Going Ape Feces

[aggle-rithm]

I saw a very disturbing TV show the other day about chimp attacks on humans. When a chimp attacks, it's not at all like a shark attack, or a bear attack, or any other sort of violent "man vs. nature" encounter. The level of rage and apparent abject hatred displayed in a chimp attack is horrific. Their intent appears to be, not to kill, but to maim. They consistently target the most vulnerable parts of the body: the face, the genitals, and the fingers. Survivors are horribly disfigured.

One of the most persistent memes in our culture is the idea that man is the most violent and dangerous animal on the planet (IIRC, that was one of the overriding themes of Planet of the Apes). Supposedly, man is the only predator that preys on his own kind, that is cruel to lesser animals, that ruins his environment, etc., etc.

The realization that man is actually quite docile compared to his primate cousins is kind of like finding out that gravity is the weakest force in the universe. It's counterintuitive, but it's undeniably true.

The irony is this: If we were as aggressive as chimpanzees, we never could have learned to cooperate to the extent that made possible the development of weapons of mass destruction. If he hadn't learned to peacefully interact as well as we have, we could never have the disconnect between those that issue the orders to kill and those that actually do the dirty work.

So, in being docile, weak, and chatty, we have developed the ability to kill with far more ruthlessness than any other animal.

Just thought I'd throw that out there. It was kind of an epiphany to me.

 

[paiute]

The irony is this: If we were as aggressive as chimpanzees, we never could have learned to cooperate to the extent that made possible the development of weapons of mass destruction.

If humans were more like the bonobo and less like the chimp, we would have a happier society.

 

[learner]

If humans were more like the bonobo and less like the chimp, we would have a happier society.

This is true. I took the leap to Bonobo behaviour some time ago. Join in. Its good.

 

[aggle-rithm]

This is true. I took the leap to Bonobo behaviour some time ago. Join in. Its good.

Maybe they are like the bonobos, but just like it rough.

 

[Michael C]

If humans were more like the bonobo and less like the chimp, we would have a happier society.

Bonobos are cool, but they may be less peaceful than the popular image suggests. On Monday I was watching the bonobos in the Berlin zoo in the company of an anthropologist/sociologist, who told me that the females can be pretty nasty: they will bite fingers or other appendages. Once, in Stuttgart zoo, a female bit off a male's penis.

There's an interesting article here, which questions the hippie, make-love-not-war image of the bonobo. It's a long read, but worthwhile. Just a short extract:

For a purportedly peaceful animal, a bonobo can be surprisingly intemperate. Jeroen Stevens is a young Belgian biologist who has spent thousands of hours studying captive bonobos in European zoos. I met him last year at the Planckendael Zoo, near Antwerp. “I once saw five female bonobos attack a male in Apenheul, in Holland,” he said. “They were gnawing on his toes. I’d already seen bonobos with digits missing, but I’d thought they would have been bitten off like a dog would bite. But they really chew. There was flesh between their teeth. Now, that’s something to counter the idea of”—Stevens used a high, mocking voice—“ ‘Oh, I’m a bonobo, and I love everyone.’ ”​

Orangutans are cool as well, seemingly philosophically inclined (if you like orangutans, this book is brilliant), but can be as nasty as the chimps in certain circumstances.

Apparently the most peaceful great apes are the gorillas.

 

[Ziggurat]

Orangutans are cool as well, seemingly philosophically inclined

Hence the librarian.

Apparently the most peaceful great apes are the gorillas.

I'm not surprised. They're big enough that they don't really need to be aggressive.

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

I saw a very disturbing TV show the other day about chimp attacks on humans. When a chimp attacks, it's not at all like a shark attack, or a bear attack, or any other sort of violent "man vs. nature" encounter. The level of rage and apparent abject hatred displayed in a chimp attack is horrific. Their intent appears to be, not to kill, but to maim. They consistently target the most vulnerable parts of the body: the face, the genitals, and the fingers. Survivors are horribly disfigured.

One of the most persistent memes in our culture is the idea that man is the most violent and dangerous animal on the planet (IIRC, that was one of the overriding themes of Planet of the Apes). Supposedly, man is the only predator that preys on his own kind, that is cruel to lesser animals, that ruins his environment, etc., etc.

The realization that man is actually quite docile compared to his primate cousins is kind of like finding out that gravity is the weakest force in the universe. It's counterintuitive, but it's undeniably true.

The irony is this: If we were as aggressive as chimpanzees, we never could have learned to cooperate to the extent that made possible the development of weapons of mass destruction. If he hadn't learned to peacefully interact as well as we have, we could never have the disconnect between those that issue the orders to kill and those that actually do the dirty work.

