On my way back from New
Orleans, I picked up Frans de Waal’s new book: The
Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates. Anyone who is familiar with de Waal’s work
will anticipate the thesis. The building
blocks of human morality are older than humanity and are observed, at least in primitive
forms in other animals.
I read the first chapter on the
plane. I note only a couple of very
interesting things that show up there.
One is the fact that chimpanzees are as good as we are at facial
recognition and even at recognizing which individuals are related to one another. Keeping track of which individual is which is
an indispensable requirement for morality even if it does not indicate some
level of moral consciousness.
He also has some fascinating
comments about bonobos. These apes, near
relatives of ourselves and the chimpanzees, have achieved a level of harmony
and reduced violence that shames both man and chimp. The secret to their success seems to be
female coalitions, cemented by homosexual engagement. The primary function of these coalitions
seems to be to protect their sons against aggression by other males.
Frans de Waal says that zoos keeping
populations of bonobos originally made a disastrous mistake. They would exchange males between colonies,
the opposite of what happens in the wild.
In the wild, males stay in their native groups while females
occasionally move to new groups. A male
bonobo moved from one zoo to another arrives with no mother or other female
relatives to protect him. Such an
individual is often the victim of male aggression and has to be isolated for
his own survival.
What this tells us, as de Waal
puts it, is that bonobos are not “angels of peace.” All the aggressive instincts that
characterize men and chimpanzees are still there in bonobos. The bonobos are not more peaceful because
they lack violent instincts but because they have evolved a system of managing
those instincts. That is
interesting.
