Posts Tagged ‘hierarchies’
on male advantage and how it continues…
The late Frans de Waal, in his book Different: what apes can teach us about gender, observes some interesting traits that humans consider to be associated with leadership, and which probably date back to our primate ancestors. The most obvious one is physical. We’ve all heard that being short (as I am) is a serious disadvantage for those vying for the Prime Ministership or the Presidency, to say nothing of military leadership.
But what about Napoleon? Actually of average height for his time, as was Hitler. Mao was a little above average, and Stalin somewhat below, but of course none of these men were elected into power. The average height of US Presidents is well above the average US citizen, and much more so if you include women, from the time that women were eligible for that office (1920).
Another physical attribute we associate with power is loudness and vocal tone. A scientific paper published in 2016 entitled ‘Sexual selection on male vocal fundamental frequency in humans and other anthropoids’, began with this interesting statement:
In many primates, including humans, the vocalizations of males and females differ dramatically, with male vocalizations and vocal anatomy often seeming to exaggerate apparent body size.
and then it continues:
Here we show across anthropoids that sexual dimorphism in fundamental frequency (F0) increased during evolutionary transitions towards polygyny, and decreased during transitions towards monogamy. Surprisingly, humans exhibit greater F0 sexual dimorphism than any other ape. We also show that low-F0 vocalizations predict perceptions of men’s dominance and attractiveness, and predict hormone profiles (low cortisol and high testosterone) related to immune function. These results suggest that low male F0 signals condition to competitors and mates, and evolved in male anthropoids in response to the intensity of mating competition.
This is quite an issue, as our vocalisations are vast and complex, and better known as speech. As de Waal puts it:
We are a verbal species, and the voice is hugely important to us. And here I don’t mean the content of what we say, but how we say it, how loudly, and with what vocal timbre.
The adult male larynx is 60% longer than that of the female, a particular sexual dimorphism that is much greater than the general sexual dimorphism of humans. One has to wonder why this evolution has occurred, because the effect has been to reinforce male dominance. The principal argument, as alluded to above, is that it suggests male vitality to other males, and females, in the mating game – but are we more competitive than other primates in that arena? Of course, in the WEIRD world, male dominance is being increasingly challenged, but how can a few decades of social evolution compete with millions of years of the physico-genetic variety? Or, as de Waal put it: ‘How does it serve sound decision-making if decisions are prioritised by the timbre of the voice that expresses them?’ This is the dilemma – we know, sort of, that we shouldn’t fall for a deep voice – or a tall stature – as a sign of greater authority, but we fall for it nevertheless.
I always feel inclined to eliminate men with high testosterone levels, perhaps by boiling them in their own sewerage (sorry, a macho moment), but every website tells me, in emergency tones, that low testosterone is a health hazard. So what is the antidote, the quick fix, to these male power advantages? One suggestion of course, is the bonobo way – not just safety in numbers but power in numbers, even to the point of bullying. A patrolling, policing bonobo sisterhood. And certainly women with ‘the knowledge’ are fighting back. And I too, have been campaigning on this front, for example by advocating less adversarial systems in politics, the law and industrial relations. I note that the political dramas currently occurring in South Korea have much to do with their having adopted, no doubt under ‘benign’ pressure, the fundamentally flawed US political system after the Korean war. However, even the more party-based Westminster parliamentary system could do with a shake-up, to effect a more inclusive, egalitarian approach to decision-making.
Ah, but wait up. Hierarchies are everywhere, de Waal and others tell us. It’s alpha males mostly, and alpha females among bonobos and some other species. And there are generally hierarchies within each gender, or sex. But these are more complex hierarchies than we might think. Whether male or female, they’re not always based on physical strength. What we would call emotional intelligence or EQ plays a big part, especially in female leadership. So, as human society, especially in the WEIRD world, becomes less patriarchal, this different kind of leadership, a kind of leadership against leadership, or a co-operation-promoting, networking leadership, will hopefully emerge. Such collaborations can help in the battle against patriarchy, of course. de Waal again, referencing the American anthropologist Barbara Smuts, writes this:
[One way] for women to reduce the risk of male sexual harassment is to rely on each other. Their support network may be kin-based (if women stay in their natal communities after marriage), but it could also, like the bonobo sisterhood, consist of unrelated women.
And, of course, sympathetic men. Some of whom, like the Dutch historian and sociologist Rutger Bregman, have tackled claims about the ‘natural’ violence of men head on. In stark contrast to de Waal, Bregman has this to say:
Basically, our ancestors were allergic to inequality. Decisions were group affairs requiring long deliberation in which everybody got to have their say.
