hasnaa
It is the patriarchal society that has made us
forget that ancient knowledge of the sacredness of the divine feminine
and her power.
hasnaa
In ancient times they knew that women were the
creators of life. And their bodies were a temple to be entered for
worship.
ThatGirlHas
An Ideal, Wishful Thinking Image Of Our Recent Past (10,000 To 1,000
Years Ago Is Not "Ancient Times". Well, It Is To People That Have A
Short Time Frame Of Reference, But Not To Anyone That's Familiar With The Evolutionary History Of The Human Species). Since The Human Species Origin (About
200,000+ Years Ago) Patriarchy Has Reigned. Only In A Few, Atypical
Cultures Within The Past 5,000 Years Or So Have Matriarchal Systems Been
Developed And Even Then Those Societies Weren't Completely Female
Controlled And Dominated. So Her Little Feminist, Hippie Quotes Are
Scientifically Inaccurate And Not Reflective Of The Vast Majority Of Our
Human Past Where Males Subjugated Females And Treated Them As Property.
https://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/dp/0395877431
https://twitter.com/PsychoSchmitt/status/1248632954986942472
https://twitter.com/PsychoSchmitt/status/1248632954986942472
"evolutionary perspective reminds us patriarchy is a human manifestation of a sexual dynamic that is played out over and over again, in many different ways, in other animals...six factors influenced the evolution of human gender inequality"
https://twitter.com/feminiscience/status/1104421466584563713
David Buss suggests that women created patriarchy. "They are not passive pawns of the masculine game". Being the sex that invests more in reproduction, women are more selective, prefer men with status and this reproduces competition and hierarchy.
Here's a short piece: 'The Evolution of Patriarchy: Women are Not Passive Pawns in Male's Game':
Pride, ideology, or belief restrains many people from viewing Homo sapiens as just another primate species, one among many. Humans have language, religion, morality - culture. Humans are able to discuss what it means to be human. Humans have big brains. God created humans to be a species separate and distinct from all other species of the natural world. Humans are unique.
Biological studies indicate a more complicated picture. We may be unique, but so is every other species, and for most of our evolution as primates, whatever was unique about the human line wasn't anything human. After all, only within the last 2 million years had our ancestors acquired brains large enough to count for inclusion in the genus Homo. It was only around 130,000 years ago that "full" humanity was achieved (the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens, the subspecies that we call ourselves). And it was not until after 35,000 years ago that art exploded onto the archaeological record in the form of cave painting and bone carvings.
Before 2 million years ago our forebears certainly weren't human. They were still woodland apes, fascinating beings who would have been lovely in many ways, but definitely apes. Further back, between 5 and 25 million years ago, they were still apes, but in the rainforest. And still further back, in the rainforest between 25 and 65 million years ago, they were something more elusive, part of a group that gave rise to both monkeys and apes...
Primates began in the dawn of the Cenozoic era, 65 milllion years ago, when the asteroid collision that killed off the last of the dinosaurs cleared the arena for a radical evolutionary experimentation. Mammals had already existed well before that moment, but now, with many of their competitors suddenly gone, they were presented with new opportunities everywhere, on land and water, in trees and on the ground. It was to the trees, to eat fruits and insect, that these earliest of our primate ancestors turned.
They weren't much like apes, of course. Our best guess is that they were something like an opossum or a bush baby: in other words, about rat-size, active mainly at night, happy to eat fruits or gums or large insects, but nothing starchy like leaves or seeds, and largely solitary although capable of distinct sociability. These grandmothers and grandfathers of us all had grasping hands (good for holding on tight), forward-facing eyes (giving binocular vision and excellent depth perception), large brains generally more specialized for sight than smell, and (compared to other mammals) middling to high intelligence. They passed these characteristics down through countless generations to the two hundred species of apes, monkeys, and prosimians that make up today's living primates.
"You Can Tell By The Way I Walk I'm A Threat Nigga!" - Goliath
(Goodall gave her chimps names – David Greybeard, Flint, Goliath, Passion, Frodo and Fifi)
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/jun/27/jane-goodall-chimps-africa-interview
Among the
characteristics passed down was a fairly typical mammalian set of
aggressive behavior patterns. Many primate species defend their
territories ferociously, and this defense is carried out by females more
often than males. Boundaries are defended first by rallying cries and
then as needed by charges at the enemy and by chasing and grappling and
biting. In some monkey species the fight escalates to where a group of
females lines up as a tight phalanx, warriors moving shoulder to
shoulder, snarling and lunging and screaming at the opposing phalanx
only a few inches away. Battle lines form and re-from, isolated
encounters occur at the edges of the main action, and the troops may
fight for an hour or more or until the weaker yields...(Goodall gave her chimps names – David Greybeard, Flint, Goliath, Passion, Frodo and Fifi)
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/jun/27/jane-goodall-chimps-africa-interview
Fierce and frequent though it may be, however, this aggression is very different from the lethal raiding of chimpanzees. The goal in these fights over land or status is merely the opponent's defeat. Dominate the other group. Remove them, perhaps. But once they give up, let them go. Don't try to kill them. Most primates are satisfied with seeing the rear ends of their opponents.
The same applies to fights inside the social group, where the most frequent aggression is between rival males. In most primates, males fight more intensely than females. They accumulate more scars, for instance. But like human boxers in a ring, each male's aim is his rival's defeat, not death. Sometimes, of course, there's an accident, and so defeat coincidentally happens to be mortal...
The accidental nature of these instances emphasizes the oddness of chimpanzees and humans, with their deliberate searches for victims, their killing and mutilation of a helpless neighbor despite his appeals for mercy. Only for these two species is the loser's death part of the plan.
So in this important way chimpanzees and humans are exceptional when compared to the extended group of primates. However, if we ignore most of the primates and restrict our comparison just to the great apes, in some ways our patterns of violence are not so odd. It's still true that only chimpanzees and humans regularly kill adults of their own kind. Chimpanzees and humans also share other evils: political murders, beatings, and rape. It seems remarkable, therefore, to learn that rape is an ordinary act among orangutans, whereas it is unknown among most species of primates and other animals. And there's other violence to be found in the lives of apes. Male gorillas kill infants so often that the threat of violent death shapes the very core of their society. These patterns are not unique to the apes, but the intensity and range of violence makes us wonder: Is there something about the apes that specifically predisposes them to violence?
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Wrangham and Peterson, p.128-132
"Watch YO Circle! Cuz Niggas 'Bouta Hurt You!" - Passion
"Once You Form Your Circle, It's Hard Foe Niggas To Hurt You!" - Flint
"Baboons Up In My Circle" - Fifi
"Baboons Up In My Circle" - Fifi
If the drought were to end relatively soon, these isolated apes might return to the richer forests, go back to their old reliance on fruits and seeds and meat, and reassociate with other members of the larger ape population living in contiguous forest. That may have indeed happened a number of times. But what if the drought persisted, so that instead of expanding, their little rainforest island continued to contract, becoming thinner and less productive until the threatened population of apes finally spread out in their search for food - for roots this time - onto the savanna woodland between the sparse rainforest patches? Here they would have found roots to be plentiful or at least sufficient, and they would therefore have discovered, for the first time in ape history, that they could survive beyond the wet forest.
Five million years ago our ancestors crossed the great ecological divide between tropical rainforest and woodland. While the old ape lineage continued relying on the forest in its traditional ways, conservative in behavior and morphology, natural selection favored rapid change for the new ape line on the woodland.
Already equipped with a way to survive, they took advantage of the open opportunity in front of them. The woodland apes kept their climbing abilities until some of them became early humans, and they continued harvesting fruits and seeds from trees when the natural orchards were productive. One line finally abandoned the old ape climbing adaptations around 2 million years ago. But they walked upright, so the bones and footprints show, by 4.5 million years ago. Maybe it was worth the initial inconvenience of tiring bipedalism to carry roots to a tree where an individual could slowly consume them in safety. Tongo chimpanzees carry their roots for a kilometer or more, so perhaps root carrying was the habit that took the woodland apes upright. At the very least, we suggest, roots kept our ancestors from starving during times when the best foods, meat and fruits and seeds and mushrooms and honey, couldn't be found.
With comparative rapidity, the woodland ape line branched several times, leading to species that probably covered the savannas and woodlands of Africa from west to south, and sometimes to two or more species sharing the same habitat. Our own ancestors from this line began shaping stone tools and relying much more consistently on meat around 2 million years ago. Their brains began expanding toward human size around 1.8 million years ago in an astonishing development that ended only half a million years ago. They tamed fire perhaps 1.5 million years ago. They developed human language at some unknown later time, perhaps 150,000 years ago. They invented agriculture 10,000 years ago. They made gunpowder around 1,000 years ago, and motor vehicles a century ago. These are amazing events, alterations, and accomplishments. And yet, despite the extraordinary change that took place during our journey from rainforest ape to modern human, there has been continuity as well. We described earlier one continuity at the behavior level: from the lethal intergroup raiding of modern chimpanzees, with their male-bonded territorial communities, to warfare among modern humans. And we raise the possibility that there is a biological foundation for these behaviors, in both chimpanzees and humans, that evolved before the ancestral split 5 million years ago.
Chimpanzee raiding and human
warfare are not the same, however, so why should anyone imagine that
they arise from the same source? How similar, or how different, are
these two sets of species-specific behaviors? In becoming human (in
turning into that upright-walking species who fights wars and makes
peace, who gathers into communities and nations, who makes sexual bonds
and breaks them, too, who uses language to expand intelligence and
collect knowledge enough to design cathedrals and mousetraps and atomic
bombs and myths), did we leave the old ape brain behind? Did we at some
point simply jettison the whole thing as a worthless relic from the
troubling shadow of time? Or is the elaborate, nervous and anxious and
proud, superstitious and self-deceiving edifice of cerebral material
that makes up our humanity still deeply infused with the essence of that
ancient forest brain?
That chimpanzees and humans kill members of neighboring groups of their own species is, we have seen, a startling exception to the normal rule for animals. Add our close genetic relationship to these apes and we face the possibility that intergroup aggression in our two species has a common origin. The idea of a common origin is made more haunting by the clues that suggest modern chimpanzees are not merely fellow time-travelers and evolutionary relatives, but surprisingly excellent models of our direct ancestors. It suggest that chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human war, making modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, 5-million -year habit of lethal aggression.
Until we face the evidence from chimpanzees, we naturally imagine that warfare is a uniquely human activity. We might see it as a practical way to control population density, or as an outcome of specific cultural practices such as the invention of weapons or an ideology of superiority. We might stress that war is based on calculation rather than instinct, and that it is an instrument of policy. Or we might see it more generally as the product of social conditions. And even with the chimpanzee evidence, the "blind instinct" of animal "hostility" seem far removed from the sophisticated calculations and ritual complexities that must surely lie at the heart of human war. From four hairy apes venturing across a valley in order to pummel some hapless neighbor to four hundred thousand flag-waving humans facing each other with guns and gas and rockets, tanks, artillery, electronic surveillance, and batlike bombers zooming overhead at two or three times the speed of sound: Can this bridge be crossed? Or is the similar pattern of violence among chimpanzees and humans merely a meaningless coincidence?
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Wrangham and Peterson, p.65-64
...
https://twitter.com/Evolving_Moloch/status/1163939416177426433
In chimpanzee society, patriarchy rules. Communities persist through a line of father-son relationships. Males are the inheritors of territory. Males conduct raids and the killing. Males are dominant. Males gain the spoils. But within any spotted hyena community, females rule. Females never leave their natal clans. And in hyena clans, up to eighty strong, the leader is always female - not because the females are larger...but because they are more determined, more aggressive, and, most important, more united. Females fight harder. Females are dominant. Females gain the spoils.
For chimpanzees, a lost territory means death for adult males, but not females. Females have more options, more freedom, even if they suffer to take advantage of it. When the K-group community of chimpanzees in Mahale was reduced to a single male in 1979, the five fertile females joined the neighboring M-group. At least four infants born subsequently to these females were killed by the M-group males, but after those first killings, later babies were allowed to live. No such luck for males on the losing side. The dominant sex lives and dies by its territory, but the subordinate sex can sometimes emigrate and thereby survive. We have seen the same pattern among humans in primitive wars.
Territorial gains, like territorial losses, have different impacts on males and females. For a male-bonded chimpanzee community, conquered land can include not only a large foraging area, but also new females who may simply continue to forage in the same area of forest as before the boundaries changed, only now with a different set of defenders. So males of an expanding community can gain females, which means that male chimpanzees should want to expand their territory to the largest area they can defend...
...Does it matter...what the fight achieves? If you're a party-gang species living in rivalry with neighbors, a chance to kill safely tends to pay off for the same underlying reason. It weakens the neighbors. The future can't be foreseen, but whatever it holds, the neighbors will be rivals, armed and dangerous. The stronger you are, the more easily their land can be taken, regardless of the particular benefits the land will bring.
This
helps explain why humans are cursed with demonic males. First, why
demonic? In other words, why are human males given to vicious, lethal
aggression? Thinking only war, putting aside for the moment rape and
battering and murder, the curse stems from our species' own special
party-gang traits: coalitionary bonds among males, male dominion over an
expandable territory, and variable party size. The combination of these
traits means that killing a neighboring male is usually worthwhile, and
can often be done safely.
And second, why males? Because males coalesce in parties to defend territory. It might have been different. If females were the resident sex and formed the coalitionary bonds and defended their territory, humans might still have had Genghis Khans, Alexanders, Caesars, and Hitlers. But they and their favored gods and their trusted soldiers would be women. Hyenas show us that human male violence doesn't stem merely from maleness.
...Why do chimpanzees and humans form party-gangs...And why are we make bonded when we could be female bonded or both, or neither?
The easier problem is that of party-gangs, a peculiar style of social behavior that looks entirely explicable by the cost of grouping theory. This theory states that primate groups might grow infinitely large, except for the restraints imposed by ecological costs...The notion is well supported by what we know about party-gang species, because for all of them, parties become bigger when or where more food is available. We see this pattern...among...chimpanzees...only when trees have ripe fruit do chimpanzee parties really swell in size...More food makes bigger parties...
...When a troop of any species becomes larger, it will have to travel farther during any given day to acquire enough food for all the individuals...If the cost-of-grouping theory holds true, then one would expect that those species forced to travel greater daily distances by increased troop size will turn out to be the same species that normally collect themselves into relatively small troops. Grouping is expensive to them, so they prefer small troops...
