IP ADR Dictionary: B is for Bonobo
Check out this week's New Yorker article, Swingers here by Ian Parker where you will learn that one set of our ancestors, the Bonobo, lives in a society in which
"female alliances intimidate males, sexual behavior is as rich as ours, different groups do not fight but mingle, mothers take on a central role, and the greatest intellectual achievement is not tool use but sensitivity."
Why is this an IP ADR item? Because the collaborative and reciprocal resolution of our intellectual property disputes requires not only our competitive tool (read: weapon) making ability, but also our sensitivity to the needs and interests of others.
In a 2003 New York Times article A Course in Evolution, Taught by Chimpanzees, author Nicholas Wade compared the aggressive, violent, male-dominated, territory defending style of the chimpanzees with the gentler ways of the bonobos as follows:
Male[] and female[] [chimpanzees] do not associate in families but in separate hierarchies. Males make females defer to them, with violence whenever necessary, and every female is subordinate to every male.
A female chimp advertises her fertile period with a visible swelling and is then so pestered by males that she may get to eat only at night. . . .
Though bonobos are almost as aggressive as chimps, they have developed a potent reconciliation technique -- the use of sex on any and all occasions, between all ages and sexes, to abate tension and make nice.
Assuming the common ancestor of people and chimps had social behavior that was essentially chimplike, how much of that behavior has been inherited by people? The unusual behavioral suite of male kin bonding and lethal territorial aggression may look as if it has been inherited with little change. Among the Yanomamo, a South American tribe, the number of males who die from aggression is about 30 percent, the identical rate found among Gombe chimps.
Dr. Wrangham said the consistent pattern of aggression seen at all the chimp sites suggests that male chimps have ''a strong emotional disposition'' to be aroused by the sight of strange males, to form coalitions against enemies, to be sensitive to balances of power and to be attracted to hunting. The same disposition could have been inherited down the human lineage.
Why do we care? It's not just because we share a single ancestor with both chimps and bonobos and therefore possess the innate characteristics of each, it's also because bonobo behavior can give us hope that we can create a society that isn't focused quite so much on territoriality, aggression, and zero-sum outcomes.
As Ian Parker notes in the New Yorker article, the study of bonobo and chimp behavior
has a place in the long-running debate about the fundamentals of human nature -- a debate, in short, about whether people were nasty or nice. Were humans savage but for the constructs of civil society (Thomas Hobbes)? Or were they civil but for the corruptions of society (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)?
Defining and re-defining achievement -- success -- is a new task for every new generation. Are we going to continue playing King of the Hill or can we inspire ourselves to reach down into our bonobo nature and solve some of our power problems with fellow feeling?
Of course the real reason for this post is the chance to reprint the photo above -- the female chimp looking so peaceful, even blissful (see the larger photo in the New Yorker) -- in a familiar posture that wouldn't be right to re-print in a blog rated "G" unless the subjects were Bonobos.
And, hey! did you guys have a Bonobo release for that photo?
