Posts Tagged ‘chimps’
more on bonobos, sex and ‘evolutionary psychology’
don’t worry, bonobo-human males can still be tough guys…
So, back to the essay by Ryan Ellsworth, which bears the mocking title, ‘Dr. Strangeape, or How to Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bonobo‘.
As for loving the bonobo, an animal I’ve written about many times, I’m reminded of when I first learned about these creatures, on ABC radio’s Science Show back in the eighties. The reporter finished the segment semi-facetiously saying ‘Vive les bonobos! I want to be one!’ I’ve never quite been the same since.
And going back further in my history, to my childhood and teen years, feeling trapped by my parents’ loveless and somewhat toxic marriage, I read, or at least skimmed, Bruno Bettelheim’s Children of the Dream, which told of a more open system of child-rearing in which, or so I imagined, one could choose one’s own parental figures and protectors, within some kind of ‘open field’ of role models and playmates. A sense of entrapment and yearning…
The point I’m making here is that, for me, bonobos are a touchstone, just as the potential of the kibbutzim was a touchstone in my youth. And however one thinks of agriculturalism, the development of enclosed nuclear families behind walls of ownership, has proven disastrous for some as well as being a boon for others, in terms of inheritance, both genetic and material.
But let’s return to Ellsworth’s critique. Take this intriguing passage:
Block refers to babies to care for, and reputations to protect, but does not seem to understand the significance of these two things for understanding human sex differences in sexual desire. Perhaps she privately does, but to acknowledge the significance of these forces on the evolution of human sexuality would severely compromise her arguments, as it demands recognition of the fact that women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity identical to men. To argue that females are as interested as males in sexual variety is to buy into a sexist worldview wherein the male is the typical specimen of the species by which to compare females (Saxon, 2012). Although ostensibly parading under the guise of liberation, such a position is no less sexist or anti-feminist than is the oppression of women’s sexuality.
Eh what? As to women having reputations to protect, I’m reminded of the women who were stoned to death for adultery in early Judaeo-Christian days, while the men received little more than a finger-wag. That would surely have made a difference to women’s overt behaviour. That ‘women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity equal to men’ says nothing about the actual desires of women – surely an individual thing – and everything about societal pressures within patriarchy. And Ellsworth’s claim here that suggesting females might be as interested in sexual variety as males is sexist because males have been doing it (with impunity) for generations – and so this is the ‘natural’ pattern for males but not for females – is, to me, a mind-bogglingly sexist argument. He has surely got to be kidding.
So before I go on with this analysis, let’s be clear about something. The reason that bonobos are something of an inspiration – for me at least – is that they are female dominant, and they are less violent than chimps. The sex thing is, for me, the cherry on top, while I also recognise that the sexual activity – mostly mutual masturbation – and the reduction in violence, and greater empathy, are intimately connected.
And they’re our closest living relatives, so we can learn, by studying how they came to differ from chimps, and trying to understand how humans came to be so chimpishly patriarchal, lessons for our future.
While things are changing, we live in an extremely patriarchal society. There are some 195 nations recognised currently, and 18 of them have a female head of state. That’s less than 10%, and this is likely a record for female leadership. Another source of power is wealth, a much murkier issue, but I don’t think it would be unreasonable to claim that 99% of the world’s wealth is in the hands of men. A world ‘turned upside down’ in terms of these figures, however delicious to contemplate, isn’t going to happen in the lifetimes of any of our great-great-great-great grandchildren. But that’s only a couple of hundred years, at most. Who knows how many thousands of years it took for patriarchy to become the human norm?
We can look, though, at so-called hunter-gatherer societies. I say ‘so-called’ because I’ve been told that this is now a much-contested term. Writers and researchers such as Bruce Pascoe and Bill Gammage have focussed on Australian Aboriginals’ understanding and treatment of their land to provide a much more nuanced picture of their lifestyle, though this has become politically contested here to a tedious degree. It may also be reasonable to assume that the blanket term ‘Aboriginal culture’ is too facile, given their multitude of language groups, and the variety of environments upon which they depended. In any case there is a standard view that ‘men’s business’ and ‘women’s business’ were/are separate but complementary. And hunter-gatherer groups or tribes in Africa, some still extant, are generally regarded as egalitarian, suggesting that this was the norm for all humans before what we term ‘civilisation’, the building of civil structures, both material and in terms of operational hierarchy.
Okay, back again to Ellsworth. He argues that Block ignores or downplays the political side of bonobo sex:
If Block had examined the political side of sex, it would have become clear that among bonobos sex is a mechanism of achieving and maintaining status, and a means of social manipulation wielded mainly by females. Most noncopulatory sexual behavior in bonobos takes the form of genito-genital rubbing between adult females, with subordinate females using their sexual receptivity to curry favor from higher-ranking females, most often in the context of feeding. Note that selection pressures for variety and quantity of reproductive partners are not the same as those for nonconceptive sexual activity such as genito-genital rubbing, as female bonobos display discriminative mate choice around the time of ovulation.
Ellsworth seems to ignore that bonobos also engage in this sexual activity for pleasure, just as humans do in the post-contraceptive, post-Catholic WEIRD world. And I’m not ignoring the fact that bonobo females engage in all that genito-genital rubbing to create bonds within the female community which, inter alia, keeps uppity males in their place. And, yes, females display discriminative mate choice, not only for themselves but also for their offspring, as Martin Surbeck cutely describes in a New Scientist article:
If your mum gets too involved in your love life, spare a thought for bonobos. Females of these great apes, which are closely related to chimpanzees, help their sons with hook-ups, guard the young lovers while they mate, and even haul rival males off females mid-sex.
Interesting to note that it’s their sons’ sex lives that concerns them, not their daughters’. Shades of the old patriarchy?
But Ellsworth, I think, downplays the pleasure-bonding aspects of bonobo sexuality in favour of the political – a typically male bias. Both are important, but it’s surely better to mix your politics with wankery than warfare, another reason for considering bonobos as an archetype and exploring why humans went the way of patriarchy – and extreme patriarchy at that. Anyhoo, let’s consider this passage:
….. maybe in some respects bonobos are similar to humans in sexual behavior, but not in the ways that Block intends to convey, and the differences are far greater than the similarities. If we do wish to focus on similarities, the most apparent and basic of all is that in both species sexual behavior is not a public good, but a commodity.
Again Ellsworth is keen to focus on the political over the pleasurable, making a false either/or distinction. But he doesn’t speculate anywhere in the essay about why bonobo females became dominant – he’s too interested in claiming why they cannot in any way be seen as a model for humanity. The essay pushes this argument with monotonous regularity, combined with ridicule. Frans de Waal, on the other hand, offers this, in Bonobo, the forgotten ape:
Bonobo society offers females a more relaxed existence. Females control the resources, dominate the males, and have little to compete over aside from their sons’ careers. The rich forest habitat of the bonobo evidently permits such an organisation. Our ancestors, however, adapted to a much harsher environment.
Frans de Waal, Bonobo, the forgotten ape, p 135
This more plentiful and relaxed environment is worth speculating on in our post-industrial age – at least in the WEIRD world. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, in my own youth I worked in several factories – Simpson-Pope, Wilkins Servis, Atco Structures, Tubemakers of Australia, and Griffin Press. They have all since closed down – not, I hope because of me. They’ve become obsolete, or mechanised, or shipped offshore. Hard, physical labour is becoming rarer in our modern society, in which brain work is much more valued. The rich, post-industrial habitat of WEIRD human society offers females a more relaxed existence. Females can control the resources, dominate the males, and have little to compete over aside from their sons’ and daughters’ careers.
Interestingly, it’s been found that bonobo males engage in lots of fighting for hierarchical positions and the attention of the females – just not in as deadly a way as chimps.
And meanwhile, there’s that sex thing….
References
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491501300115
Frans de Waal & Frans Lanting, Bonobo: the forgotten ape, 1997
https://www.science.org/content/article/bonobos-hippie-chimps-might-not-be-so-mellow-after-all
on gender, and bonobos
So there seems to be a lot of noise about gender issues these days, and it has been a topic of much interest to me from pre-pubescent days. I wrote in my novel In Elizabeth about how, even in primary school, I stood at the back of my class line during ‘school assembly’ and surveyed my classmates in terms of ‘likeability’, not so much in sexual terms, though there was probably an element of that. It interested me to think, or feel, that those who attracted me least were the ‘girly girls’ and ‘the boysy boys’, even if I could only judge from the clothes they wore, which may well have been chosen by their parents. But also something in the way they moved, which attracted or repulsed me like no other school-kid.