...Party-gang species, for ecological reasons, cannot afford to live in permanent troops year-round. They simply happen to possess lifestyles that make grouping very useful at sometimes and quite costly at others. There are lifestyles centered on eating high-quality but sometimes hard-to-find foods. Foods, perhaps, that pop up seasonally or grow in patches variable in size and density. Foods that are especially nutritious when you can find them, but are often unavailable. Foods that may be abundant one moment and rare the next. Foods like ripe fruits and fat-rich nuts and juicy roots and meats. Foods like the ones that both chimpanzees and humans have evolved to rely on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLn9GwHoUy0
World War Chimp | The Brutal 1974 - 1978 Gombe Chimpanzee War: Documentary
So the party-gang patterns of chimpanzees and humans probably come from our being connoisseurs of high-quality foods that are often too scarce to allow friends or allies to forage together regularly without some or all of them starving. If only we were like gorillas and could sit down in a mountain meadow eating leaves all day, we could cheerfully live in stable troops - just as gorillas do. But our digestive system didn't evolve to process leaves all day, and thus, while we move in parties when we can - for protection and for the benefits and pleasures of sociability - we still hunt those gourmet foods rare enough that just one extra forager in our party can reduce the gains markedly for everyone else, forcing us all to go distinctly farther every day to fill our bellies or food sacks. And for us connoisseur species, the distances easily become too great, intolerable on our tight energy budget. Rather than starve together, it is better to break up and forage alone, however valuable or pleasant the company.
Like other primate and carnivores, the party-gang species are xenophobic and territorial...when parties grow smaller they simultaneously become increasingly vulnerable to attack by neighbors who happen to be hanging out for the moment in bigger parties.
And why are those aggressive neighbors almost always male for chimpanzees and humans, but female for spotted hyenas? Partly, perhaps, because female apes don't benefit as much by fighting for food as female spotted hyenas do. You can't aggressively defend a branch of fruit as effectively as you can a chunk of meat. But benefits aside, there's a cost-of-grouping problem that pushes apes toward a male-bonded social system. Adult males walk faster and tire less quickly than adult females with infants because the males don't carry the infants. You see this principle express itself most clearly on long chimpanzee expeditions to favorite food patches. A mixed party may start off together, but mothers carrying their offspring often end up taking a rest halfway up a hill or slowly falling farther behind, so after a twenty-minute walk they arrive at the food patch five minutes after the males. Almost always it is only the females without infants who keep up with the males. Almost always it is only the females without infants who keep up with the males. So extra travel simply costs less for adult males and for childless females than it does for adult females with infants. This simple fact might on its own explain why males can spend more time together than females. They can afford to. They can afford to travel in large parties because the extra foraging distance is less expensive for them. And hence, in a classic example of how a seemingly arid ecological issue can ultimately generate major social effects, cost-of-grouping theory suggests that males can bond together merely because they can afford to spend more time together. If this is right, then it also predicts that childless females will be more social than mothers. Indeed they seem to be so. And mothers should form closer bonds with each other during the times and in the places where abundant food means they can spend time together. Again, they do.
Around 5 million years ago, our chimpanzee-like ancestor became a
woodland ape and spawned a family of descendant species. Around 2
million years ago, the early signs of humanness emerged. Climbing
adaptations fell away. Erect bipedalism became more refined. Teeth,
mouth, and jaw became smaller. The brain became larger. Changes to the
mouth and brain continued at a varying pace until modern humans evolved
100,000 to 200,000 years ago. But not until after agriculture began, a
mere 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, did human societies begin to unveil
their habits clearly. Evidence of real war comes soon after that
unveiling. Jericho at 7000 B.C. was a thriving city of 2,000 to 3,000
inhabitants, a center of cultivation within a fertile oasis formed by
the River Jordan. Among the population were traders and craftsmen who
processed and stored, handled and distributed food and material goods.
The stony remnants of that old city today tell us, however, that Jericho
was designed as a fortress: surrounded by one continuous wall more than
three meters thick and four high, reinforced below by a broad moat cut
down into the bedrock another three meter; supplemented above by a
lookout tower rising an additional five meters. Written history starts a
little later, with scraps of pottery form modern-day Iraq bearing
witness to the Sumerian invention of writing in about 3100 B.C. By then,
the written record informs us, wars and the patriarchal systems
fighting them were in full glory.
The mysterious history before history, the blank slate of knowledge about ourselves before Jericho, has licensed our collective imagination and authorized the creation of primitive Edens for some, forgotten matriarchies for others. It is good to dream, but a sober, waking rationality suggests that if we start with ancestors like chimpanzees and end up with modern humans building walls and fighting platforms, the 5-million-year-long trail to our modern selves was lined, along its full stretch, by a male aggression that structured our ancestors' social lives and technology and minds. A few collected heaps of smashed skulls and projectile tips embedded in bone, the rare but fascinating examples of modern people living in Pleistocene economies, and the occasional vague theoretical glimpses we can gather on occasion of that otherwise deeply hidden 5 million years do not challenge this vision.
And yet, if we take this Dostoyevskian view of our origins, one more mystery immediately presents itself. Surely, if our ancestral males were so demonic in the structure of their daily lives, natural selection should have left deep traces of design in the structure of our own bodies. But humans look so feeble compared to the other apes. So where does the biologist find evidence of adaptation to our postulated demonic past? And if such evidence cannot be found, why not?
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Wrangham and Peterson, p.165-171.
Though bonobos are clearly distinct from chimpanzees, the physical differences between the two species are less than the average differences between many populations of humans. But walk with them in the forest, and the differences shine clearly. Chimpanzee parties communicate to each other with huge, throaty screams, hoots and barks that can carry for a kilometer. The equivalent calls for bonobos are brief, high-pitched, soft hoots, reaching much less far. To Kano, the first primatologist to hear bonobos in the wild, they sounded like birds: like "hornbills twittering in the distance."
The gentleness of bonobo calls is only the first of an extraordinary suite of behavioral differences that are now known to divide the two species...
As we enter the social world of bonobos, we can think of them as chimpanzees with a threefold path to peace. They have reduced the level of violence in relations between the sexes, in relation among males, and in relations between communities.
First, how do males treat females? The basic evidence is clear and strong. Among bonobos there are no reports of males forcing copulations, battering adult females, or killing infants.
On the surface, bonobos have a social life very much like chimpanzees, living in communities, sharing a range with eighty or more others, traveling in various-size parties within the community range, living with their male kin group, and defending their range against outsiders. Most importantly, bonobos have the same size difference between males and females as chimpanzees. So why don't bonobo males exert their physical power over females in the same way chimpanzees do? The answer takes us into the heart of bonobo society.
Among chimpanzees every adult male is dominant to every adult female, and he enjoys his dominance. She must move out of his way, acknowledge him with the appropriate call or gesture, bend to his whim - or risk punishment...
But among bonobos, the sexes are codominant. The top female and top male are equal. The bottom female and the bottom male are equal. In between, your rank depends on who you are, not what sex you are. Of course, just as among chimpanzees, social rank is not the only thing that determines if you get your way. At least as important is who will help you.
...
Bonobo sons are almost inseparable from their mothers. They groom with them more than with males or anyone else. They stay with them throughout their lives, consistently in the same party. From the sons' point of view, this makes sense because their mothers' support appears to be crucial for success in competing with other males. Males whose mothers are alive tend to be high-ranking. Kano's study documents four young males who rose rapidly in rank because they had mothers alive and supporting them; two other males fell in rank when their mothers died...
...
The reason why mothers are so valuable to their sons opens a window into the bonobo world. Female bonobos cooperate with one another in ways males do not. Among bonobos, the mother-son relationship is the closest bond there is between males and females; and if a mother calls for help, other females will respond. So if a son or his mother is harassed the mother's group of females is always liable to counterattack in her support...
...
...female power is the secret to male gentleness among bonobos. However, the females don't often have to assert their power...
...
All available observations tell the same story. Female bonobos turn the tables on males. And if bonobo males throw their weight around and become overly aggressive, they are liable to be suppressed by females. The big question, therefore, is what bond makes the females such reliable, predictable supporters of each other. It's not kinship. Bonobos are like chimpanzees in that regard: When a female enters adolescence she leaves her family, migrates to a new community, and settles there. Most of the females she will spend her life with are unrelated to her. No, the bonds among females come not from kinship but from experience. In other words, the newly arrived adolescent must work to develop her support network.
The pattern has been witnessed for only a few females, but it is striking...The adolescents started out by sitting close, alert to their target adult, clearly subordinate but showing a quiet interest. The adolescent initiated most interactions, perhaps when the older female signaled willingness for the interaction to happen. Then, over a course of a few weeks, the pair become each other's most frequent partners in friendly interactions...
...What do her friendly interactions with the senior female consist of? Partly it's the ordinary social life of primates, sitting close and grooming each other. But in addition, she behaves, well, romantically. She has sex with the older female.
Researchers describe sex between female bonobos with an accurate but to us unsettling clinical term: genito-genital rubbing. But the term GG-rubbing...hardly captures the abandonment and excitement exhibited by two females practicing it. So let's use the Mongandu expression to describe this remarkable act: hoka-hoka...
...
Through sitting together, grooming, and hoka-hoka, the bond between the adolescent and the older female resident deepens. In a matter of a few months, the adolescent has a "friend" - in the technical sense of an individual with whom she has a specially affiliative relationship. With the development of that friendship, her integration into the new community has begun...all the females in a bonobo community have close affiliative relationships with other females, consistently expressed through hoka-hoka. And we know that the dominant females respect their subordinates. Unlike males, they don't display aggressively at each other, and the subordinates rarely give submissive signals...relations among females make for a generally peaceful life, in which the seniors do little to exert the authority of their position. It looks as though the adolescent's development of a bond with a senior female is her passport into a network of support and security.
As for how males treat other males of the same community, bonobos and chimpanzees show lots of similarities. In both species, males compete for status and for hierarchies, with the alpha male particularly easy to recognize. In both, males stay close and groom each other often, for similar amounts of time. In both, males try to intimidate each other by charging while dragging branches...
But there are many differences, too, and they all tell the same story. Whereas chimpanzee males are prepared to fight fiercely and risk a good deal to attain the alpha position, bonobos are not. Male bonobos just don't seem to care quite so much about being the boss. Bonobos fight less often, with lower intensity, and have less elaborate behaviors for preventing or resolving their differences...The unseating of an alpha male from his position of highest dominance can lead to life-threatening wounds among chimpanzees, but no such wounds have been seen among competing bonobos.
The contest for dominance is more elaborate among chimpanzees. Chimpanzees have ritualized signals of status recognition; bonobos don't. For example, in chimpanzees, signals of reassurance or reconciliation exaggerate the hierarchy - such as when a subordinate crouches and approaches a dominant while panting softly, and the dominant reaches out and pats the outstretched hand of the subordinate...
Chimpanzee males form alliances, as we have seen, which are crucial for their success in gaining and keeping high rank. Bonobo males don't. Along with this distinction come several differences in political strategizing. Even though the amount of grooming is similar for the males of both species, the pattern is different: Chimpanzee males tend to groom all their fellows, whereas bonobo males show clear favorites. Why? One theory is that chimpanzees use grooming as a way to curry favor with rivals rather than simply expressing friendly preferences. Chimpanzee males do the same with food sharing; unlike bonobos, they share as a political tactic.
Milder attacks between males, less male competition for rank, no male alliances to gain political advantage - why don't male bonobos care as much as chimpanzees about being the big cheese? The influence of mothers and female firepower is obviously very strong. But bonobo males are less aggressive with each other for another reason as well: They are much less concerned about who mates with the females. Among chimpanzees, copulation attempts by low-ranking males are often stopped by high-ranking males, especially near ovulation time. This happens very rarely among bonobos.
Why don't bonobo males care more about who gets to mate? The answer looks simple. Males can't tell when females are ovulating, apparently because the crucial smells that signal the approach of ovulation to male chimpanzees are simply absent in female bonobos. The ignorance is crucial. Ovulation is the time when the egg slips out of the ovary and readies itself to be fertilized. It happens once a month for a female, who thereby becomes ready for impregnation. By the logic of natural selection, a female's moment of ovulation is the critical time for the males to mate with her and, of course, to stop other males from mating. Chimpanzees appear able to tell the day of ovulation rather precisely, and males compete intensely for copulations at that time. Among bonobos, males show more interest in females during cycles when ovulation is relatively likely to occur. But during those cycles, no research has yet reported increased male anxiety about mating access as the specific day of ovulation approaches. It looks as though females conceal their ovulation.
...
But perhaps more interesting perhaps is what bonobos do with their sex...Bonobos use sex for much more than making babies. They have sex as a way to make friends. They have sex to calm someone who is tense. They have sex as a way to reconcile after aggression...We know their sexual activity has nothing to do directly with reproduction...just as people use sex as a way for deepening relationships, comforting each other, and testing each other, not to mention having fun or getting pleasure, so do bonobos.
Such a diverse sexuality among these apes both amazes us and leads us to wonder why it evolved. Again, a comparison with chimpanzees offers some insight. When a female chimpanzee has her monthly sexual swelling, she is subject to being herded and attacked by males. She has to dodge the noisy, dangerous fights of males challenging each other. She looks emotionally stressed, spends little time eating, and suffers wounds. Vulnerable to male power, she can pay a high price for being sexy. But since female bonobos are able to control males, their sexual attractiveness is not a liability but a strength, particularly because with the disguised ovulation time, males no longer know precisely when it's best to compete with each other.
The third part of the threefold bonobo way to peace was the last discovered and remains the least understood. Intercommunity violence is reduced; some encounters between communities are even friendly. True, smaller parties normally avoid larger ones, and if parties from different communities meet, there can be a fight. But when relaxed meetings between communities do happen, how remarkable they are.
...
Friendliness was always initiated by the females...females groomed with members of the other community; they continued their intercommunity hoka-hoka; and they also copulated with males from the other community. Most remarkably, the males simply watched, inert, while the females of their community copulated with males from the other side...
...twenty years of information with up to four different bonobo communities...in all that time no one has seen border patrols, raiding, lethal aggression, or battering of strangers. The difference from chimpanzees looks clear.
Three behavioral comparisons lead to the same conclusion: Male bonobos are not as violent as male chimpanzees...
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Wrangham and Peterson, p.204-216.
Replying to
"If male chimpanzees could talk, they would probably develop rudimentary myths and rituals that increased male political solidarity and control over females and that decreased female tendencies toward autonomy and rebellion."
In chimpanzee society, patriarchy rules. Communities persist through a line of father-son relationships. Males are the inheritors of territory. Males conduct raids and the killing. Males are dominant. Males gain the spoils. But within any spotted hyena community, females rule. Females never leave their natal clans. And in hyena clans, up to eighty strong, the leader is always female - not because the females are larger...but because they are more determined, more aggressive, and, most important, more united. Females fight harder. Females are dominant. Females gain the spoils.