So ‘allergic to inequality’ or ‘hierarchies everywhere’? Both of these things are not like the other. And yet both authors have written admiringly of each others’ work. I think the answer lies in complexity. I’ve lived in share houses, which formed hierarchies of a sort, hierarchies that shifted as tenants came and went. Others would describe the group as essentially egalitarian, though with a certain seniority for more long-standing tenants. And obviously a nuclear family is a hierarchy, with parents of different rank depending on personality, and age-ranked siblings. Workplaces are generally hierarchical, whether formally or informally, depending on seniority and competence. Again, in the world that I’ve grown up in, these hierarchies have become less patriarchal – in fact, my mother was the principal breadwinner in our family, and the principal decision-maker.
So is there much in the way of male advantage in today’s WEIRD world? Of course there is. How many women are in the top ten richest individuals (sorry to bring up filthy lucre)? Zero of course. How many female US Presidents? Zero of course. How many elected Canadian Prime Ministers? Zero. How many French Presidents? Zero. How many Italian Prime Ministers? Congratulations, their current PM Giorgia Meloni is the first to hold that office. How many Spanish Prime Ministers? None. And so on. Of course there has been Thatcher and Merkel, and other one-offs in progressive countries vis-a-vis gender, but there has been nothing like parity, and there won’t be for a long long time into the future. And then there’s the rest of the world, where patriarchy and misogyny run riot.
I’m getting old and tired.
References
Frans de Waal, Different: what apes can teach us about gender, 2021
Rutger Bregman, Human kind: a hopeful history, 2020
no hairless apes and no egalitarian apes, but let’s have more beautiful hierarchies
her beard is beautiful, her stupid shoes, not so much…
As occasionally mentioned, I often get a bit defensive about the title, and apparent purpose, of my blog. Yes I know we’re (almost) nothing like bonobos, or at least that our 98.7% genetic similarity says nothing about the complex human cultures that we’ve developed more or less globally in the last few thousand years. Our civilisations, our technology, our great fashion sense…
And we’re so much better looking. Well, at least the best of us. I mean, has a bonobo ever turned you on? Primatologists often describe bonobos as more gracile than chimps – meaning more slender, graceful and other notably sensual terms. But, really, what about all that hair? Yes, bonobos have that cute middle parting at the top of their heads, but what about the rest of it? It’s hard to say, with humans, how much hair is too much – I mean, it’s whatever turns you on, or off. Certainly human females learn fairly early in life that too much bodily hair is a no-no. But how much is too much? Google’s AI overview thingy tells us that ‘The global hair removal products market was valued at around $14.7 billion in 2023’. That 14.7 billion bucks tells us that we’re most definitely not ‘the hairless ape’.
Even so, we’re nothing like bonobos, or chimps, or gorillas. As for orangutans, the one I saw recently at the local zoo was exceptional. I could barely discern a face, body or limbs underneath a mountain of hair. It was a lovely silky mountain though.
But with humans there’s a gender thing about hair, is there not? Especially bodily hair. Hairy chests on men can be a turn-on for some women, but women with hairy chests? Is this something to do with sexual selection? In spite of all that dosh spent on hair removal, it strikes me as unlikely that women in their ‘natural state’ have as much chest hair as men. Male chimps and bonobos have more chest hair than females. Could this be about breast-feeding? But then, all primates breast-feed, even the hairiest, without too much trouble.
A 2018 scientific paper, linked below, seeks, I think, to link the reduction in human body hair with ‘sweat gland traits’. From the abstract:
Humans differ in many respects from other primates, but perhaps no derived human feature is more striking than our naked skin. Long purported to be adaptive, humans’ unique external appearance is characterized by changes in both the patterning of hair follicles and eccrine sweat glands, producing decreased hair cover and increased sweat gland density.
Our findings suggest that a decrease in hair density in the ancestors of humans and apes was followed by an increase in eccrine gland density and a reduction in fur cover in humans. This work answers long-standing questions about the traits that make human skin unique and substantiates a model in which the evolution of expanded eccrine gland density was exclusive to the human lineage.