Later, into my teens, with schooldays happily left behind, I discovered Bowie, and Lou Reed’s Transformer album, and played deliciously transgressive games with lipstick and stockings and a tucked-away penis. It was a phase, you might say, but I do recall that in the pre-pubescent era, I found boys who were just as physically attractive as girls, an attraction that faded with the appearance of facial hair and signs of muscularity. Broken voices might have broken the spell too.
One term that I never had to consider, of course, was the term ‘trans’, a term I’m still not sure that I understand, hence this investigative piece. But before I embark on that prickly issue, here’s a thought.
Do dogs know that they’re male or female? Cats? Birds? Yes, some get pregnant, or lay eggs, while other don’t, and that’s how we distinguish them, as well as anatomically, but… Is it a matter of consciousness, aka the hard problem of philosophy? Of course ‘AI’ provides an answer, which is more or less the one I would give. Gender as we know it is a social construct, as well as an aspect of language, but with other creatures it’s more about biological cues – pheromones perhaps, as well as subtle physiological differences (perhaps not so subtle for them). Chimps/bonobos seem to recognise those of their own sex, not just for sex but for hanging out, for fighting and so on. And it seems that, even with our close cousins, there are girly girls and boysy boys, as Frans de Waal noted in his book Different, particularly in his description of the gender-nonconforming female chimp, Donna, brought up in the Yerkes Field Station in Atlanta, USA:
Donna grew up into a robust female who acted more masculine than other females. She had the large head with the rough-hewn facial features of males, and sturdy hands and feet. She could sit poised like a male. If she raised her hair, which she did more often the older she got, she was quite intimidating, thanks to her broad shoulders. Her genitals were those of a female, however, even though they were never fully swollen. Female chimpanzees, at the peak of their thirty-five day menstrual cycle, sport inflated genitals. But after Donna passed puberty, hers never reached the shiny maximum size that announces fertility. The males were barely interested in her and refrained from mating. Since Donna also never masturbated, she probably didn’t have a strong sex drive. She never had offspring.
Frans de Waal, Different: what apes can teach us about gender, pp 50-51
de Waal spends the next half dozen pages describing Donna in terms of sex (physical elements) and gender (behaviour), which again reminds me of schooldays. Donna was big for a female, just as some human females are taller and heavier than the average male, her calling voice was lower than most females’, and she engaged in hooting, swaggering behaviour with other males, though she was never violent. As with humans, male chimps are hairier than the females, but Donna was hairier than most. In spite of her eccentricity, her tendency to hang out with the males and her unusual appearance, she was well-accepted by her troupe.
So was Donna “trans”? de Waal asks this question himself:
Individuals who are born as one sex yet feel they belong to the opposite sex are known as transgender. Transgender humans actually prefer to turn this description around and prioritise their felt identity. They were born as one sex but found themselves inside the body of the other. We have no way of applying this to Donna, however, because we can’t know how she perceived her gender. In many ways – her grooming relations with others, her non-aggressiveness -she acted more like a female than a male. The best way to describe her is perhaps as a largely asexual gender-non-conforming individual.
Ibid, p54
I mentioned schooldays. A fond memory from when I was around nine years old was of a class-mate, a big strapping thunder-thighed girl who would lie on her back on the school’s grassy knoll and urge us to run and jump on her. She’d catch us, rough us up a bit, then toss us to one side ready for the next victim. As the smallest kid in the class I was an easy toss, and I loved it. I found her totally admirable, perhaps also because she was the smartest kid in my class – along with myself of course.
The point here, I think, is acceptance of difference – which is what de Waal’s Different is all about. In some ways the ‘trans’ thing is about our need to categorise, and our obsession with being hard and fast about those categories. I recall my enthusiasm when unisex toilets became a thing a couple of decades ago, but it doesn’t seem to have caught on, really, though I do know of a few people who subscribe to gender fluidity, and ‘men who want to be men’ and ‘women who want to be women’, are types I prefer to avoid, largely because they tend to want to impose those hard and fast categories on others. But in researching ‘gender fluidity’ I again find this human tendency to categorise gets in the way, with ‘gender fluid’ being described as it own category that requires explaining, like some medical/physiological/psychological condition, as if people who are this way worry about being abnormal in some sense, rather than rarely giving it a moment’s thought.
And yet, what with the patriarchy that is still with us, abetted by all the major religions, gender in a general sense is something we need to face. So I will leave transgender and gender reassignment issues, which are purely human ones, for another piece, and focus for now on sex, or gender, and power, which is an issue for all complex social creatures.
de Waal has a chapter in his book, ‘Bonobo Sisterhood’, which compares those apes with their chimp cousins and neighbours. The Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary near Kinshasa, capital of the embattled Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), is home to over 70 bonobos, many of them damaged orphans rescued from poachers and traders. This has made the sanctuary a difficult place for observing the natural life of bonobos, since many of them have experienced injury, separation from parents and other disruptions, including leading pampered lives in human households. One female bonobo who had been brought up with humans was quite bewildered when brought to the sanctuary, where other females greeted her with kisses and presenting of genitals for hoka-hoka, also known as genito-genital (GG) rubbing, a form of female sexual bonding that is key to their collective control of males. Not having been brought up in a bonobo environment, this female took some time to become accustomed to the ‘natural’ behaviour of her kind. Another bonobo had spent his early years in a gorilla enclosure, and was accustomed to making ‘gorilla’ noises and gestures. He was quite bewildered when female bonobos made advances, and didn’t recognise their genital swellings as anything sexual – though he eventually worked it out.
The point here is that there are social cues about sex and behaviour as well as what we might consider natural cues. And, as Donna the chimp has shown us, there may be wide differences in sexual behaviour within species, and it might be well for we humans to note the tolerance within the chimp community shown to Donna’s quasi-male behavioural traits.
de Waal provides a description of bonobos, particularly in contrast to chimps, that I’ll set down here to remind myself, more than anyone, of the difference:
Chimps look as if they work out in the gym every day. They have large heads, thick necks, and broad, muscular shoulders. In comparison, bonobos have an intellectual look, as if they spend time in the library. They have slim upper bodies, narrow shoulders, thin necks, and elegant piano-player hands. A lot of their weight is in their legs, which are long and thin. When a chimpanzee knuckle-walks on all fours, his back slopes down from his powerful shoulders. A bonobo, in contrast, has a perfectly horizontal back because of his elevated hips. When standing on two legs, bonobos straighten their back and hips better than any other ape, so that they look eerily human-like. They walk upright with remarkable ease while carrying food or looking out over tall grass.
Frans de Waal, Different: p 109
There’s more, and you get the impression that de Waal is very much captivated by the species. He even argues that their anatomy is closer to Lucy, our Australopithecus ancestor, than is any other of the great apes. It’s true that they’re more arboreal, due to the environment in which they’re confined. They’re also more group-oriented than chimps and more neotenous, according to de Waal. That’s to say, they preserve childhood or juvenile traits into adulthood – as do humans, with our love of play of all kinds. Their sensitivity may be attested to by a poignant story related by de Waal. A group of bonobos were sent to the Hellabrunn Zoo in Munich in the 1930s, just around the time that they were recognised as a separate species. Their uniqueness was noted by the first experts who studied them – ‘The bonobo is an extraordinarily sensitive, gentle creature, far removed from the demoniacal Urkraft [primitive force] of the adult chimpanzee”. But, as de Waal relates:
Sadly, the Hellabrunn bonobos died on the night in 1944 when the World War II allies bombed Munich. Terrified by the noise, they all succumbed to heart failure. That none of the zoo’s other apes suffered the same fate attests to the bonobo’s exceptional sensitivity.
Ibid: p 111
It seems to me – no doubt many would disagree – that bonobo sensitivity bears some relation to their matriarchal and more generally bonding culture. As de Waal and others point out, bonobos really are very very sexual, and it has nothing to do with reproduction, the rate of which is no greater than chimps. And it really is a ‘make love not war’ mind-set, with sexual closeness, especially among females, acting against serious violence, though they can be as rough-and-tumble in their play as their chimp cousins. de Waal, in his bonobo chapter, describes how reluctant the scientific community were to accept both bonobo matriarchy and bonobo sexual enthusiasm. I find this community’s reluctance, even today, to emphasise the matriarchy and sexuality of this closest relative of ours, to be a source of great frustration. Bonobos deserve our attention – and will repay it in spades – not just by the fact that they’re matriarchal but in the way they’ve become matriarchal, in spite of a slight sexual dimorphism in the males’ favour. Diane Rosenfeld’s The Bonobo Sisterhood is a start, but it requires the attention and activity of both females and males to move us in the right direction. Et ça va prendre beaucoup de temps, malheureusement.