For chimpanzees, a lost territory means death for adult males, but not females. Females have more options, more freedom, even if they suffer to take advantage of it. When the K-group community of chimpanzees in Mahale was reduced to a single male in 1979, the five fertile females joined the neighboring M-group. At least four infants born subsequently to these females were killed by the M-group males, but after those first killings, later babies were allowed to live. No such luck for males on the losing side. The dominant sex lives and dies by its territory, but the subordinate sex can sometimes emigrate and thereby survive. We have seen the same pattern among humans in primitive wars.
Territorial gains, like territorial losses, have different impacts on males and females. For a male-bonded chimpanzee community, conquered land can include not only a large foraging area, but also new females who may simply continue to forage in the same area of forest as before the boundaries changed, only now with a different set of defenders. So males of an expanding community can gain females, which means that male chimpanzees should want to expand their territory to the largest area they can defend...
...Does it matter...what the fight achieves? If you're a party-gang species living in rivalry with neighbors, a chance to kill safely tends to pay off for the same underlying reason. It weakens the neighbors. The future can't be foreseen, but whatever it holds, the neighbors will be rivals, armed and dangerous. The stronger you are, the more easily their land can be taken, regardless of the particular benefits the land will bring.
And second, why males? Because males coalesce in parties to defend territory. It might have been different. If females were the resident sex and formed the coalitionary bonds and defended their territory, humans might still have had Genghis Khans, Alexanders, Caesars, and Hitlers. But they and their favored gods and their trusted soldiers would be women. Hyenas show us that human male violence doesn't stem merely from maleness.
...Why do chimpanzees and humans form party-gangs...And why are we make bonded when we could be female bonded or both, or neither?
The easier problem is that of party-gangs, a peculiar style of social behavior that looks entirely explicable by the cost of grouping theory. This theory states that primate groups might grow infinitely large, except for the restraints imposed by ecological costs...The notion is well supported by what we know about party-gang species, because for all of them, parties become bigger when or where more food is available. We see this pattern...among...chimpanzees...only when trees have ripe fruit do chimpanzee parties really swell in size...More food makes bigger parties...
...When a troop of any species becomes larger, it will have to travel farther during any given day to acquire enough food for all the individuals...If the cost-of-grouping theory holds true, then one would expect that those species forced to travel greater daily distances by increased troop size will turn out to be the same species that normally collect themselves into relatively small troops. Grouping is expensive to them, so they prefer small troops...
...Party-gang species, for ecological reasons, cannot afford to live in permanent troops year-round. They simply happen to possess lifestyles that make grouping very useful at sometimes and quite costly at others. There are lifestyles centered on eating high-quality but sometimes hard-to-find foods. Foods, perhaps, that pop up seasonally or grow in patches variable in size and density. Foods that are especially nutritious when you can find them, but are often unavailable. Foods that may be abundant one moment and rare the next. Foods like ripe fruits and fat-rich nuts and juicy roots and meats. Foods like the ones that both chimpanzees and humans have evolved to rely on.
"If You Ain't From The Gang Don't Say No Names!" - Frodo
"Keep My Name Outcho Mouth! Keep My Fuckin' Baboons Name Outcho Fuckin' Mouth! Cuz You Don't Know NONE Of Us! We Don't No NONE Of Y'all! (NOT AT ALL)" - Jane
"Keep My Name Outcho Mouth! Keep My Fuckin' Baboons Name Outcho Fuckin' Mouth! Cuz You Don't Know NONE Of Us! We Don't No NONE Of Y'all! (NOT AT ALL)" - Jane
World War Chimp | The Brutal 1974 - 1978 Gombe Chimpanzee War: Documentary
So the party-gang patterns of chimpanzees and humans probably come from our being connoisseurs of high-quality foods that are often too scarce to allow friends or allies to forage together regularly without some or all of them starving. If only we were like gorillas and could sit down in a mountain meadow eating leaves all day, we could cheerfully live in stable troops - just as gorillas do. But our digestive system didn't evolve to process leaves all day, and thus, while we move in parties when we can - for protection and for the benefits and pleasures of sociability - we still hunt those gourmet foods rare enough that just one extra forager in our party can reduce the gains markedly for everyone else, forcing us all to go distinctly farther every day to fill our bellies or food sacks. And for us connoisseur species, the distances easily become too great, intolerable on our tight energy budget. Rather than starve together, it is better to break up and forage alone, however valuable or pleasant the company.
Like other primate and carnivores, the party-gang species are xenophobic and territorial...when parties grow smaller they simultaneously become increasingly vulnerable to attack by neighbors who happen to be hanging out for the moment in bigger parties.
And why are those aggressive neighbors almost always male for chimpanzees and humans, but female for spotted hyenas? Partly, perhaps, because female apes don't benefit as much by fighting for food as female spotted hyenas do. You can't aggressively defend a branch of fruit as effectively as you can a chunk of meat. But benefits aside, there's a cost-of-grouping problem that pushes apes toward a male-bonded social system. Adult males walk faster and tire less quickly than adult females with infants because the males don't carry the infants. You see this principle express itself most clearly on long chimpanzee expeditions to favorite food patches. A mixed party may start off together, but mothers carrying their offspring often end up taking a rest halfway up a hill or slowly falling farther behind, so after a twenty-minute walk they arrive at the food patch five minutes after the males. Almost always it is only the females without infants who keep up with the males. Almost always it is only the females without infants who keep up with the males. So extra travel simply costs less for adult males and for childless females than it does for adult females with infants. This simple fact might on its own explain why males can spend more time together than females. They can afford to. They can afford to travel in large parties because the extra foraging distance is less expensive for them. And hence, in a classic example of how a seemingly arid ecological issue can ultimately generate major social effects, cost-of-grouping theory suggests that males can bond together merely because they can afford to spend more time together. If this is right, then it also predicts that childless females will be more social than mothers. Indeed they seem to be so. And mothers should form closer bonds with each other during the times and in the places where abundant food means they can spend time together. Again, they do.
...
The mysterious history before history, the blank slate of knowledge about ourselves before Jericho, has licensed our collective imagination and authorized the creation of primitive Edens for some, forgotten matriarchies for others. It is good to dream, but a sober, waking rationality suggests that if we start with ancestors like chimpanzees and end up with modern humans building walls and fighting platforms, the 5-million-year-long trail to our modern selves was lined, along its full stretch, by a male aggression that structured our ancestors' social lives and technology and minds. A few collected heaps of smashed skulls and projectile tips embedded in bone, the rare but fascinating examples of modern people living in Pleistocene economies, and the occasional vague theoretical glimpses we can gather on occasion of that otherwise deeply hidden 5 million years do not challenge this vision.
And yet, if we take this Dostoyevskian view of our origins, one more mystery immediately presents itself. Surely, if our ancestral males were so demonic in the structure of their daily lives, natural selection should have left deep traces of design in the structure of our own bodies. But humans look so feeble compared to the other apes. So where does the biologist find evidence of adaptation to our postulated demonic past? And if such evidence cannot be found, why not?
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Wrangham and Peterson, p.165-171.
The evidence that "we come from an evolutionary history of male domination & patriarchal systems," is pretty overwhelming, and even in the bonobo case here, there are examples of bonobo mothers helping their sons sexually coerce lower status females. quillette.com/2019/05/09/a-g
The gentleness of bonobo calls is only the first of an extraordinary suite of behavioral differences that are now known to divide the two species...
As we enter the social world of bonobos, we can think of them as chimpanzees with a threefold path to peace. They have reduced the level of violence in relations between the sexes, in relation among males, and in relations between communities.
First, how do males treat females? The basic evidence is clear and strong. Among bonobos there are no reports of males forcing copulations, battering adult females, or killing infants.
On the surface, bonobos have a social life very much like chimpanzees, living in communities, sharing a range with eighty or more others, traveling in various-size parties within the community range, living with their male kin group, and defending their range against outsiders. Most importantly, bonobos have the same size difference between males and females as chimpanzees. So why don't bonobo males exert their physical power over females in the same way chimpanzees do? The answer takes us into the heart of bonobo society.
Among chimpanzees every adult male is dominant to every adult female, and he enjoys his dominance. She must move out of his way, acknowledge him with the appropriate call or gesture, bend to his whim - or risk punishment...
But among bonobos, the sexes are codominant. The top female and top male are equal. The bottom female and the bottom male are equal. In between, your rank depends on who you are, not what sex you are. Of course, just as among chimpanzees, social rank is not the only thing that determines if you get your way. At least as important is who will help you.
...
Bonobo sons are almost inseparable from their mothers. They groom with them more than with males or anyone else. They stay with them throughout their lives, consistently in the same party. From the sons' point of view, this makes sense because their mothers' support appears to be crucial for success in competing with other males. Males whose mothers are alive tend to be high-ranking. Kano's study documents four young males who rose rapidly in rank because they had mothers alive and supporting them; two other males fell in rank when their mothers died...
...
The reason why mothers are so valuable to their sons opens a window into the bonobo world. Female bonobos cooperate with one another in ways males do not. Among bonobos, the mother-son relationship is the closest bond there is between males and females; and if a mother calls for help, other females will respond. So if a son or his mother is harassed the mother's group of females is always liable to counterattack in her support...
...
...female power is the secret to male gentleness among bonobos. However, the females don't often have to assert their power...
...
All available observations tell the same story. Female bonobos turn the tables on males. And if bonobo males throw their weight around and become overly aggressive, they are liable to be suppressed by females. The big question, therefore, is what bond makes the females such reliable, predictable supporters of each other. It's not kinship. Bonobos are like chimpanzees in that regard: When a female enters adolescence she leaves her family, migrates to a new community, and settles there. Most of the females she will spend her life with are unrelated to her. No, the bonds among females come not from kinship but from experience. In other words, the newly arrived adolescent must work to develop her support network.
The pattern has been witnessed for only a few females, but it is striking...The adolescents started out by sitting close, alert to their target adult, clearly subordinate but showing a quiet interest. The adolescent initiated most interactions, perhaps when the older female signaled willingness for the interaction to happen. Then, over a course of a few weeks, the pair become each other's most frequent partners in friendly interactions...
...What do her friendly interactions with the senior female consist of? Partly it's the ordinary social life of primates, sitting close and grooming each other. But in addition, she behaves, well, romantically. She has sex with the older female.
Researchers describe sex between female bonobos with an accurate but to us unsettling clinical term: genito-genital rubbing. But the term GG-rubbing...hardly captures the abandonment and excitement exhibited by two females practicing it. So let's use the Mongandu expression to describe this remarkable act: hoka-hoka...
...
Through sitting together, grooming, and hoka-hoka, the bond between the adolescent and the older female resident deepens. In a matter of a few months, the adolescent has a "friend" - in the technical sense of an individual with whom she has a specially affiliative relationship. With the development of that friendship, her integration into the new community has begun...all the females in a bonobo community have close affiliative relationships with other females, consistently expressed through hoka-hoka. And we know that the dominant females respect their subordinates. Unlike males, they don't display aggressively at each other, and the subordinates rarely give submissive signals...relations among females make for a generally peaceful life, in which the seniors do little to exert the authority of their position. It looks as though the adolescent's development of a bond with a senior female is her passport into a network of support and security.
As for how males treat other males of the same community, bonobos and chimpanzees show lots of similarities. In both species, males compete for status and for hierarchies, with the alpha male particularly easy to recognize. In both, males stay close and groom each other often, for similar amounts of time. In both, males try to intimidate each other by charging while dragging branches...
But there are many differences, too, and they all tell the same story. Whereas chimpanzee males are prepared to fight fiercely and risk a good deal to attain the alpha position, bonobos are not. Male bonobos just don't seem to care quite so much about being the boss. Bonobos fight less often, with lower intensity, and have less elaborate behaviors for preventing or resolving their differences...The unseating of an alpha male from his position of highest dominance can lead to life-threatening wounds among chimpanzees, but no such wounds have been seen among competing bonobos.
The contest for dominance is more elaborate among chimpanzees. Chimpanzees have ritualized signals of status recognition; bonobos don't. For example, in chimpanzees, signals of reassurance or reconciliation exaggerate the hierarchy - such as when a subordinate crouches and approaches a dominant while panting softly, and the dominant reaches out and pats the outstretched hand of the subordinate...
Chimpanzee males form alliances, as we have seen, which are crucial for their success in gaining and keeping high rank. Bonobo males don't. Along with this distinction come several differences in political strategizing. Even though the amount of grooming is similar for the males of both species, the pattern is different: Chimpanzee males tend to groom all their fellows, whereas bonobo males show clear favorites. Why? One theory is that chimpanzees use grooming as a way to curry favor with rivals rather than simply expressing friendly preferences. Chimpanzee males do the same with food sharing; unlike bonobos, they share as a political tactic.
Milder attacks between males, less male competition for rank, no male alliances to gain political advantage - why don't male bonobos care as much as chimpanzees about being the big cheese? The influence of mothers and female firepower is obviously very strong. But bonobo males are less aggressive with each other for another reason as well: They are much less concerned about who mates with the females. Among chimpanzees, copulation attempts by low-ranking males are often stopped by high-ranking males, especially near ovulation time. This happens very rarely among bonobos.
Why don't bonobo males care more about who gets to mate? The answer looks simple. Males can't tell when females are ovulating, apparently because the crucial smells that signal the approach of ovulation to male chimpanzees are simply absent in female bonobos. The ignorance is crucial. Ovulation is the time when the egg slips out of the ovary and readies itself to be fertilized. It happens once a month for a female, who thereby becomes ready for impregnation. By the logic of natural selection, a female's moment of ovulation is the critical time for the males to mate with her and, of course, to stop other males from mating. Chimpanzees appear able to tell the day of ovulation rather precisely, and males compete intensely for copulations at that time. Among bonobos, males show more interest in females during cycles when ovulation is relatively likely to occur. But during those cycles, no research has yet reported increased male anxiety about mating access as the specific day of ovulation approaches. It looks as though females conceal their ovulation.
...
But perhaps more interesting perhaps is what bonobos do with their sex...Bonobos use sex for much more than making babies. They have sex as a way to make friends. They have sex to calm someone who is tense. They have sex as a way to reconcile after aggression...We know their sexual activity has nothing to do directly with reproduction...just as people use sex as a way for deepening relationships, comforting each other, and testing each other, not to mention having fun or getting pleasure, so do bonobos.
Such a diverse sexuality among these apes both amazes us and leads us to wonder why it evolved. Again, a comparison with chimpanzees offers some insight. When a female chimpanzee has her monthly sexual swelling, she is subject to being herded and attacked by males. She has to dodge the noisy, dangerous fights of males challenging each other. She looks emotionally stressed, spends little time eating, and suffers wounds. Vulnerable to male power, she can pay a high price for being sexy. But since female bonobos are able to control males, their sexual attractiveness is not a liability but a strength, particularly because with the disguised ovulation time, males no longer know precisely when it's best to compete with each other.
