maul people or even tricks like painting or playing catch. Sort of like the fauna version of The Truman Show: I watched Pin Ling sleep for a few minutes. Turns out watching a motionless, heavily breathing panda sleep in the comfort of your own living room is a pretty effective stress reducer.