References
Frans de Waal, Different: what apes can teach us about gender, 2022
Diane Rosenfeld, The bonobo sisterhood, 2022
https://www.bonobosisterhoodalliance.org
Claudine at school – a bonoboesque novel?
This is the Penguin edition I’m reading
I’ve been aiming for reading 40 books a year – maybe just because nobody seems to read books anymore. I go to cafes here in the pleasantly middling city of Adelaide, with me book, and notice a few tables with people sitting alone, reading, or maybe just looking, but not at books, at their phones. I don’t know how bookshops survive these days and I can only assume they won’t survive for much longer. Someone close to me buys me books on special occasions – my birthday, Christmas – but she orders them online – delivered from some massive warehouse, I imagine. The next step will no doubt be to eliminate the paper book – a terrible waste of trees, ink and the like, when we have ipads and their successors. And then of course reading itself will be eliminated, the whole tome being plugged into our frontal cortex, complex metaphors, hyperbole, onomatopoeia and all.
Anyway, it’s December and I’m a bit behind on my 40 books – I’ve gotta read 6 books this month! So, one book I’ve chosen is something decidedly racey – a novel (I almost exclusively read non-fiction these days) by the French author Colette, published in 1900 under the name of Willy, her first husband. It was Colette’s first novel, and it’s a doozy – sexy, witty, and enormously self-assured. My paperback copy has been languishing on my bookshelves… well, having just blitzed through the first 60 pages, I happened to glance at the inside front cover, where I found my name written, and the date of purchase, July 1982 – that’s 42 years ago (!), and well before I began my French degree in 1986. I’m thinking now of getting a collection of her works in the original – I couldn’t think of a more stimulating way of brushing up on la belle langue.
So though I’m trying to rush through Claudine à l’école, it’s really worth lingering on, like anything delicious. So far, it’s a world of women – schoolgirls of around fifteen, and their school-teachers, some of them not much older, and the forbidding senior mistress who turns out be rather drawn to her juniors. And of course there are a few male masters to drool over, in a mocking, superior sort of way. I recall reading about how Willy urged Colette to make the content a bit more steamy, and I like to think she was happy to comply. Anyway, time to read a bit more….
So I’m hoping the term bonoboesque will catch on, but it’s unlikely, both for its intrinsic clunkiness (and yet there is beauty…) and for the fact, more to the point, that I’m the world’s worst promoter of anything. Whateva, I’ve never read anything as bonoboesque as this novel. If bonobos could speak…
So, I’m wondering, does Colette continue in this vein? She was a prolific writer, beginning with four Claudine novels, all of which were immensely popular and provided a good income – for Willy. After disentangling herself from him she struggled to survive as a part-time actor and music hall performer, before turning to journalism in the 1910s. During this time she caused admirable scandals with onstage and offstage love affairs with various men and women. And, of course, she wrote. I’ve been hunting desperately through my unkempt bookshelves for Ripening Seed, (Le Blé en herbe), which I’m sure I’ve got somewhere in one of those old paperbacks, priced in shillings and pence… Anyway, she wrote a couple of dozen novels at least, of which La Vagabonde, Chéri, Sido and Gigi are among the best-known, if not the best – but what would I know?
Any way, reading about all the squabbles and squeezes of the school-girl Claudine, her frenemies, rivals, whipping-girls and other assorted victims, I fantasise about bonobos having language. After all, they’re a boisterous lot – without the occasional deadliness of their chimp neighbours, for sure, but I suspect not quite always as lovey-dovey as they’re portrayed. And yet, for the most part, it’s a world of inclusiveness and happy endings, and without the shock value of female-on-female pleasure that Colette brought to her fin de siècle readership. Bonobos are a million years ahead of that curve.
So while it may be that Claudine at school was deliberately aimed at scandalising and titillating, while bonobos only do what comes naturally, it’s far more honest and natural in its sensuality than just about any other work of its time, surely. And still has lessons, in that regard, for us today – though Claudine does have something of a cruel streak at times, which bonobos… I don’t know, are the primatologists missing something – or am I?
So, when I’ve look such things up lately, I’ve encountered an ‘AI Overview’ at the head of my enquiry. Ominous, but oh well, let’s go with it.
AI OverviewBonobos are generally less violent than chimpanzees, but they can still be aggressive:
Less violent than chimpanzeesBonobos are less likely to commit murder, infanticide, and cannibalism than chimpanzees.
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More frequent but less intense squabbling
Bonobos are more likely to push, chase, and bite other males than chimpanzees, but these interactions are less intense.
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Male bonobos are more aggressive than female bonobos
Male bonobos are about three times more likely to be aggressive than chimpanzees.
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Female bonobos prefer aggressive males
Female bonobos may prefer to mate with aggressive males.
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Bonobos may fight when groups come togetherTwo groups of bonobos may engage in serious fighting when they come together.
All of which is a bit confusing – male bonobos are three times more aggressive than chimps, except in the case of murder, infanticide and cannibalism. That’s a bit unclear, to say the least. Bonobos, I’ve always heard, don’t engage in those acts at all. And so how does an AI measure aggression, to work out that male bonobos are three times more aggressive than chimps? And female bonobos may prefer to mate with aggressive chimps – but then again, they may not? Still, I suspect there might be some truth here – there may be a bit more squabbling than is generally admitted. Which doesn’t much alter my view of bonobos as role models – it just makes them more human.
In any case, having read about half of Colette’s first novel, I find that, unsurprisingly, Claudine is something like a bonobo in a chimp world, humanly speaking. The big bosses are male – the school inspectors and the like – and the female schoolmistresses kowtow to them, while lording it over the schoolgirls, excepting the much petted school pets. There’s a lot of petty nastiness going on, much of it perpetrated by Claudine herself, but she maintains her popularity for all that. In the end it seems a lot more complicated than the descriptions I’ve read of bonobo society. Then again, so is bonobo society, I’m sure.
References
Colette, Claudine at school, 1900
Bonobo cruelty – AI overview, Google
bonobos, chimps, theory of mind, and sex
bonobo mother and child
Jacinta: So how is the bonobo influence faring these days – in Afghanistan, Iran, Trumpistan, Pakistan, China, Russia, Israel and Burma, to name a few…?
Canto: Okay, enough goat-getting. I’m still fascinated by how bonobos – more genetically similar to chimps, of course, than to humans – came to be so different. It’s not genetics, so what is it? It can’t just be diet, or habitat. And, my feeling is, if you know how something works, you can build it yourself. Like, if you know how beehives work you can build your own beehive, which we’ve done.
Jacinta: Not quite the same as building a new social system methinks. Though they have tried, haven’t they? ‘Let’s go to the Americas and build a Paraiso en el Nuevo Mundo‘… ‘But isn’t it already inhabited?’ ‘Yeah, we might need a bit of rubbish-clearing to start with’.
Canto: You’d think that our discovery of the bonobo lifestyle, really only a few decades ago, its feminism, its relative pacifism, its great community spirit, not to mention the sex, would be of interest to more than just a few primatologists, especially given the world of warfare, rapine and religious numbskullduggery that so many of us are still trapped within – it makes me scream with frustration.
Jacinta: It seems that the timber of humanity is more crooked than that of bonobos. I reckon we took a really wrong turn a few million years ago, so now we’re lost in the patriarchal jungle and we’ll never find our way back.
Canto: But bonobos are showing us the way don’t you see? And if humans didn’t make life so difficult for them, and their habitat wasn’t so fouled and fenced in by human depredations, they’d be so numerous, such a dominant force in the landscape, they’d put us to shame.
Jacinta: Haha we’re a pretty shameless species I’m afraid. Anyway, aren’t bonobos the anomalous ones? Chimps vastly outnumber them, despite the same human depredations. It be Nature, and what do please Evolution. If they hadn’t been separated into two species by the formation of the Congo River, they’d still be one species, and patriarchal, I’m betting.
Canto: Wow, who’s side are you on? Whether bonobos’ ancestors were patriarchal or not is beside the point to me. The point is, they’re matriarchal now, who cares when it started. And they’re happy, and successful. And we humans want to be happy, or happier, and more successful. So we might learn from bonobos about being less aggressive, less cruel, less exploitative, less competitive, and more caring, more playful, more communal, more uninhibited…
Jacinta: Okay, okay, I get it. But I’m wondering about that aggression, or at least that competitiveness. Hasn’t it been to our advantage as a species? The space race, the battles between competing scientific theories, between political ideologies and the like, haven’t they sharpened the collective human mind? Aren’t bonobos a bit intellectually lazy? I’ve read somewhere that chimps are more consistent toolmakers than bonobos. Or would you rather we lived in some timeless hippy-bonobo nirvana?
