Archive for the ‘dominance’ Category
Why are bonobos female dominant? Culture or genetics?
I was going to entitle this post ‘How did bonobos become female dominant?’, but that assumes that they weren’t always so. To assume makes an ass out of u and me, and I don’t care about u, but I have my pride. And speaking of pride, lions live in those groups (of up to forty, but usually much smaller) and malely dominate, even though the women bring home most of the bacon, chevaline (well, zebra), venison, rattus and the occasional long pork, if they’re lucky.
The point is, we wouldn’t consider this a product of leonine (okay, lion) culture. It’s just what lions – male and female – are genetically programmed to do, just as marmosets, magpies (Australian) and macaroni penguins are programmed to be monogamous (more or less). But considering that separating genetic and cultural evolution in humans is a tricky business, the same would surely go for our closest living relatives. We’re generally convinced that the male dominance in most human history is cultural. I’ve often read the claim that the transition to an agricultural lifestyle in many parts of the world from about 11,000 years ago resulted in a more patriarchal society, with the concept of property, including women, becoming essential to power and dominance. This seems plausible enough, though I would assume that the first claims to property relied primarily on brute strength. Male muscularity is different from that of females, and, more importantly, they’re not hampered by pregnancies and child-rearing. And whereas hunter-gatherers (and it now seems the distinction between these lifestyles is by no means cut and dried) tend to migrate along with food resources, some concept of land ownership, based on kinship over time, clearly developed with an agricultural lifestyle. Again, such a fixed lifestyle would have essentially created the notion of ‘domesticity’, which became associated with the female world. And it seems also have encouraged a degree of polygyny as a sign of male social status. And as we left all this behind, in the WEIRD world so fulsomely described in Joseph Henrich’s book, we’re starting to leave patriarchy behind, though way too slowly for my liking.
So, let’s get back to bonobos. I was struck by an observation I read a while ago in some otherwise forgotten piece on bonobos. Female bonobos are smaller than male bonobos to much the same degree as in chimps and humans, but slightly less so. Considering that the split between bonobos and chimps occurred only between one and two million years ago (and I’d love that margin of error to be narrowed somehow), any reduction in this sexual dimorphism seems significant – and surely genetic. But then genes are modified by environment, and by the behaviour that environment encourages or necessitates. Here’s what I found on a Q&A forum called Worldbuilding:
Bonobos have less dimorphism because they all feed close together and females can almost always protect each other. Male A tries to monopolize female A and gets driven off by female B, C, and D.
Hmmm. There’s something in this, but not quite enough. Why wouldn’t the males bond together to monopolise a particular female? In non-euphemistic human terms this is called pack rape, and it does seem to be confined to humans, though coercive sex, on an individual level, is quite common in other species, and for obvious anatomical reasons it’s always the male who coerces.
This leads to the reasonable conclusion, it seems to me, that for females to have control in the sexual arena – at least in the mammalian world – requires co-operation. And that requires bonding, arguably over and above the bonding associated with ‘girl power’ in WEIRD humans. So here’s how the Max Planck Society explains it:
To clarify why same-sex sexual behavior is so important specifically for female bonobos, we collected behavioral and hormonal data for over a year from all adult members of a habituated bonobo community at the long-term LuiKotale field site in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In addition to our focus on sexual interactions, we identified preferred partners for other social activities such as giving support in conflicts. We also collected urine to measure the hormone oxytocin, which is released in the body in other species after friendly social interactions, including sex, and helps to promote cooperation.
We found that in competitive situations, females preferred to have sex with other females rather than with males. After sex, females often remained closer to each other than did mixed sex pairs, and females had measurable increases in urinary oxytocin following sex with females, but not following sex with males. Among same-sex and opposite-sex pairs, individuals who had more sex also supported each other more often in conflicts, but the majority of these coalitions were formed among females. “It may be that a greater motivation for cooperation among females, mediated physiologically by oxytocin, is the key to understanding how females attain high dominance ranks in bonobo society,” explained co-lead author Martin Surbeck, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Harvard University.