I’m not quite sure why I don’t find this entirely convincing – not the ‘expanded eccrine gland density’, but its connection with the reduced density of human hair. However what interests me more is the aesthetics that humans have developed around having more or less bodily hair. And head hair too. I was a teenager in the late 60s into the mid 70s when long hair was all the go for guys, and I had a big black frizz – then came the punk era and we all cut our hair and wore out-sized op-shop jackets plastered with badges and decorata – at least I did for a year or so. But the hippy era and the punk follow-up both had a kind of unisex feel to them that I actually found inspirational. I’ve always had a thing for gender fluidity, with hairstyles and modes of dress being but the outer show of deeper changes in human behaviour and thought that I hoped were coming to pass.
Of course, these changes are occurring, and it’s noticeable here in Australia, especially to us oldies, with patriarchal religion receding and universities full of female students, with our first and only female Prime Minister and the very occasional female state Premier, with female sports gaining more prominence, but…
There are still stupid shoes, depilatory creams, fish lips, boob jobs and a thousand tints of lipstick, foundation (whatever that is) and other cosmetics. To which one might reasonably respond – ‘Isn’t the pursuit of beauty a good thing? Don’t we find humans in general more ‘beautiful’, or shall we say attractive, than macaques, siamangs or bonobos? And some humans more attractive than others?’
It’s a puzzlement. Human physical beauty turns us on, depending on the gender we’re attracted to. And even if we’re not turned on, we recognise physical beauty – and ugliness – as a real thing. But who hasn’t had the experience of meeting a physically attractive person, and, after a few minutes’ conversation, being ‘turned off’? Or of meeting a physically so-so person and then being drawn, attracted, by their exceptional smarts, humour and je ne sais quoi? Beauty is ultimately in the consciousness of the beholder. And that’s not just the case for humans. Being on top of things – being an alpha of any sort, not just in strength and looks, is an attractant in many species. Becoming an alpha of whichever gender, in the whole primate world including H sapiens, requires more than strength and aggression, as I’m learning from the late Frans de Waal’s last book, which tells us, inter alia, that hierarchies are everywhere, and we’re never likely to get away from them.
So where does that leave my anti-authoritarian self? Someone who finds a certain kind of alpha male totally abhorrent? Probably leaning towards a bonobo humanity, where the authority isn’t quite so exacting, and may come with some very stimulating trimmings.
References
https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/hair-removal-products-market#
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30502901/
Frans de Waal, Different: what apes can teach us about gender, 2022
a bonobo world, etc 17 – good and bad hierarchies, human superiority and extinction threats
Robert Sapolsky on hierarchies – always worth listening to
One might say that bonobo society isn’t democratic, it’s hierarchical. But of course being hierarchical isn’t the opposite of being democratic. Every human society has been and is hierarchical. The hierarchy in earliest human times was probably based on raw prowess in providing resources and maintaining effective order in the group, the tribe, the village. Whoever managed to do so obtained prestige for himself, his family or breeding partners and his heirs, until such time as it all fell apart and competitors proved more effective. History, some former toff wrote, is a graveyard of aristocracies, but as human society became more formalised, those aristocracies often survived beyond their utility (to everyone but the aristocratic clique), as witness various hereditary power systems. Arguably the most unequal and rigid hierarchies were based on land ownership and control, when societies were largely agricultural, in feudal Europe and no doubt elsewhere. The more one family was able to concentrate power in its hands, as in medieval Britain and Czarist Russia, the more steps there would be in the ladder to the bottom, where the majority slaved away.
Nowadays, of course, we’re more slaves to our devices than to any human overlords. Most of us have never seen a harvest, but our homes are full of fruits and wines, basics and treats. Where our ancestors were treated as little more than effluent, we now feel ourselves to be relatively affluent, even with part-time work in service or tech industries. Where our forebears worried about the breadline, we’re more concerned about our waistline, and where we’ll put all our stuff. In his indispensable book The origin of feces (I had to buy it), David Waltner-Toews points out that, with some 7.5 billion human apes on the planet, we’re producing over 400 million tonnes of shit per year. Add to that our ever-increasing loads of sheepshit, bullshit, horseshit and chickenshit, and the figures for these are as mucky as the topic, and you might start to worry whether it’s the effluent of affluence that will finally bury us.
However, the prospect of spaceship Earth gradually filling up with the brown-and-yellow, or any other stuff, shouldn’t concern us, not because it’s all more or less biodegradable, but because spaceship Earth is just a bad metaphor, according to David Deutsch in The beginning of infinity. For Deutsch, the problem with the metaphor is its emphasis on finite resources, finite space, finite everything, and the idea that we humans are abusing the spaceship’s finite ‘design’. Deutsch is a boundless admirer of Jacob Bronowski and his 70s series ‘The ascent of man’, by which he means we human apes. Basically, Deutsch and Bronowski share the vision of a Danish prince written about some centuries ago:
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals.
