Archive for the ‘other minds’ Category
do bonobos love each other?
Fly with me, lift me up to my feet, set me free from this skin I’ve been too long in
Leddra Chapman, ‘Picking Oranges’
I got to know that your heart beats fast, and I got to know I’m the only one for you. What have I become? I’m a fucking monster, when all I wanted was something beautiful. My love, too much. Your love, not enough
Meg Myers, ‘Monster’
It wasn’t that I didn’t wanna hold your hand, I just knew if we held tight once, we would never let go. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to call you mine – but, you’re not mine
Liza Anne, ‘Watering Can’
right… but why only two?
Canto: So bonobos have been called the ‘make love not war ‘ apes, a joke moniker in a way, but I’ve been thinking about that in an attempt to be more serious about love, fellow-feeling and all that stuff, in bonobos, humans, and other species.
Jacinta: Yes, the idea of ‘true love’, which involves some kind of eternal monogamy, and is seen as peculiarly human, and sells ye olde penny romances, is still with us, and whole governments are raised around it – the couple, the nuclear family and such. Of course, in the WEIRD world, there are increasingly diverse ‘household arrangements’, but they still generally involve separate, enclosed households. Ye olde hippy free love encampments, if they were anything other than an imaginary figment, seem as distant now as our connection with bonobos. A while back we read Ferdinand Mount’s 1982 book The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage, a fairly well-reasoned defence of marriage and monogamy, and its glorious survival in spite of the free love mini-revolution, but of course he didn’t mention bonobos or speculate about the domestic arrangements of australopithecines.
Canto: Mount was – still is – a lifelong conservative, so his history was always going to be tendentious, and as you say, limited to more recent times, so it didn’t really address how we came to be monogamous, if that’s what we are. And just to set the scene with our loving cousins:
Bonobos do not form permanent monogamous sexual relationships with individual partners. They also do not seem to discriminate in their sexual behavior by sex or age, with the possible exception of abstaining from sexual activity between mothers and their adult sons.
Wikipedia entry: bonobo sociosexual behaviour
Jacinta: Conservatives wouldn’t be too happy about that sort of indiscriminate behaviour among humans, but they’d be hard pressed to argue that bonobos are ‘immoral’ or selfish, or dysfunctional and a behavioural threat to the well-being of their own society.
Canto: No, they’d probably just argue that they’re not humans and we have nothing much to learn from them. We’re 8 billion, after all, and they’re just a few thousand. We win! But I don’t think our success has much to do with our domestic arrangements. It presumably has more to do with the enlargement of our prefrontal cortex, and the causes of that, which were presumably numerous and incremental, may have also brought about an increasing division of labour along patriarchal lines.
Jacinta: Certainly our history, at least since it has been recorded, has been overwhelmingly patriarchal. Hunting as a largely male activity, as I believe it also is in chimps, could be kind of brutalising, as it’s a kill-or-be-killed activity at its worst.
Canto: Meanwhile bonobos have been evolving in their own way over the past few million years. Or not. I mean, they’ve been content to stay in the forest, in a pretty lush part of the Congo, consuming a very largely vegetarian diet, not exactly requiring a lot in the way of muscles and physical prowess. And get this, again from Wikipedia:
Bonobo clitorises are larger and more externalized than in most mammals; while the weight of a young adolescent female bonobo “is maybe half” that of a human teenager, she has a clitoris that is “three times bigger than the human equivalent, and visible enough to waggle unmistakably as she walks”
As they say ‘exercise makes the clit grow longer’. Dunnit?
Jacinta: Well, it’s true, bonobo females engage in genito-genital rubbing more than males do, and this seems to form the basis of female group dynamics, which has led to female dominance. Unfortunately in humans, clothing creates a major barrier to this activity, at least in public.
Canto: Ahh, the terrible price of civilisation. But what I’m interested in is the effect of female dominance. Yes, it’s mediated to a large degree by sexual play, and a general closeness, which we don’t seem to have the maturity to adopt, so obsessed have we been with sexual possessiveness and jealousy, to the point of stoning people – sorry, women – for adultery. Death by drowning was the punishment back in Hammurabi’s day, almost 4000 years ago. Under Ancient Greek and Roman law, women could be executed for adultery, while the men would rarely get more than a smacked bottom.
Jacinta: Actually, stoning is still a punishment, for both genders, in countries that apply strict Shari’ah law. But in the WEIRD world, where no-fault divorce is increasingly accepted, adultery has faded as an issue. And generally we’ve become more relaxed about sexuality in all its varieties, and more sceptical about ‘love’, of the everlasting and exclusive type.
