PROFILE
A haphazard career Ronald Noë
I was asked to explain why and how a Dutchman got to be a professor teaching animal behaviour in a French university. Someone must have thought that my story could provide some guidance for aspiring ethologists and behavioural ecologists. I am not so sure that my career path is one that should be followed, but perhaps someone can learn from my mistakes. I think I can now afford to write about them without much of a negative effect on my career. Not that I have bothered much about my ‘career’, but that is perhaps the core of my problem. I have never been good at preparing myself for the future, so after treading the mills of the Dutch educational system I found myself regularly confronted with steps in life that I should have prepared, if not better, then at least earlier. And so I ended up in a ‘cul de sac’. But let me start from the beginning. I can’t tell you what kind of ‘—ist’ I am exactly at this point – primatologist, behavioural ecologist or evolutionary psychologist – but I went to the university to become an ethologist. The reason was simple: I liked animals a lot, and notably the furry ones. I defi nitely preferred seeing them alive, healthy and doing their own thing. I understood from books by the likes of Tinbergen, Lorenz, Wickler and EiblEibesfeldt that ethologists did professionally what I liked to do anyway: watch animals behave. What their books didn’t say is that there are rather few positions for ethologists. Not that I wasn’t warned.
During the introduction day for biology at the university we were told that about 2% of us would fi nd jobs as biologists. That translates to about 0.1% for ethologists, I guess. So after fi nishing a school in which I wasted about a third of my time learning dead languages, I enrolled in biology in Groningen. Why Groningen? I had four good reasons. Because it was not Amsterdam; it was not Leiden, where my sister studied already; it was not Utrecht, which was too close to my parents’ home; and I had never been to Groningen before. As it happens Groningen was, and still is, the best place in the Netherlands for animal behaviour, but I would lie if I said that I realised that at the time. So I enjoyed highly interesting lectures in classical ethology by Gerard Baerends, Jaap Kruijt and others. The only drawback was that the ethology group of Groningen concentrated on birds and fish. Their lack of furriness forced me to look elsewhere for my master’s topics, of which we did three in those days. I had my fi rst experience with field work by following radio-collared foxes around in the night, then I watched chimpanzees in the zoo for a year, and fi nally did a topic in plant ecology. Fairly furry plants in fact. The key experience was the year in the Arnhem Zoo, where I was one of Frans de Waal’s fi rst students. Perhaps the most important among Frans’ many skills is that he is an incredibly keen
Social Behaviour: Genes, Ecology and Evolution, ed. Tamás Székely, Allen J. Moore and Jan Komdeur. Published by Cambridge University Press. © Cambridge University Press 2010.
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observer. By analysing video tapes of complicated interactions together with him for many hours, I learned to observe the details of animal behaviour. I also learned to appreciate primates, and became interested in complicated forms of cooperation such as coalition formation. No less important was the introduction to Jan van Hooff and the animal behaviour department he was building up at of the University of Utrecht. What bothered me about the chimpanzees was that they lived in captivity. The Arnhem Zoo has a nice big enclosure, but it remains an enclosure. The foxes, the dunes in which I did my plant ecology, the nature reserve in which I lived during my chimp year, Kenya, which I toured with some friends, all reinforced my preference for working in the field. I had also become more interested in the evolutionary aspects of animal behaviour than in the mechanistic questions. I am convinced that if one wants to study the evolution of something, then one should do that in the environment that resembles the environment of origin as closely as possible. In short, I looked out for a possibility to do field work on mammals. A small problem was that I still had to do my military service and that I started the long procedure necessary to be recognised as a conscientious objector too late. In those days it was not unusual to start a PhD project with the 18 months replacement service, and I had already organised something vague on polecats at the Dutch institute of wildlife research. Then one lucky day I banged my knee so badly on an iron pole during a coffee break that the damage was visible on an x-ray. That of course meant that I was not fit for military service of any kind, and free to do something else. That something else was a PhD project on baboons on Kenya’s beautiful savannas. During a primatological congress in Florence Glen Hausfater invited me to work in the Amboseli Baboon Project, led by him together with Jeanne and Stuart Altmann. With the support of Jan van Hooff and Bettie, my future wife, who made 50 copies of the proposal on a stencil machine, I obtained a four-year grant to study coalition formation in
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male baboons. Bettie gave up her job as a teacher and also married me, because the granting agency would otherwise not pay her airfare. I can’t think of a better reason to get married. So we were off together to Kenya to observe coalitions among male baboons, although there were none to be seen in Amboseli according to Glen, and although I knew next to nothing about the basic theories on cooperation. Luckily Glen’s ignorance and my own didn’t stop us from having a great time, during which I learned a lot about the organisation of a field site, about working in Africa, about primates and about the rest of wildlife. After 18 months in Amboseli I had in fact enough data to fi ll my thesis, but I still had money for another year of field work. We spent that in another baboon project in Kenya, which was a contrast to the Amboseli project in almost any way one could think of. Say no more. The most important thing I learned during my PhD project was that a popular theory, in my case Trivers’ idea of reciprocal altruism and related models based on the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, can go an incredible long way without any empirical support. It is most amazing to see that a theoretic tail can wag an empirical dog for decades and nobody cares (Noë 1990, 1992, Noë et al. 1991). So I spent a good deal of the rest of my career screaming out loud that theoretical models can be nice and even useful, but that once in a blue moon they need a bit of empirical support (Noë 2006). Back in the Netherlands I spent a lot of time analysing the data and publishing the chapters of my thesis, but with my typical lack of bureaucratic talent I didn’t properly organise the graduation event itself, which is quite a circus in Utrecht. Luckily enough Hans Kummer invited me to Zurich for a postdoc long before I got my doctoral title officially. I was supposed to work on captive groups of banded mongoose there, but then the university decided to construct a new building right next to their enclosure. When they proposed to build a temporary enclosure for an astronomic sum, I joked that I could work in Africa for half of that. Within weeks I found myself with exactly that sum
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Ronald Noë
Bettie Noë-Sluijter collecting a focal animal sample in Alto’s group (1982, Amboseli National Park, Kenya). Photo: Ronald Noë.
