Archive for the ‘aggression’ Category
sex and gender in bonobos, humans, etc
So there’s been a lot of talk lately about trans people, whatever that may mean, and whether or not they should be taken seriously. It seems to relate to the ‘woke’ issue, for some people, and it has become a hot button issue for the most divided and tedious nation in the WEIRD world. All of this has to do with sex and gender, it seems to me, and I’ve had many thoughts on this topic ever since I was a kid, over fifty years ago.
I’ve written about this before, briefly, but I want to go into it in more detail now. I was around eleven or so, pre-pubescent, in primary school, year 5 or 6. It was school assembly, and we were standing in line outside the school buildings, listening to some headmasterly homilies. I was at the back of the two lines for our class, one for girls, one for boys. It was probably towards the end of the year, because I was very familiar with my classmates, at least by observation. As I looked at them this day, I considered which ones were the most, and least, attractive, and why. I knew nothing about sex at the time (unlike most eleven-year-olds today), but I knew about physical attraction – and attraction generally. My thoughts ran along lines which I still feel proud of to this day, though no doubt I’ll exaggerate their sophistication, as is the way with memories.
I decided that the prettiest kid in the class was a boy, and I was ‘turned on’ by the naughtiness of this thought. I also noted that of the two prettiest girls, one was much more attractive to me than the other, not because of her physical appearance, but her manner – perhaps her air of gravity, her intelligent expression, the clothes she wore, her way of walking. And then there were girls I was attracted to, but not physically. They were fun, good sports, approachable. And on further reflection I noticed that the kids who least interested me were the ‘girlie’ girls and the ‘tough guy’ boys, and that the kids in front of me could all be put on a spectrum from most masculine to most feminine, regardless of their actual genitalia. Which led me to wonder – where was I on this spectrum?
It so happens that throughout my school years I was the shortest kid in my class, male or female, and skinny with it. A less masculine male could hardly be imagined. I never considered myself homosexual though. By the time I fully understood the term, the blokes my age were developing face fuzz, which was a total turn off. That didn’t stop me from falling in love with Bowie at sixteen – the music, that is, and the in-your-face androgynous persona. This tended to make me persona non grata in the socially conservative working-class environment of my childhood and early youth.
All of this is to say that I was highly sensitised to issues of sex and gender from an early age. Some years later, well into my twenties, a certain family kerfuffle came to my attention. A married cousin had a daughter, aged about six or so, who insisted on keeping her hair short and refused to be dressed in a dress. I encountered her once or twice, and she seemed morose, withdrawn, smart, and yes, kind of masculine, if that makes sense for someone so young. My mother seemed worried, as did other family members, but the mother not so much. There was talk of doctors, of taking a firmer line, and I didn’t know what to make of it. Nobody asked my advice of course, but I would’ve argued for letting the girl, or boy, be what they wanted to be. I was thoroughly fascinated, however. But I soon lost touch with family, became as solitary as an orang-utan, and know nothing of the outcome.
Returning to modern times, people talk today of the LGBTQIA+ community, and I can probably work out what each letter signifies, but only just. It seems to me that if there is a problem here, it’s a problem of categorising and compartmentalising – maybe of working out which ‘tribe’ you supposedly belong to. I myself have never been particularly tribal, so it all just flies over my head. And anyway, is there a community here, a community of difference? I hope so, but I’m doubtful.
I’ve mentioned orang-utans, but it’s the far from solitary bonobos I’m really interested in. Opposites attract, they say. Recently I’ve been pondering sex and gender in our primate cousins, and other mammals. Does our pet dog know she’s a girl? Does our pet cat know he’s a boy? We call our pets such things to eternally infantilise them, but that’s another story. Let’s consider bonobos – when, if ever, do they learn that they’re male or female? And when do we humans learn the same? For humans, it seems straightforward – we have language. One of the first things a child learns is that they’re ‘a pretty/naughty/clever girl, or boy, as the case may be. This sort of makes up for the fact that we rarely get to go about naked and notice the difference in each others’ genitalia – unlike bonobos. But our bonobo and chimp cousins are smart and complex – they know the difference between the one who nurses and protects them and the adults who are sometimes friendly but at other times indifferent or hostile. They might not conceive it in terms of gender, but they might discern a pattern. And of course hormonal and developmental differences both between and within the two sexes will play their part. So they too have ‘gender issues’, if we can call it that.