The third part of the threefold bonobo way to peace was the last discovered and remains the least understood. Intercommunity violence is reduced; some encounters between communities are even friendly. True, smaller parties normally avoid larger ones, and if parties from different communities meet, there can be a fight. But when relaxed meetings between communities do happen, how remarkable they are.
...
Friendliness was always initiated by the females...females groomed with members of the other community; they continued their intercommunity hoka-hoka; and they also copulated with males from the other community. Most remarkably, the males simply watched, inert, while the females of their community copulated with males from the other side...
...twenty years of information with up to four different bonobo communities...in all that time no one has seen border patrols, raiding, lethal aggression, or battering of strangers. The difference from chimpanzees looks clear.
Three behavioral comparisons lead to the same conclusion: Male bonobos are not as violent as male chimpanzees...
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Wrangham and Peterson, p.204-216.
https://twitter.com/jurijfedorov/status/1337554422595989504
Those who work with bonobos are often suspected of idealizing them.
But it's now clear that the bonobos reputation is fair. Their remarkable
qualities of sympathy and restraint lie not just in particular
individuals...but in the species as a whole. We're dealing with a
species that experienced several odd things as it diverged from its
chimpanzee-like ancestors, of which the most unusual was the reduction
in personal violence.
So naturally we want to know why that happened. What set bonobos off on their curious path after they left their common ancestry with chimpanzees?...we will suggest a specific prehistorical link between the evolution of bonobos and the evolution of humans, making us ponder the irony of an event that could have changed two different apes in two very different ways.
We have seen that the power of female alliances explains why bonobo males so rarely exert brute force over females. It also explains why females have been able to evolve their hypersexuality. And the reduction in male-against-male violence flows from the males' inability to monopolize females, perhaps also from their ignorance of the females' fertile periods...Female power is a sine qua non of bonobo life, the magic key to their world. So where did bonobos find this key to a better life?
That's one problem. The other has to do wit lethal raiding. Even female power can't explain why intercommunity violence between groups of males has been so repressed. Male bonobos still live with their fraternal kin groups in communities that hold land, and they still fight over it with battle cries and even physical engagements. But they don't go on border patrols. They don't stalk into neighboring territory. And, so far as we know, they don't kill each other.
The two problems have a single answer. Party size.
The contrast with chimpanzee parties was evident from the earliest days of bonobo fieldwork...bonobo parties include more females than chimpanzee parties do, and they vary less in size over the year. Chimpanzee parties are sometimes small, with individuals or mother-child groups often traveling alone. Bonobo parties are never so atomistic...bonobos combined "the cohesiveness of gorilla society with the flexibility of chimpanzee social organization."
Their gorilla-style foods are the young leaves and stems of herbs on the forest floor. Bonobos snack on them while traveling between fruit trees...For much of their travel, bonobos may walk as a group, though widely spread, with individuals stopping at their own little herb patch and eating for a few minutes before walking another hundred meters to the front of the party and finding another snack. It is the same way gorillas feed. And just as with gorillas, those herbs are so common that the presence of others in the group does little to reduce the food supply.
Because they have this snack food, the costs of traveling with other individuals are reduced. Bonobos don't have to visit many extra fruit trees every day to satisfy their hunger. The gorilla foods buffer the effects of seasonal fruit shortages and allow bonobos to travel with their fellows more easily than chimpanzees can afford.
So the diets of bonobos and chimpanzees are different in an important way. The beauty of this difference is that we can explain why it's there. The puzzle, remember, was that the forests of bonobos on one side of the Zaire River and those of chimpanzees on the other side look so similar. Well, floristically, they are indeed similar. But the important difference between the forests of bonobos and the forests of chimpanzees lies not in the plants; it lies in the animals. The lowland forests occupied by chimpanzees are shared with gorillas. But bonobos have no gorillas in their range. In other words, gorilla foods are commoner in the bonobo forests simply because there are no gorillas to eat them.
... Remove the gorillas in the forest, and chimpanzees - if they were inclined to seek it out - would suddenly discover a lot of gorilla food.
We are close to the end of this winding road. Bonobos can afford to live in larger, more stable parties than chimpanzees because they live in a world without gorillas. They have evolved to take advantage of the more digestible parts of the gorilla diet - not the tough, low-quality stems that occur in patches around swamps, but the juicy, protein-rich growth buds and stem bases of young herbs...Bonobos have evolved in a forest that is kindlier in its food supply, and that allows them to be kindly, too.
But why are there no gorillas in the land of bonobos? Why do chimpanzees and gorillas both live on the right bank of the Zaire River, while only bonobos live on the left bank?
...Chimpanzees and gorillas have that old common ancestry, having separated from each other 8 to 10 million years ago. Bonobos and chimpanzees separated from their common ancestor around 1.5 to 3 million years ago. The Zaire River appears by comparison very old: The rocks in its eastern wall are around 3 billion years old. The forests around it have sometimes been vast and continuous, allowing apes to migrate all the way round. Indeed, many species of mammals live on both sides of the river.
These basic facts mean that some scenarios are unlikely. For instance, it's unreasonable to think that the first apes to reach the river's southern bank were bonobos. Gorilla and chimpanzee ancestors surely lived north and south of the river for much of the last 8 million years. Let's not think that bonobos evolved somewhere else and then arrived in the forests to find a world magically without gorillas or chimps. Instead, we must imagine that bonobos evolved within the southern forests out of their original chimpanzee-like ancestor - and they evolved there once the ancestral gorillas had left.
To think about why ancestral gorillas left this area, we must step back for a moment and consider climate. Africa's climatic history during the last few million years tells a story of irregular drought. During the ice ages, when so much of the earth's moisture was locked up in great ice caps, forests dried up and contracted to tiny areas in East and West Africa, surviving only where it was wet - usually where there were mountains, or in river gullies. It is easy to imagine that in a cold, dry period around 2.5 million years ago, African forests were so reduced that gorillas, crucially dependent on the herbs of the moist forest, were forced to retreat along with their forests and finally could survive only in forested mountains, as some gorillas do today. On the Zaire River's right bank, in fact, forests would have receded west and east onto mountains. But on the left bank, there was a problem. No mountains. Here, the low altitude of the Zaire basin spelled a temporary end to gorilla foods and the permanent end of the southern gorillas. So ancient climatic events probably solve the modern puzzle of how gorillas are distributed in Africa, separated by a 1,000-kilometer gap in the rich heart of the continent.
Chimpanzees today can live in dry areas, uninhabited by gorillas, by eating fruits in strips of riverine forest that linger amid open savanna. Ancestral chimpanzees could have survived in the same way on the Zaire's southern side during some appalling 10,000-year drought 2.5 million years ago. Then, when the drought ended, they would have found themselves in a new world. The southern forests would have returned, botanically much the same as before, but without gorillas. Now the southern chimpanzees could exploit the plentiful herbs that gorillas had monopolized as a food source. Herbs became this ape's reserve food. And, with a new and predictable reserve food in place, they could expand their ecological niche, endure well during the fruit-poor seasons, and travel in more stable parties. Stable parties meant they could become bonobos.
Party stability, in other words, produced female power. For females to develop supportive relationships, they need to spend time together.
Even among chimpanzees, there are females who spend time together...chimpanzee females do develop mutual support networks, assisting each other in competition for status against other females...And females may defend each other against males...It is mainly in captivity, where a chimpanzee group stays together for a long time, that stable female relationships emerge...They protect each other from the excesses of male violence by developing mutually supportive coalitions against males.
And that same behavior occurs, as we have seen, among bonobos in the wild. Females form the core of bonobo parties, so that in small parties there are more females than males. Females spend their time closer to each other than males do. Females are more likely to be in the center of the party, with males on the outside. And they form alliances that effectively protect them against male aggression.
As for intercommunity aggression, once again, stable party size is essential - but not because it allows particular females to live together. Instead, it affects the power imbalance that most predicts intercommunity violence in party-gang species. We have argued that the crucial feature favoring lethal raiding by chimpanzees is that a party of several males can find a lone individual and thereby attack at minimal costs to themselves. Among chimpanzees an individual travels alone when forced to do so by the exigencies of a poor food supply. Among bonobos, the existence of herbs gives all individuals the luxury of company, so every party remains capable of putting up a good defense; and raiders into neighboring ground will not find a vulnerable loner.
Around the same time that bonobos and chimpanzee ancestors began their revolutionary divergence, 2 to 2.5 million years ago, another great event was unfolding a few hundred kilometers away, in the savana woodlands. One line of woodland apes was evolving into humans. Most likely, a drying event led to the loss of fruit trees and thereby passed one particular population into a full commitment to terrestrial life. This was the start of the genus Homo.
...One kind of habitat change eliminated gorillas and thereby made bonobos. Another eliminated fruit trees and thereby made humans. And it is a fair possibility that the same deep drought, squeezing the African ape with enough pressure to produce to new forms, created humans in the savannas and bonobos in the forest.
...
In the
savanna woodlands our ancestors acquired the simple physical hallmarks
of being human. Those hallmarks aren't what we normally think of when we
talk proudly of "our humanity," but they distinguish humans in the
fossil record. The brain expanded beyond the ape range; teeth shrank
from the giant molars of the woodland apes; and the skeleton became
committed to terrestrial locomotion. Perhaps then our ancestors stopped
feeding in trees, but our line kept such ancient climbing adaptations as
the mobile shoulder joint. Fossils show these physical characteristics
had all appeared by around 2 million years ago. With their arrival we
can look back and say: Then we began our departure from the apes. They
mark the start of our physical humanity.
But what about the moral aspects of humanity? Under the stars of the Pliocene nights, sated by a good day's eating and relaxing in the company of playful children, our ancestors would sometimes have reflected kindly on their peers. Many a friendship would have bloomed. But we know of no foods in the savanna woodlands that would have allowed the woodland apes, or their human descendants, to forage in stable parties as bonobos do. A diet of meat and fruits and nuts and honey and roots would demand constant splitting up to find the best patches. If so, females could not effectively restrain males, imbalances of power would have continued among party-gangs, and heartless aggression would have been employed occasionally, as it is with chimpanzees and modern humans.
The southern forests provide the message that it didn't have to be this way, that there was room on the earth for a species biologically committed to the moral aspects of what, ironically, we like to call "humanity": respect for others, personal restraint, and turning aside from violence as a solution to conflicting interests. The appearance of these traits in bonobos hints at what might have been among Homo sapiens, if evolutionary history had been just slightly different.
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Wrangham and Peterson, p.220-230.
Sexual selection, the evolutionary process that produces sex differences, has a lot to answer for. Without it, males wouldn't possess dangerous bodily weapons and a mindset that sanctions violence. But males who are better fighters can stop other males from mating, and they mate more successfully themselves. Better fighters tend to have more babies. That's the simple, stupid, selfish logic of sexual selection. So, what about us? Is sexual selection ultimately the reason why men brawl in barrooms, from urban gangs, plot guerrilla attacks, and go to war? Has it indeed designed men to be especially aggressive?
...
What about our minds? Has sexual selection shaped our psyches also, in order to make us better fighters? Can sexual selection explain why men are so quick to bristle at insults, and, under the right circumstances, will readily kill? Can our evolutionary past account for modern war?
Inquiry about mental process is difficult enough when we deal just with humans. Comparison with other species is harder still. The supposed problem is that animals fight with their hearts, so people say, whereas humans fight with their minds. Animal aggression is supposed to happen by instinct, or by emotion, and without reason...
The argument sounds fair enough, but it depends on oversimplified thinking, a false distinction between animals acting by emotion (or instinct) and humans acting by reason. Animal behavior is not purely emotional. Nor is human decision-making purely rational. In both cases, the event is a mixture. And new evidence suggests that even though we humans reason much more (analyze past and present context, consider a potential future, and so on) than nonhuman animals, our essential process for making a decision still relies on emotion.
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Now we're ready to ask
what causes aggression. If emotion is the ultimate arbiter of action for
both species, then what kinds of emotions underlie violence for both?
Clearly there are many. But one stands out. From the raids of
chimpanzees at Gombe to wars among human nations, the same emotion looks
extraordinarily important, one that we take for granted and describe
most simply but that nonetheless takes us deeply back to our animal
origins: pride.
Male chimpanzees compete much more aggressively for dominance than females do. If a lower-ranking male refuses to acknowledge his superior with one of the appropriate conventions, such as a soft grunt, the superior will become predictable angry. But females can let such insults pass. Females are certainly capable of being aggressive to each other, and they can be as political adept as males in using coalitions to achieve a goal. But female chimpanzees act as they don't care about their status as much as males do.
By contrast, we exaggerate only barely in saying that a male chimpanzee in his prime organizes his whole life around issues of rank. His attempts to achieve and then maintain alpha status are cunning, persistent, energetic, and time-consuming. They affect whom he travels with, whom he grooms, where he glances, how often he scratches, where he goes, and what time he gets up in the morning. (Nervous alpha males get up early, and often wake others with their overeager charging displays.) And all these behaviors come not from a drive to be violent for its own sake, but from a set of emotions that, when people show them, are labeled "pride" or, more negatively, "arrogance."
The male chimpanzee behaves as if he is quite driven to reach the top of the community heap. But once he has been accepted as the alpha (in other words, once his authority is established to the point where it is no longer challenged), his tendency for violence falls dramatically...once males have reached the top, they can become benign leaders as easily as they earlier became irritated challengers. What most male chimpanzees strive for is being on the top, the one position where they will never have to grovel. It is the difficulty of getting there that induces aggression.
Eighteenth-century Englishmen used less dramatic tactics than wild chimpanzees, but that acute observer Samuel Johnson thought rank concerns were as pervasive: "No two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other." Pride obviously serves as stimulus for much interpersonal aggression in humans, and we can hypothesize confidently that this emotion evolved during countless generations in which males who achieved high status were able to turn their social success into extra reproduction. Male pride, the source of many a conflict, is reasonably seen as a mental equivalent of broad shoulders. Pride is another legacy of sexual selection.
And can it account for war? The immediate causes of wars are as varied as the interests and policies of those who launch them, but deeper analysis leads to a consistent conclusion: Wars tend to be rooted in competition for status.
...The rivalry between Sparta and Athens broke out into war, fed by border clashes and conflicts over trade, prospects of booty, individual acts of treason or glory seeking, and by all the complex divided loyalties and personal ambitions that mark any war. But the essential dynamic, according to Thucydides, was that Sparta watched the growth of Athenian power, feared the outcome, and decided to counter the threat. Michael Howard argues that the same logic applies throughout history, from the Peloponnesian War to the World Wars of the twentieth century. Men fight, he says, "neither because they are aggressive nor because they are acquisitive animals, but because they are reasoning ones: because they discern, or believe that they can discern, dangers before they become immediate, the possibility of threats before they are made.