Canto: Okay, let’s look at the evidence, or what we have of it. Michael Tomasello et al published a research study in the journal PloS One in 2010, entitled ‘Differences in the Cognitive Skills of Bonobos and Chimpanzees’. Here’s the whole abstract from it:
While bonobos and chimpanzees are both genetically and behaviorally very similar, they also differ in significant ways. Bonobos are more cautious and socially tolerant while chimpanzees are more dependent on extractive foraging, which requires tools. The similarities suggest the two species should be cognitively similar while the behavioral differences predict where the two species should differ cognitively. We compared both species on a wide range of cognitive problems testing their understanding of the physical and social world. Bonobos were more skilled at solving tasks related to theory of mind or an understanding of social causality, while chimpanzees were more skilled at tasks requiring the use of tools and an understanding of physical causality. These species differences support the role of ecological and socio-ecological pressures in shaping cognitive skills over relatively short periods of evolutionary time.
Mirroring individual differences observed in theory of mind development in human children, the more cautious and socially tolerant bonobos outperformed chimpanzees on the theory of mind scale. Meanwhile, the prolific tool-using chimpanzee, whose survival is more dependent on extractive foraging, outperformed bonobos in the tool-use and causality scale.
This pattern can potentially be interpreted as suggesting that bonobos are more skilled at solving problems requiring an understanding of social causality, while chimpanzees are more skilled at solving problems relating to physical causality. In contrast, the two species did not differ in the scales measuring their understanding of problems related to spatial comprehension, discriminating quantities, using and comprehending communicative signals and learning from others via a social demonstration. This pattern of findings provides support for the hypothesis that socio-ecological pressures play an important role in shaping the cognitive differences observed between these species.Long-term observations of wild chimpanzees have suggested that female chimpanzees acquire more proficient tool-using techniques faster than males, and other studies show a similar pattern in captive bonobos. Therefore, it may be that socio-ecological pressures play a more limited role in producing cognitive differences based on sex in these species, but it also suggests that female Panins pay closer attention to others which allows them to learn and solve social problems more quickly and skillfully than males (while both sexes perform similarly in physical cognition tasks).
bonobos, an outlier in the primate world, and yet…
any excuse for a nice bonobo pic
In trying to develop a bonobo world with human characteristics, or perhaps more realistically a human world with bonobo characteristics, I suspect it’s best not to start by disparaging the male (human) brain as ‘unevolved’ or distinctly inferior to that of the female – something I heard in an interview with a male psychotherapist recently. Firstly, it make no sense to say that a brain, or a human, or a dog, a dolphin or a donkey is ‘unevolved’. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution, which is about ongoing change to most effectively adapt to a changing environment. And this includes social environments. The Andamanese, a tiny population living on scattered islands in the Bay of Bengal from about 25,000 years ago, and driven almost to extinction in the 18th and 19th centuries by the introduction of measles, influenza, pneumonia, and alcohol, have recovered somewhat and preserve their simple lifestyle via extreme hostility to interlopers, and are no more unevolved than were the ancient Hominins who once lived on the Indonesian island of Flores. It’s true, of course, that evolution can be competitive, and some species – or sub-species or cultures – can win out over others, but to describe this as due to being ‘more evolved’ rather over-simplifies matters. Each species evolves to survive and thrive in its own niche, and may thrive in that way for an eon, but may be swept away by another invasive species, or by relatively sudden climate change, or by very sudden events such as meteor showers or volcanic eruptions.
In the same interview, the psychotherapist described the male brain, including his own, as sick and in some sense mentally unbalanced compared to the female brain. And you can go onto YouTube and other sources to find dozens of mini-lectures and expert opinions on the male versus the female brain.
However, it might surprise people to know that there is no categorical difference between the male and female brain, at least not in the sense there is, usually, between a male and female body. Put another way, if a neurologist with decades of experience was given a disembodied brain and asked about its sex, she wouldn’t be able to say, categorically, whether it was male or female. There are statistical differences – males have, on average, more ‘grey matter’ (individual neurons) while females have more ‘white matter’ (myelinated axons connecting neurons) – but there is great diversity within this frame, which should hardly surprise us. Our brains develop within the womb, subject to the diet and environmental conditions of our mothers, and genetic and epigenetic factors have their role to play. In early childhood neural connections multiply rapidly in response to a multitude of more or less unique conditioning factors, and new connections continue to be made well into adulthood, resulting in more than eight billion tediously unique noggins clashing and combining in tediously unique ways.
So, to me, it’s behaviour that we need to start with. Of course I’m interested in the nervous system and the endocrine system of bonobos, but that’s because I’m first and foremost taken by their behaviour. I’m encouraged by what I see as changes in male behaviour in the WEIRD world, but then I was told recently that male violence against women is actually increasing. Of course these things are hard to measure as not all violence is reported, and the very concept of violence may be disputed, but a quick look at figures for Australia, which surely qualifies as a WEIRD nation, suggests that my sense of things is right:
Experiences of partner violence in the 12 months before the survey (last 12 months) remained relatively stable for both men and women between 2005 and 2016. However, between 2016 and 2021–22 the proportion of women who experienced partner violence decreased from 1.7% in 2016 to 0.9% in 2021–22.
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (Australian Government)
Whatever one might think of these figures, there’s little evidence of an increase in male violence (against females), at least here, in this teeny WEIRD nation. So maybe it’s places like Australia, and New Zealand, far from some of the major global threats, slowly building a multi-ethnic culture (largely proof against the massive social divisions stifling the divided ‘USA’), an oasis of 26 million compared to the bonobo oasis of maybe 20 thousand, a region that still likes to think of itself as ‘young and free’, and prepared to experiment with our politics and culture, maybe it’s here that bonobo-style caring-and-sharing behaviour can start to make some headway (but of course even as I write this it strikes me as ridiculous).
The trouble, of course, is that it’s hard to focus on such a possible future without sex rearing its not-so-ugly head. In human culture we’re obsessed with beauty (both male and female) in a positive way (though bad luck if you happen not to be physically attractive), and obsessed with sex in a much more confused but largely negative way (‘licentiousness’, a very human term, is generally condemned in all societies). Do bonobos distinguish between each other in terms of ‘good looks’? If not, when did we, or our ancestors start to do so? There has of course been much talk of ‘sexual selection’ in anthropology, going back to Darwin, but in bonobo society, where female-female sex predominates but sex, generally in the form of mutual masturbation, occurs among and between all age groups and genders, sexual selection (for breeding purposes) would only occasionally operate. And after all, masturbation is about one’s own erogenous zones, which, like being tickled, are best aroused by another, no matter what they look like. Think of a dog masturbating on your leg.
One might argue that religion has a lot to answer for, in so firmly linking sex to shame and transgression, while another might argue, along with Freud, that sexual sublimation was a necessary prerequisite for human civilisation. I’m still trying to work out my own view on this, but I’d surmise that the link between sex and shame existed in humans long before the Abrahamic religions took it to extremes. And unfortunately, much of the online material on our history of sex and shame contains a lot of bollocks, so I’ve reached a dead end there.
So here’s some guesswork. It may have started with the wearing of minimal clothing to protect the reproductive parts, both from damage and from gawkers – out of sight, out of mind. Perhaps this was initiated by females, but more likely (in the case of female genitalia) by males. On this topic I’ve often read claims that pre-agricultural or non-agricultural societies were less patriarchal, and I’ve even adopted that view myself, but I suspect the difference was only in degree, not in kind.
As to patriarchy itself, consider this. Bonobos and chimps split from each other 2 million years ago, at most. From that time on, bonobos survived and thrived in a relatively circumscribed, densely forested region south of the Congo. Chimps on the other hand are more numerous and wide-ranging (with more varied habitats), and are currently divided into four sub-species, from the west to the east of sub-Saharan Africa, and their number in the wild, though hard to determine with any precision, is generally estimated as about ten times that of bonobos. And all chimps are patriarchal.
The dating of the CHLCA (the last chimpanzee-human common ancestor, and note that bonobos are excluded from this reference) has been a subject of ongoing debate and analysis. Here’s how Wikipedia puts it:
The chimpanzee–human last common ancestor (CHLCA) is the last common ancestor shared by the extant Homo (human) and Pan (chimpanzee and bonobo) genera of Hominini. Estimates of the divergence date vary widely from thirteen to five million years ago.