So, in being docile, weak, and chatty, we have developed the ability to kill with far more ruthlessness than any other animal.

Just thought I'd throw that out there. It was kind of an epiphany to me.

Perhaps they found out that they descended from us. And it makes them angry.

 

[aggle-rithm]

Perhaps they found out that they descended from us. And it makes them angry.

If chimps evolved from people, then why are there still people?

 

[HansMustermann]

Well, in all fairness, the vast majority of human history doesn't really involve more organization than the chimps or bonobos have. There still are tribes out there whose size is limited by Dunbar's number, same as chimp groups or for that matter any primate group. It's the limit up to which the group can work just because everyone knows everyone else. It's higher in humans than in other primates, but still basically that's the number up to which anarchy works, and it's how human groups likely worked for about 95% of the time we've been on Earth.

I don't think we're really inherently prone to get more organized, nor to care much more about other humans than chimps are inclined to care about other chimps. Otherwise we'd have gotten more naturally organized like that.

At some point simply some groups seem to have been in a position to impose their will upon other groups and exploit them. Think, instead of just driving them off their land like a chimp tribe would, ask them to feed you for "protection". Resulting in a hierarchy that could exceed Dunbar's number, because it could work _without_ everyone being nicer and more concerned about more than 150 people.

Basically I'm just not seeing that being more docile and cooperative.

 

[Roboramma]

I'm with Hans. Amoung hunter-gatherer societies warfare is very common. The chances of a young man being killed by men from another tribe are startlingly high. See the Yanomamo for instance:

Historically, more than a third of the Yanomamö males, on average, died from warfare.[3] The scholar Chagnon claimed that men who participated in killings had more wives and children than those who did not.[1] Some Ya̧nomamö men, however, reflected on the futility of their feuds and made it known that they would have nothing to do with the raiding.[1] These findings, originally reported by Chagnon, have been empirically replicated several times.[4]

Of course, we are also capable of cooperation and peace. But the same is true of chimpanzees: while they are at times very violent, they are also very capable of cooperating with those within their group.

 

[Roboramma]

Bonobos are cool, but they may be less peaceful than the popular image suggests. On Monday I was watching the bonobos in the Berlin zoo in the company of an anthropologist/sociologist, who told me that the females can be pretty nasty: they will bite fingers or other appendages. Once, in Stuttgart zoo, a female bit off a male's penis.

There's an interesting article here, which questions the hippie, make-love-not-war image of the bonobo. It's a long read, but worthwhile. Just a short extract:

For a purportedly peaceful animal, a bonobo can be surprisingly intemperate. Jeroen Stevens is a young Belgian biologist who has spent thousands of hours studying captive bonobos in European zoos. I met him last year at the Planckendael Zoo, near Antwerp. “I once saw five female bonobos attack a male in Apenheul, in Holland,” he said. “They were gnawing on his toes. I’d already seen bonobos with digits missing, but I’d thought they would have been bitten off like a dog would bite. But they really chew. There was flesh between their teeth. Now, that’s something to counter the idea of”—Stevens used a high, mocking voice—“ ‘Oh, I’m a bonobo, and I love everyone.’ ”​

Orangutans are cool as well, seemingly philosophically inclined (if you like orangutans, this book is brilliant), but can be as nasty as the chimps in certain circumstances.

Apparently the most peaceful great apes are the gorillas.

I think you're right that the idea of the "peace and love" bonobo is a little off, but I think we also need to be careful about generalizing the behavior of an animal based on observations in captivity. The behavior of captive animals can be as influenced by the stress of that environment as anything else.
Of course, that doesn't mean we can't learn anything from it, just that we need to be careful about our conclusions.

 

[Michael C]

I think you're right that the idea of the "peace and love" bonobo is a little off, but I think we also need to be careful about generalizing the behavior of an animal based on observations in captivity. The behavior of captive animals can be as influenced by the stress of that environment as anything else.
Of course, that doesn't mean we can't learn anything from it, just that we need to be careful about our conclusions.

Quite true. In fact the "sexy" image of bonobos owes a lot to the work of Frans de Waal, who has (according to the article I linked to) never seen a wild bonobo! Research on bonobos in their natural environment is still in its infancy, but it seems probable that the bonobos in captivity are more sex-obsessed than those in the wild. Another extract from the same article:

“It was so easy for Frans to charm everyone,” Hohmann said of de Waal one afternoon. “He had the big stories. We don’t have the big stories. Often, we have to say, ‘No, bonobos can be terribly boring. Watch a bonobo and there are days when you don’t see anything—just sleeping and eating and defecating. There’s no sex, there’s no food-sharing.’ ” During our first days in camp, the bonobos had been elusive. “Right now, bonobos are not vocalizing,” Hohmann said. “They’re just there. And if you go to a zoo, if you give them some food, there’s a frenzy. It’s so different.”

