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Greetings:<br><br>
I'm leaving for a 3-week trip to Morocco next week and I could take a
break from my radio commentaries (Donovan would like that), but I just
had too many topics that I wanted to cover. I've done two and two
more ("What Ever Happened to the Last Judgment?" and an Earth
Day piece "America's Moral Obligation for Global Warming") will
somehow get done before Tuesday evening.<br><br>
I'm holding my column "Tolerance for Islam in the Early American
Republic" until after the symposium this afternoon (1:30 at the
Moscow High Aud.), but below you will find my column for the Borah
Symposium.<br><br>
<br>
<div align="center"><b>WOMEN, BONOBOS, AND PEACE:<br>
HOW WE CAN LEARN TO BE NICE TO ONE ANOTHER<br><br>
</b>Chimps are from Mars and Bonobos are from Venus.<br>
--Robert M. Sapolsky <br><br>
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The<b> </b>Borah Symposium will be held in the UI SUB Ballroom from April
1-4. This year's topic is "Women, War, and Peace," a topic that
I had unsuccessfully lobbied for when I was on the Borah Committee in
1985.<br><br>
When Jane Goodall first told her colleagues that she had witnessed
chimpanese murder, they advised her to not to make this discovery
public. As a good scientist, Goodall of course chose otherwise,
even though the news undermined the widely held view that only we were
the only violent apes.<br><br>
We now know that we and the chimps have a close relation, the peaceful
bonobos, who are now near extinction in the jungles of the Democratic
Republic of the Congo. Discovered in the early 20th Century, the
bonobos were initially mistaken as small chimps, but they are a separate
species that most closely resemble <i>Australopithecus afarensis</i>, a
distant human ancestor. Bonobos are more naturally bipedal, and the
males lack both the heavy musculature and aggressive nature of their
chimp cousins.<br><br>
Bonobo society is matriarchal, even though the alpha male bonobo will
pretend that he is in charge, sometimes making threatening gestures at
intruders, it is the alpha female and her sisters who rule the roost.
<br><br>
While a dominant male chimp can take any female he wants by force, the
bonobo male has to court his mate. Bonobo males, as one scientist
observed, must "ask first . . . offering food or making other
propositions--and bonobo females have the right to refuse."<br><br>
Bonobos are the most sexually active creatures on earth. Unlike
chimps but like humans, bonobo females are almost always sexually
receptive, and same sex encounters are just as frequent as heterosexual
intercourse. Unlike other animals but like humans, bonobos
frequently make love face to face. <br><br>
With only a few observed exceptions, when different bonobo bands meet,
they make love not war. (In a similar instance male chimps would
usually fight.) In bonobo society having sex is the primary means of
conflict resolution, a solution that even some married couples have
learned to use. The Japanese have been studying the bonobo for 34
years, and they have not observed a bonobo killing another
bonobo.<br><br>
Describing bonobos as "highly compassionate and conscious
beings," Sally Coxe writes fondly about her interaction with
Panbanisha, a bonobo female at Georgia State University. Panbanisha
can understand English, use sign language, and spell out words on a
keyboard. <br><br>
While playing hide-and-seek with Panbanisha, Coxe noticed that the bonobo
recognized her name, and then made a gesture to Coxe to be quiet so that
they would not be found. Responding to a small cut on Coxe's wrist,
Panbanisha wrote out "hurt" on her keyboard. [Note to
Visionaries: Panbanisha is a person!]<br><br>
The question of whether chimps and humans are hard-wired for violence has
been addressed by Robert Spolsky, who has studied baboons most of his
career. Male baboons are just as aggressive and abusive to their
females as some male humans are. <br><br>
Spolsky documented remarkable behavioral changes in the particular band
of baboons that he had been studying closely. The dominant males
had been raiding the garbage dump of a hunting lodge, and all of them
died as a result of eating tainted meat. <br><br>
This troop's females were able to stage a velvet revolution, in which
they were able to pacify the surviving less dominant males. Spolsky noted
that "aggression was less frequent, particularly against third
parties. . . . There were even instances, now and then, of adult males
grooming each other--a behavior nearly as unprecedented as baboons
sprouting wings."<br><br>
This evidence, combined with other experiments in which babies from
aggressive monkey species were pacified by less aggressive foster
mothers, strongly suggests that primates are not "natural born
killers," and that we can all, under the influence of nurturing
females, learn to be nice to one another. <br><br>
And since we seem to have a lot of bonobo in us, we don't have a far to
go as our chimp cousins.<br><br>
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