a bonobo humanity?

Casting around for something new to write about – which is only occasionally a problem – I’ve found, more or less by accident, an online essay published back in 2015 in Evolutionary Psychology, which is a review of a book by Susan Block, The bonobo way: the evolution of peace through pleasure. I’ve never heard of the book, but it sounds promising. However, this reviewer, Ryan Ellsworth, is clearly not a fan. You get a sense of this early on: 

In The Bonobo Way, Block advises that recognizing and tuning in to our “inner bonobo” can bring positive consequences such as improvement in one’s sex life, interpersonal relationships, and mental health. While not a scholarly book by any measure, it demands some treatment, for, like Sex at Dawn, it bears on the public’s understanding of bonobos, humans, and the science that informs this understanding.

So we get some sense that Ellsworth is going to give the author of ‘this muddled book’, as he calls it, ‘The Treatment’, courtesy of Science. He goes on to say that he’s going to teach Block, and us, some lessons. First, he challenges two basic assumptions she makes:

that 1) bonobos and humans are sufficiently similar for one species to hold useful lessons for the other; and/or 2) that bonobos surpass humans in the aforementioned qualities…

The aforementioned qualities are these:

Block urges that the time is ripe to “learn as much as we can from [bonobos] about our noblest and kinkiest characteristics, our capacity for peace (even world peace) through pleasure, more satisfying relationships, better communication, hotter sex and deeper love”.

True, this does sound like hippy fun stuff, and I would want to qualify it in various ways. but the first assumption is a reasonable one to me. There are no species on the planet more similar to us than chimps and bonobos – if we can’t learn from these species we can hardly learn from any others, and I’m no great fan of human exceptionalism. My focus on bonobos, though, has been less about sex per se, and more about matriarchy – which of course is the key to different attitudes to sex and sexuality. Our patriarchal societies, battened down by all the major religions that have dominated much of humanity for millennia, and which the WEIRD world is only just beginning to squirm its way out of, are I feel, slowly eking out their final days, and monogamy too – not practised by either of our two closest relatives, is not quite as strong, particularly in the WEIRD world, as it once was. We have to take the long view, but it will surely be helped by noting the success story of bonobo society, currently being assisted by human protections in that tragic mess of a human state, the former ‘Belgian’ Congo (actually the then personal fiefdom and killing field of Leo Victor, by provenance Leopold II of Belgium). 

Ellsworth, I think, misses the point completely while engaging in what I would describe as scientific gobbledegook:

Recognition of our relationship to other apes doesn’t necessitate that we are like them in any particular respect. Phylogenetic distance alone does not provide sufficient grounds for arguing that species are similar for any trait; nor that they should be dissimilar on some trait in question. The utility of comparative genomics and phylogenetics in biology depends upon our comprehension of evolutionary processes, and they do not lend themselves easily to facile postulations of expected phenotypic similarities based solely on genetic similitude.

Don’t try to understand this – it’s completely irrelevant. What we’re concerned about here isn’t biology but cultural praxis. It is the culture of bonobos – and they certainly have a culture – that should inspire us, and make us wonder – how did our culture go so off the rails as to be as patriarchally violent and exploitative of females as it came to be? 

I’ve just pointed out in my previous post re capital punishment that the nations most enamoured of state killing are the most patriarchal – Confucionist China with its massively male-dominated government, and the Islamist governments of the Middle East with their veiled and silenced women. Of course we can’t compare this with chimp and bonobo social practices directly, but we know through long observation that male-dominated chimp society practices and condones infanticide, when alpha males want to breed with particular females. Perhaps ‘condone’ is the wrong word here – the males simply get away with it, to the distress of female mothers. Chimps are also known to engage in warfare, troupe against troupe, even until one troupe is completely wiped out. Bonobos, on the other hand, ease the possibility of conflict with other troupes by food-sharing, and other delightfully friendly and relationship-opening practices. Compare trading in human societies, as opposed to warfare.

Ellsworth points out that Block and others have blamed the rise of agriculture for a ‘masking’ of our naturally promiscuous nature:

Block relates that “prehistoric humans participated in various forms of bonoboesque ‘free love,’ group sex and multi-partner arrangements … for tens of thousands of years before the advent of farming and our current ownership-oriented, property based, paternity-obsessed society” (p. 63). As do Ryan and Jethá [authors of Sex at dawn], Block points the finger at agriculture as the source of stultification of our bonobo-like sexuality, especially for women, but maintains that modern society masks, but has not changed, our promiscuous nature.

It’s certainly true that human society has, for as long as history has been recorded, been hierarchical, ownership-oriented and largely patriarchal. Whether we were more ‘promiscuous’, a rather dodgy term, before that, is unknown. I’d really love to find out though. 

One major difference between human apes and our cousins is the relationship between sex and fertility. Our last common ancestor with chimps/bonobos lived sometime between 6 and 8 million years ago (there’s much debate about the timing), while the bonobo/chimp divide occurred much later, around 1.5 million years ago, with the formation of the Congo River barrier. There are many things I’d love to know about these histories. How and when did our species become fertile pretty well all year round? As I’ve reported in a previous post, the Guinness Book of Records has it that the most children born of one woman is 69. I suspect this is bullshit, but there’s no doubt that the record for human births is way way higher than that for chimps and bonobos. So what’s the explanation? Higher androgen levels may be one factor – these hormones are important for fertility in both males and females, but also for chimps and bonobos so I’m not sure… 

I’ve heard tell that many animals are ‘in season’ or ‘in heat’ – when they can become pregnant – only at certain times in a month, somehow related to women’s menstrual cycle. Whether or not this is true for some mammals, it doesn’t apply to our closest relatives any more than it does to us. However, female sexual swellings appear to be a come-on for males, as this abstract from a 2004 paper, ‘Female sexual swelling size, timing of ovulation, and male behaviour in wild West African chimpanzees’, linked below, more than suggests:

We are able to show that (i) even within the traditionally defined maximum swelling period, further slight increases in swelling size indicate approaching ovulation, and (ii) that male mating interest changes according to the changes in swelling size.

But it gets more complicated: 

Finally, when having the choice between several “maximally” tumescent females, the alpha male prefers the female that is in the fertile phase of her cycle rather than that with the biggest swelling at that time.

Which seems to suggest that something’s going on ‘under the hood’ in terms of hormones and pheromones. How much of this ‘unconscious’ stuff relates to humans? I’ve often experienced ‘lust at first sight’ in my youth, and even beyond, but I doubt if it had to do with a woman’s sexual swellings – surely the last thing on my mind. It had to do with a woman’s face, her smile, the grace of her movements, a clever comment, a way of dressing, much of the stuff that is typically human and sets those chemicals swirling. 

I’ve taken myself a bit far from Ryan Ellsworth’s critique, but these issues are of grand importance to me, so, to be continued…