Captivity can have a striking impact on animal behavior. As Craig Stanford, a primatologist at the University of Southern California, recently put it, “Stuck together, bored out of their minds—what is there to do except eat and have sex?” De Waal has argued that, even if captive bonobo behavior is somewhat skewed, it can still be usefully contrasted with the behavior of captive chimpanzees; he has even written that “only captive studies control for environmental conditions and thereby provide conclusive data on interspecific differences.” Stanford’s reply is that “different animals respond very differently to captivity.”​

Gottfried Hohmann is one of the few scientists engaged in research on bonobos in their native habitat. He's seen evidence of extreme violence in wild bonobos, possibly going as far as murder, but he is cautious of writing about it before he has collected more data.

 

[aggle-rithm]

Well, in all fairness, the vast majority of human history doesn't really involve more organization than the chimps or bonobos have. There still are tribes out there whose size is limited by Dunbar's number, same as chimp groups or for that matter any primate group. It's the limit up to which the group can work just because everyone knows everyone else. It's higher in humans than in other primates, but still basically that's the number up to which anarchy works, and it's how human groups likely worked for about 95% of the time we've been on Earth.

I don't think we're really inherently prone to get more organized, nor to care much more about other humans than chimps are inclined to care about other chimps. Otherwise we'd have gotten more naturally organized like that.

At some point simply some groups seem to have been in a position to impose their will upon other groups and exploit them. Think, instead of just driving them off their land like a chimp tribe would, ask them to feed you for "protection". Resulting in a hierarchy that could exceed Dunbar's number, because it could work _without_ everyone being nicer and more concerned about more than 150 people.

Basically I'm just not seeing that being more docile and cooperative.

There is a hypothesis about human brain development that also brings up the docility issue. It states that in order to support development of large brains, we had to increase our protein intake. In order to do that, we had to develop cooking. In order to cook, we had to become patient enough to sit around a fire waiting for our meal to be ready. This had the added benefit of helping us develop communication skills. Our ancestors needed something to while away the time as our wooly mammoth carcasses sizzled on the grill.

I don't know how much supporting evidence there is for this, but it makes intuitive sense.

 

[aggle-rithm]

I'm with Hans. Amoung hunter-gatherer societies warfare is very common. The chances of a young man being killed by men from another tribe are startlingly high.

I completely agree that humans are prone to war. However, when a human kills in wartime the nature of the attack seems to be quite different. Humans don't seem to have a predisposition to inflict pain and suffering on their enemies, at least not to the extent that chimps do. In humans, the goal seems to be simply to eliminate the enemy.

Yes, I know there are exceptions. However, in chimps the tendency towards maiming rather than killing seems to be universal, as the same pattern arises in one attack after another.

(Also, we know for a fact that humans have better impulse control than the "lower" primates, because of the more developed frontal lobes of the brain.)

 

[William Parcher]

I completely agree that humans are prone to war. However, when a human kills in wartime the nature of the attack seems to be quite different. Humans don't seem to have a predisposition to inflict pain and suffering on their enemies, at least not to the extent that chimps do. In humans, the goal seems to be simply to eliminate the enemy.

Yes, I know there are exceptions. However, in chimps the tendency towards maiming rather than killing seems to be universal, as the same pattern arises in one attack after another.

Capture and torture is not uncommon in human tribal warfare. But putting that aside, chimps are not physically equipped to easily kill each other. Unlike us, they have no weapons (tools) for this purpose. They use their teeth and they are almost always not alone. All they can really do to kill each other is bite. If the victim is of similar size and strength (very strong) then the best way to subdue them might be to strategically bite in places that cause great pain (bringing shock) or reduce the ability to defend (bite off fingers). Death is probably going to come from blood loss as they are not known to strangle. How else could they kill?

Your point seems to be.... chimps have good alternative ("humane") ways to kill each other yet instead they choose the most horrible methods. Is that what you are saying?

 

[aggle-rithm]

Capture and torture is not uncommon in human tribal warfare. But putting that aside, chimps are not physically equipped to easily kill each other. Unlike us, they have no weapons (tools) for this purpose. They use their teeth and they are almost always not alone. All they can really do to kill each other is bite. If the victim is of similar size and strength (very strong) then the best way to subdue them might be to strategically bite in places that cause great pain (bringing shock) or reduce the ability to defend (bite off fingers). Death is probably going to come from blood loss as they are not known to strangle. How else could they kill?