There seems to have been a bit of sarcasm at play there, but Deutsch is very much an optimist about human capacities, as his book’s title implies. The ascent of human apes isn’t like an ascent to the mountain’s summit, even less up the stairway to heaven, it’s the rise and expansion into a human-created infinity of invention and creation – a forever bubble blown out of human ingenuity, as progress accelerates and earth-boundness becomes hide-boundness and shit turns to sugar through the magic of science that is not magic.
And yet there are still human hierarchies, on an individual and even a national level. There are the OECD nations, for example, and those who don’t make the grade. There are the G8 or G7 nations and the not-so G7 nations. And there are the stateless and the non-nationalists, who might sometimes wish they were bonobos. Or would if they only knew…
Meanwhile, bonobos, hierarchical but also inclusive. Huddled together lovingly, mostly, and besieged, perhaps without knowing it. Did the last Neanderthals, perhaps huddled together in Gibraltar’s caves, know, or have any inkling, that they were the last? The African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) describes bonobos as Africa’s forgotten ape. Many people I know hadn’t even heard of them. It might well be their remoteness, compared to chimps. The southern bank of the Congo bears little resemblance to la rive gauche of Paris, and long may it remain so, but for years the region has been threatened by human warfare, slash and burn agriculture, and bushmeat hunting. The current wild population is hard to assess, but it is at least larger than perhaps the smallest ethnic group of humans, the Samaritans, who number less than a thousand. The Samaritans, however differ from bonobos in that their numbers are very gradually rising, without the need for them to be protected in zoos. Bonobos also manage to be charitable without religion.
Truly the threats to the bonobo community are no laughing matter, and I hope in my way to provide them with a pinch more of publicity. There’s competition of course. The solitary orang-utans of Sumatra and Borneo are under severe threat from deforestation and palm oil production, and Madagascar’s unique biodiversity is being devastated, again by slash and burn agriculture, as well as mining, climate change, invasive species, overharvesting and habitat fragmentation. Andy Isaacson writes about it in Cosmos magazine:
Madagascar’s endemic lemurs are now the most threatened group of primates on Earth, and nearly all of its species (94%) are at risk of extinction because of habitat loss and unsustainable hunting.
As always, there are human heroes, local and international, struggling to protect and improve the lives of these cousins of ours. Bonobos are facing an upsurge of hunting, according to AWF’s Jacqueline Conciatore:
For a long time, local taboos against hunting bonobos, who are so human-like, protected the peaceable apes. But those mores are dropping off under the influence of cultural outsiders and with tradition’s weakening hold on the young. Today, commercial bushmeat hunting, supported by ever more trade routes, joins habitat loss as a top threat to bonobos. Some researchers estimate that tons of bushmeat are extracted daily in bonobo range areas. The number of bonobos killed for bushmeat is limited compared to other species, but because bonobos reproduce slowly, bushmeat hunting poses a dire threat.
Spaceship Earth may seem ever-expandable for the all-conquering, infinitely capable human ape, and of course I accept that we aren’t under threat here in the way that the Ehrlichs’ book The Population Bomb notoriously predicted, but it’s notable that David Deutsch makes no mention of the plight of other species, let alone other apes, in his book about the future. Perhaps we can do without them?
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samaritans#Demographics
Andy Isaacson, ‘Food to save Madagascar’s future’, in Cosmos, issue 88
David Waltner-Toews, The origin of feces, 2013
David Deutsch, The beginning of infinity, 2011
A bonobo world ? personal reflections on societal health 7
Bertrand Russell – a very well-connected philosopher
This world of reading has long excited me about our scientific and technological achievements, about what we know and are discovering of our solar system, our galaxy and our universe, of our origins, our neurology and our immune system, and so much more, but I’ve also been fascinated, horrified and moved to tears by our history, and our capacity for inflicting and enduring suffering. Even while taking those steps to ‘rational knowledge’, we’ve revealed how unreasoning we are. Aristotle, the founder of syllogistic logic and virtue ethics, believed that many humans were born to be slaves, and that women needed to be ruled over by men due to their lack of control, deceptiveness and general inferiority. Plato’s many dialogues, such as Euthyphro and Protagoras, still provide much food for thought, but his notions of ideal justice and eternal souls have had a corrosively irrational influence. We understandably admire the ancient Greeks but much of their economy and that of other ancient civilisations was based on slavery, and in ancient Egypt as well as in feudal Britain the lower classes were slaves in all but name. The veiling of women began in Mesopotamia, and was common practice in ancient Greece and Rome. All of this betokened hierarchies of class and gender, and the majority of the population lucked out in the lottery of birth and parentage.