It’s often said that sex is biological, gender is cultural. That, of course, is way too neat, and too hard to prove, because every single family in which a child is brought up is a micro-culture of sorts, and every child has a slightly different genetic and epigenetic inheritance. The problem again is our tendency to compartmentalise. What is more important, as bonobos might teach us, is acceptance of variety and difference.
Another obvious difference between bonobos and the only clothed apes, is of course, clothing, covering, hiding our ‘naughty bits’. It’s a topic I tend to be squeamish about, being human, but it needs to be addressed. We wear clothing for a whole variety of reasons – for keeping protected and warm, to display solidarity with our tribe, to be fashionable and attractive, to show contempt for fashionable elites, to avoid being arrested for indecent exposure, and so on. We certainly learn from very early on that it’s ‘rude’ and ‘uncivilised’ to go about in the altogether. It’s interesting to note that the term ‘savage’, used regularly by Europeans well into the 19th century, precisely coincided with the degree of covering used by the indigenous populations they encountered. The more covered they became, the more civilised and intelligent they became in our minds.
It’s also worth noting that, until recently in the WEIRD world, clothing and other visible accoutrements have been used to distinguish the two sexes – hence the concept of cross-dressing, which now seems dated. In my own youth my hair was long and bushy, and it seemed to me that most of the girls’ hair was shorter than the boys’, which I found titillating. At the time I thought it was revolutionary, and went along with free love and the dissolution of marriage, but sadly it turned out to be just another turn of the fashion wheel.
And yet, not quite. Or not at all. Some of us might be slaves to fashion, but the percentage has considerably reduced. Gone forever are the days, revealed in 100 year-old photos and newsreels, when men were obliged to wear more or less lookalike homburgs, and women cloche hats. Jeans, t-shirts and casual jackets are as commonplace now as they were fifty years ago, and casual apparel has maintained its non-binary style in that time. Fashions may go in cycles but they never return to the same place. Marriage is still popular, but it’s not what it was when my dad were a lad.
So at a time when sexual identity and politics are being fought over to a degree that I find laughable, it’s a relief to turn to the bonobo world. Bonobos females tend to engage in same sex acts a lot more than males do, according to research by the Max Planck Society, and this activity creates more lifelong bonds than occurs with mixed-sex pairs. The research suggests that this has to do with increased oxytocin levels after these interactions. Oxytocin, the so-called ‘feel good’ or ‘love’ hormone is often associated with the bonding of mother and child. These increased levels didn’t occur after male-female sex. Interestingly, and very surprisingly (and rather disappointingly to me) male-male sex is rare among bonobos. Considering that some 75% of bonobo sex has no reproductive purpose (compared to 99.999% of human sex, according to my own extensive research), this seems to me a missed opportunity. Then again, this female-female bonding appears to be the key, not only to female dominance, but more importantly that species’ lack of aggression compared to chimps and humans. Obviously the answer for us humans is to ban male homosexuality on penalty of death, and encourage the female version with prizes and worldwide fame for the loudest and longest orgasms.
Okay, I was a bit drunk when I wrote that.
There’s a lot more to be said, though, about how bonobos have broken the aggression habit, or how they’ve targeted aggression to reduce aggression, and so to become less aggressive overall. I’ll explore that in my next post.
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-insights-same-sex-sexual-interactions-important.html
Evolutionary biology, testosterone and bonobos
this is the first of a 22-part slide show on the topic – hormones don’t rate a mention!
Canto: So I think we need to get back to another obsession of ours – bonobos and how we can harness a bit more bonoboism for human purposes. We’re currently observing, horrified, as Russia’s alpha male chimp flips out on his own testosterone, perhaps….
Jacinta: Yes, it could well read like something out of Jane Goodall – a long-term alpha male, who has done reasonably well in holding his troupe together by inordinate bullying, random slaughter and regular breast-beating, and by smart alliances, suddenly endangers everything in attempting to take over another troupe…
Canto: And having read three books on the trot, referenced below, on China and its all-male thugocracy, it’s more than tempting to cast that thugocracy in chimpian terms – alpha male after alpha male after alpha male.
