Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [15]
Over the years, biologists have claimed any number of differences between us and primates, only to see them fall by the way-side. The latest—and one of the most sophisticated—is the claim that humans are the only ones to have a theory of mind (the ability to imagine what other people are thinking), but recent experiments have revealed even that order of higher-level thinking to be something that chimpanzees exhibit.
Of course, if we accept that chimps and bonobos are our closest relatives, we are left with one absolutely essential question: are we more like chimps or bonobos? The question carries larger implications than you may realize. Just take the matter of sex. With chimpanzees, power is used to resolve questions about sex. With bonobos, though, sex is used to resolve questions of power. Needless to say, this leads to two very different social orders. With chimpanzees, males dominate, and there is a very strict hierarchy. Alliances are constantly forming and re-forming to try to topple the dominant male chimpanzee who has extensive, although not exclusive, control of sexual access to the females. There is a great deal of posturing and even violence, and it is not uncommon for chimpanzees to kill one another. Think of how violent gangs act in prison, and you have a rough human approximation of a chimpanzee society.
But bonobos are like bizarro chimps. Their social order flips everything on its head. In a bonobo troop, the females dominate. Consequently, male aggression is greatly reduced. And because the males do not have to jockey with one another for sexual access, the males spend a lot less time trying to rise in the hierarchy. If there is a dispute, bonobos generally resolve it using sex and engage in an incredibly diverse array of sexual practices. Picture the most freewheeling sexual commune from the late sixties in America, and you probably have the closest approximation to bonobo society in this country’s history. Talk about giving peace a chance! As primatologist Frans de Waal has aptly put it, we are left with a choice between the power hungry and brutal chimp or the peace-loving and erotic bonobo.
This has implications not just for our sex lives but for our political lives as well. According to de Waal, primate evolution suggests that rigid hierarchies came first and that equality only developed much later. Monkeys display a rigid hierarchy, and chimpanzees are somewhere in between monkeys and our own attempts at equality. Lest we think that we Americans have long thrown off any vestiges of a rigidly stratified past, our own voices betray our less egalitarian roots. Below 500 hertz, the voice produces meaningless noise. If you filter out the high-pitched noise, you will hear only a low hum. But it turns out that this noise is a hidden window into the unconscious way we are always monitoring our status within a group. During a conversation between two people, the two voices tend to converge, but the amazing part is that the lower-status person is always the one who makes the largest adjustment toward the pitch of the higher-status person. In a study of guests on Larry King, Dan Quayle made the most obvious adjustment of any of King’s guests, which should give us some sympathy for the hapless former vice president. Although we are the most sophisticated animals when it comes to communication, with a vast and complicated language, words blind us to these other levels of communication, so much so that a number of studies have shown that animals can better intuit our moods than we can ourselves.
Unfortunately, there is no clear-cut answer about whether humans are more like chimps or bonobos, although recent times provide far more examples of societies organized around violence and hierarchy than they do of societies organized around freewheeling sex. But perhaps the most crucial element of comparison is a key difference. Despite all of our similarities, we diverge from chimps and bonobos in one absolutely essential respect—we are the only ones to form long-term pair bonds. And that difference has