We may feel we’ve escaped from these rigid hierarchies, but it’s rather that we’re less honest or more deluded about them. Certainly the hierarchies aren’t quite as easy to define or identify, but they involve money, power and influence, as they always have. It’s not so much about caste, land ownership or birthright today, it’s about social connections, whether though family, business, academia or politics. It’s often not what you know, but who you know. The philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote of pulling the beard of William Gladstone, four-term Prime Minister of the UK, as a child. Bertrand was himself the grandson of John Russell, twice Prime Minister, and senior government minister for two decades. It wouldn’t be hard to find many other examples of well-connected success, though happily there are counter-examples, such as Newton, Faraday and Einstein. In any case, until recently, those hierarchies were much more fixed than they are today. For example a modern university education can be gained in a multitude of ways, such as scholarships and through government subsidies. Mature age students can be accepted by a simple entry test, something like an IQ test, as I was. This less regimented, more fluid society can easily lead people into the mythical belief that anyone can achieve anything they put your mind to, and that we’re entirely responsible for our achievements in the battle to the top in any sphere of activity. It is the reason, of course, for the rise of libertarianism in many affluent countries. But the fact is that elites and elitism are just as common as ever, and it was ever thus. When Aristotle wrote that some men were born to be slaves, he was insisting upon his own superiority, and that of his associates, those for whom he was writing.
So the human ape has always been ensnared in a hierarchy, whether as a hunter-gatherer or a computer programmer. Considering the inevitability of such a situation, the question we should ask is, are some hierarchies better or more effective than others for human flourishing, and for our subsistence with other species on the planet? With that question in mind, let’s again consider our ape cousins, the bonobos and the chimps.
Chimpanzees are far more numerous than bonobos and have been studied more thoroughly in the wild. Like bonobos, they’re an endangered species, their numbers being considerably reduced by deforestation, habitat degradation and poaching – the standard problems inflicted by human apes on all of their cousins. Chimps like to move around, in small travelling bands of a few individuals, but habitat degradation and fragmentation has limited this behavioral inclination, just as land clearing and the takeover and degradation of natural resources by Europeans in Australia has limited the behavioral inclinations and practices of its more ancient human inhabitants. However, these small groups often come together to form larger communities of as much as 150 members. This splitting and combining behaviour, shared by bonobos (and of course by humans), is described as a fission-fusion society. The smaller groups perform different functions, such as an all-male hunting party or an all-female nursing group, or a combination of genders and generations for various purposes, but the social structure is always dominated by males, who fight each other for dominance. Once a particular male has asserted his dominance, he maintains it through aggression, even when there is no challenge from other males. This results in a dominance hierarchy, with a second and third most dominant male, each one threatened from below and threatening the chimp above him. Such a hierarchy is inherently unstable, not only because individuals grow stronger and weaker as they grow and age, but because the fission-fusion society produces shifting coalitions which can alter the balance of power at any time. A dominant male who develops an overly aggressive style might be toppled, and even killed, in a ‘palace coup’ of disgruntled underlings. This allows for a form of political manoeuvring to defeat physical aggression. A less physically strong male may develop political skills, if not to get to the top, to derive benefits from his king-maker role. In this situation, the alpha male may also have to develop political skills as well as displaying aggression. Threats to his power often come during the fusion period of the fission-fusion dynamic, and he often succeeds in maintaining his position through display of force rather than attack, much like a dictator mobilising his forces around the perimeter of a demonstration.
Female chimps, of course, are not necessarily entirely passive in such circumstances, and will use their connections and their sexual availability to influence the social hierarchy and their own position within it. Female dominance has even been recorded in chimps in captivity, though it is likely very rare. The males are aggressive not only in terms of maintaining or overturning the hierarchy but in maintaining, defending or expanding territory, though this territoriality may vary between subspecies, and may even be affected in the wild by those humans who study them and provide them with food, so as to keep them nearby. Think of the territoriality of your pet dog, who is kept well-fed and cared for by the pack leader, yourself, and feels threatened by canine and even human encroachers.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee
Thomas Crump, A brief history of science, 2001