Obviously, this was before the chimp-bonobo divergence, and considering speculation by anthropologists that bonobo ‘female power’ might be linked to a more frugivorous diet and less of a hunting-killing lifestyle (due to their restriction to an area rich in fruits, nuts, seeds and small game), it seems likely that the CHLCA was already more patriarchally inclined. Consider also that the genus Homo sapiens, long believed to date to no more than 200,000 years ago, and arising in eastern sub-Saharan Africa, has recently been dated to over 300,000 years from remains found in faraway Morocco. That suggests the traversing of vast regions, and a diet much richer in meat than that of bonobos. So, while the hunter-gatherer term has been passionately disputed by some, it’s generally accepted – and it makes sense to me – that there was some division of labour, as implied by the term, and that it would likely be largely gender-based. So, our history, and our ancestry, has been almost entirely patriarchal.
However, this doesn’t define our future. Patriarchy is breaking down in the WEIRD world, albeit slowly. And there are, depressingly, many forces in opposition to female empowerment, especially in the non-WEIRD world. I’ll focus on that in my next post.
back to bonobos – and sex
Canto: We’re reading Rebecca Wragg Sykes’ brilliant book, Kindred, an almost up-to-date account (published in 2020) of all the new discoveries about our close relatives the Neanderthals, and the speculations resulting from them. And of course we’re always alert to the slightest mention of bonobos in any works of anthropology…
Jacinta: Yes, we’ve been a bit timid about talking too much about bonobos and sex, but a few mentions in Kindred have emboldened us.
Canto: W’ve seen the odd photo or video of chimps or bonobos with erect penises, and it was a scary but also puzzling sight, but we’ve not really explored the difference between theirs and ours, so now is the time to do so. So here’s some interesting comments linking humans, Neanderthals and our chimp/bonobo rellies:
Anatomically, pelvic dimensions point to vaginas very similar to ours, and as penises are tailored to fit, those too were probably more like living men’s equipment than that of chimpanzees.
Luckily for all concerned, unlike chimps Neanderthal males lacked the genes for ‘penis spines’. While in apes they’re more like tiny hardened pebbles than spikes, their presence does affect copulation: marmosets have sex and orgasms that last twice as long when the spines are removed.
We should probably therefore picture Neanderthal sex as more leisurely and satisfying than chimp-style rapid thrusting bouts. Not forgetting clitorises – organs solely existing for pleasure – unluckily for Neanderthals, like us they probably lacked bonobo-like versions that make face-to-face orgasms easier. But masturbation in some form is pretty much guaranteed, whether during sexual encounters as is found among humans, or more generally for social bonding and diffusing tensions, as in bonobos where it takes place between pretty much anyone.
Kindred, Rebecca Wragg Sykes, p 271
Jacinta: So this makes me want to know more about the bonobo penis, and ‘penis spines’. It sounds like it isn’t ‘made for pleasure’, which helps to explain why female-female sex is the most practised type among bonobos.
Canto: Then again chimps have the same penises as bonobos but they’ve evolved differently. So here we go with ‘penile spines’. First, Wikipedia:
Many mammalian species have developed keratinized penile spines along the glans and/or shaft, which may be involved in sexual selection. These spines have been described as being simple, single-pointed structures (macaques) or complex with two or three points per spine (strepsirrhines). Penile spine morphology may be related to mating system.
This is news to me, but fascinating.
Jacinta: Just up our alley, so to speak. So to elaborate on this last quote, again using Wikipedia (largely), strepsirrhines are a suborder of primates including lemurs, galagos or bushbabies, pottos and lorises. Sexual selection is, I presume, a form of mating system, which Darwin reflected upon in The Descent of Man, inter alia. Macaques are a type of Old World monkey, with 23 known species. Interestingly, they’re matriarchal and frugivorous, like bonobos.
Canto: Apparently they’re a feature of felines – penile spines, that is. In cats, it’s speculated that they may contribute to pregnancy, as they ‘rake the walls of the female’s vagina [during withdrawal], which may serve as a trigger for ovulation’. I’m wondering, though, how that might relate to sexual selection. ‘A spiny dick, nothing turns me on more.’
Jacinta:
It all works below the conscious level, mate. I mean, female bowerbirds hang out with the males with the best display, but I don’t think they’re thinking about sex, especially considering how much of a nothing bird sex generally is. But getting back to bonobos, Wragg refers in the above quote to ‘bonobo-like’ clitorises that make face-to-face orgasms easier than it was for Neanderthals and, more to the point, we H sapiens. How could we have missed this in all our explorations of the bonobo world?
Canto: Hmmm. I blame the prudery of researchers. Including ourselves. Anyway, it probably all gets back to genes and their expression. So we need to explore – but should we look at penises first or clitorises – is that the plural?
Jacinta: Not sure, I can only cope with one at a time. So here’s something we should never have missed:
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”. In scientific literature, the female–female behavior of bonobos pressing genitals together is often referred to as genito-genital (GG) rubbing. This sexual activity happens within the immediate female bonobo community and sometimes outside of it. Ethologist Jonathan Balcombe stated that female bonobos rub their clitorises together rapidly for ten to twenty seconds, and this behavior, “which may be repeated in rapid succession, is usually accompanied by grinding, shrieking, and clitoral engorgement”; he added that it is estimated that they engage in this practice “about once every two hours” on average. As bonobos occasionally copulate face-to-face, evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk has suggested that the position of the clitoris in bonobos and some other primates has evolved to maximize stimulation during sexual intercourse. The position of the clitoris may alternatively permit GG-rubbings, which has been hypothesized to function as a means for female bonobos to evaluate their intrasocial relationships.
Canto: What can I say?
Jacinta: So this quote, from Wikipedia, compares the bonobo clit to the human one, but says nothing about chimps. I mean, it occurs to me that this enlarged clit, and the pleasure derived from it, would help to explain female-female sexual bonding, leading to social bonding, leading perhaps to matriarchy, if we can call it that. But if chimps have the same-size female pleasure-place, that thesis collapses.
Canto: Good point. So, googling ‘chimp clitoris’ takes me first to an essay from nearly 40 years ago on ‘The external genitalia of female pygmy chimpanzees’, an early term for bonobos. The abstract actually compares Pan paniscus (bonobos) and Pan troglodytes (chimps) as if just to resolve your dilemma:
The external genitalia of four adult female pygmy chimpanzees (Pan paniscus) were examined during a 2-year period. It was found that the labia majora are retained in adults of this species and that, when tumescent, the labia minora effectively relocate the frenulum and clitoris so that they point anteriorly between the thighs. When detumescent, the configuration of the labia minora and clitoris resembles that of immature common chimpanzees (P. troglodytes). It is suggested that the simple, structural relocation of the clitoris from the normal [sic] condition noted in adult P. troglodytes makes possible the homosexual, intergenital rubbing observed in P. paniscus, when ventroventral juxtaposition of the individuals permits eye-to-eye contact. In addition, this change probably increases sexual stimulation of the female during heterosexual, ventroventral copulations.
Jacinta: Wow. So bonobos separated from chimps between 1 and 2 million years ago. And in that time a kind of structural change took place in the positioning of the clitoris. Is that plausible? And what about the swelling?
Canto: Hard to get clear info, but the general genital swellings of chimps versus bonobos differ in one respect – in chimps, they’re indicative of fertility, or ovulation, but bonobos, like humans have ‘concealed’ ovulation. A wonder that this can occur in the relatively short time since the split. Or maybe not, I’m no primatologist.
Jacinta: Apparently bonobos and humans aren’t the only primates with concealed ovulation – it also occurs in Vervet monkeys, but the very concept of ‘concealed ovulation’ is a bit controversial – as if it’s being done deliberately, which would surely be absurd. But it certainly does mean that, in those primates that don’t exhibit clear signs of ovulation, copulation occurs through all stages of the menstrual cycle. It could be a way of preventing males from being aware of their own offspring, thus reducing the infanticidal tendencies found in male, and sometimes female, chimps. As for the position of the clitoris, its shift to a more ‘accessible’ spot for genito-genital rubbing in bonobos is often mentioned as a great development for female bonding, but I can find nothing much on how this anatomical change could’ve happened.
Canto: Well, think of Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos. Certain beak shapes were more adaptive to the particular vegetation on particular islands, and birds with those beak shapes outbred other birds and became dominant, and ultimately the outright winners. With bonobos, okay this different clitoral positioning might not have led directly to those females outbreeding other females, since it might not have made it easier for males to have sex with females (though where there’s a willie there’s a way), but it might have led indirectly to females becoming dominant through sexually stimulated female bonding, allowing the females with the most changed and, to females, most alluring clitorises to choose the most male partners and so produce the most offspring.
Jacinta: Female rather than male choice. Or even females ‘sexually assaulting’ males? Definitely sounds interesting. But as always, more research is required…
References
Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art. 2020
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3985376/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strepsirrhini
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaque
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bonobo-sex-and-society-2006-06/
bonobos, chimps, humans, testosterone and the future, again…
What kind of societies did our primate ancestors live in? Could they have been more egalitarian than the ones we have now?
