I have been hearing about Bonobos for more than 20 years. My first exposure to them was probably in late high school, but one of my clearest recollections of them stems from the book: The Lost Ark: New and Rediscovered Species of the 20th Century. This book described how from a specimen that was thought to be a Chimpanzee the reality of two species was accepted. For years I have heard people talking about this species as the model of how humans should be. They are much more peaceful than the closely related Chimpanzee's and people seem to love to talk about how much sex they have, I remember a documentary with Michael Dorn as the narrator (which despite literally 'minutes' searching IMBD and Google I couldn't find) touting their "make love not war" lifestyle and commenting on how frequent their sexual contact is. Well earlier this week I was catching up on some TED talks I was interested in which does include one about Bonobos.
As I listened to it something bothered me. It seemed to be yet another message of anything goes. Our taboos agains adultery, homosexuality and a variety of other things are so wrong, no violence, let's just get along. Don't misunderstand. I actually loved the talk and found a lot of it very agreeable, but then part of the reason we watch things like this is to think, to challenge our current world view. This video did. Maybe it won't for others, but for me it made me really think. One of the thinks I thunk was: Well if this is such an evolutionarily successful strategy why are there so few Bonobos??
One possibility is that the more dominant, aggressive and less sexually free Chimpanzees have wiped them out. Turns out that later this week I found that may not be the whole story, (more on that later) but certainly it could be part of it. Bonobos live in isolation from the Chimps. That is part of what keeps the two species apart. They can likely interbreed and so I would suspect that the species with the higher population and wider range has the more successful strategy.
But what does this say about us? Well with our biological heritage coming from the same place as these two species some violence and some love. We aren't all one thing. What gave me even more insight was a Science Friday episode with Frans de Waal: Search for the Roots of Right and Wrong
25 minutes later I had even more insights both into the inner lives of primates but into how one admittedly non-believing scientist views religion.
As a believing scientist, I still don't know how to harmonize all these things, but I do love the challenge of struggling with it. Frans de Waal's ideas that he shared in the broadcast were for me contrasted with another fun listen from this week, from BYU Classic Speeches Podcast: "The Power of God unto Salvation" In this speech Marion G. Romney states that the concept that Christ taught the Fatherhood of God only as a construct to help people be more good to each other is not as powerful as the reality that we actually all are children of our Heavenly Father and we all are truly brothers. This fact is born out by the biology. We all have common ancestors and apparently more moral ones that I had previously known.
So, what? What does this mean? Well for one thing it means I have even more reasons to be kind to all those around me and to do my best to help others have the most happiness they can!
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