We could well substitute for Sparta and Athens the names of two male chimpanzees in the same community, one rising in power, the other anxious to keep his higher status.
Even if Athen's power had exceeded Sparta's, the future would still be uncertain. Athens might still have remained benign or been devastated by natural disaster or conquered by another enemy. But Sparta knew, of course, that Athens would likely take advantage of her power, because, apparently, Greek city-states behave the way human or male chimpanzee males behave. So it is easy to see the Peloponnesian War as having begun as a consequence of competition between two prideful city-states, ruled by prideful men concerned - like two tough guys squared off for a fight in a tavern - not rationally but emotionally about who is the biggest and the best. Which city-state is number one? Who is the real superpower of the Peloponnesus? Pride, the emotional complex driving status competition, may remind us of the Peloponnesian War, or it may make us think of contemporary street gang clashes, such as those recalled by Sanyika Shakur from the early days of Crips and Bloods in South Central Los Angeles. "Our war, like most gang wars, was not fought for territory or any specific goal other than the destruction of individuals, human beings. The idea was to drop enough bodies, cause enough terror and suffering so that they'd come to their senses and realize that we were the wrong set to fuck with. Their goal, I'm sure, was the same."
Sparta's seemingly rational fear, laid in place by evolved systems of thinking and feeling, was based on calculated guesswork about Athenian intentions - but also on the unexamined feeling that it is always worth being on top, an emotion that has evolved for good reasons. We can doubtless overcome this feeling, but the bias in favor of it is powerful. We get into fights or lust for imperial dominion over another nation for reasons of pride.
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The problem is that males are demonic at unconscious and irrational levels. The motivation of a male chimpanzee who challenges another's rank is not that he foresees more matings or better food or a longer life. Those rewards explain why sexual selection has favored the desire for power, but the immediate reason he vies for status is simpler, deeper, and less subject to the vagaries of context. It is simply to dominate his peers. Unconscious of the evolutionary rationale that placed this prideful goal in his temperament, he devises strategies to achieve it that can be complex, original, and maybe conscious. In the same way, the motivation of male chimpanzees on a border patrol is not to gain land or win females. The temperamental goal is to intimidate the opposition, to beat them to a pulp, to erode their ability to challenge. Winning has become an end in itself. It looks the same with men.
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Wrangham and Peterson, p.173-199.
Patriotism is love and defense
of one's country, ordinarily considered a high virtue. The national
flag is a sacred symbol; hearts quicken at the sound of martial bands.
Celebrated in language, music, and the visual arts, patriotism leads us
to some of our greatest acts of heroism. It gives us national holidays
and justifies the purest kind of sacrifice. Patriotism can look fine and
glamorous - at least in the abstract.
Stripped to its ape essence, patriotism is male defense of the community, gloried among humans and surely enjoyed among chimpanzees and bonobos. For all the cultural determinists' efforts to persuade us that it's an arbitrary choice, patriotism seems such a fundamental aspect of being human that one can hardly imagine how things might be different. And the concept that fighting males are a natural, inevitable part of life is merely reinforced by comparing our own strange mixture of compassion and cruelty with that of chimpanzees. Even the comparison with bonobos emphasizes that idea that male coalitionary violence is primal. After all, the very triumph of bonobo females, in achieving equality with males, is a response to the problems imposed by male coalitions, male violence and male kinship. Coalitionary male action in defense of group identity, it might seem, is just an essential building block of social evolution and something that any species must live with.
...As we have seen, the evolutionary logic of our odd cluster of ape social systems is explicable, albeit still imperfectly. Ecological pressures kept females from forming effective alliances. With females unable to rely on each other, they became vulnerable to males interested in guarding them. Males seized the opening, collaborated with each other to possess and defend females, and started down the road to patriarchy. We are fascinated by the lives of patriarchal men and the histories of their patriotic alliances - not because we are humans or because we are primates, but because we are apes, and in particular because we are part of a group within the apes where the males hold sway by combining into powerful, unpredictable, status-driven and manipulative coalitions, operating in persistent rivalry with other such coalitions.
Unfortunately, there appears something special about foreign policy in the hands of males. Among humans and chimpanzees, at least, male coalitionary groups often go beyond defense (typical of monkey matriarchies) to include unprovoked aggression, which suggests that our own intercommunity conflicts might be less terrible if they were conducted on behalf of women's rather than men's interests. Primate communities organized around male interests naturally tend to follow male strategies and, thanks to sexual selection, tend to seek power with an almost unbounded enthusiasm. In a nutshell: Patriotism breeds aggression.
Males have evolved to possess strong appetites for power because with extraordinary power males can achieve extraordinary reproduction. Admittedly, not all powerful males have done so. Alexander the Great, arguably the most powerful man the world has seen, never showed more than a passing interest in women and fathered just a single child by the time he died at the age of thirty-two. But Alexander bucked the trend. Harems of at least several hundred women have been the norm for the emperors of all major civilizations: Aztec, Babylonian, Chinese, Egyptian, Incan, Indian, and Roman. The women were always young (that is, comparatively fertile), and they were carefully guarded in well-fortified sites, normally by eunuchs...
In societies without an absolute ruler, the reproductive benefits of power have been shared between men. War captives, who tend to be women, were routinely given as rewards to warriors and a supporting elite...
Any male ruler not trapped by institutional rules has tended to have more wives than ordinary men. This is the logic of sexual selection played out exactly as among many other species: If a male wins power, he will tend to use it to mate as many females as possible. Of course, expanded reproductive opportunities is by no means the only reason why men like power so much. The goal of winning women may be unconscious; or it may in fact have no direct association at all with the emotional systems that drive men to win battles and palace intrigues. Thanks to the effects of sexual selection, men are inclined to seek power for its own sake, even in circumstances where tradition inhibits and law prohibits extra wives or concubines.
Because of the large potential reproductive rewards at stake for males, sexual selection has apparently favored male temperaments that revel in high-risk/high-gain adventures. At the individual level, this temperamental quality can show relatively trivial effects. Men may sometimes drive their cars faster or gamble more intensely or perhaps play sports more recklessly than women. But the sort of relatively discountable wildness that, for example, hikes automobile insurance rates for adolescent boys and young men also produces a greater willingness to risk their own and others' lives; and that sort of risk attraction becomes very significant once men acquire weapons. And where men combine into groups - gangs or villages or tribes or nations - this driving, adventurous ethic turns quickly aggressive and lethally serious. Based on this logic, we conclude that imperialism derives partly from the fact that human foreign policy is based on male rather than female reproductive interests.
The idea could be tested by comparing aggressive tendencies in party-gang species according to whether foreign policy benefits females or males. Spotted hyenas' foreign policy benefits females; in chimpanzees it benefits males. The few data currently available support the notion that raiding, an imperialist tendency, occurs more regularly among chimpanzees than among hyenas. But whether or not matriots are less greedy than patriots, the chimpanzee-human system looks clear. The downtrodden of the earth rail against the imperialism of the temporarily dominant, but imperialist expansionism is nevertheless a broad and persistent tendency of our demonic male species.
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Friedrich Engels regarded the historical institution of marriage as the beginning of the end for humankind: the start of the bourgeois family, patriarchy, and from there class and social struggle. For Engels, as for many traditional feminists, women are caught in a trap constructed by men - one marked by violence and perpetuated through a patriarchy of specific historic and social origins.
Evolutionary feminism provides a longer look. Human patriarchy has its beginning in the forest ape social world, a system based on males' social dominance and coercion of females. We can speculate that it was elaborated subsequently, perhaps in the woodland ape era, perhaps much later, by the development of sexual attachments with the same essential dynamic as gorilla bonds: women offering fidelity, men offering protection from harassment and violence by other men. From those poorly articulated forms of pairing, language would eventually generate both marriage and the patriarchal rules that favor married men. Men, following an evolutionary logic that benefits those who make the laws, would create legal systems that so often defined adultery as a crime for women, not for men - a social world that makes men freer than women.
Traditional feminism, even if it accepted the evolutionary timetable, would want to stop the analysis there and restrict the blame to men. But evolutionary feminism views women as active players in the development of the patriarchy, albeit often suffering as an ironic outcome of serving their own interests. Women's interests, their strategies and counterstrategies in response to men, have clearly played a major role in the development of human social forms.
...It so happens that among chimpanzees, as among orangutans and gorillas, females have been unable to develop effective counterstrategies against those of their demonic male partners, though females with strong personalities will develop relatively satisfactory relationships with individual males. Among bonobos, though, females (newly freed from ecological constraints) responded effectively to the problem. The result, we have argued, was effectively a revolution in the nature of their society, the reduction of what was once an unpleasant form of patriarchy to a relatively tolerant and charming world in which the sexes are equal.
If there is no human group where women have achieved a comparable equality, women everywhere nevertheless have much of the same potential as bonobo females to change the system. Everywhere, women develop supportive societal networks with each other. Everywhere, women wield influence over their husbands and sons and other males - a power often much stronger than at first appears. The problem is that everywhere, women are caught in a trap. If they support each other too much, they become vulnerable to losing what they want, the investment and protection of the most desirable men. There is competition between women for the best men, and it can break the unwritten compact among them.
The interplay between women's interests in protecting themselves from abusive husbands on one hand, and finding or maintaining a long-term relationship on the other, is a classic tragedy of marriage. And all too often, despite the most appalling abuse, women don't leave a relationship. They stay because they are afraid, or because they forgive their mates, or because they hope to change them. Too often they stay because in some part of their mind, they want their mates, despite their aggression. We can take this as a metaphor for women's awkward place in the larger society. Individual women are caught in the trap of wanting a man to protect and provide for them; women as a group find their general interests ignored or stymied because some women side with men.
Bonobos have shown us that the trap can be broken through female alliances. Among humans, a direct equivalent would be if women always remained together, day an night, in groups so large and well armed that they could always suppress the hostility of rowdy, aggressive men. The prospect seems too fantastic to consider further. Fortunately, humans can create other possibilities.
The problem in both human and ape history is that political power is built on physical power - and the physical power is ultimately the power of violence of its threat. "Political power," in the words of Mao Tse-tung, "grows out of the barrel of a gun," In other words, those who have political power can count on someone coming to their aid - the police or the military or the mob or the family, or the royal guard.
In traditional human societies political power is personalized. That is, it resides in the person (or families and alliances) of the most successful individuals and their descendants. Whenever political power is personalized, so is the physical power on which it ultimately depends; and whenever the physical power is personalized (not parsed and regulated through institutions, laws, and rules) the violence of demonic males from which it ultimately derives will be unrestrained. This is the broad current of human affairs, challenged in a thousand places by exceptional backwaters and eddies, but never reversed.
The alternative to personal is institutional. Italian politics, as Robert D. Putnam implies in Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1993), chose both routes after a collapse of medieval authority during the twelfth century, shifting toward institutional systems in the North while remaining traditionally personalized in the South. The result in this century? Southern politics is still profoundly corrupted by male power contests and stained by the secrets of Palermo.
The great revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century in France and America marked a historic though incomplete shift from personal to institutional political power in those places. Once political power was taken away from individual men (who held it for life, by tradition and inheritance) and assigned by law and institution to temporarily appointed men, the physical power from which it derived also became, to a degree, regulated by institution. The underlying grip of male demonism, which attaches itself to human affairs through personalized physical power, was loosened slightly. The shift from personal to institutional actually describes not so much a single event as a process: a widening of the distribution of control away from individuals and cabals toward a more democratic spread. Democracy itself is a process; and its success requires long-standing habits and traditions of civic engagement, not merely the miraculous appearance of good constitutions or enlightened legal codes. Women in nineteenth-century America acquired the beginnings of political power through their own struggle, of course - but also because they lived within a system in which political power had been institutionalized to the degree that someone actually counted votes.
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So personalized political power favors the appearance of the demonic male behaving in a male competitive style. The human political system most likely to favor a female competitive style is the one in which power has been depersonalized through the construction of stable institutions. Of the many styles of political institutions, the most depersonalized are also the most democratic. Among the nation-states, therefore, institutional democracies present the best actual situations where women can hope to acquire political codominance with men. Institutional democracies are deeply imperfect, in several instances weakened by civic and economic crises, often still highly personalized and therefore inevitably patriarchal. But they are also remarkably flexible and resilient, and a reduction in interpersonal violence seems most positively assured by faith in the evolution of institutional democracy.
In true institutional democracies, political power ultimately comes from the ballot box. And it is to the ballot box that women in the real world can most effectively mass themselves...and break through the trap defined by male interest. Feminist commentator Naomi Wolf has remarked on the peculiarity that women in democracies, who after all represent half the voters, have not learned to use their power more effectively. But the trend is there.
On April 19, 1995, in downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, two young men park a Ryder rental truck packed with a two-ton bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building during working hours, a time when they can be certain the building will contain around five hundred ordinary adults of both sexes and, in a day care center on the second floor, about two dozen children and infants. The two men light a fuse and walk walk away from the truck. At 9:02 A.M. the bomb ignites side of the nine-story building, top to bottom, creating a giant orange fireball and a chaos of glass, concrete, steel, dust, office furniture, people, and body parts. The blast tears into the second-floor day care center and rips away toys and blocks and picture books along with children's faces, heads, arms, and fingers.
Within days a prime suspect is captured, one Timothy McVeigh, an all-American male recently retired from the U.S. army and having some background connection with an informal group calling itself the Michigan Militia. McVeigh, standing soldier stiff and looking out through blue eyes and a lean, vacant face, appears to regard himself as a hero and prisoner of war, and refuses to say one word about himself, his ideas, his motives, or his possible association with the bombing. The Michigan Militia turns out to be the creation of a gun dealer named Norman Olson who believes the United Nations is poised to take over the United States and has therefore organized 12,000 gun-toting men across his home state to prepare resistance. Members of the group, who informally describe themselves as American patriots, describe seeing black helicopters flying overhead, obviously preparing the way for an international takeover, "Armed conflict may be necessary if the country doesn't turn around," Olson declares. He later blames the Oklahoma explosion on the Japanese, while another spokesman for the group, Brigade Executive Director Stephen Bridges, righteously denies any association whatsoever with the bomb attack or its perpetrators.
The details are new: serious patriots and pot-bellied ideologues loyal to what they believe are original American ideals construct among themselves a vision of threatening forces as solid as the guns they carry and as fantastic, in its elaborations, as a visit from outer space. But the pattern is classic. As David Trochmann, cofounder of another American group of similar bent, Militia of Montana, express the mindset: "Where we come from is very simple. There are good guys and bad guys out there. The bad guys have to be stopped."