Angela Saini
hormones follow social evolution?
So I wrote a piece a few months ago on this topic, and my most recent piece starts to revisit the issue. Human males, at least in the WEIRD world, are experiencing reduced testosterone levels, which in terms of general health, is apparently a bad thing. Females on the other hand, already have testosterone levels at between a tenth and a twentieth those of males. What does this mean, for their health, and their behaviour? And what about testosterone levels of male and female bonobos and chimps, our equally closest living relatives, whose behaviour is so strikingly different from each other, and from us? To paraphrase Sabine Hossenfelder, ‘that’s what I’m going to write about today’. Or maybe not!
First caveat – it’s far from being all about testosterone, as regards behaviour or physicality. And I’m interested in changes to behaviour, re humans, rather than changes to testosterone. So I’m looking for clues in bonobos for promoting more of the changes I already see occurring in male human behaviour, partly due to the increasing empowerment of women. It’s likely that testosterone levels, and endocrine changes generally, will follow changes in social behaviour, rather than vice versa. But I’m certainly no expert.
I mentioned in one of my previous pieces that bonobo sexual dimorphism is equal to that of chimps, and of humans. However, I’ve since read that the sexual dimorphism is a wee bit less in bonobos than in chimps and humans (and given that the split between bonobos and chimps is quite recent, in evolutionary terms, that difference might continue to diminish, and even reverse, if both species manage to survive…). Every little bit helps in the power struggle, though it’s likely that female bonding is the real key to bonobos’ female dominance. A key to our human future?
Having said that, let’s still consider testosterone, and its reduction, and what it means for men in the future. Carole Hooven says this in Testosterone:
The consensus of experts is that testosterone’s main job is to support the anatomy, physiology and behaviour that increases a male’s reproductive output – at least in nonhuman animals. And men are no exception – T helps them reproduce, and directs energy to be used in ways that support competition for mates.
So it’s probably true to say that the reduction in T among males, in ‘developed’ nations, over such a short period in evolutionary terms, is more disturbing than exciting. However, male aggression and violence has long been a problem, to say the least. Hooven again:
Men are much more likely than women to be sexually attracted to women, and they are far more physically aggressive than women in every pocket of the earth, at every age. For example, they are responsible for around 70 percent of all traffic fatalities and 98 percent of mass shootings in the United States, and worldwide commit over 95 percent of homicides and the overwhelming majority of violent acts of every kind, including sexual assault.
All of which is hardly new news (though I’ve encountered disbelieving males), and in most mammalian species males are the more aggressive sex, but there are exceptions. Hooven cites the naked mole rat, the meerkat and the spotted hyena as examples of high levels of female aggression, but the role of hormones in these animals’ behaviour is complex and not fully understood. In bonobos, female dominance isn’t achieved in anything like the way male dominance is achieved in chimps. They do it though female solidarity, most often achieved through ‘sexual closeness’, to speak euphemistically.
Surprisingly, while there’s a massive difference between male and female human testosterone levels, this is not the case for bonobos or chimps. Male chimps ‘have on average 397 ng/dl testosterone, which is below the human male average’,
On this basis,I’d like to do everything I can to support female-female bonding. One inspiring story I first heard about years ago is a coalition of Palestinian and Israeli women trying to find a way around the impasse that exists within Israeli-Palestinian lands, where both groups have an in-group approach to the cultural history of the region they share.
These women — both independently and part of nonprofits and organizations — are working to bridge the gap, break down the walls — both literally and metaphorically — and build a world where Israelis and Palestinians aren’t enemies but neighbors and friends.
I suspect that the walls they’re trying to break down are those of macho insistence on the rightness of their ‘ownership’ of the land they inhabit. This insistence, and resultant violence, has resulted in trauma on both sides. Considering this trauma (naturally felt more on the militarily weaker side than the other), and the fact that both sides in the conflict are dominated by belligerent males, women are often reluctant to speak out about the situation, particularly on the Palestinian side. Take this example, from an article linked below:
We struggled to find a Palestinian woman in Gaza to openly speak in fear of retribution from Hamas, the “Palestinian resistance group,” or fundamentalist, militant, and nationalist organization that controls the region.
The same article features Jewish women, brought to Israel as children from persecution in Middle Eastern or African countries, expressing mixed feelings of gratitude and shock on being exposed to apartheid-style conditions in their adopted country, and Palestinian Arab women, dedicated to education and a historical understanding of the complexities of belonging and loss experienced by both sides of the conflict in the region.
All of this has taken me far from what I earlier promised to talk about – the more speculative question of our ancestry. Were those ancestors less or more violent than we are now? Or – was the CHLCA (the last chimp-human common ancestor) more like chimps (and humans) or bonobos?
One of the features most notable in ape and monkey societies – and also in humans – is hierarchy. We don’t notice it so much in our vastly populous society, in which we might be born to ‘unskilled’ labourers, teachers, small business owners, billionaire entrepreneurs or royalty – the gradations are so numerous that it may take us quite a while to know where in the hierarchy we belong, if we ever do – and whether we’re failing or improving in terms of the rung on the ladder we started out on. And there’s no doubt that failure or success can be measured in a much greater variety of ways than ever before, by ourselves or by anyone who chooses to measure us. In any case, the fact that there are people we ‘look up to’ – artists, scientists, parents, activists, monarchs, whatever – is an indication that we strive to better ourselves in an essentially non-egalitarian cultural environment.
But there have been notable changes in that environment in the last 100 years or so – not only with respect to female empowerment, but major transformations due to science and technology, in transport, communications, medicine and industry. We’re living longer, educating ourselves more, and working less hard, in a physical sense. We’re having fewer children, and a greater diversity of sexual relations. Though there are still many who ‘fall through the gaps’, we’ve developed human welfare systems to reduce dire poverty and to enable the intellectually and physically disabled to experience better lives than was previously afforded them. We’ve become generally more sensitive to the web of life from which our species has emerged, and what we owe to it and to the planet whose environment has enabled all living things to survive and more or less thrive. Some of these developments have long roots, but most of their fruits have been recent, though of course far from universal in human societies and nations. Democracies and open societies have proved to be the most healthful and beneficial for their people, and the general tendency has been to grow those societal types, through migration or activism against repressive regimes.
We live in a world of growing prosperity, often compromised by the belligerence and repression of the odd authoritarian national leader. It might seem a mite ridiculous to compare this massive and complex human population with the tiny bonobo world in a small corner of a sadly benighted African country, but I see some utility in the comparison, precisely because I see signs that our best societies are heading in the bonobo direction. Not that we’re getting hairier or more arboreal, but that we’re gradually becoming more caring and socially responsible, less violent and more sexually tolerant and diverse. The circle has expanded, the better angels of our nature are managing to prevail, and like David Deutsch, though perhaps for slightly different reasons, I feel little cause to despair of the human species.
References
Carole Hooven, Testosterone, 2022
Click to access Surbeck_et_al_2012a.pdf
https://qz.com/1033621/scientists-assumed-that-patriarchy-was-only-natural-bonobos-proved-them-wrong
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080715204745.htm
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2010.1572
less testosterone? – such a worry
the Chinese Testosterone Party – ‘let’s wear boring western outfits and shit on “western values” – that’ll fix em’
Okay, so back to the real stuff, testosterone. The inimitable Sabine Hossenfelder, of the dry humour and sexy German accent, has explored its supposed reduction among humans and how it is deplored among the wannabe macho fraternity.
So first of all I must go straight to bonobos, our more or less female-dominant cousins. There’s precious little data on bonobos and testosterone, but see my previous piece, referenced below. A 2005 study of wild bonobos found, unsurprisingly, that ‘the alpha male had the highest circulating levels of T’, though a comparison with chimp T levels would have been useful. And when I say ‘little data’ I should qualify that – there’s not much data that can be made sense of (by me), it’s so complicated. For example, testosterone levels in female bonobos are just as important as in males, and they vary with age and circumstances. What seems to be the case, which I suspected all along, is that testosterone levels follow rather than lead social aggression and lifestyle patterns, which is why I’ve always been interested in the social development of humans along bonobo lines, so to speak, without worrying about hormones too much.
Now, returning to Sabine, who does a great job of summarising the pros and cons of having too much or too little T. Her most important point, which is well-known but can hardly be stressed enough, is that testosterone levels drop when males are holding or playing with a child (or maybe even thinking of doing so, or having pregnancy fantasies, or just wearing his favourite little black dress…), and they rise after divorce – which may help to explain some restraining orders. But these effects are relatively small for most males.
