Bonobos, Chimpanzees, and Maureen Dowd

In her endless quest to bring sexual politics into practically every discussion, the New York Time‘s Maureen Dowd recently blamed men for the fact that only 49 percent of female executives making more than $100,000 have children (compared to 10 percent of men in that position who are childless). Dowd absurdly thinks that men should take a lesson from bonobos.

Before we get into monkey business, lets look at Dowd’s absurd logic. She cites a “60 Minutes” report in which a handful of women claimed that the second they told men that they attend Harvard Business School, the men are no longer interested in them. Harvard Business School student Ani Vartanian told Lesley Stahl,

As soon as you say Harvard Business School . . . that’s the end of the conversation. As soon as the guys say, ‘Oh, I go to Harvard Business School,’ all the girls start falling into them.

Of course anecdotes like this are manna to columnists like Dowd who seem positively allergic to anything even remotely smelling of actual data. Dowd implicitly argues that this is the reason female executives are childless without offering a shred of evidence.

She then goes on to urge men to be willing to date more “challenging” women, and, in the process, pauses to denigrate women who are not as “challenging” or “demanding.” According to Dowd,

Women who don’t have demanding jobs are not less demanding in relationships; indeed, they may be more demanding. They’re saving up all that competitive energy and critical faculty to lavish on you when you get home.

What a demeaning thing to say about women who do not attend Harvard Business School or pursue the high challenge careers that Dowd apparently thinks they should.

But it is when Dowd ends her column in a bit of comparative evolutionary biology between human beings and bonobos that Dowd really goes off the deep end. According to Dowd,

Bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees, live in equatorial rain forests of Congo, and have an extraordinarily happy existence.

And why? because in bonobo society, the females are dominant. Just light dominance, so that its more like a co-dominance, or equality between the sexes.

“They are less obsessed with power and status than their chimpanzee cousins, and more consumed with Eros,” The Times’s Natalie Angier has written. “Bonobos use sex to appease, to bond, to make up after a fight, to ease tensions, to cement alliances . . . Humans generally wait until after a nice meal to make love; bonobos do it beforehand.”

All of this, is offered as a way to achieve Dowd’s ultimate goal which is, namely, “If men would only give up their silly desire for world dominance, the world would be a much finer place.”

First, Angier’s claim that chimpanzees are “obsessed with power and status” whereas bonobos are “more consumed with Eros” is the absolute worse sort of anthropomorphism. Chimpanzees don’t sit around plotting how to obtain power, and bonobos aren’t thinking of ways to get laid. They’re both following scripts pre-arranged for them by their particular evolutionary path. Imputing to them these human motives is absurd and unworthy of even a beginning biology student.

More importantly, though, decades ago this sort of anthropomorphizing held up chimpanzees as a model for human behavior. Until it was discovered that chimpanzees organizing hunting parties and engage in plenty of other organized violence.

But in evaluating bonobos vs. chimpanzees Dowd, like a lot of people who cite bonobos, leave out what bonobos do not do. What they do not do is use tools to nearly the extent that chimpanzees do. Chimps, like human beings, are rather creative tool users — they will use sticks to fish, use tree branches as ladders to escape, and exhibit a whole host of other behaviors. Bonobos have never been observed using tools in the wild (though they do learn how to use tools in captivity).

One persistent theory about human intelligence and tool use is that it evolved out of the needs of organized hunting and other aggressive. To the extent that one can draw the sort of crude comparisons between non-human primates and human beings, the clear lesson is that following Dowd’s advice might indeed reduce conflict, but it would also reduce that which makes us human — our incredible manipulation of our environment.

Personally, though, I suspect the amount of comparative information that can be gleaned about human behavior from chimpanzees and bonobos is extremely limited. More often commentators such as Dowd simply use these non-human primates as a post hoc justification for their already pre-existing ideological views. That’s one difference between non-human primates and someone like Dowd — the primates do not intentionally prefer fallacious logic over reasoned argument (the bonobos and chimpanzees at least have a ready justification for not relying on solid data — what’s Dowd’s excuse?)

Source:

The baby bust. Maureen Dowd, New York Times, April 10, 2002.