Jacinta: Yes, I’ve long considered how best to rename the soi-disant Chinese Communist Party (CCP), arguably the most absurd misnomer in the known universe. I considered the Chinese Fascist Party, but that seems a bit ‘trendy’, and to call it simply The Party seems too bland, neutral, and even festive. But to call it the Chinese Testosterone Party – that fits the bill perfectly. I really really want that to catch on in the WEIRD world. So anyway, with the evidence mounting that female leadership leads to better outcomes, politically, socially and, I hope, sexually – though we’ve been a bit nervous about that tediously sensitive issue – how can we speed up the trend towards human bonoboism?
Canto: It’s hard, especially when all these macho shenanigans bring out my own most bloodthirsty revenge fantasies. But I’ve been wondering about hormones: Are there any hormonal differences between chimps and bonobos that might help to explain the bonobo turn towards female-female bonding and control of males – and the freewheeling sexual play within bonobo society?
Jacinta: You mean – could we control and transform our human world through some kind of hormone replacement therapy? Sounds promising.
Canto: We’ll here’s some food for thought re males versus females, and not just in humans:
Empathy is our ability to understand how others are feeling, and men are less able to do this than women, across cultures. This is a widely replicated and consistent finding, and it’s not true just of human males and females. In chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, elephants, dogs and wolves, researchers have observed that males engage in lower rates of behaviours related to empathy, like caregiving, cooperating, helping and comforting.
Carole Hooven, Testosterone, p159.
Jacinta: So the question is – is there a hormone we can take for that? Sadly, it’s never that simple.
Canto: Sure, but anyway, let’s ask Dr Google. Hmmm, top of the page:
There is some evidence that high levels of estradiol and progesterone are associated with low levels of aggression
Jacinta: That’s enough for me. Compulsory high-level doses for all males. Overdoses in fact. They either die or shut the fuck up.
Canto: So there’s a university textbook, Principles of social psychology, which has a section, the biological and emotional causes of aggression, and of course Hooven writes a lot about aggression and testosterone in humans and other animals. There’s just so much to dig into here. For example, pair-bonding male birds and other animals, such as bonobos, who have more of a share in child-rearing, have lower testosterone levels than those in social situations where there is a greater separation between males and females. Arguably that is the case in agricultural societies as opposed to hunter-gatherers.
Jacinta: So much easier to change hormone levels by just stuffing them into people’s bodies than by changing behaviour, though, surely. Can’t you just add them to the water supply?
Canto: That might be possible, especially if we lived in a thugocracy.
Jacinta: Hmmm, it gets more and more confusing.
Canto: What’s interesting about the findings is the chicken-egg issue. Does the gradual social evolution of male caring – if that’s what’s happening – reduce hormone levels or vice versa? I would hypothesise that it’s the caring that’s affecting the hormone levels, but how to test this?
Jacinta: Seriously, testosterone plays a huge role in our development, physiologically to take it to its most basic level. It makes for more athleticism, and probably for more of the competitive urge that leads to that obsessive athleticism, and bodybuilding claptrap. Somehow it makes me think of Mr Pudding, and his caricaturish experience of first being bullied by Charles Atlas types, and then learning a few martial arts-type skills to get revenge, with the end result of controlling a whole nation, and leading a military to rape and murder women and blow kids to bits in Ukraine. Testosterone has a lot to answer for.
Canto: And yet. Look at bonobos. Look at Scandinavia. The beast has been tamed, in a few pockets of our universe.
Jacinta: Do aliens have hormones, there’s a question.
Canto: Yeah we first have to answer the earthling question – are there aliens in the universe?
Jacinta: But haven’t quite a few humans been kidnapped by aliens?
Canto: Ha, oh yes, the ones who escaped…. but all the missing persons…
Jacinta: Returning to Earth, the hormone issue, and possibly even the neurophysiology issue, these raise the questions of masculinity and femininity – which Hooven explores from an endocrinological perspective – does a woman with a high testosterone level have a disqualifying advantage over another ‘normal’ woman, in running, jumping, throwing and lifting?
Canto: Hilariously – depending on your perspective – this has become a minefield in the world of sport and athletics. Hooven cites an athlete, Caster Semenya (and I know v little about this topic) who had a habit of blitzing the field in running events a decade ago – in fact from 2009 to 2018. Unsurprisingly, I would say, she had ‘suspiciously’ high testosterone levels (which of course would never have been measured before the 21st century), so complaints were made. Was this woman really a man? Which raises obvious masculinity and femininity questions…
Jacinta: Which, just as obviously, should be quashed by – fuck, she’s fast, that’s so fantastic! Go, girl!