The evidence is clear, though, that T levels really are falling (oh frabjous day!). Sabine provides graphic, heartening evidence, at least to this dweeb. But there are downsides – both men and women are becoming physically weaker, slower and fatter, especially in the WEIRD world. High protein diets are more common than ever before, and weight gain lowers T, which in turn results in weight gain. And even the abandonment of cigarettes reduces T somewhat – another pleasant, if bizarre, surprise. Of course, as Sabine points out, all this is far from pleasant to some, such as the perennial dweeb who would be otherwise, Tucker Carlson, but others, such as myself, call it progress. Sabine winds her piece up with a most excellent quote from the sadly missed Carl Sagan which I’ll set down here for my own delight:
Why is the half of humanity with a special sensitivity to the preciousness of life, the half untainted by testosterone poisoning, almost wholly unrepresented in defence establishments and peace negotiations worldwide?…. Testosterone also causes the kind of aggression needed to defend against predators and without it we’d all be dead…. Testosterone is there for a reason. It’s not an evolutionary mistake.
Testosterone won’t disappear, in humans or bonobos. If we have more need of it in the future, it’ll probably mean bad news, as Sabine points out. Meanwhile we have the near-apoplectic Mr Poo-tin (a sobriquet for which I’m most grateful) and the Chinese Testosterone Party as ongoing examples of the downside of T.
So while T isn’t an evolutionary mistake, evolution doesn’t stand still. Indeed social evolution is a more accelerated version of earlier forms. It took a couple of million years, at most, for bonobos to depart from chimps in terms of their happy, sharing-and-caring lifestyles. Humans, so much smarter and quicker off the mark once they’ve grasped the benefits (think Deutsche’s The beginning of infinity), have just started to move towards a more female-empowered society in the last century or so, at least in the WEIRD world. And it’s largely females in collaboration that have made it happen, just as occurred, I’m sure, in bonobo society. Of course, this is still too slow for those of us growing older and more impatient. However, horrible as this is to admit, super-macho events such as the ‘great wars’ of the first half of the 20th century, Japan’s half-century of brutal slaughter and rape in the East, and now Poo-tin’s crime against Ukraine, lead to a quickening of positive responses – the United Nations, international monitoring agencies, defensive alliances, and the like. Global human-caused problems are leading to globally-negotiated attempts at solutions, and the lure of global trade dollars also has its benefits.
We need also to learn from previous mis-steps. Here in Australia we commemorate Anzac Day every year, and we hear kids saying ‘they died to save our country’ or ‘…that we can be free’. In the USA we hear praise of Vietnam vets, who fought ‘to defend our country’ or ‘our values’. Against the Vietnamese? It’s such arrant bullshit. The US was in Vietnam first at the behest of the French, who decided to quit their overlordship because it wasn’t delivering enough benefits – to the French. And of course it was impossible for the locals to govern themselves, in spite of having inhabited the region for millennia. It’s just another story of the powerful against the powerless, stories that go back to the dawn of civilisations. As to the ANZACs, fighting the Turks on the other side of the world, what was that about? Certainly nothing to do with Australian freedom. Australia just happened to be much more closely linked to Britain in 1914 than it is now, and two imperialisms, Britain with its quite vast empire, and Germany, the late-comers, spoiling for more power and influence, and a great muddle of other countries trying to work out which side would best suit their interests, came to blows in much the same way as two troupes of chimps have been known to do, but with much more horrific consequences. And blind patriotism, and its fanatical encouragement, didn’t help matters. The ‘Great War’ was an avoidable catastrophe and all our remembrance should surely be focussed on this avoidability.
To accentuate the positive, we are getting better. Yes, there’s the horrors in Ukraine, Iran, Burma and a number of African nations, which have diverse roots. Often it’s to do with the powerless rising up against their disempowerment, having virtually nothing to lose. Such conflicts have been going on for millennia, but we shouldn’t turn our backs o them. None of us get to choose whether we’re born in a rich or poor country, or a rich or poor sub-section of that country. We need to always bear this in mind. Of course it’s hard. It’s estimated that there are between 10,000 and 50,000 bonobos left in the wild. Humans number 8 billion. Even if we turned our backs on 99% of them, that would leave us with millions to worry about. And we all have our own problems… but sympathy and sharing seem to do us all a power of good. Vive les bonobos!
References
more oxytocin fantasies: an interminable conversation 3
not sure if this measures a significant difference
Canto: So, as it turns out, the bonobo-oxytocin connection is all the rage on the internet. I mean, there are at least two articles on it. Here’s a quote from a PubMed article called ‘Divergent effects of oxytocin on eye contact in bonobos and chimpanzees’:
Previous studies have shown that bonobos and chimpanzees, humans’ two closest relatives, demonstrate considerable behavioral differences, including that bonobos look more at others’ eyes than chimpanzees. Oxytocin is known to increase attention to another’s eyes in many mammalian species (e.g. dogs, monkeys, and humans), yet this effect has not been tested in any nonhuman great ape species.
Jacinta: Hmm, so how do they know this? Presumably they’ve dosed subjects with oxytocin and measured their eye contact against controls?
Canto: No no, they know that bonobos have more eye contact than chimps, simply from observation. So they might infer from this that bonobos produce more oxytocin naturally than chimps…
Jacinta: So do women produce more oxytocin than men I wonder? I presume women make more eye contact than men.
Canto: Well in this study they dosed both bonobos and chimps with oxytocin, and the effect – more eye contact – was greater in bonobos than chimps. In fact, chimps even tended to avoid eye contact when shown images of conspecifics.
Jacinta: So, it’s a matter of interplay between this hormone/neurotransmitter and social conditioning?
Canto: Maybe, but you’d think that an increase in this supposedly touchy-feely hormone would act against social conditioning. Isn’t this the point of that drug, ecstacy? That it reduces social inhibitions… But presumably nothing is ever so simple. Being poor, I only have access to the abstract of this paper, but another abstract, which looks at the effects of oxytocin and vasopressin on chimps, describes them as neuropeptides, just to confuse matters. The abstract also refers to about a dozen brain regions, as well as specific oxytocin and vasopressin receptors, so it gets pretty complicated.
Jacinta: Okay, vasopressin… from Wikipedia:
Human vasopressin, also called antidiuretic hormone (ADH), arginine vasopressin (AVP), or argipressin, is a hormone synthesised from the AVP gene as a peptide prohormone in neurons in the hypothalamus, and is converted to AVP. It then travels down the axon terminating in the posterior pituitary, and is released from vesicles into the circulation in response to extracellular hypertonicity (hyperosmolality). AVP has two major functions… etc etc
Canto: Okay thanks for that, let’s stick with oxytocin for now. It’s produced in the hypothalamus, a smallish region buried deep within the brain, just below the larger thalamus and above the even smaller amygdala. It releases and manages a variety of hormones. Brain signals are sent to the hypothalamus, exciting it to release oxytocin and other hormones, which are secreted into the bloodstream by the posterior pituitary gland….
Jacinta: Can you tell me what oxytocin is actually made of? Its structure? The term ‘hormone’ is just a black box to me.
Canto: Okay, here’s a diagram of oxytocin to try and make sense of:
It’s a polypeptide. A peptide is basically an amino acid chain. FYI:
An amino acid is an organic molecule that is made up of a basic amino group (−NH2), an acidic carboxyl group (−COOH), and an organic R group (or side chain) that is unique to each amino acid. The term amino acid is short for α-amino [alpha-amino] carboxylic acid.
Jacinta: So these are coded for, ultimately, by genes?
Canto: Yes, we’re heading backwards here, but each amino acid is encoded by a sequence of three of the four base pairs in our DNA. Anyway oxytocin, among other things is sometimes given to women while in labour. It helps with the contractions apparently. I’ve also heard that the recreational drug ‘ecstasy’, or MDMA, works essentially by releasing oxytocin.
Jacinta: It just so happens I’ve found an interesting 2014 paper published in Neuropsychopharmacology, my new favourite journal, called ‘Effects of MDMA and Intranasal Oxytocin on Social and Emotional Processing’, and here’s a quote from the abstract:
Oxytocin produced small but significant increases in feelings of sociability and enhanced recognition of sad facial expressions. Additionally, responses to oxytocin were related to responses to MDMA with subjects on two subjective measures of sociability. Thus, MDMA increased euphoria and feelings of sociability, perhaps by reducing sensitivity to subtle signs of negative emotions in others. The present findings provide only limited support for the idea that oxytocin produces the prosocial effects of MDMA.
Canto: That is interesting. If that finding can be replicated, I’d say forget the MDMA, dose people with oxytocin. A small but significant increase in feelings of sociability might just be enough to transform our human world.
Jacinta: Hmmm. Small but significant – that sounds a mite contradictory.
