On his book The New Chimpanzee: A Twenty-First-Century Portrait of Our Closest Kin
Cover Interview of June 10, 2018
A close-up
Most readers tell me they are most intrigued by the
Machiavellian politics that define chimpanzee social life; and indeed,
increasing evidence of violence may shed light on the nature of violence in our
own species.
Chimpanzees use aggression in ways that repulse us when we
see it in in our own species. My colleague Christopher Boehm estimated that the
rate of non-lethal violence among wild chimpanzees is greater than that of most
human societies. A separate study by Richard Wrangham and his coauthors found a
similar “murder” rate between chimpanzees and traditional human hunter-gatherer
societies, but also a much higher rate of nonlethal aggression by chimpanzees. Chimpanzees
are the only primate other than ourselves who routinely kill one another in the
name of territory and resources. Male chimpanzees lack the weapons we associate
with efficient killers; they have hands and fingernails, not paws and claws. Their
canine teeth, while impressive, are no match for those of a carnivore. And yet
they carry out grisly attacks on members of their own and especially
neighboring communities. Males sexually coerce females. And both males and
females are known to commit infanticide.
Chimpanzees are not killing machines; ninety-nine per cent
of their lives are spent in peace. Of course, the same could be said about us. The
potential for violent behavior is within each of us, but it surfaces only
rarely, or never at all. And just as humans have myriad ways to defuse disputes
before they reach a stage at which violence seems a feasible option,
chimpanzees have many fail-safes that prevent lethal aggression from taking
place. After minor squabbles they reconcile, and the ways in which they restore
social harmony are as interesting and important as the violence that gets all
the attention from scientists and the media.
Like every other mammal on the planet, chimpanzees have the
capacity to inflict physical harm on one another. It’s harder to take a
utilitarian approach to violence in chimpanzees than it is in lower mammals. Chimpanzees
who injure or kill one another are not immoral. They are amoral; their violence
is a means to reach an end. We don’t get angry at lions for attacking each
other or for killing zebras; it’s what lions do. We tend to view great apes in
a different light because of their close evolutionary connection to us. An
entire wing of animal behavior research is founded on the idea that the roots
of human morality may be found in the pre-moral behavior of nonhuman primates,
with chimpanzees serving as a prime animal model. Most
researchers have concluded that “might makes right” when it comes to
chimpanzees’ treatment of one another. Anthropologists have, for many years, cited chimpanzee aggression as an example of how punitive violence may have its cultural origins in our own species.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
A close-up
Most readers tell me they are most intrigued by the Machiavellian politics that define chimpanzee social life; and indeed, increasing evidence of violence may shed light on the nature of violence in our own species.
Chimpanzees use aggression in ways that repulse us when we see it in in our own species. My colleague Christopher Boehm estimated that the rate of non-lethal violence among wild chimpanzees is greater than that of most human societies. A separate study by Richard Wrangham and his coauthors found a similar “murder” rate between chimpanzees and traditional human hunter-gatherer societies, but also a much higher rate of nonlethal aggression by chimpanzees. Chimpanzees are the only primate other than ourselves who routinely kill one another in the name of territory and resources. Male chimpanzees lack the weapons we associate with efficient killers; they have hands and fingernails, not paws and claws. Their canine teeth, while impressive, are no match for those of a carnivore. And yet they carry out grisly attacks on members of their own and especially neighboring communities. Males sexually coerce females. And both males and females are known to commit infanticide.
Chimpanzees are not killing machines; ninety-nine per cent of their lives are spent in peace. Of course, the same could be said about us. The potential for violent behavior is within each of us, but it surfaces only rarely, or never at all. And just as humans have myriad ways to defuse disputes before they reach a stage at which violence seems a feasible option, chimpanzees have many fail-safes that prevent lethal aggression from taking place. After minor squabbles they reconcile, and the ways in which they restore social harmony are as interesting and important as the violence that gets all the attention from scientists and the media.
Like every other mammal on the planet, chimpanzees have the capacity to inflict physical harm on one another. It’s harder to take a utilitarian approach to violence in chimpanzees than it is in lower mammals. Chimpanzees who injure or kill one another are not immoral. They are amoral; their violence is a means to reach an end. We don’t get angry at lions for attacking each other or for killing zebras; it’s what lions do. We tend to view great apes in a different light because of their close evolutionary connection to us. An entire wing of animal behavior research is founded on the idea that the roots of human morality may be found in the pre-moral behavior of nonhuman primates, with chimpanzees serving as a prime animal model. Most researchers have concluded that “might makes right” when it comes to chimpanzees’ treatment of one another. Anthropologists have, for many years, cited chimpanzee aggression as an example of how punitive violence may have its cultural origins in our own species.