Canto: Yes, and yet… love, whether it’s a human invention or not, or whether it’s just hormones – it really hurts. You develop this ridiculous passion for someone, her movements, her smile, her vitality – though she has as much interest in you as in a rotten egg. Or she takes a general interest but backs off when she senses your need. And that’s just ‘unrequited love’. Even when it’s a mutual passion it can sooner or later turn to shit. The quotes above are just three of thousands that could be mined from songs, stories, legends and our own lives. Great expectations, dashed, sublimated, given up on, nursed in solitude. A tension between the cult of individuality and its freedoms and the love that loves to speak its name, where those individuals go together like a horse and carriage, like fire and ice, Batman and Robin, Venus and Mars…
Jacinta: Well, humans do tend to overthink these matters, or over-feel them perhaps, what with our heightened sensibilities. And our civilisations have tended to push us towards exclusive ‘love relations’, and the concept of ownership:
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour. (Exodus 20:17)
So it’s not just that we’ve fallen for the myth of true love and the ideal partner – our society has created a monogamous reproductive norm, and for a good few millennia (not really so long in human history, but we know hardly anything about our sociosexual behaviour beyond the last 10,000 years or so) we’ve fallen in with it – leaving aside sultans, random monarchs and the odd billionaire entrepreneur. Our homes have, over time, become designed to largely rule out even extended family togetherness. Bonobos don’t have homes and they’re not particularly territorial….
Canto: Well, to change the subject, I’m interested in that description of bonobo clitorises. It sounds wild -so to speak. And of course it sounds very much like a penis. It all makes me think of the whole penis envy malarky of Freudian psychotherapy. Not a problem for bonobos, clearly. If we get our social evolution right, our female descendants in the non-foreseeable future (if that makes any sense) will be waggling those clits about most merrily.
Jacinta: Hah, makes a change from current-day ‘clitoridectomy’ aka FGM.
Canto: Well, they could give em a trim, like modern-day circumcision. Or have em shaped and coloured, like orchids….
Jacinta: Lovely. Interestingly, Simone de Beauvoir touches on this in The Second Sex, probably influenced by the penis envy ideas of the time. Writing of woman:
her anatomy condemns her to remain awkward and impotent, like a eunuch: the desire for possession is thwarted for lack of an organ to incarnate it. And man refuses the passive role.
No organ permits the virgin to satisfy her active eroticism; and she does not have the lived experience of he who condemns her to passivity.
the second sex, trans. C Borde & S Malovany-Chevallier, vintage books 2011
But in the WEIRD world, things have changed, or are changing, and hopefully girls are much more expert at playing the organ. Though, unlike bonobos, it’s largely done in solitude.
Canto: But do bonobos love each other, or just each others’ organs? It’s probably as uninteresting a question as What’s this thing called, love?
Jacinta: Well, that’s it, bonobos just get it together, not just for sex, but for safety in numbers, for huddling and cuddling, for play, for warmth, food-sharing and back-scratching. I doubt if they wonder if it’s really love, or how selfish or selfless they’re being. It’s their life – one of community rather than pairing off – as long as they can be left to get on with it.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo
https://www.britannica.com/topic/adultery
Ferdinand Mount, The subversive family: an alternative history of love and marriage, 1982
Simone de Beauvoir, The second sex, 1949
the short life and strange brains of the octopus, and other thoughts
a meeting of minds?
Canto: So we’ve been reading about the strange world of the octopus, and her fellow cephalopods, the squid and the cuttlefish, and what they might tell us about other intelligent forms of life. So what might they?
Jacinta: This is quite a new field of investigation, but certainly an exciting one. The octopus appears to be the most intelligent invertebrate on earth, though we still have lots to learn about it, and we know even less about its cephalopod cousins.
Canto: And we need to be careful about the ‘it’ word, as there are at least 300 species of the beasties, which vary considerably in size, habitat and even quite possibly in life-span.
Jacinta: Yes, some octopuses appear to have very short life-spans, a mere two years, but so little is known about so many of the deeper water species out there…
Canto: They’re predators, of course, feeding mainly on crabs, but some of the shallow-water species are known to scavenge off human activities, stealing bait and the like. They have incredibly flexible, almost amorphous bodies that aren’t co-ordinated simply by a central brain. In fact their nervous systems are still very much a source of mystery.
