Bonobos: Free-Loving Hippies or Chimps With Better PR?

With their gentle, sexually carefree ways, bonobos have captured the public imagination as an alternative to warlike, short-tempered chimpanzees.

The appeal is undeniable: bonobos are as closely related to humans as chimps. Inasmuch as other primates provide insight, metaphorical if not literal, into our own character, maybe we don't have to be warlike and short-tempered, either.

But is their aquarian reputation based more on human hope than scientific reality?

In an excellent New Yorker essay, Ian Parker discusses our perception of bonobos and the science behind it. As to the former, his scene of a
Manhattan fundraiser is priceless:

I spoke to a tall man in his forties who went by the single name Wind, and who had driven from his home in North Carolina to sing at the event. He was a musician and a former practitioner of “metaphysical counselling,” which he also referred to as clairvoyance. [...] Bonobos are remarkable, Wind told me, for being capable of “unconditional love.” They were “tolerant, patient, forgiving, and supportive of one another.” Chimps, by contrast, led brutish lives of “aggression, ego, and plotting.” As for humans, they had some innate stock of bonobo temperament, but they too often behaved like chimps. (The chimp-bonobo division is strongly felt by devotees of the latter. Wind told me that he once wore a chimpanzee T-shirt to a bonobo event, and “got shit for it.”)

It was Wind’s turn to perform. “Help Gaia and Gaia will help you,” he chanted into a microphone, in a booming voice that made people jump.
“Help bonobo and bonobo will help you.”

The science, however, is a bit more ambiguous. It turns out that the bonobo's reputation is based largely on observations of a small group in a zoo.

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?”

In the wild, bonobos aren't quite so loving, though they still don't seem as psychotic as chimps. But this is still preliminary -- because they live only in the jungles of the wartorn Congo, they're extremely difficult to study.

Parker's essay shows how scientific "reality" can be shaped as much by society as by research. If you have a spare half-hour, read it....

Swingers [New Yorker]

Image: Maryrose Dunton*