She has a feminist ideology that she wants to see accepted in modern society (and I don’t disagree with her), but then projects it onto the bonobos, seeing them as “true feminists”, and then reverse-engineers this projection back onto humans as an “ought.” But there’s no need to draw any moral lessons from primates, even from our closest relatives. Yet that is exactly what Cauterucci does in her piece. If we want to change our behaviors, it’s just dumb to try to find animal models and then say, “We should be like them.” What’s the point? Sadly, though, people have drawn moral lessons from chimps, saying that we should be more “bonobish” than “chimpish”, although there’s nothing in the evolutionary tree-or in science itself-that suggests such an “ought”. (Some have argued that in the wild, rather than in zoos or enclosures, the difference between the species is not as great, but let’s accept it for the time being.)Īnother fact: we have no idea, given this divergence, what the behavior of the chimps’ common ancestor was like, nor, of course, do we have behavioral information about our own common ancestor with the chimps. Second, the social systems of the two chimps-bonobos were formerly called “pygmy chimps”-are quite different, with bonobos having a greater diversity of sexual behavior, more female/female bonding, and a pervasive use of sexuality as social glue. The two chimp diverged from their own common ancestor about 2.4 million years ago. They’re equally closely related to humans, with our joint common ancestor living about 6 million years ago. troglodytes) are our closest living relatives. First, chimps and bonobos, the latter now regarded as a species distinct from the common chimpanzee (former P. The author, Christina Cauterucci, was also a PuffHo editor (surprise!), and I can’t find any evidence of a scientific background.Īt any rate, most of us know two things. When someone sent me the title of this Slate piece, “ Why do we idolize chimps when we could be imitating feminist bonobos?“, I was sure it was a parody-perhaps from The Onion.īut no, I don’t think so-or else it’s parody that isn’t good because it’s so close to seeming real without a hint that it’s farcical.
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