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April 20, 2005
Demonic Males Part 2
Powerline has a link to a story about human nature and apes. John writes,
This AP headline caught my eye: Expert: Apes May Be Key to Human Nature. This strikes me as odd. I would think that humans provide better clues to human nature than apes, and we have thousands of years of human history, not to mention six billion or so living humans, to draw on for information about human nature. But the idea of drawing conclusions about humans from observations of apes has a long history, and shows no signs of going away. Why is that? I suspect it's because some people don't like what human history and human behavior tell us about human nature.
The actual story is about using bonobos for a model. The AP story says,
Bonobos, a species of ape from the Congo, are the most like humans, Savage-Rumbaugh said. They constantly vocalize "as though they are conversing" and often walk upright."If you want to find a human-like creature that exists in a completely natural state ... that creature is the bonobo," said Savage-Rumbaugh, an experimental psychologist who is one of the world's leading ape-language researchers.
But from everything I have read, humans are genetically closer to chimpanzees than to bonobos (while chimps and bonobos are closer to each other than either is to humans). Both humans and chimpanzees are also unique in that they are the only two species that form primarily male parties to raid the territory of other members of the same species with the intent to kill. Bonobos are far less violent than humans or chimps, which may make us want to be like them, but nature wise we are closer to chimps.
Update (4/21/04): It turns out that the chimps who excaped from their cages a few weeks ago and then bit off part of a man's face escaped on their own:
one of the chimps apparently figured out how to reach through a tight space between a chain link fence and a wall, pull out a steel pin and slide a door open.
Posted by Pete at April 20, 2005 06:39 PM
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