[Vision2020] Women, Bonobos, and Peace

[Nick Gier]

Greetings:

I'm leaving for a 3-week trip to Morocco next week and I could take a 
break from my radio commentaries (Donovan would like that), but I 
just had too many topics that I wanted to cover.  I've done two and 
two more ("What Ever Happened to the Last Judgment?" and an Earth Day 
piece "America's Moral Obligation for Global Warming") will somehow 
get done before Tuesday evening.

I'm holding my column "Tolerance for Islam in the Early American 
Republic" until after the symposium this afternoon (1:30 at the 
Moscow High Aud.), but below you will find my column for the Borah Symposium.


WOMEN, BONOBOS, AND PEACE:
HOW WE CAN LEARN TO BE NICE TO ONE ANOTHER

Chimps are from Mars and Bonobos are from Venus.
--Robert M. Sapolsky

The Borah Symposium will be held in the UI SUB Ballroom from April 
1-4. This year's topic is "Women, War, and Peace," a topic that I had 
unsuccessfully lobbied for when I was on the Borah Committee in 1985.

When Jane Goodall first told her colleagues that she had witnessed 
chimpanese murder, they advised her to not to make this discovery 
public.  As a good scientist, Goodall of course chose otherwise, even 
though the news undermined the widely held view that only we were the 
only violent apes.

We now know that we and the chimps have a close relation, the 
peaceful bonobos, who are now near extinction in the jungles of the 
Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Discovered in the early 20th 
Century, the bonobos were initially mistaken as small chimps, but 
they are a separate species that most closely resemble 
Australopithecus afarensis, a distant human ancestor.  Bonobos are 
more naturally bipedal, and the males lack both the heavy musculature 
and aggressive nature of their chimp cousins.

Bonobo society is matriarchal, even though the alpha male bonobo will 
pretend that he is in charge, sometimes making threatening gestures 
at intruders, it is the alpha female and her sisters who rule the roost.

While a dominant male chimp can take any female he wants by force, 
the bonobo male has to court his mate.  Bonobo males, as one 
scientist observed, must "ask first . . . offering food or making 
other propositions--and bonobo females have the right to refuse."

Bonobos are the most sexually active creatures on earth.  Unlike 
chimps but like humans, bonobo females are almost always sexually 
receptive, and same sex encounters are just as frequent as 
heterosexual intercourse.  Unlike other animals but like humans, 
bonobos frequently make love face to face.

With only a few observed exceptions, when different bonobo bands 
meet, they make love not war.  (In a similar instance male chimps 
would usually fight.) In bonobo society having sex is the primary 
means of conflict resolution, a solution that even some married 
couples have learned to use.  The Japanese have been studying the 
bonobo for 34 years, and they have not observed a bonobo killing 
another bonobo.

Describing bonobos as "highly compassionate and conscious beings," 
Sally Coxe writes fondly about her interaction with Panbanisha, a 
bonobo female at Georgia State University.  Panbanisha can understand 
English, use sign language, and spell out words on a keyboard.

While playing hide-and-seek with Panbanisha, Coxe noticed that the 
bonobo recognized her name, and then made a gesture to Coxe to be 
quiet so that they would not be found. Responding to a small cut on 
Coxe's wrist, Panbanisha wrote out "hurt" on her keyboard.  [Note to 
Visionaries: Panbanisha is a person!]

The question of whether chimps and humans are hard-wired for violence 
has been addressed by Robert Spolsky, who has studied baboons most of 
his career.  Male baboons are just as aggressive and abusive to their 
females as some male humans are.

Spolsky documented remarkable behavioral changes in the particular 
band of baboons that he had been studying closely.  The dominant 
males had been raiding the garbage dump of a hunting lodge, and all 
of them died as a result of eating tainted meat.

This troop's females were able to stage a velvet revolution, in which 
they were able to pacify the surviving less dominant males. Spolsky 
noted that "aggression was less frequent, particularly against third 
parties. . . . There were even instances, now and then, of adult 
males grooming each other--a behavior nearly as unprecedented as 
baboons sprouting wings."

This evidence, combined with other experiments in which babies from 
aggressive monkey species were pacified by less aggressive foster 
mothers, strongly suggests that primates are not "natural born 
killers," and that we can all, under the influence of nurturing 
females, learn to be nice to one another.

And since we seem to have a lot of bonobo in us, we don't have a far 
to go as our chimp cousins.

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