Canto: But I suppose there’s a legitimate question – do abnormal levels of x give you an advantage?
Jacinta: Yeah, like long legs, in running? Shouldn’t leg length be subject to restrictions?
Canto: It’s a good point. We want to think maleness and femaleness are distinct, but we tend to think in terms of averages – the average female is 80% of the mass of the average male, the average male produces x more testosterone than the average female, etc, but there’s enormous variation within each gender, and that’s genderbendingly problematic for more than just athletics officials.
Jacinta: Anyway, just how important is endocrinology for a future bonobo world? Should we be focussing on promoting estradiol and progesterone rather than femaledom? Should we be screening politicians for the best hormonal balance rather than the best policies?
Canto: Ah but if my previously mentioned hypothesis is correct, we should be screening potential ‘leaders’ for their caring and sharing, which will lead to a greater expression of the ‘good’ hormones.
Jacinta: Yes, good for a society in which aggression has more serious consequences than it had in the past, what with WMDs and the like – the slaughter of women for their ‘contemptuous’ flouting of dress codes, the slaughter of ethic communities for their insistence on a modicum of independence. Aggression with a massive state apparatus behind it, and more effective weaponry than ever before. But how do we rid ourselves of these aggressive states without aggression? How do we even defend ourselves against them without aggression?
Canto: Maybe we’re just wanting too much too soon. I note that we’re getting more female political leaders than in the past, though they tend so far to be countries with relatively small populations – Scotland (our birth country), Scandinavian countries, New Zealand, Taiwan, the Baltic States… and, as with bonobos, it’s not just the alpha females, it’s the status of the whole female sex that makes the difference.
Jacinta: Yes, if we had but world enough, and time….
References
Jane Goodall, Through a window, 1990
Trevor Watson & Melissa Roberts, ed. The Beijing bureau, 2021
David Brophy, China panic, 2021
Bill Birtles, The truth about China, 2021
Carole Hooven, Testosterone: the story of the hormone that dominates and divides us, 2021
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5942158/
Nicky Hayes (?), Principles of social psychology, c2015?
a bonobo world 62: more species, and then back to the point of it all
male aggression – it’s everywhere
Canto: Okay, let’s look at other cetaceans. There are 89 species, so we can’t cover them all. There are toothed and baleen types, but all dolphins and porpoises are toothed. There are river dolphins and oceanic dolphins, and in terms of size, cetaceans range widely, so that we have names like northern right whale dolphin, southern right whale dolphin, false killer whale, pygmy killer whale and various types of humpback dolphin as well the humpback whale. So it might be that they’re as culturally various as humans. I’ll limit my examination, then, to four or five well-known species, with no pretence that any of them typify the whole.
Jacinta: Yes, when we talked about dolphins before, it was the common bottle-nose dolphin, right?
Canto: Essentially yes, and I’ll pick some of the best known cetaceans, avoiding those most endangered, because they’ll probably be the least studied in the wild. First, the humpback whale, which is a rorqual. Rorquals represent the largest group of baleen whales, and of course humpback whales are an iconic and fairly well researched species, as whales go. And one immediately interesting fact is that the females are on average slightly larger than the males.
Jacinta: Size usually matters.
Canto: And they can live up to 100 years. But let’s talk about sex, or courtship as the Wikipedia article on humpbacks charmingly describes it. You’ll be happy to know that humpbacks are polyandrous – that’s to say, females mate with many males during their breeding season. This is generally seen as the opposite of polygyny – one male mating with many females. In fact polyandry is more often seen in insects than in any other life forms. Humpbacks have even been known to have it off with other species. Wikipedia calls it hybridisation. There’s apparently a humpback-blue whale hybrid out there.
Jacinta: I assure you that when females rule the world – in nevereverland – any attempt to employ ‘euphemisms’ for fucking will be punished by instant castration.
Canto: Well you’ll also be amused to know that males fight over females.
Jacinta: How very unsurprising. But at least they sing, which almost compensates.
Canto: Yes, males and females vocalise, but the long, complex and very loud songs are produced by males. It’s believed that they help to produce estrus in the females.
Jacinta: The correct term is fuck-readiness.