Now, I know I’ve written about the peptide hormone oxytocin before, somewhere, and suffice to say its role in behaviour and its relation to the general endocrine and neurotransmission systems are extremely complex. Having said that, there will doubtless be strong similarities for its role in humans and in bonobos. And, reflecting on the above quote, what came first, the oxytocin release, or the bonding? Should we encourage more oxytocin doses, or more female-female sex? Doing both sounds like a fine idea.
To tell the truth, I find the willingness to see bonobos as any kind of female model somewhat lacking. They’re ‘jokingly’ referred to as the scandalous primate, and their revolutionary nature is underplayed. Yet their relatively comfortable, largely frugivorous lifestyle in the southern Congo region, where their only real threat is humanity, reflects in miniature the comforts of the WEIRD world, with its hazards of overspending at the supermarket, lazing too long at the beach, or pokies, cocktail bars and ‘Lust-Skin Lounges’ for the true thrill-seekers.
Of course, we got to our ascendant position today through the explorations, calculations and inventions produced by our brains, and the super-brains of our cities, corporations and universities. What can we learn from a bunch of gangly, hairy mutual masturbators dangling about in the Congolese rainforest? Well, we brains and super-brains can still learn a bit more about sharing and caring – as any study of our own history can tell us – and we can certainly learn to stop being so dumb and fucked-up about sexuality, gender and power. Learning lessons from bonobos doesn’t mean getting hairier and improving our brachiation skills, but, well, eating less meat would be a start, given what we know about the environmental damage our current diet is causing. And that’s just one of many lessons we can learn. For me, of course, the most important lesson is the role played by females. How ridiculously long did it take for us – I mean we male humans who have been in control of almost all human societies since those societies came into being – to recognise and admit that females are our equal in every intellectual sphere? This is still unacknowledged in some parts. And although we call this the WEIRD world, the Industrial part of that acronym has lost its machismo essence, a loss Susan Faludi has sensitively analysed in her book Stiffed: the betrayal of the modern man – though I think ‘betrayal’ is the wrong word. After all, men were never promised or guaranteed to be breadwinners and heads of households, they took or were given the role through social evolution, and it’s being taken from them, gradually, through the same process.
Finally, getting back to the question in the title, the answer, for Pan paniscus as surely as for Homo sapiens, is culture, which can affect gene expression (epigenetics), which can ultimately affect genetics. I suspect that the slight diminution in the sexual dimorphism between male and female bonobos, over a relatively short period of time, evolutionarily speaking, might, if they’re left to their own devices (which is unlikely, frankly), lead to a size reversal and a world of male sexual servitude. Vive les bonobos, I’d like to be one, for the next few million years!
References
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world, 2021
Susan Faludi, Stiffed, 1999
A bonobo world ? personal reflections on societal health 7
Bertrand Russell – a very well-connected philosopher
This world of reading has long excited me about our scientific and technological achievements, about what we know and are discovering of our solar system, our galaxy and our universe, of our origins, our neurology and our immune system, and so much more, but I’ve also been fascinated, horrified and moved to tears by our history, and our capacity for inflicting and enduring suffering. Even while taking those steps to ‘rational knowledge’, we’ve revealed how unreasoning we are. Aristotle, the founder of syllogistic logic and virtue ethics, believed that many humans were born to be slaves, and that women needed to be ruled over by men due to their lack of control, deceptiveness and general inferiority. Plato’s many dialogues, such as Euthyphro and Protagoras, still provide much food for thought, but his notions of ideal justice and eternal souls have had a corrosively irrational influence. We understandably admire the ancient Greeks but much of their economy and that of other ancient civilisations was based on slavery, and in ancient Egypt as well as in feudal Britain the lower classes were slaves in all but name. The veiling of women began in Mesopotamia, and was common practice in ancient Greece and Rome. All of this betokened hierarchies of class and gender, and the majority of the population lucked out in the lottery of birth and parentage.
