http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0602090007feb09,1,7032711.story

 

Going ape

We humans could learn a thing or two from primates about how to get along with each other, researcher says

 

William Mullen
Tribune staff reporter - February 9, 2006



When it comes to hedonists of the ape world, primatologist Frans de Waal says the winner is a primate, the bonobo.

Having a sexual encounter every 90 minutes or so throughout the day might seem a bit busy, but he says that's about average for bonobos, sometimes called pygmy chimpanzees.

Humans, de Waal says, should pay more attention to the way a few thousand surviving wild bonobos live out their lives in matriarchal bands deep in Africa's humid Congo rainforests. But not so much because of their sexuality, but their ability to reject violence and maintain peace.

Bonobos and chimpanzees are humans' closest relatives, each sharing more than 98 percent of the same genes as humans. But science has spent much more time studying chimps because they share our propensity for violent, murderous territorial ambition.

"Bonobos are the make love, not war apes," de Waal said on a recent visit to Chicago promoting his new book, "Our Inner Ape" (Riverhead, $24.95).

The Dutch-born de Waal, 57, is no crackpot. A research director at Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta and professor of psychology at Emory University, he is one of the most respected prima-tologists in the world.

Writing with a warm sense of humor and with poetic clarity rare for a serious scientist, he has millions of avid fans in the general reading public who have made his books international best sellers since his first one, "Chimpanzee Politics," appeared in 1982.

"When humans behave murderously, such as inflicting senseless slaughter of innocents in warfare, we like to blame it on some dark, `animalistic' instinct," de Waal said in an interview here.

Dressed in the outdoor chinos of a working anthropologist, he sat in a North Side hotel coffee shop talking about the animals he studies. A tall, spare man with graying sandy hair, he would have the mien of a scholarly monk except for a slight, bemused smile that often plays across his face as he talks.

"When we do good things," he continued, "act with generosity and compassion towards others, we like to credit our own `humaneness,' as though only humans can act that way."

In fact, as his book points out, emotional responses such as generosity, compassion and forgiveness play out constantly in the daily lives of wild and captive chimps and bonobos, as do jealousy and reprisal, just as they do in human lives.

Comparing humans genetically to bonobos and chimps, de Waal said, is like comparing dogs to foxes, they are so close. The other two great ape species, gorillas and orangutans, aren't far behind, so studying how they live offers clues to the most primal human behaviors.

"We [humans] are apes. Darwin didn't go far enough," said de Waal, shrugging off the religious creationist movement currently trying to question the theory of evolution.

"We are smart apes. We are bipedal apes. But we are apes."

His views are also antithetical to a long tradition of most animal researchers who are careful never to anthropomorphize, which means ascribing human emotions to animals. De Waal says if you don't anthropomorphize while observing animals like primates, you will ignore important data.

"Chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans are all acutely aware of their social interactions and ponder many options as they go about their daily life," he said.

Gone fishing

"There is a very high level of cognition going on. A chimp that is going to fish for ants in a termite mound, for example, starts in one location by searching for proper sticks to use as tools to fish the ants out of the mounds, putting the sticks in its mouth.

"Then it may walk two hours or so to get to the site of the termite mounds and start fishing. They are able to think about the future and formulate plans to achieve future goals."

All of the ape species, he said, have the capacity either for kind or cruel responses to events in their day.

"Here in Chicago you have one of the most famous demonstrations of primate empathy with Binti Jua, the female gorilla at Brookfield Zoo," de Waal said. He referred to a young female gorilla that in 1996 picked up an unconscious 3-year-old boy who fell 18 feet from a public walkway into the zoo's gorilla enclosure.

"She cradled and comforted him in her own lap, then gently carried him to a door to leave him with rescue workers," he said. "People made a big deal of that, but what my feeling was that it was not such a big deal because that is what a gorilla would do at any time for a juvenile of its own species."

It is the similarity of violent, aggressive dispositions of male-dominated chimp and human communities that so fascinates scientists, he said.

Female dominance may or may not account for a far less violent bonobo communities. While the record is full of quarreling chimps killing each other in captivity and in the wild, bonobos quarrel, too, but there is no recorded incidence of bonobo murder, de Waal said.

"Female bonobos form a strong sisterhood. They rule through female solidarity," de Waal said. They are the only ape species that is female-dominated.

Instead of the threat of violence, bonobo females seem to rule through the lure of sex. As a society they are universally bisexual.

"Bonobos use sex like we use the handshake," de Waal said.

Instead of being in a state of arousal only a day or two out of the month, like most non-human primate species, bonobo females are aroused -- "in heat" -- about half the time, advertising the fact with prominently swollen red butts.

No wonder bonobo males, too, often walk around in an obvious state of arousal. When two aroused males meet, they often end up playfully fencing with each other.

Constant sex

With constant sex and a parade of sexual partners, male bonobos have little to compete for, making them more compliant to female rule, de Waal theorizes. If a male flares and throws his weight around, even though bonobo females are 20 percent smaller than males, they gang up and beat up the offending male.

When bonobo troops encounter each other at the borders of their territories, the results are far less lethal than when similar encounters take place between rival chimpanzee troops.

"Bonobos are territorial too," de Waal said, "and when they meet at the borders of their territories, they scream and chase each other and stuff. But very soon they start what is called mingling."

The juvenile chimps of the opposing sides start play wrestling and cavorting, the adult females engage each other in sex, as do the males. Pretty soon episodes of heterosexual lovemaking ensue.

Bonobo sexual proclivities don't have much bearing on how humans conduct their lives, de Waal said. Humans, after all, are the only apes that evolved into monogamous heterosexual unions to produce and raise their young.

(There are no bonobos in the Chicago area zoos. The closest place to see bonobos is in the Milwaukee County Zoo.)

But de Waal argues that how bonobos maintain peace in their communities isn't as important as the fact that they let their innate capacity for empathy, sympathy and kindness dominate their innate capacity for violence.

"For the last 25 years, science has been mesmerized by the parallels of chimp and human male violence as a means of probing the human propensity of violence," de Waal said.

"I try to counter this cynical view of humanity in my book with the idea that, if we work very, very hard, with the help of human nature, we can overcome this, allowing us to rely on empathy, sympathy and other characteristics innate in our lineage."

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wmullen@tribune.com

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