The system of thought, feeling, and behavior is no different in its dynamic and underlying psychology from that of a thousand other predominantly male groups, including urban gangs, motorcycle gangs, criminal organizations, pre-state warrior societies, and even the more formalized and state-sponsored armies (which after all still organize their fundamental fighting units at the platoon level). The psychology engaged may be hardly different from that expressed in predominantly male team sports - American football and hockey, for example. This behavior is similar, not alien, and it reiterates a pattern as old and wide as the species. Demonic males gather in small, self-perpetuating, self-aggrandizing bands. They sight or invent an enemy "over there" - across the ridge, on the other side of the boundary, on the other side of a linguistic or social or political or ethnic or racial divide. The nature of the divide hardly seems to matter. What matters is the opportunity to engage in the vast and compelling drama of belonging to the gang, identifying the enemy, going on the patrol, participating in the attack.
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Wrangham and Peterson, p.231-246
Have you ever noticed how the worst part of someone's personality is often also the best? You may know an anally retentive, detail-oriented accountant who never cracks a joke, nor understands any, but this is in fact what makes him the perfect accountant. Or you may have a flamboyant aunt who constantly embarrasses everyone with her big mouth, yet is the life of the party. The same duality applies to our species. We certainly don't like our aggressiveness -- at least on most days --but would it be such a great idea to create a society without it? Wouldn't we be all as meek as lambs? Our sports teams wouldn't care about winning or losing, entrepreneurs would be impossible to find, and pop stars would sing only boring lullabies. I'm not saying that aggressiveness is good, but it enters into everything we do, not just murder and mayhem. Removing human aggression is thus something to consider with care.
Humans are bipolar apes. We have something of the gentle, sexy bonobo, which we may like to emulate, but not too much; otherwise the world might turn into one giant hippie fest of flower power and free love. Happy we might be, but productive perhaps not. And our species also has something of the brutal, domineering chimpanzee, a side we may wish to suppress, but not completely, because how else would we conquer new frontiers and defend our borders? One could argue that there would be no problem if all of humanity turned peaceful at the same time, but no population is stable unless it's immune to invasions by mutants. I'd still worry about that one lunatic who gathers an army and exploits the soft spots of the rest.
So, strange as it may sound, I'd be reluctant to radically change the human condition. But if I could change one thing, it would be to expand the range of fellow feeling. The greatest problem today, with so many different groups rubbing shoulders on a crowded planet, is excessive loyalty to one's own nation, group, or religion. Humans are capable of deep disdain for anyone who looks different or thinks another way even between neighboring groups with almost identical DNA such as the Israelis and Palestinians. Nations think they are superior to their neighbors, and religions think they own the truth. When push comes to shove, they are ready to thwart or even eliminate one another. In recent years, we have seen two huge office towers brought down by airplanes deliberately flown into them as well as massive bombing raids on the capital of a nation, and on both occasions the deaths of thousands of innocents was celebrated as a triumph of good over evil. The lives of strangers are often considered worthless. Asked why he never talked about the number of civilians killed in the Iraq War, U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld answered: "Well, we don't do body counts on other people."
Empathy for "other people" is the one commodity the world is lacking more than oil. It would be great if we could create at least a modicum of it. How this might change things was hinted at when, in 2004, Israeli justice minister Yosef Lapid was touched by images of a Palestinian woman on the evening news. "When I saw a picture on the TV of an old woman on all fours in the ruins of her home looking under some floor tiles for her medicines, I did think, 'What would I say if it were my grandmother?'" Even though Lapid's sentiments infuriated the nation's hard-liners, the incident showed what happens when empathy expands. In a brief moment of humanity, the minister had drawn Palestinians into his circle of concern.
The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. De Waal, p. 203-204.
...Empathy needs both a filter that makes us select what we react to, and a turn-off switch. Like every emotional reaction, it has a "portal," a situation that typically triggers it or that we allow to trigger it. Empathy's chief portal is identification. We're ready to share the feelings of someone we identify with, which is why we do so easily with those who belong to our inner circle: For them the portal is always ajar. Outside this circle, things are optional. It depends on whether we can afford being affected, or whether we want to be. If we notice a beggar in the street, we can choose to look at him, which may arouse our pity, or we can look away, even walk to the other side of the street, to avoid facing him. We have all sorts of ways to open or close the portal.
The moment we buy a movie ticket, we chose to identify with the leading character, thus making ourselves vulnerable to empathizing. We swoon when she falls in love or leave the theater in tears because of her untimely death, even though it's just a character played by someone we don't personally know. On the other hand, we some times deliberately shut the portal, such as when we suppress identification with a declared enemy group. We do so by removing their individuality, defining them as an anonymous mass of unpleasant, inferior specimens of a different taxonomic group. Why should we put up with those dirty "cockroaches" (the Hutus about the Tutsis) or disease-ridden "rats" (the Nazis about the Jews)? Called the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, dehumanization has a long history of excusing atrocities.
Since men are the more territorial gender, and overall more confrontational and violent than women, one should expect them to have the more effective turn-off switch. They clearly do have empathy, but perhaps apply it more selectively. Cross-cultural studies confirm that women everywhere are considered more empathic than men, so much so that the claim has been made that the female (but not the male) brain is hardwired for empathy. I doubt that the difference is that absolute, but it's true that at birth girl babies look longer at faces than boy babies, who look longer at suspended mechanical mobiles. Growing up, girls are more prosocial than boys, better readers of emotional expressions, more attuned to voices, more remorseful after having hurt someone, and better at taking another's perspective. When Carolyn Zahn-Waxler measured reactions to distressed family members, she found girls looking more at the other's face, providing more physical comfort, and more often expressing concern, such as asking "Are you okay?" Boys are less attentive to the feelings of others, more action-and object-oriented, rougher in their play, and less inclined to social fantasy games. They prefer collective action, such as building something together.
Men can be quite dismissive of empathy. It's not particularly manly to admit it, and one reason why it has taken so long for research in this area to take off is undoubtedly that academics saw empathy as a bleeding-heart topic associated with the weaker sex...
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...Asked about loved ones, such as their parents, wife, children, and close friends, most men are plenty empathic. The same applies in relation to unfamiliar, neutral parties. Men are perfectly willing to empathize under such circumstances, the way they often can't keep their eyes dry in romantic or tragic movies. With their portal open, men can be just as empathic as women. But things radically change when men enter a competitive mode, such as when they're advancing their interests or career. Suddenly, there's little room for softer feelings. Men can be brutal toward potential rivals: Anyone who stands in the way has to be taken down. Sometimes the physicality slips out, such as when Jesse Jackson, the longtime African alpha male, expressed his feelings about the new kid on the block, Barack Obama, in 2008. In surreptitiously taped comments on a television show, Jackson said about Obama that he'd like to "cut his nuts off." At other times, things literally get physical, such as the way head of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, reacted to hearing that a senior engineer of his company was going to work for his competitors at Google. Ballmer was said to have picked up a chair and thrown it forcefully across the room, hitting a table. After this chimpanzee-like display, he launched into a tirade about how he was going to fucking kill those Google boys.
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Is it possible, then, that male sensitivity to others is conditional, aroused mostly by family and friends. For those who don't belong to the inner circle, and especially those who act like rivals, the portal remains closed and the empathy switch turned off. Neuroscience supports this idea for humans. A German investigator, Tania Singer, tested men and women in a brain scanner while they could see another in pain. Both sexes commiserated with the other: The pain areas in their own brains lit up when they saw the other's hand getting mildly shocked. It was as if they felt the sting themselves. But this happened only if the partner was someone likeable and with whom they had played a friendly game. Things changed drastically if the partner had played unfairly in he previous game. Now the subjects felt cheated, and seeing the other in pain has less of an affect. Women still showed some empathy, but the men had nothing left. On the contrary, if men saw the unfair player getting shocked, their brain's pleasure centers lit up. They had moved from empathy to justice, and seemed to enjoy the other's punishment...
The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. De Waal, p. 213-218.
Replying to
"We share 99% of our genes with Bonobo Chimpanzees. That 1% makes a huge difference in cognitive capacity: one hundredth of 1% might make a huge difference between socially identified groups."
So naturally we want to know why that happened. What set bonobos off on their curious path after they left their common ancestry with chimpanzees?...we will suggest a specific prehistorical link between the evolution of bonobos and the evolution of humans, making us ponder the irony of an event that could have changed two different apes in two very different ways.
We have seen that the power of female alliances explains why bonobo males so rarely exert brute force over females. It also explains why females have been able to evolve their hypersexuality. And the reduction in male-against-male violence flows from the males' inability to monopolize females, perhaps also from their ignorance of the females' fertile periods...Female power is a sine qua non of bonobo life, the magic key to their world. So where did bonobos find this key to a better life?
That's one problem. The other has to do wit lethal raiding. Even female power can't explain why intercommunity violence between groups of males has been so repressed. Male bonobos still live with their fraternal kin groups in communities that hold land, and they still fight over it with battle cries and even physical engagements. But they don't go on border patrols. They don't stalk into neighboring territory. And, so far as we know, they don't kill each other.
The two problems have a single answer. Party size.
The contrast with chimpanzee parties was evident from the earliest days of bonobo fieldwork...bonobo parties include more females than chimpanzee parties do, and they vary less in size over the year. Chimpanzee parties are sometimes small, with individuals or mother-child groups often traveling alone. Bonobo parties are never so atomistic...bonobos combined "the cohesiveness of gorilla society with the flexibility of chimpanzee social organization."
Cohesive. Now this is
peculiar. Cohesive parties, according to theory, depend on a low
cost-of-grouping. Why should grouping cost less for bonobos than for
chimpanzees? Here are two species with anatomy and body size so similar
that bonobo specimens were tucked away in European museums for almost
fifty years before someone recognized them as distinct from chimpanzees.
The two apes live in forests separated merely by a river, the Zaire.
Chimpanzees live north of the river, they are actually no farther south
than many chimpanzees - both species have equal use of the equatorial
forests where ape foods grow best. Both straddle the equator because the
Zaire River forms so great an arc around the bonobo rainforests that
bonobos on the equator have chimpanzees living both to the east and to
the west of them. As far as anyone knows, these forests have the same
species of trees on both sides of the river, the same forest structure,
the same ape foods. Can it literally be true that this forest island in
the heart of Zaire, an island the size of California, is so different
from the forests all around it that there and only there the apes find
it easier (or ecologically less expensive) to live in larger or more
stable groups?
To rainforest apes, the forests are
first and foremost reservoirs of food. As for the favored foods of
bonobos...they include "both the [fruit] foods of [chimpanzees] an [the]
fibrous foods of gorillas."..."fibrous foods of gorillas" have turned up
in significant quantities everywhere bonobos have been studied. Bonobos
indeed eat more gorilla-style foods than chimpanzees do.Their gorilla-style foods are the young leaves and stems of herbs on the forest floor. Bonobos snack on them while traveling between fruit trees...For much of their travel, bonobos may walk as a group, though widely spread, with individuals stopping at their own little herb patch and eating for a few minutes before walking another hundred meters to the front of the party and finding another snack. It is the same way gorillas feed. And just as with gorillas, those herbs are so common that the presence of others in the group does little to reduce the food supply.
Because they have this snack food, the costs of traveling with other individuals are reduced. Bonobos don't have to visit many extra fruit trees every day to satisfy their hunger. The gorilla foods buffer the effects of seasonal fruit shortages and allow bonobos to travel with their fellows more easily than chimpanzees can afford.
So the diets of bonobos and chimpanzees are different in an important way. The beauty of this difference is that we can explain why it's there. The puzzle, remember, was that the forests of bonobos on one side of the Zaire River and those of chimpanzees on the other side look so similar. Well, floristically, they are indeed similar. But the important difference between the forests of bonobos and the forests of chimpanzees lies not in the plants; it lies in the animals. The lowland forests occupied by chimpanzees are shared with gorillas. But bonobos have no gorillas in their range. In other words, gorilla foods are commoner in the bonobo forests simply because there are no gorillas to eat them.
... Remove the gorillas in the forest, and chimpanzees - if they were inclined to seek it out - would suddenly discover a lot of gorilla food.
We are close to the end of this winding road. Bonobos can afford to live in larger, more stable parties than chimpanzees because they live in a world without gorillas. They have evolved to take advantage of the more digestible parts of the gorilla diet - not the tough, low-quality stems that occur in patches around swamps, but the juicy, protein-rich growth buds and stem bases of young herbs...Bonobos have evolved in a forest that is kindlier in its food supply, and that allows them to be kindly, too.
But why are there no gorillas in the land of bonobos? Why do chimpanzees and gorillas both live on the right bank of the Zaire River, while only bonobos live on the left bank?
...Chimpanzees and gorillas have that old common ancestry, having separated from each other 8 to 10 million years ago. Bonobos and chimpanzees separated from their common ancestor around 1.5 to 3 million years ago. The Zaire River appears by comparison very old: The rocks in its eastern wall are around 3 billion years old. The forests around it have sometimes been vast and continuous, allowing apes to migrate all the way round. Indeed, many species of mammals live on both sides of the river.
These basic facts mean that some scenarios are unlikely. For instance, it's unreasonable to think that the first apes to reach the river's southern bank were bonobos. Gorilla and chimpanzee ancestors surely lived north and south of the river for much of the last 8 million years. Let's not think that bonobos evolved somewhere else and then arrived in the forests to find a world magically without gorillas or chimps. Instead, we must imagine that bonobos evolved within the southern forests out of their original chimpanzee-like ancestor - and they evolved there once the ancestral gorillas had left.
To think about why ancestral gorillas left this area, we must step back for a moment and consider climate. Africa's climatic history during the last few million years tells a story of irregular drought. During the ice ages, when so much of the earth's moisture was locked up in great ice caps, forests dried up and contracted to tiny areas in East and West Africa, surviving only where it was wet - usually where there were mountains, or in river gullies. It is easy to imagine that in a cold, dry period around 2.5 million years ago, African forests were so reduced that gorillas, crucially dependent on the herbs of the moist forest, were forced to retreat along with their forests and finally could survive only in forested mountains, as some gorillas do today. On the Zaire River's right bank, in fact, forests would have receded west and east onto mountains. But on the left bank, there was a problem. No mountains. Here, the low altitude of the Zaire basin spelled a temporary end to gorilla foods and the permanent end of the southern gorillas. So ancient climatic events probably solve the modern puzzle of how gorillas are distributed in Africa, separated by a 1,000-kilometer gap in the rich heart of the continent.
