More on apes and violence
July 8th, 2010 by Mary
I’ve posted a couple of links lately to stories about humans, chimps, and violence. The New York Times recently ran a brief interview with two primatologists who study bonobos, the hippy cousin of chimps and humans. The title of the article is “Why Bonobos Don’t Kill Each Other,” and while that question isn’t really answered, it’s still an interesting look at bonobo research.
I think using drugs and torture we could train a generation of bonobos living in captivity to behave like fundamentalist christians, and then we could watch what their kids’ kids do.
I think we’d trash the idea of the “hippy chimps”.
So if “nurture” could move bonobos in one direction, do you think it could move religious fundamentalists in the other?
Frans de Waal has a series of brief guest blog posts over at Scientific American (http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/guest-blog/). In one of them, he speculates about how we would view human evolution and human nature if we had discovered bonobos before chimps.
I don’t know why it says comments are closed, by the way. They’re not supposed to be; maybe I’ve found a WordPress bug. At any rate, I’m not trying to close down the discussion.