on a research account. That’s what I call the opposite of bureaucracy. Perhaps we could make Zurich a kind of Lourdes for bureaucrats: a pilgrimage there could heal their morbid inclination to put spokes in the wheels of science. The pilot study I did with this unexpected grant, followed two years later by a grant from the Swiss National Research Foundation, was the start of the Taï Monkey Project in Ivory Coast – the springboard of many a career and the source of data for a long list of publications, such as Noë & Bshary (1997). At that point in time we had salaries, an apartment, a bank account etc. in Switzerland, but no work permits. The solution came in the form of an invitation by Peter Hammerstein to work in the Max-Planck Institute in Seewiesen, Germany, supported by a grant from the Humboldt Foundation. After a little reproductive break my wife and I worked for several years in Ivory Coast in the winter and Bavaria in the summer. With Peter Hammerstein I further developed an idea that had been inspired by my work with baboons: the biological market paradigm (Noë & Hammerstein 1994, 1995, Noë 2001). The Taï Monkey Project grew into a large venture in which
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we studied eight monkey species with the help of a small army of local assistants and students. All this was possible thanks to the very generous support of Wolfgang Wickler, the director of our department. I happily lived on temporary contracts in Seewiesen until the Max-Planck Gesellschaft thought it was time to close the famous Seewiesen institute. That’s when I started to worry about feeding the family. Again, the solution came from an unexpected direction: an invitation by Bernhard Th ierry to compete for a professorship at the Université Louis-Pasteur in Strasbourg, France. That I indeed fi nd myself in this position today I owe to the strong support of Bernhard and several other insiders who guided me thought the most amazing bureaucratic procedure I have ever experienced. I don’t think I beat most of the competition on merit, but more likely because I was one of the few who had the right forms fi lled out in time. So, a career like mine is perhaps an idea for someone who likes a bit of adventure, enjoys living in many different countries and is willing to learn a couple of languages. It doesn’t need a lot of planning, because one goes where the wind blows. However, it doesn’t
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work without an extraordinary partner who is willing to pull up stakes about once a year and remain cheerful all the time. Such people are thin on the ground. In fact, I only met one in my life. If you dream of a big scientific career, but are risk-adverse and worry about the economic aspects of life, you had better get organised instead. Or maybe you should avoid the study of animal behaviour altogether.
References Noë, R. (1990) A veto game played by baboons: a challenge to the use of the Prisoner’s Dilemma as a paradigm for reciprocity and cooperation. Animal Behaviour, 39, 78 –90. Noë, R. (1992) Alliance formation among male baboons: shopping for profitable partners. In: Coalitions and Alliances in Humans and Other Animals, ed. A. H. Harcourt & F. B. M. de Waal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 282–321. Noë, R. (2001) Biological markets: partner choice as the driving force behind the evolution of cooperation. In:
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Economics in Nature. Social Dilemmas, Mate Choice and Biological Markets, ed. R. Noë, J. A. R. A. M. van Hooff & P. Hammerstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 93–118. Noë, R. (2006) Cooperation experiments: coordination through communication versus acting apart together, Animal Behaviour, 71, 1–18. Noë, R. & Bshary R. (1997) The formation of red colobus – diana monkey associations under predation pressure from chimpanzees. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 264, 253–251. Noë, R. & Hammerstein, P. (1994) Biological markets: supply and demand determines the effect of partner choice in cooperation, mutualism and mating. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 35, 1–11. Noë, R & Hammerstein, P. (1995). Biological markets. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 10, 336 –339. Noë, R., van Schaik , C. P. & van Hooff, J. A. R. A. M. (1991) The market effect: an explanation for pay-off asymmetries among collaborating animals. Ethology, 87, 97–118.
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