Chimpanzees today can live in dry areas, uninhabited by gorillas, by eating fruits in strips of riverine forest that linger amid open savanna. Ancestral chimpanzees could have survived in the same way on the Zaire's southern side during some appalling 10,000-year drought 2.5 million years ago. Then, when the drought ended, they would have found themselves in a new world. The southern forests would have returned, botanically much the same as before, but without gorillas. Now the southern chimpanzees could exploit the plentiful herbs that gorillas had monopolized as a food source. Herbs became this ape's reserve food. And, with a new and predictable reserve food in place, they could expand their ecological niche, endure well during the fruit-poor seasons, and travel in more stable parties. Stable parties meant they could become bonobos.
Party stability, in other words, produced female power. For females to develop supportive relationships, they need to spend time together.
Even among chimpanzees, there are females who spend time together...chimpanzee females do develop mutual support networks, assisting each other in competition for status against other females...And females may defend each other against males...It is mainly in captivity, where a chimpanzee group stays together for a long time, that stable female relationships emerge...They protect each other from the excesses of male violence by developing mutually supportive coalitions against males.
And that same behavior occurs, as we have seen, among bonobos in the wild. Females form the core of bonobo parties, so that in small parties there are more females than males. Females spend their time closer to each other than males do. Females are more likely to be in the center of the party, with males on the outside. And they form alliances that effectively protect them against male aggression.
As for intercommunity aggression, once again, stable party size is essential - but not because it allows particular females to live together. Instead, it affects the power imbalance that most predicts intercommunity violence in party-gang species. We have argued that the crucial feature favoring lethal raiding by chimpanzees is that a party of several males can find a lone individual and thereby attack at minimal costs to themselves. Among chimpanzees an individual travels alone when forced to do so by the exigencies of a poor food supply. Among bonobos, the existence of herbs gives all individuals the luxury of company, so every party remains capable of putting up a good defense; and raiders into neighboring ground will not find a vulnerable loner.
Around the same time that bonobos and chimpanzee ancestors began their revolutionary divergence, 2 to 2.5 million years ago, another great event was unfolding a few hundred kilometers away, in the savana woodlands. One line of woodland apes was evolving into humans. Most likely, a drying event led to the loss of fruit trees and thereby passed one particular population into a full commitment to terrestrial life. This was the start of the genus Homo.
...One kind of habitat change eliminated gorillas and thereby made bonobos. Another eliminated fruit trees and thereby made humans. And it is a fair possibility that the same deep drought, squeezing the African ape with enough pressure to produce to new forms, created humans in the savannas and bonobos in the forest.
...
But what about the moral aspects of humanity? Under the stars of the Pliocene nights, sated by a good day's eating and relaxing in the company of playful children, our ancestors would sometimes have reflected kindly on their peers. Many a friendship would have bloomed. But we know of no foods in the savanna woodlands that would have allowed the woodland apes, or their human descendants, to forage in stable parties as bonobos do. A diet of meat and fruits and nuts and honey and roots would demand constant splitting up to find the best patches. If so, females could not effectively restrain males, imbalances of power would have continued among party-gangs, and heartless aggression would have been employed occasionally, as it is with chimpanzees and modern humans.
The southern forests provide the message that it didn't have to be this way, that there was room on the earth for a species biologically committed to the moral aspects of what, ironically, we like to call "humanity": respect for others, personal restraint, and turning aside from violence as a solution to conflicting interests. The appearance of these traits in bonobos hints at what might have been among Homo sapiens, if evolutionary history had been just slightly different.
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Wrangham and Peterson, p.220-230.
Sexual selection, the evolutionary process that produces sex differences, has a lot to answer for. Without it, males wouldn't possess dangerous bodily weapons and a mindset that sanctions violence. But males who are better fighters can stop other males from mating, and they mate more successfully themselves. Better fighters tend to have more babies. That's the simple, stupid, selfish logic of sexual selection. So, what about us? Is sexual selection ultimately the reason why men brawl in barrooms, from urban gangs, plot guerrilla attacks, and go to war? Has it indeed designed men to be especially aggressive?
...
What about our minds? Has sexual selection shaped our psyches also, in order to make us better fighters? Can sexual selection explain why men are so quick to bristle at insults, and, under the right circumstances, will readily kill? Can our evolutionary past account for modern war?
Inquiry about mental process is difficult enough when we deal just with humans. Comparison with other species is harder still. The supposed problem is that animals fight with their hearts, so people say, whereas humans fight with their minds. Animal aggression is supposed to happen by instinct, or by emotion, and without reason...
The argument sounds fair enough, but it depends on oversimplified thinking, a false distinction between animals acting by emotion (or instinct) and humans acting by reason. Animal behavior is not purely emotional. Nor is human decision-making purely rational. In both cases, the event is a mixture. And new evidence suggests that even though we humans reason much more (analyze past and present context, consider a potential future, and so on) than nonhuman animals, our essential process for making a decision still relies on emotion.
...
Male chimpanzees compete much more aggressively for dominance than females do. If a lower-ranking male refuses to acknowledge his superior with one of the appropriate conventions, such as a soft grunt, the superior will become predictable angry. But females can let such insults pass. Females are certainly capable of being aggressive to each other, and they can be as political adept as males in using coalitions to achieve a goal. But female chimpanzees act as they don't care about their status as much as males do.
By contrast, we exaggerate only barely in saying that a male chimpanzee in his prime organizes his whole life around issues of rank. His attempts to achieve and then maintain alpha status are cunning, persistent, energetic, and time-consuming. They affect whom he travels with, whom he grooms, where he glances, how often he scratches, where he goes, and what time he gets up in the morning. (Nervous alpha males get up early, and often wake others with their overeager charging displays.) And all these behaviors come not from a drive to be violent for its own sake, but from a set of emotions that, when people show them, are labeled "pride" or, more negatively, "arrogance."
The male chimpanzee behaves as if he is quite driven to reach the top of the community heap. But once he has been accepted as the alpha (in other words, once his authority is established to the point where it is no longer challenged), his tendency for violence falls dramatically...once males have reached the top, they can become benign leaders as easily as they earlier became irritated challengers. What most male chimpanzees strive for is being on the top, the one position where they will never have to grovel. It is the difficulty of getting there that induces aggression.
Eighteenth-century Englishmen used less dramatic tactics than wild chimpanzees, but that acute observer Samuel Johnson thought rank concerns were as pervasive: "No two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other." Pride obviously serves as stimulus for much interpersonal aggression in humans, and we can hypothesize confidently that this emotion evolved during countless generations in which males who achieved high status were able to turn their social success into extra reproduction. Male pride, the source of many a conflict, is reasonably seen as a mental equivalent of broad shoulders. Pride is another legacy of sexual selection.
And can it account for war? The immediate causes of wars are as varied as the interests and policies of those who launch them, but deeper analysis leads to a consistent conclusion: Wars tend to be rooted in competition for status.
...The rivalry between Sparta and Athens broke out into war, fed by border clashes and conflicts over trade, prospects of booty, individual acts of treason or glory seeking, and by all the complex divided loyalties and personal ambitions that mark any war. But the essential dynamic, according to Thucydides, was that Sparta watched the growth of Athenian power, feared the outcome, and decided to counter the threat. Michael Howard argues that the same logic applies throughout history, from the Peloponnesian War to the World Wars of the twentieth century. Men fight, he says, "neither because they are aggressive nor because they are acquisitive animals, but because they are reasoning ones: because they discern, or believe that they can discern, dangers before they become immediate, the possibility of threats before they are made.
We could well substitute for Sparta and Athens the names of two male chimpanzees in the same community, one rising in power, the other anxious to keep his higher status.
Even if Athen's power had exceeded Sparta's, the future would still be uncertain. Athens might still have remained benign or been devastated by natural disaster or conquered by another enemy. But Sparta knew, of course, that Athens would likely take advantage of her power, because, apparently, Greek city-states behave the way human or male chimpanzee males behave. So it is easy to see the Peloponnesian War as having begun as a consequence of competition between two prideful city-states, ruled by prideful men concerned - like two tough guys squared off for a fight in a tavern - not rationally but emotionally about who is the biggest and the best. Which city-state is number one? Who is the real superpower of the Peloponnesus? Pride, the emotional complex driving status competition, may remind us of the Peloponnesian War, or it may make us think of contemporary street gang clashes, such as those recalled by Sanyika Shakur from the early days of Crips and Bloods in South Central Los Angeles. "Our war, like most gang wars, was not fought for territory or any specific goal other than the destruction of individuals, human beings. The idea was to drop enough bodies, cause enough terror and suffering so that they'd come to their senses and realize that we were the wrong set to fuck with. Their goal, I'm sure, was the same."
Sparta's seemingly rational fear, laid in place by evolved systems of thinking and feeling, was based on calculated guesswork about Athenian intentions - but also on the unexamined feeling that it is always worth being on top, an emotion that has evolved for good reasons. We can doubtless overcome this feeling, but the bias in favor of it is powerful. We get into fights or lust for imperial dominion over another nation for reasons of pride.
...
The problem is that males are demonic at unconscious and irrational levels. The motivation of a male chimpanzee who challenges another's rank is not that he foresees more matings or better food or a longer life. Those rewards explain why sexual selection has favored the desire for power, but the immediate reason he vies for status is simpler, deeper, and less subject to the vagaries of context. It is simply to dominate his peers. Unconscious of the evolutionary rationale that placed this prideful goal in his temperament, he devises strategies to achieve it that can be complex, original, and maybe conscious. In the same way, the motivation of male chimpanzees on a border patrol is not to gain land or win females. The temperamental goal is to intimidate the opposition, to beat them to a pulp, to erode their ability to challenge. Winning has become an end in itself. It looks the same with men.
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Wrangham and Peterson, p.173-199.
Stripped to its ape essence, patriotism is male defense of the community, gloried among humans and surely enjoyed among chimpanzees and bonobos. For all the cultural determinists' efforts to persuade us that it's an arbitrary choice, patriotism seems such a fundamental aspect of being human that one can hardly imagine how things might be different. And the concept that fighting males are a natural, inevitable part of life is merely reinforced by comparing our own strange mixture of compassion and cruelty with that of chimpanzees. Even the comparison with bonobos emphasizes that idea that male coalitionary violence is primal. After all, the very triumph of bonobo females, in achieving equality with males, is a response to the problems imposed by male coalitions, male violence and male kinship. Coalitionary male action in defense of group identity, it might seem, is just an essential building block of social evolution and something that any species must live with.
...As we have seen, the evolutionary logic of our odd cluster of ape social systems is explicable, albeit still imperfectly. Ecological pressures kept females from forming effective alliances. With females unable to rely on each other, they became vulnerable to males interested in guarding them. Males seized the opening, collaborated with each other to possess and defend females, and started down the road to patriarchy. We are fascinated by the lives of patriarchal men and the histories of their patriotic alliances - not because we are humans or because we are primates, but because we are apes, and in particular because we are part of a group within the apes where the males hold sway by combining into powerful, unpredictable, status-driven and manipulative coalitions, operating in persistent rivalry with other such coalitions.
Unfortunately, there appears something special about foreign policy in the hands of males. Among humans and chimpanzees, at least, male coalitionary groups often go beyond defense (typical of monkey matriarchies) to include unprovoked aggression, which suggests that our own intercommunity conflicts might be less terrible if they were conducted on behalf of women's rather than men's interests. Primate communities organized around male interests naturally tend to follow male strategies and, thanks to sexual selection, tend to seek power with an almost unbounded enthusiasm. In a nutshell: Patriotism breeds aggression.
Males have evolved to possess strong appetites for power because with extraordinary power males can achieve extraordinary reproduction. Admittedly, not all powerful males have done so. Alexander the Great, arguably the most powerful man the world has seen, never showed more than a passing interest in women and fathered just a single child by the time he died at the age of thirty-two. But Alexander bucked the trend. Harems of at least several hundred women have been the norm for the emperors of all major civilizations: Aztec, Babylonian, Chinese, Egyptian, Incan, Indian, and Roman. The women were always young (that is, comparatively fertile), and they were carefully guarded in well-fortified sites, normally by eunuchs...
In societies without an absolute ruler, the reproductive benefits of power have been shared between men. War captives, who tend to be women, were routinely given as rewards to warriors and a supporting elite...
Any male ruler not trapped by institutional rules has tended to have more wives than ordinary men. This is the logic of sexual selection played out exactly as among many other species: If a male wins power, he will tend to use it to mate as many females as possible. Of course, expanded reproductive opportunities is by no means the only reason why men like power so much. The goal of winning women may be unconscious; or it may in fact have no direct association at all with the emotional systems that drive men to win battles and palace intrigues. Thanks to the effects of sexual selection, men are inclined to seek power for its own sake, even in circumstances where tradition inhibits and law prohibits extra wives or concubines.
Because of the large potential reproductive rewards at stake for males, sexual selection has apparently favored male temperaments that revel in high-risk/high-gain adventures. At the individual level, this temperamental quality can show relatively trivial effects. Men may sometimes drive their cars faster or gamble more intensely or perhaps play sports more recklessly than women. But the sort of relatively discountable wildness that, for example, hikes automobile insurance rates for adolescent boys and young men also produces a greater willingness to risk their own and others' lives; and that sort of risk attraction becomes very significant once men acquire weapons. And where men combine into groups - gangs or villages or tribes or nations - this driving, adventurous ethic turns quickly aggressive and lethally serious. Based on this logic, we conclude that imperialism derives partly from the fact that human foreign policy is based on male rather than female reproductive interests.
The idea could be tested by comparing aggressive tendencies in party-gang species according to whether foreign policy benefits females or males. Spotted hyenas' foreign policy benefits females; in chimpanzees it benefits males. The few data currently available support the notion that raiding, an imperialist tendency, occurs more regularly among chimpanzees than among hyenas. But whether or not matriots are less greedy than patriots, the chimpanzee-human system looks clear. The downtrodden of the earth rail against the imperialism of the temporarily dominant, but imperialist expansionism is nevertheless a broad and persistent tendency of our demonic male species.
...
Friedrich Engels regarded the historical institution of marriage as the beginning of the end for humankind: the start of the bourgeois family, patriarchy, and from there class and social struggle. For Engels, as for many traditional feminists, women are caught in a trap constructed by men - one marked by violence and perpetuated through a patriarchy of specific historic and social origins.
Evolutionary feminism provides a longer look. Human patriarchy has its beginning in the forest ape social world, a system based on males' social dominance and coercion of females. We can speculate that it was elaborated subsequently, perhaps in the woodland ape era, perhaps much later, by the development of sexual attachments with the same essential dynamic as gorilla bonds: women offering fidelity, men offering protection from harassment and violence by other men. From those poorly articulated forms of pairing, language would eventually generate both marriage and the patriarchal rules that favor married men. Men, following an evolutionary logic that benefits those who make the laws, would create legal systems that so often defined adultery as a crime for women, not for men - a social world that makes men freer than women.
