Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Orangutan

I watched Animal Planet at the dentist today (yes, our dentist friend in Seattle has a ceiling television to distract patients having cavities filled) and Orangutan Island was on. This is a show that tracks a group of orphan orangutans in Borneo. What's interesting is that orangutans are generally solitary and nomadic, but because of logging, these orphans have been forced to become more rooted and more group-like in order to survive in the limited space available to them. Also, because they are orphans, they have to teach themselves survival skills that would normally be taught by their mothers. The researchers in charge of the show are tracking their group interactions, including group learning.

This really got me thinking about the nature vs. nurture debate. I think that we have a predisposition to think that animal behavior is predominantly instinctive and that nurture, to a large degree, is merely a catalyzed version of necessary invention. On one hand, watching the orangutans discover the use of sticks as tools to eat ants would seem to support the latter assumption; the use of tools for this purpose is something normally taught by orangutan parents but is, clearly, easily self-taught. On the other hand, the innovator orangutan taught the other orangutans the trick, begging the question: Is teaching considered nurturing because of the skills it provides to its students or because of the process of social cohesion that it facilitates?

More importantly, on this topic of social cohesion, the 'unnatural' make-up of the orangutans on the island suggests that group dynamics, even at a more primordial level, might be completely normative. Is the occasional infighting due to previously learned behavior by some of the older orphans or is orangutan solitude genetically coded? It will be interesting to see how long the group manages to stick together.