We may feel we’ve escaped from these rigid hierarchies, but it’s rather that we’re less honest or more deluded about them. Certainly the hierarchies aren’t quite as easy to define or identify, but they involve money, power and influence, as they always have. It’s not so much about caste, land ownership or birthright today, it’s about social connections, whether though family, business, academia or politics. It’s often not what you know, but who you know. The philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote of pulling the beard of William Gladstone, four-term Prime Minister of the UK, as a child. Bertrand was himself the grandson of John Russell, twice Prime Minister, and senior government minister for two decades. It wouldn’t be hard to find many other examples of well-connected success, though happily there are counter-examples, such as Newton, Faraday and Einstein. In any case, until recently, those hierarchies were much more fixed than they are today. For example a modern university education can be gained in a multitude of ways, such as scholarships and through government subsidies. Mature age students can be accepted by a simple entry test, something like an IQ test, as I was. This less regimented, more fluid society can easily lead people into the mythical belief that anyone can achieve anything they put your mind to, and that we’re entirely responsible for our achievements in the battle to the top in any sphere of activity. It is the reason, of course, for the rise of libertarianism in many affluent countries. But the fact is that elites and elitism are just as common as ever, and it was ever thus. When Aristotle wrote that some men were born to be slaves, he was insisting upon his own superiority, and that of his associates, those for whom he was writing.
So the human ape has always been ensnared in a hierarchy, whether as a hunter-gatherer or a computer programmer. Considering the inevitability of such a situation, the question we should ask is, are some hierarchies better or more effective than others for human flourishing, and for our subsistence with other species on the planet? With that question in mind, let’s again consider our ape cousins, the bonobos and the chimps.
Chimpanzees are far more numerous than bonobos and have been studied more thoroughly in the wild. Like bonobos, they’re an endangered species, their numbers being considerably reduced by deforestation, habitat degradation and poaching – the standard problems inflicted by human apes on all of their cousins. Chimps like to move around, in small travelling bands of a few individuals, but habitat degradation and fragmentation has limited this behavioral inclination, just as land clearing and the takeover and degradation of natural resources by Europeans in Australia has limited the behavioral inclinations and practices of its more ancient human inhabitants. However, these small groups often come together to form larger communities of as much as 150 members. This splitting and combining behaviour, shared by bonobos (and of course by humans), is described as a fission-fusion society. The smaller groups perform different functions, such as an all-male hunting party or an all-female nursing group, or a combination of genders and generations for various purposes, but the social structure is always dominated by males, who fight each other for dominance. Once a particular male has asserted his dominance, he maintains it through aggression, even when there is no challenge from other males. This results in a dominance hierarchy, with a second and third most dominant male, each one threatened from below and threatening the chimp above him. Such a hierarchy is inherently unstable, not only because individuals grow stronger and weaker as they grow and age, but because the fission-fusion society produces shifting coalitions which can alter the balance of power at any time. A dominant male who develops an overly aggressive style might be toppled, and even killed, in a ‘palace coup’ of disgruntled underlings. This allows for a form of political manoeuvring to defeat physical aggression. A less physically strong male may develop political skills, if not to get to the top, to derive benefits from his king-maker role. In this situation, the alpha male may also have to develop political skills as well as displaying aggression. Threats to his power often come during the fusion period of the fission-fusion dynamic, and he often succeeds in maintaining his position through display of force rather than attack, much like a dictator mobilising his forces around the perimeter of a demonstration.
Female chimps, of course, are not necessarily entirely passive in such circumstances, and will use their connections and their sexual availability to influence the social hierarchy and their own position within it. Female dominance has even been recorded in chimps in captivity, though it is likely very rare. The males are aggressive not only in terms of maintaining or overturning the hierarchy but in maintaining, defending or expanding territory, though this territoriality may vary between subspecies, and may even be affected in the wild by those humans who study them and provide them with food, so as to keep them nearby. Think of the territoriality of your pet dog, who is kept well-fed and cared for by the pack leader, yourself, and feels threatened by canine and even human encroachers.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee
Thomas Crump, A brief history of science, 2001