Canto: In fact, researchers only think that because only males produce the complex songs. It’s a reasonable inference, but it could be wrong. Some think that the songs might be used to prove the male’s virility to the female, to make him more attractive. This supposedly happens with birdsong too.
Jacinta: Trying to think of human equivalents. Rocks in the jocks?
Canto: Oh no, too chafing. Being a good cook helps, I’ve found. But what with the obesity epidemic, that’s a balancing act. Anyway, those humpback boys put a lot of energy into their songs, which sometimes last for over 24 hours. Animals of one population, which can be very large, sing the same culturally transmitted song, which slowly changes over time. All interesting, but probably not much of a model for us. I can barely swim.
Jacinta: Well yes, it’s hardly sing or swim for us, but let’s turn to other cetaceans. What about blue whales?
Canto: Well it’s interesting to find that most websites don’t even mention their social life – it’s all about their ginormity, their big hearts, and their feeding and digestion. It took me a while to discover that they’re solitary creatures, which I suppose is common sense. Hard to imagine a superpod of blue whales out in search of a collective meal. They do sometimes gather in small groups, presumably for sex, and of course there’s a mother-calf relationship until maturity. As with humpbacks, the females are a bit larger than the males. What would that be about?
Jacinta: Well, some researchers (see link below) have discovered that male humpbacks favour the largest females, so there’s presumably sexual selection going on. And of course, they fight over the biggest females.
Canto: Well you can’t blame them for being macho. It be nature, and what do please gods.
Jacinta: Oh no, let’s not go there. Anyway, the largest females produce the largest and presumably healthiest offspring. They also found that the older females make the best mothers, which I’m sure is generally the case in humans too, mutatis mutandis.
Canto: So in conclusion, these mostly solitary creatures, whether they be cetaceans or primates, can’t be said to be patriarchal or matriarchal, but the males still manage to be more violent, or at least more cross with each other, than the females.
Jacinta: But it doesn’t have to be that way, hence bonobos.
Canto: Yes, but that makes me think. I hear that bonobos use sex to ‘ease tensions’, among other things. Tensions hints of violence, or at least anger. I’m wondering if that anger comes mostly from the males, and if the use of sex to dissipate that anger comes mostly from the females.
Jacinta: That’s a good question. There’s a site, linked below, which sort of looks at that question. It cites research showing that female bonobos gang up on male aggressors. The researchers found an absence of female-on-female aggression (perhaps less so than in the human world). According to this site – which may not be wholly reliable, as it’s really about humans and nightlife behaviour – female bonobos bond in small groups for the specific purpose of keeping males in line. How do they know that? They might be arguing from girl nightlife behaviour. I mean, who’s zoomin who?
Canto: The general point though is that among bonobos, males are more aggressive than females. Which isn’t to say that females can’t be aggressive, and not just in a defensive way.
Jacinta: This website also mentions something which is the general point of all our conversations on bonobos and humans and sex and well-being. It’s worth quoting in full:
Anthropological data analyzed by neuropsychologist James Prescott suggests societies that are more sexually open are also less likely to be violent. The key to understanding this correlation, however, is that it’s the society as a whole that is more sexually open and not just a small percentage of individuals.
Canto: That’s a good quote to get us back to humans. We need to look at this matter more closely next time. And the next and the next.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cetaceans
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna29187881
a bonobo world 61 or so: some more species
Gibbons – beautiful and imperilled
Canto: So if only we could quicken the modern world, which is so fast leaving behind the benefits of brute strength and embracing the strength of collaborative smarts… Well, maybe not that fast… We’d experience ourselves the loving fruits of bonobo-humanism.
Jacinta: Yeah, too bad. So let’s look more closely at other female dominated species, like elephants. They tend to value experience, so their family units have a female head.
Canto: Except that, they split into female and male groups, don’t they?
Jacinta: Well, they have these female family units, ranging from 3 to 25 members. The males presumably have their groupings, but sometimes they come together to form large herds or herd aggregations – huge numbers. Males can also be solitary, which virtually never happens with females. Of course it’s the females who raise the young, but there can be a lot of group solidarity.
Canto: It seems that the grouping changes more or less perpetually, seasonally, daily, hourly.