Canto: Not the same as significantly small. That slightly significant dose, administered to Messrs Pudding and Pingpong and their enablers, might’ve saved the lives of many Ukrainians, Uyghurs and advocates of multiculturalism, democracy, feminism and other wild and woolly notions. And it doesn’t really transform characters, it just softens their edges.
Jacinta: Yes it’s a nice fantasy – more productive than butchering the butchers, a fantasy I occasionally indulge in. But not workable really.
Canto: Why not? We dosed petrol with lead, and look at how that worked out. It certainly had an effect. In Japan they still use radium baths (at very low levels) for health purposes, even claiming it as a cure for cancer. I’m not sure if oxytocin baths can ever be a thing, but if so I’m sure there will be early adopters.
Jacinta: Well, it’s good to think positively. Oxytocin is often thought of as a bonding hormone between mother and child. The key would be to ensure it facilitates a more general bonding: to cause Mr Pingpong, for example, to see Uyghur, Tibetan, Yi, Limi, and all the other non-Han ethnicities in China as his sisters – or lovers even, revolting as that would be to those peoples.
Canto: Better than being their oppressors and exterminators.
Jacinta: Slightly. But I wonder, quite seriously, if, assuming such a dose of bonding could be effectuated, we could still function as the sometimes rational, problem-solving, highly creative species we indubitably are. Would there be a price to pay for all that oxytocin? And how would this affect all those other hormones and neurotransmitters and all their myriad effects? Humans are notorious for causing extra problems with their solutions, e.g lead, DDT, etc etc.
Canto: Well, there’s no need to worry about the fallout from this solution as yet. I just googled Putin and oxytocin together and came up empty. Obviously we’re way ahead of the curve.
Jacinta: Haha, it’s not a curve these days, it’s a pivot. Get with the program!
References
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33388536/
https://www.yourhormones.info/hormones/oxytocin/
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/molecule-of-the-week/archive/o/oxytocin.html
https://www.britannica.com/science/amino-acid
https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-JRTB-11551
still bitten by the bonobo bug…
Having written quite a few essays on a future bonoboesque world, I’ve found myself in possession of a whole book on our Pan paniscus relatives for the first time. All that I’ve gleaned about these fellow apes until now has been from the vasty depths of the internet, a gift that will doubtless keep on giving. My benefactor apologised for her gift to me, describing it as a coffee-table book, perhaps more pictorial than informative, but I’ve already learned much that’s new to me from the first few pages. For example, I knew from my basic research that bonobos were first identified as a distinct species in the late 1920s or early 1930s – I could never get the date straight, perhaps because I’d read conflicting accounts. De Waal presents a more comprehensive and interesting story, which involves, among other things, an ape called Mafuka, the most popular resident, or inmate, of Amsterdam Zoo between 2011 and 2016, later identified as a bonobo. The zoo now features a statue of Mafuka.
More important, though, for me, is that everything I’ve read so far reminds me of the purpose of my bonobo essays, but also makes me wonder if I haven’t focussed enough on one central feature of bonobo society, probably out of timidity. Here’s how De Waal puts it:
It is impossible to understand the social life of this ape without attention to its sex life: the two are inseparable. Whereas in most other species, sexual behaviour is a fairly distinct category, in the bonobo it has become an integral of social relationships, and not just between males and females. Bonobos engage in sex in virtually every partner combination: male-male, male-female, female-female, male-juvenile, female-juvenile, and so on. The frequency of sexual contact is also higher than among most other primates.
In our own society, definitely still male-dominated but also with a legacy of religious sexual conservatism, this kind of all-in, semi-masturbatory sexual contact is absolutely beyond the pale. I’m reminded of the Freudian concept of sublimation I learned about as a teen – the eros or sex drive is channelled into other passionate, creative activities, and, voila, human civilisation! And yet, we’re still obsessed with sex, which we’re expected to transmute into sexual fulfilment with a lifelong partner. Meanwhile, the popularity of porn, or what I prefer to call the sex video industry, as well as the world’s oldest profession, indicates that there’s much that’s not quite right about our sex lives.
This raises questions about monogamy, the nuclear family, and even the human concept of love. This is ancient, but nevertheless dangerous territory, so for now I’ll stick with bonobos. As with chimps, female bonobos often, though not always, move to other groups at sexual maturity, a practice known as philopatry. Interestingly, this practice has similarities to exogamous marriage practices, for example among some Australian Aboriginal groups. It’s interesting, then, that female-female bonds tend to be the strongest among bonobos, considering that there’s no kinship involved.
Needless to say, bonobos don’t live in nuclear families, and child-care is a more flexible arrangement than amongst humans, though the mother is naturally the principal carer. And it seems that bonobo mothers have a subtly closer relationship with their sons than their daughters:
the bond between mother and son is of particular significance in bonobo society where the son will maintain his connection with his mother for life and depend upon her for his social standing within the group. For example, the son of the society’s dominant female, the strong matriarch who maintains social order, will rise in the ranks of the group, presumably to ensure the establishment and perpetuation of unaggressive, non-competitive, cooperative male characteristics, both learnt and genetic, within the group.
Considering this point, it would be interesting to research mother-son relations among human single-parent families in the WEIRD world, a situation that has become more common in recent decades. Could it be that, given other support networks, rather than the disadvantages often associated with one-parent families in human societies, males from such backgrounds are of the type that command more respect than other males? Particularly, I would suspect, from females. Of course, it’s hard to generalise about human upbringing, but we might be able to derive lessons from bonobo methods. Bonobo mothers rarely behave punitively towards their sons, and those sons remain attached to their mothers throughout their lives. The sons of high-status females also attain high status within the male hierarchy.
Yet we are far from being able to emulate bonobo matriarchy, as we’re still a very patriarchal society. Research indicates that many women are still attracted to high-status, philandering men. That’s to say, they’ve been ‘trained’ to climb the success ladder through marriage or co-habitation than through personal achievement. They’ve also been trained into the idea of high-status males as dominating other males as well as females. It is of course changing, though too slowly, and with too many backward moves for the more impatient among us. Two macho thugocracies, Russia and China, are currently threatening the movement towards collaboration and inclusivity that we see in female-led democracies such as Taiwan, New Zealand and a number of Scandinavian countries. It may well be that in the aftermath of the massive destruction wrought by these thugocracies, there will come a reckoning, as occurred after the two ‘world wars’ with the creation of the UN and the growth of the human rights movement and international aid organisations, but it is frustrating to contemplate the suffering endured in the meantime, by those unlucky enough to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Now of course all this might be seen as presenting a romanticised picture of bonobos (not to mention female humans), which De Waal and other experts warn us against. The difference in aggression between bonobos and chimps is more a matter of degree than of type, perhaps, and these differences can vary with habitat and the availability of resources. And yet we know from our studies of human societies that male-dominated societies are more violent. And male domination has nothing to do with simple numbers, it is rather about how a society is structured, and how that structure is reinforced. For example I’ve written recently about how the decidedly male god of the Abrahamic religions, originally written as YWH or Elohim, emerged from a patriarchal, polygamous society in the Sinai region, with its stories of Jacob and Abraham and their many wives, which was reinforced in its structure by origin myths in which woman was created out of a man’s rib and was principally responsible for the banishment from paradise. The WEIRD world is struggling to disentangle itself from these myths and attitudes, and modern science is its best tool for doing so.
One of the most interesting findings, then, from modern neurology, is that while there are no categorical differences between the male and the female brain in humans, there are significant statistical differences – which might make for a difference in human society as a whole. To explain further: no categorical difference means that, if you were a professional neurologist who had been studying the human brain for decades, and were presented with a completely disembodied but still functional human brain to analyse, you wouldn’t be able to assert categorically that this brain belonged to a male or a female. That’s because the differences among female brains, and among male brains, are substantial – a good reason for promoting gender fluidity. However, statistically, there are also substantial differences between male and female brains, with males having more ‘grey’ material (the neurons) and females having more ‘white’ material (the myelinated connections between neurons), and with males having slightly higher brain volume, in accord with general sexual dimorphism. In a 2017 British study involving some 5,000 subjects, researchers found that:
Adjusting for age, on average… women tended to have significantly thicker cortices than men. Thicker cortices have been associated with higher scores on a variety of cognitive and general intelligence tests.
This sounds promising, but it’s doubtful that anything too insightful can be made of it, any more than a study of bonobo neurophysiology would provide us with insights into their culture. But, you never know…
References
Frans De Waal & Frans Lanting, Bonobo: the forgotten ape, 1997.
https://www.humancondition.com/freedom-the-importance-of-nurturing-in-bonobo-society/
on the origin of the god called God, part 2: the first writings, the curse on women, the jealous god