Jacinta: Like our own. Well, okay we know a helluva lot more about ours. Some other facts: they have three hearts, their eight arms or tentacles are made up of four pairs, they’re all more or less venomous, they’re famously able to match their colour to their surroundings pretty well instantly, they can unscrew the lids of jars to get at the contents, some species collect shells to use as constructions around their homes, they have very high brain-to-body mass ratios, and they appear to be very quick to learn new stuff.
Canto: Apparently tentacles are out, they’re called arms. Tentacles are another thing. A cuttlefish has two tentacles and eight arms. Snails have tentacles. As to the brain and nervous systems of octopuses, here’s what we know. Two thirds of its neurons are to be found in its arms, and they can allow the arms to act independently to some extent. Interestingly, although octopuses have complex motor systems, they don’t have an internalised map of the body as vertebrates apparently do. It’s called a somatotopic map, and it’s found in humans in the primary somatosensory cortex, at the top of the brain. Octopuses’ brains/nervous systems are organised quite differently, and that’s the point – their relationship to us on the evolutionary bush is very distant indeed.
Jacinta: Yes, that’s exactly what makes them fascinating – they’ve evolved a complex nervous system on a completely different plan, like aliens.
Canto: Not quite – they still have neurons after all, and DNA. But the link between humans and octopuses probably goes back at least 500 million years, to some of the earliest complex life forms.
Jacinta: Not so complex by modern standards…
Canto: Indeed, something like a sea worm or sea sponge. Anyway, although they appear to have highly developed intelligence, their learning capacity is really hard to ascertain. They’re not highly social animals like many primates and cetaceans are, and they certainly don’t learn from their parents, since both parents ‘fall apart’ and die shortly after breeding.
Jacinta: They’re quite inventive, even playful, they’ve been observed pushing objects into circular currents and catching them. They also board fishing boats in search of food and find ways of getting out of lab aquariums. Their ability to flatten and elongate or bunch up when required makes them very slippery little suckers, you always have to keep an eye on them.
Canto: Well no doubt researchers will be keen to learn more about their neurology, but this relatively new understanding of their smarts raises questions about their treatment by researchers – not to mention eating them en masse.
Jacinta: Well just sticking with lab treatment, I remember reading in The Lab Rat Chronicles how the rather complacently cruel treatment of lab rats, and all experimental animals, is being questioned more and more, leading to the use of less invasive neurological and other operational approaches..
Canto: Which would in any case be a good thing – the more we can learn without destroying the living thing we’re seeking to learn about, the better, for obvious reasons.
Jacinta: Rats are really smart animals – and just about the most successful animals on the planet – and they certainly feel pain and become depressed, and it’s clear that octopuses do too. In fact some countries have rules against surgical procedures without anaesthetic for octopuses, presumably based on a growing body of knowledge about them.
Canto: They often lose an arm to predators – which by the way they’re able to regrow – and have been observed to favour and tend to damaged or lost arms and other parts, which is a clear sign of ‘feeling’ the damage. But really, the idea that animals don’t feel pain – any animal – has surely had its day.
Jacinta: So what about eating them? I gather that in some parts, eating them live is a thing.
Canto: Well I’ve always been of two minds about this, about eating other animals. And Peter Wohlleben argues for the smartness and the communal life of trees and plants, so that doesn’t leave us with anything to eat at all, if we’re being truly sensitive to others. But there’s no doubt we’re eating too much, we’re destroying the habitats of huge number of species, on land and sea, to feed our growing and increasingly voracious human population. Nobody knows how that’s going to end, though some are hoping, as ever, for technological fixes – artificial meat, ways of creating bumper harvests using less and less land and so forth.
Jacinta: Another whole realm of discussion, but getting back to octopuses, can they tell us anything about consciousness, given their vastly different origin, compared to us?
Canto: Well I don’t want to get into consciousness now – that’s such a massive subject – but they can tell us a lot about a different neurological system, obviously. The fact is, though, that we observe whales, crows, elephants, octopuses, rats and other creatures that are vastly different from each other behaving in ways we, in our indulgent and sometimes condescending manner, consider intelligent, but we know barely anything about, to paraphrase a philosopher, what it’s like to be any of those creatures. Do they have thoughts like us? Or do they have thoughts, but nothing like our own? Which of course raises the question, what exactly is a thought? Can it be reduced to brain processes or do we lose too much in the reduction? Will our endless and increasing probing of human and other brains definitively answer this question?
Jacinta: I think we’ll have to wait till after we die to find out…
References
Other minds: the octopus and the evolution of intelligent life, by Peter Godfrey-Smith
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus
https://onekindplanet.org/animal/octopus/