Your point seems to be.... chimps have good alternative ("humane") ways to kill each other yet instead they choose the most horrible methods. Is that what you are saying?

You bring up a good point...I was anthropomorphizing them a little bit when I assumed that the viciousness of the attacks were motivated by "rage and hatred".

The humans who are attacked are probably injured so badly for the same reason that a dog's corrective bite hurts human children so badly...the action is meant for a member of their own species, and we are just more fragile than they are.

That's actually somewhat comforting.

 

[HansMustermann]

There is a hypothesis about human brain development that also brings up the docility issue. It states that in order to support development of large brains, we had to increase our protein intake. In order to do that, we had to develop cooking. In order to cook, we had to become patient enough to sit around a fire waiting for our meal to be ready. This had the added benefit of helping us develop communication skills. Our ancestors needed something to while away the time as our wooly mammoth carcasses sizzled on the grill.

I don't know how much supporting evidence there is for this, but it makes intuitive sense.

But it still didn't happen. In parts of the world where agriculture didn't force a sedentary life style, tribe sizes are still limited at Dunbar's number. There is no naturally emerging organization.

Plus, I've yet to see any evidence that Dunbar's number increased over time, which would be the case if the brain changed like that.

And agriculture may be a factor only because it made the location itself a resource worth defending. Normally a tribe, of humans or chimps alike, will just move on if defeated. But if moving away from one location would cause an extreme disadvantage, the tribe won't budge no matter how much beating it takes. And again, in chimps too: there was one experiment that actually caused chimp warfare by creating such a situation.

Humans may have been just smart enough to figure out that you can just tax that defeated tribe, instead of having to kill off every single member. (And take heavier casualties yourself in the process.) If they won't budge unless completely wiped out, wth, maybe we don't really need their land, we'll just take half of their crop in exchange for letting them keep that fertile patch. And promising to help defend them and their patch of land from others who want it.

 

[aggle-rithm]

But it still didn't happen.

Which part didn't happen? I know humans developed language and the ability to cooperate and cook their food...the theory states that all these behaviors fed back on each other to help drive rapid evolution of the human brain.

In parts of the world where agriculture didn't force a sedentary life style, tribe sizes are still limited at Dunbar's number. There is no naturally emerging organization.

Plus, I've yet to see any evidence that Dunbar's number increased over time, which would be the case if the brain changed like that.

But...don't those tribes that have not exceeded Dunbar's number have the same brains we do?

We know for a fact that the homonid brain did grow very large in a very short period of time.

 

[HansMustermann]

The point is: not _inside_ the Homo Sapiens species. The cranial capacity of the Cro-Magnons is very much the same as that of modern day humans, and cooking was there all the time. (Estimates place its invention about 250,000 years ago.)

Yet for about 95% of our existence, and for some humans even until this day, there is no sign of forming a more sophisticated society than chimps do. Or any other primates for example. We're still limited by the same number predicted very well based on brain size calculations.

Yes, as the brain of primates grew, so did Dunbar's number. Chimps can live in larger groups than baboons. But there is no sign that anything else than that happened.

Chimps are not peaceful, but their group size grew along the same curve that predicts that number for humans too. Basically if (hypothetically) you took a chimp and increased his brain to human size, you'd expect it to slide along the same curve and have a natural group size of about 150, same as humans do.

Either docility and cooperation somehow don't factor into the natural group size (hence then they didn't make any difference for us anyway), or really we didn't change much in that aspect.

 

[aggle-rithm]

The point is: not _inside_ the Homo Sapiens species. The cranial capacity of the Cro-Magnons is very much the same as that of modern day humans, and cooking was there all the time. (Estimates place its invention about 250,000 years ago.)

Yet for about 95% of our existence, and for some humans even until this day, there is no sign of forming a more sophisticated society than chimps do. Or any other primates for example. We're still limited by the same number predicted very well based on brain size calculations.

Yes, as the brain of primates grew, so did Dunbar's number. Chimps can live in larger groups than baboons. But there is no sign that anything else than that happened.

Chimps are not peaceful, but their group size grew along the same curve that predicts that number for humans too. Basically if (hypothetically) you took a chimp and increased his brain to human size, you'd expect it to slide along the same curve and have a natural group size of about 150, same as humans do.

Either docility and cooperation somehow don't factor into the natural group size (hence then they didn't make any difference for us anyway), or really we didn't change much in that aspect.

OK, thanks.