Maybe The GOP Senators Aren't Scared of Trump.

Maybe they're just doing what male primates do.

Dr. Robert Sapolsky and the Keekorok Baboon Troop

I heard Amy Walter on NPR saying that the GOP Senators are afraid of Donald Trump because he threatens to have them primaried and they'll lose their jobs. I was buying into that, with skepticism, when I remembered Robert Sapolsky’s work with baboons.

Dr. Robert Sapolsky, Stanford professor of biology, neurology, and neurosurgery. He is also a research associate at the National Museum of Kenya. He is the author of several best-selling books, including A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons. For much of his career he spent his summers in Kenya studying a baboon troop, observing their behavior toward one another, and taking blood samples to analyze their stress hormone levels.

Like Congress, the Keekorok Baboon Troop has alpha males. Males are aggressive, and they compete with one another for the top spot in male baboon society. The male most adept at beating up others, stealing from others, commanding others, getting groomed more than giving grooming, bullying others, male and female, is the Boss Baboon. Other males compete for his favor and bully those beneath them. The society is highly stratified, and operates on different rules from female baboon society. The emotional atmosphere of the troop is toxic. If you’ve ever worked on Capitol Hill, you know what we’re talking about.

One day, the Keekorok alpha male baboon led his followers - all male - across the river to the garbage pit of a tourist lodge. There they dined on the carcass of a cow that had been dumped because it had been found to have tuberculosis.

Nearly half the males in the Keekorok troop died, truly painful deaths.

Sapolsky says “In that troop, if you were aggressive, and if you were not particularly socially connected, socially affiliative, if you did not spend your time grooming and hanging out, if you were that kind of male, you died.”

Every alpha male was dead. The Keekorok Congress now consisted of twice as many females as males; the remaining males were not aggressive, they were nice to the females, they were very socially affiliative. Society changed. The emotional atmosphere of the troop changed.

When new, younger males would join the troop, it would take them about six months, Sapolsky related, to change their behavior to fit into the Keekorok troop values. You don’t dump on females just because you’re in a bad mood, we groom each other and socialize with one another. Sapolsky reported that 20 years after the tuberculosis outbreak among the aggressive males, the Keekorok troop were still “mellow.”

So, if baboons can change their behavior in one generation, maybe Senators could. Under the right circumstances.