Jacinta: Yes, that’s a fission-fusion society, common among primates too – such as Homo sapiens at work, school, uni etc. But over time, the matriarch becomes more important, and presides over a wider network as she gets older. They play follow the leader as she has accumulated knowledge on the best watering holes, the paths of least resistance.
Canto: So elephants have it all worked out. What about those orangutans, what’s going on there?
Jacinta: Well apart from imminent extinction, there’s little to say. They’re solitary, though the Sumatran orang-utans are a little less so than those in Borneo, due to more food being available. The males exhibit hostility to each other and try to avoid each other, though they’re not territorial. They only hang out with females until they get their end away, and the females raise the offspring until they’re old enough to go solo.
Canto: So I wonder why the males are so much bigger than the females?
Jacinta: Yes they can be well over twice the size of the females. I haven’t found any explanation for it. They don’t have a harem of females to prove their rugged manliness. Apparently those big cheek pads help to attract the girls, but their huge bulk seems a bit superfluous.
Canto: Maybe it’s like whales – they grow big because they can. But then, the more you grow, the more you have to eat, presumably. A bit of a mug’s game.
Jacinta: Tell that to the elephants. Or those old ginorosauruses. Basically, if you’re as huge as an elephant, who else is going to attack you or compete with you? Apart from blokes with guns. But we were talking about sex. Or at least gender. Gorillas are proving a lot more complex than originally thought in their social structure – quite multilayered, not quite the chest-beating alpha male and his harem, more like human extended families. Matriarchies within patriarchies perhaps.
Canto: And what about gibbons – just to round out the primates. I know nothing about them.
Jacinta: Well, apparently these South-East Asian apes are monogamous, unlike other primates (except maybe humans, but I’m reluctant to rule on that). In fact only 3% of mammals are monogamous, according to a fact sheet I found (linked below). So that makes for family groups of two to six, just like our nuclear family, unless you’re a Catholic. Gibbons are considered as ‘lesser apes’, family Hylobatidae, unlike we great apes, family Hominidae. Physically, they’re by far the smallest of the apes, depending on particular species, but weighing at most about 12 kgs. These small family groups defend their territory aggressively – none of this fission-fusion stuff. They’re quite good at bipedalism, and present a good model for bipedalism in humans, but they’re also fantastically acrobatic tree-swingers, with the longest arms in relation to their bodies of any of the primates. They also have a nice healthy herbivorous diet.
Canto: They sound like a good human model all-round, and maybe a model for gender equality?
Jacinta: Well, yes, but I do prefer female supremacy. Gibbons are apparently the least studied of all the apes. There are 12 species of them, but many species are very near extinction, a fact not much known by the general public. Orangutans clearly get much more attention.
Canto: Okay so let’s look further afield – before coming back to human cultures to see if there are any matriarchies worth emulating. What more do we know about dolphins and other cetaceans?
Jacinta: Well, as you know dolphins live together in pods of up to 30, though sometimes where there’s an abundant food source they can form massive superpods of over 1000. And as we’ve learned, they engage in sex for fun.
Canto: I suppose also they could form superpods in the face of predators, like schools of fish.
Jacinta: Yes, possibly, though they wouldn’t have too many predators, unlike small fish. Interestingly these superpods can be made up of different cetacean species, so this would obviously benefit the smaller species. And individual dolphins can switch from pod to pod quite freely. Something like fission-fusion, but with greater flexibility. Researchers find this flexibility a sign of high intelligence.
Canto: Ahh, so that accounts for the stupidity of conservatives.
Jacinta: Some dolphin species are a bit more hierarchical than others, and you can see plenty of bite marks on bottlenose dolphins, evidence of fights for dominance.
Canto: And I recall a big hubbub a few years ago when those delightful creatures were discovered torturing and killing some of their own. But then, they are male-dominated, aren’t they?
Jacinta: They are, sadly. Males of all species are largely arseholes (well, not literally). But they certainly engage in a lot of play, I mean dolphins generally. Maybe they’ll evolve one day into a higher form of female-dominated life, but I doubt it. They’ll have to realise how fucked-up they are as a species to do that, like some humans have realised – but not enough.
Canto: Okay, so dolphins are out as a model. What about other cetaceans? I somehow suspect that orcas won’t fit the bill.
Jacinta: Next time. And we’ll look at some human models, if we can find them.
