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Chimpanzees, Bonobos, and Humans
Chimpanzees and bonobos are our closest relatives. They are apes. Monkeys have tails; apes have no tails. So basically we humans, we are apes because we are large primates without tails. And to complicate matters, chimps and bonobos are very different characters. Even though they’re equally close to us, genetically, chimps are male-dominated and quite violent and territorial, and bonobos are female-dominated. They’re much more erotic and peaceful and not territorial. So there’s a big difference in the two societies of these species.
I think humans are psychologically, socially, and emotionally exactly like the apes. We are intellectually more developed. We have language, of course. We are technologically more developed. But in your basic emotional reactions in your daily life, your love, your hate, your jealousy, your hope, your attachments, you are very much like the other apes. And so certainly in that area, the apes can tell us something about us because there’s a lot of similarity.
Chimpanzees are male-bonded. The males are rivals at the same time that they are friends, and they hang out together. They do a lot of things together. They also hunt together. And so in chimpanzees, the male bonds are really central to the society. In the bonobos, the female bonds are really central to the society because the females have a sisterhood, and they protect each other, and they help each other, much more than the males. The males are not really bonded very much in the bonobo.
Then when you go to human society, you see that we have the male bonding, that there’s a lot of male friendships in human society. We have the female bonding – there’s a lot of female friendships and family life in human society. And then we have the nuclear families where you have men and women and children doing things together and the men taking care of children. And that last part is uniquely human. So we share two different aspects with chimps and bonobos, and then we have our own family life, which is unique, I think.
Sex and Gender
Sex is usually in biology used for biological sex. Sex is mostly binary. There’s a small in between category, but it’s mostly male versus female. And that’s defined by chromosomes, by genitals, by hormone profiles, physical size also. Gender is a much more complex concept. Gender is much more like a spectrum, and gender should not be divided, I think, in male and female. It should be divided in masculine and feminine and everything in between.
The differentiation between the genders is much vaguer. It’s much harder to define than what you see between the sexes. Gender is usually a cultural concept. Gender comes from your society. Your society decides how you have to behave like a man and how you have to behave like a woman and what you have to do in your life. And they change with time. They change with society. So they’re much more flexible, and they’re much more open-ended, so to speak.
Biology and Culture
Biology and culture, or nature and nurture as we sometimes call it. There’s always an interaction, and it’s a very complex one. Everything we do and other species do is an influence of both. People always confuse these things, that if you say something is natural, that it means you have to accept it. We are a very flexible species. It’s just remarkable how culturally flexible we are. And so even if I, as a biologist, would make a statement like “males are more violent than females,” which is true for many primates, and I think it’s true for human society. You look at all the murder statistics. Even a statement like that, we know that there are some societies which train their kids not to be violent, which are very peaceful, where murder is extremely exceptional.
Another example would be the family role division. Women take care of kids. Men don’t take care of kids because people will say it’s natural in all mammals that females do that and it’s not natural that males do that. So normally in a chimp society or bonobo society, the females take care of the kids. They carry them, they feed them, they protect them. The males do very, very little. But then sometimes a mother loses her life. So an adult male picks up the kid, starts carrying it, not just for a few days, but sometimes for two years up to five years. I’ve heard cases of that. So males have this care-taking potential that we normally don’t get to see, but it’s very highly developed in them.
You should not necessarily go exactly with biology. You should say that there’s always an overlap in the psychology between males and females and that a lot of things are possible. And so, in biology, we call that a naturalistic fallacy. You cannot deduce from biology how things ought to be in society. Society has an enormous amount of flexibility.