Traditional feminism, even if it accepted the evolutionary timetable, would want to stop the analysis there and restrict the blame to men. But evolutionary feminism views women as active players in the development of the patriarchy, albeit often suffering as an ironic outcome of serving their own interests. Women's interests, their strategies and counterstrategies in response to men, have clearly played a major role in the development of human social forms.
...It so happens that among chimpanzees, as among orangutans and gorillas, females have been unable to develop effective counterstrategies against those of their demonic male partners, though females with strong personalities will develop relatively satisfactory relationships with individual males. Among bonobos, though, females (newly freed from ecological constraints) responded effectively to the problem. The result, we have argued, was effectively a revolution in the nature of their society, the reduction of what was once an unpleasant form of patriarchy to a relatively tolerant and charming world in which the sexes are equal.
If there is no human group where women have achieved a comparable equality, women everywhere nevertheless have much of the same potential as bonobo females to change the system. Everywhere, women develop supportive societal networks with each other. Everywhere, women wield influence over their husbands and sons and other males - a power often much stronger than at first appears. The problem is that everywhere, women are caught in a trap. If they support each other too much, they become vulnerable to losing what they want, the investment and protection of the most desirable men. There is competition between women for the best men, and it can break the unwritten compact among them.
The interplay between women's interests in protecting themselves from abusive husbands on one hand, and finding or maintaining a long-term relationship on the other, is a classic tragedy of marriage. And all too often, despite the most appalling abuse, women don't leave a relationship. They stay because they are afraid, or because they forgive their mates, or because they hope to change them. Too often they stay because in some part of their mind, they want their mates, despite their aggression. We can take this as a metaphor for women's awkward place in the larger society. Individual women are caught in the trap of wanting a man to protect and provide for them; women as a group find their general interests ignored or stymied because some women side with men.
Bonobos have shown us that the trap can be broken through female alliances. Among humans, a direct equivalent would be if women always remained together, day an night, in groups so large and well armed that they could always suppress the hostility of rowdy, aggressive men. The prospect seems too fantastic to consider further. Fortunately, humans can create other possibilities.
The problem in both human and ape history is that political power is built on physical power - and the physical power is ultimately the power of violence of its threat. "Political power," in the words of Mao Tse-tung, "grows out of the barrel of a gun," In other words, those who have political power can count on someone coming to their aid - the police or the military or the mob or the family, or the royal guard.
In traditional human societies political power is personalized. That is, it resides in the person (or families and alliances) of the most successful individuals and their descendants. Whenever political power is personalized, so is the physical power on which it ultimately depends; and whenever the physical power is personalized (not parsed and regulated through institutions, laws, and rules) the violence of demonic males from which it ultimately derives will be unrestrained. This is the broad current of human affairs, challenged in a thousand places by exceptional backwaters and eddies, but never reversed.
The alternative to personal is institutional. Italian politics, as Robert D. Putnam implies in Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1993), chose both routes after a collapse of medieval authority during the twelfth century, shifting toward institutional systems in the North while remaining traditionally personalized in the South. The result in this century? Southern politics is still profoundly corrupted by male power contests and stained by the secrets of Palermo.
The great revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century in France and America marked a historic though incomplete shift from personal to institutional political power in those places. Once political power was taken away from individual men (who held it for life, by tradition and inheritance) and assigned by law and institution to temporarily appointed men, the physical power from which it derived also became, to a degree, regulated by institution. The underlying grip of male demonism, which attaches itself to human affairs through personalized physical power, was loosened slightly. The shift from personal to institutional actually describes not so much a single event as a process: a widening of the distribution of control away from individuals and cabals toward a more democratic spread. Democracy itself is a process; and its success requires long-standing habits and traditions of civic engagement, not merely the miraculous appearance of good constitutions or enlightened legal codes. Women in nineteenth-century America acquired the beginnings of political power through their own struggle, of course - but also because they lived within a system in which political power had been institutionalized to the degree that someone actually counted votes.
...
So personalized political power favors the appearance of the demonic male behaving in a male competitive style. The human political system most likely to favor a female competitive style is the one in which power has been depersonalized through the construction of stable institutions. Of the many styles of political institutions, the most depersonalized are also the most democratic. Among the nation-states, therefore, institutional democracies present the best actual situations where women can hope to acquire political codominance with men. Institutional democracies are deeply imperfect, in several instances weakened by civic and economic crises, often still highly personalized and therefore inevitably patriarchal. But they are also remarkably flexible and resilient, and a reduction in interpersonal violence seems most positively assured by faith in the evolution of institutional democracy.
In true institutional democracies, political power ultimately comes from the ballot box. And it is to the ballot box that women in the real world can most effectively mass themselves...and break through the trap defined by male interest. Feminist commentator Naomi Wolf has remarked on the peculiarity that women in democracies, who after all represent half the voters, have not learned to use their power more effectively. But the trend is there.
On April 19, 1995, in downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, two young men park a Ryder rental truck packed with a two-ton bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building during working hours, a time when they can be certain the building will contain around five hundred ordinary adults of both sexes and, in a day care center on the second floor, about two dozen children and infants. The two men light a fuse and walk walk away from the truck. At 9:02 A.M. the bomb ignites side of the nine-story building, top to bottom, creating a giant orange fireball and a chaos of glass, concrete, steel, dust, office furniture, people, and body parts. The blast tears into the second-floor day care center and rips away toys and blocks and picture books along with children's faces, heads, arms, and fingers.
Within days a prime suspect is captured, one Timothy McVeigh, an all-American male recently retired from the U.S. army and having some background connection with an informal group calling itself the Michigan Militia. McVeigh, standing soldier stiff and looking out through blue eyes and a lean, vacant face, appears to regard himself as a hero and prisoner of war, and refuses to say one word about himself, his ideas, his motives, or his possible association with the bombing. The Michigan Militia turns out to be the creation of a gun dealer named Norman Olson who believes the United Nations is poised to take over the United States and has therefore organized 12,000 gun-toting men across his home state to prepare resistance. Members of the group, who informally describe themselves as American patriots, describe seeing black helicopters flying overhead, obviously preparing the way for an international takeover, "Armed conflict may be necessary if the country doesn't turn around," Olson declares. He later blames the Oklahoma explosion on the Japanese, while another spokesman for the group, Brigade Executive Director Stephen Bridges, righteously denies any association whatsoever with the bomb attack or its perpetrators.
The details are new: serious patriots and pot-bellied ideologues loyal to what they believe are original American ideals construct among themselves a vision of threatening forces as solid as the guns they carry and as fantastic, in its elaborations, as a visit from outer space. But the pattern is classic. As David Trochmann, cofounder of another American group of similar bent, Militia of Montana, express the mindset: "Where we come from is very simple. There are good guys and bad guys out there. The bad guys have to be stopped."
The system of thought, feeling, and behavior is no different in its dynamic and underlying psychology from that of a thousand other predominantly male groups, including urban gangs, motorcycle gangs, criminal organizations, pre-state warrior societies, and even the more formalized and state-sponsored armies (which after all still organize their fundamental fighting units at the platoon level). The psychology engaged may be hardly different from that expressed in predominantly male team sports - American football and hockey, for example. This behavior is similar, not alien, and it reiterates a pattern as old and wide as the species. Demonic males gather in small, self-perpetuating, self-aggrandizing bands. They sight or invent an enemy "over there" - across the ridge, on the other side of the boundary, on the other side of a linguistic or social or political or ethnic or racial divide. The nature of the divide hardly seems to matter. What matters is the opportunity to engage in the vast and compelling drama of belonging to the gang, identifying the enemy, going on the patrol, participating in the attack.
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Wrangham and Peterson, p.231-246
Have you ever noticed how the worst part of someone's personality is often also the best? You may know an anally retentive, detail-oriented accountant who never cracks a joke, nor understands any, but this is in fact what makes him the perfect accountant. Or you may have a flamboyant aunt who constantly embarrasses everyone with her big mouth, yet is the life of the party. The same duality applies to our species. We certainly don't like our aggressiveness -- at least on most days --but would it be such a great idea to create a society without it? Wouldn't we be all as meek as lambs? Our sports teams wouldn't care about winning or losing, entrepreneurs would be impossible to find, and pop stars would sing only boring lullabies. I'm not saying that aggressiveness is good, but it enters into everything we do, not just murder and mayhem. Removing human aggression is thus something to consider with care.
Humans are bipolar apes. We have something of the gentle, sexy bonobo, which we may like to emulate, but not too much; otherwise the world might turn into one giant hippie fest of flower power and free love. Happy we might be, but productive perhaps not. And our species also has something of the brutal, domineering chimpanzee, a side we may wish to suppress, but not completely, because how else would we conquer new frontiers and defend our borders? One could argue that there would be no problem if all of humanity turned peaceful at the same time, but no population is stable unless it's immune to invasions by mutants. I'd still worry about that one lunatic who gathers an army and exploits the soft spots of the rest.
So, strange as it may sound, I'd be reluctant to radically change the human condition. But if I could change one thing, it would be to expand the range of fellow feeling. The greatest problem today, with so many different groups rubbing shoulders on a crowded planet, is excessive loyalty to one's own nation, group, or religion. Humans are capable of deep disdain for anyone who looks different or thinks another way even between neighboring groups with almost identical DNA such as the Israelis and Palestinians. Nations think they are superior to their neighbors, and religions think they own the truth. When push comes to shove, they are ready to thwart or even eliminate one another. In recent years, we have seen two huge office towers brought down by airplanes deliberately flown into them as well as massive bombing raids on the capital of a nation, and on both occasions the deaths of thousands of innocents was celebrated as a triumph of good over evil. The lives of strangers are often considered worthless. Asked why he never talked about the number of civilians killed in the Iraq War, U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld answered: "Well, we don't do body counts on other people."
Empathy for "other people" is the one commodity the world is lacking more than oil. It would be great if we could create at least a modicum of it. How this might change things was hinted at when, in 2004, Israeli justice minister Yosef Lapid was touched by images of a Palestinian woman on the evening news. "When I saw a picture on the TV of an old woman on all fours in the ruins of her home looking under some floor tiles for her medicines, I did think, 'What would I say if it were my grandmother?'" Even though Lapid's sentiments infuriated the nation's hard-liners, the incident showed what happens when empathy expands. In a brief moment of humanity, the minister had drawn Palestinians into his circle of concern.
The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. De Waal, p. 203-204.
...Empathy needs both a filter that makes us select what we react to, and a turn-off switch. Like every emotional reaction, it has a "portal," a situation that typically triggers it or that we allow to trigger it. Empathy's chief portal is identification. We're ready to share the feelings of someone we identify with, which is why we do so easily with those who belong to our inner circle: For them the portal is always ajar. Outside this circle, things are optional. It depends on whether we can afford being affected, or whether we want to be. If we notice a beggar in the street, we can choose to look at him, which may arouse our pity, or we can look away, even walk to the other side of the street, to avoid facing him. We have all sorts of ways to open or close the portal.
The moment we buy a movie ticket, we chose to identify with the leading character, thus making ourselves vulnerable to empathizing. We swoon when she falls in love or leave the theater in tears because of her untimely death, even though it's just a character played by someone we don't personally know. On the other hand, we some times deliberately shut the portal, such as when we suppress identification with a declared enemy group. We do so by removing their individuality, defining them as an anonymous mass of unpleasant, inferior specimens of a different taxonomic group. Why should we put up with those dirty "cockroaches" (the Hutus about the Tutsis) or disease-ridden "rats" (the Nazis about the Jews)? Called the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, dehumanization has a long history of excusing atrocities.
Since men are the more territorial gender, and overall more confrontational and violent than women, one should expect them to have the more effective turn-off switch. They clearly do have empathy, but perhaps apply it more selectively. Cross-cultural studies confirm that women everywhere are considered more empathic than men, so much so that the claim has been made that the female (but not the male) brain is hardwired for empathy. I doubt that the difference is that absolute, but it's true that at birth girl babies look longer at faces than boy babies, who look longer at suspended mechanical mobiles. Growing up, girls are more prosocial than boys, better readers of emotional expressions, more attuned to voices, more remorseful after having hurt someone, and better at taking another's perspective. When Carolyn Zahn-Waxler measured reactions to distressed family members, she found girls looking more at the other's face, providing more physical comfort, and more often expressing concern, such as asking "Are you okay?" Boys are less attentive to the feelings of others, more action-and object-oriented, rougher in their play, and less inclined to social fantasy games. They prefer collective action, such as building something together.
Men can be quite dismissive of empathy. It's not particularly manly to admit it, and one reason why it has taken so long for research in this area to take off is undoubtedly that academics saw empathy as a bleeding-heart topic associated with the weaker sex...
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...Asked about loved ones, such as their parents, wife, children, and close friends, most men are plenty empathic. The same applies in relation to unfamiliar, neutral parties. Men are perfectly willing to empathize under such circumstances, the way they often can't keep their eyes dry in romantic or tragic movies. With their portal open, men can be just as empathic as women. But things radically change when men enter a competitive mode, such as when they're advancing their interests or career. Suddenly, there's little room for softer feelings. Men can be brutal toward potential rivals: Anyone who stands in the way has to be taken down. Sometimes the physicality slips out, such as when Jesse Jackson, the longtime African alpha male, expressed his feelings about the new kid on the block, Barack Obama, in 2008. In surreptitiously taped comments on a television show, Jackson said about Obama that he'd like to "cut his nuts off." At other times, things literally get physical, such as the way head of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, reacted to hearing that a senior engineer of his company was going to work for his competitors at Google. Ballmer was said to have picked up a chair and thrown it forcefully across the room, hitting a table. After this chimpanzee-like display, he launched into a tirade about how he was going to fucking kill those Google boys.
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Is it possible, then, that male sensitivity to others is conditional, aroused mostly by family and friends. For those who don't belong to the inner circle, and especially those who act like rivals, the portal remains closed and the empathy switch turned off. Neuroscience supports this idea for humans. A German investigator, Tania Singer, tested men and women in a brain scanner while they could see another in pain. Both sexes commiserated with the other: The pain areas in their own brains lit up when they saw the other's hand getting mildly shocked. It was as if they felt the sting themselves. But this happened only if the partner was someone likeable and with whom they had played a friendly game. Things changed drastically if the partner had played unfairly in he previous game. Now the subjects felt cheated, and seeing the other in pain has less of an affect. Women still showed some empathy, but the men had nothing left. On the contrary, if men saw the unfair player getting shocked, their brain's pleasure centers lit up. They had moved from empathy to justice, and seemed to enjoy the other's punishment...
The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. De Waal, p. 213-218.