References
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/six-facts-about-elephant-families-9015298.html
https://seaworld.org/animals/all-about/orangutans/behavior/
http://www.gibbons.de/main2/08teachtext/factgibbons/gibbonfact.html
a bonobo world 37: chimps r us?
human tool use
There are a number of videos, including one by David Attenborough’s Planet Earth team, showing how chimps are able to engage in planned attacks on neighbouring chimp groups in a way that resembles, and is seen as ancestral to, tribal warfare among hominids and humans. The 4-minute Planet Earth vid doesn’t mention whether the attacking chimps are all male – a question of great interest to me – though it does mention an attack on an enemy female, which is unsurprising, considering human warfare. The fact that defeated chimps are sometimes eaten raises the grizzly question about our more recent ancestors, and our human selves. We may never have eaten our human victims alive (though we probably have), but we have subjected them to far more excruciating suffering than any other Earth-bound species could manage.
I’ve often claimed that we’re leaving warfare behind us, especially with the push to female empowerment, but I’m never quite sure if this is just wishful thinking. We should never allow ourselves to be complacent about apparent trends, to assume they’re somehow inevitable. And of course while need to push for such empowerment, we shouldn’t assume that this will produce the desired result, regarding ‘peace, love and understanding’ or anything else. We need to examine the evidence.
That’s why bonobo culture is so intensely interesting. It raises important questions. What exactly is the relationship between the power structure within bonobo groups – power held mostly by females – and their level of in-group aggression? How exactly does this compare with human power structures and human-to human aggression? How do these different power structures relate to hunting practices and diet? We know that the bonobo diet includes less meat than that of chimps, but is this due more to environment (bonobos are more arboreal, for example), or to social structure? Humans, we know, can get by on a vegetarian diet, and we also know that a less meat-heavy diet is more beneficial for the environment. We have also moved far beyond our primate cousins in being able to produce food through cultivation, using, over time, less and less land to produce more and more food. We even have the means, if not the will, to mass-produce artificial meat – ‘you won’t believe it’s not meat’.
Yet male aggression, in the domestic sphere, in politics, on the sports field, and in riotous assemblies, is as much a problem as ever. A world turned upside-down, with government, business, the law, science, academia and the military being led by women to the same extent as they are led by men today, that’s the impossible dream scenario that may solve this problem. Or not. But then, bonobos are so like chimps, aren’t they? I mean physically. But socially they’re not. The differences aren’t that great, and it only took a million or two years to produce them.
Of course, that’s where we’re hugely different. The changes we’ve undergone – we of European ancestry – in only the past few thousand years have been astonishing, and they do seem to be accelerating. But in those developments there’s hope. If you’re prepared to believe we can find solutions to anthropogenic global warming, to the loss of species diversity, to our own ageing population, and to the various national and cultural enmities that plague us as a species, then you can surely believe we can move towards a happier, sexier bonobo-type social existence with all the human benefits we can add to it through our extraordinarily imaginative, creative, problem-solving minds. Chimps r us, it may sometimes seem, but with the ascent of woman, bonobos r our future. At least it’s worth a try. I for one would love to be a male in a female-dominant human world. At least I just can’t imagine how it would be worse than the world we’ve made for ourselves.
Reference
Violent chimpanzee attack – Planet Earth – BBC wildlife (video)
A bonobo world, etc, 18: gender and aggression in life and sport
bonobos play-fighting
human apes play-fighting?
If anyone, like me, says or thinks that they’d like to be a bonobo, it’s to be presumed they don’t mean they’d like to live in trees, be covered in hair, have a shortened life-span, a brain reduced to a third of its current size, and to never concern themselves with why the sky is blue, how the Earth spins, and whether the universe is finite or infinite. What we’re really interested in is how they deal with particular matters that have bedevilled human societies in their infinite variety – namely sex, violence, effective community and the role of women, vis-a-vis these matters.
While making a broad generalisation about human society, in all its billions, might leave me open to ridicule, we seem to have followed the chimpanzee and gorilla path of male domination, infighting as regards pecking order, and group v group aggression, rising to warfare and nuclear carnage as human apes became more populous and technologically sophisticated. One interesting question is this: had we followed the bonobo path of female group bonding and controlling the larger males by means of those bonds, and of group raising of children causing reduced jealousies and infanticides, would we have reached the heights of civilisation, if that’s the word, and world domination that we have reached today?
I realise this is an impossible question to answer, and yet… Human apes, especially in post-religious societies, are recognising the power and abilities of their women more and more. Social evolution has speeded up this process, bringing about changes in single lifetimes. In 1793 Olympe de Gouges, playwright, abolitionist, political activist and author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, was guillotined by Robespierre’s disastrous Montagnard faction, as much for being a moderate as for being a woman. Clearly a progressivist, de Gouges opposed the execution of Louis XVI, and capital punishment generally, and favoured a constitutional monarchy, a system which still operates more or less effectively in a number of European nations (it seems better than the US system, though I’m no monarchist). Today, capital punishment generally thrives only in the most brutally governed nations, such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, though there are unfortunate outliers such as Japan, Singapore and arguably the USA (none of those last three countries have ever had female leaders – just saying). One hundred years after de Gouges died for promoting female equality and moderation, women were still being denied a university education in every country in the world. However in the last hundred years, and especially in the last fifty, we’ve seen dramatic changes, both in the educational and scientific fields, and in political leadership. The labours of to the Harvard computers, Williamina Fleming, Annie Jump Cannon, Antonia Maury and many others, working for a fraction of male pay, opened up the field of photometric astronomy and proved beyond doubt that women were a valuable and largely untapped intellectual resource. Marie Curie became the most famous female scientist of her day, and inspired women around the world to enter the scientific fray. Today, women such as Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, of CRISPR-Cas9 fame, and Michelle Simmons, Australia’s quantum computing wizard, are becoming more and more commonplace in their uncommon intellect and skills. And in the political arena, we’ve had female leaders in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Germany, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Belgium, France, Portugal, Austria, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Serbia, Croatia, Russia (okay, in the eighteenth century), China (nineteenth century), South Korea, Myanmar, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, the Phillippines, Sri Lanka (the world’s first female PM), Israel, Ethiopia and Liberia, and I may have missed some. This may seem an incredible transformation, but many of these women were brief or stop-gap leaders, and were all massively outnumbered by their male counterparts and generally had to deal with male advisers and business and military heavyweights.
So it’s a matter of rapid change but never rapid enough for our abysmally short life spans. But then, taking a leaf from the bonobo tree, we should look at the power of female co-operation, not just individual achievement. Think of the suffragist movement of the early 1900s (the term suffragette was coined by a Daily Mail male to belittle the movement’s filletes), which, like the Coalition of Women for Peace (in Israel/Palestine) a century later, was a grassroots movement. They couldn’t be otherwise, as women were then, and to a large extent still are, shut out of the political process. They’re forced into other channels to effect change, which helps explain why approximately 70% of NGO positions are held by women, though the top positions are still dominated by men.
When I think of teams, and women, and success, two more or less completely unrelated fields come to mind – science and sport. In both fields cooperation and collaboration are essential to success, and more or less friendly competition against others in the field is essential to improve quality. Womens’ team sport is as competitive as that of men but without quite the same bullish, or chimp, aggressiveness, it seems to me, and the research backs this up. Sport, clearly, is a constructed form of play, in which the stakes are sometimes very high in terms of trophies, reputations and bragging rights, but in which the aggression is generally brought to an end by the final whistle. However, those high stakes sometimes result in foul play and overly aggressive attempts to win at all costs – and the same thing can happen in science. Sporting aggression, though, is easier to assess because it’s more physical, and more publicly displayed (and more likely to be caught on camera). To take my favourite sport, soccer, the whole object for each team is to fight to get and maintain possession of the ball for the purpose of scoring goals. This battle mostly involves finesse and teamwork, but when the ball is in open play it often involves a lot of positional jostling and other forms of physicality. Personally, I’ve witnessed many an altercation in the male game, when one player gets pissed off with another’s shirt-tugging and bumping, and confronts him chest-to-chest, nature documentary-style. The female players, when faced with this and other foul play, invariably turn to the referee with a word or a gesture. Why might this be?
In 1914, the American psychologist E L Thorndike wrote:
The most striking differences in instinctive equipment consists in the strength of the fighting instinct in the male and of the nursing instinct in the female…. The out-and-out physical fighting for the sake of combat is pre-eminently a male instinct, and the resentment at mastery, the zeal to surpass, and the general joy at activity in mental as well as physical matters seem to be closely correlated with it.