Bonobos Are Altruistic (without Payback And Without Encouragement)

[dookie]

@haidut
@Revo

Let us not forget that excess estrogen can create "nymphomania" or "insatiable sex desires", so the inability to stay monogamous may also have to do with the rising estrogen levels

Of course, what the ideal type of behavior is, seems difficult to pinpoint given we are so far away from what is "natural" or healthy

 

[pimpnamedraypeat]

I don't deal in goods, bads or shoulds. Appealing to both naturality and morality in the same argument is a sure recipe for an intellectual disaster. No, I'm saying our current societal behavior is not any less or more natural than any other behavior we can partake in. Either we exist as units of nature and are therefore 100% bound by naturality, or we exist outside of nature and can not partake in authentic natural behavior. Claiming that this or that behavior or state of mind is unnatural is equal to saying that x is bad because it feels bad. It's an emotion-based opinion, not a rational, or even practical argument in itself.

It seems like you want to play silly semantic games with made up rules.

I don't think the people youre arguing with are concerned with having an intellectually rigorous discussion on the meaning of 'natural" they're trying to discuss a global issue, one that affects us all.

Thank God they are not, and thank God we have built a society that generally protects women from that sort of coercion. Women select for men and thus serve life and incentivize the moral and societal development of humanity.

It depends. In some cases, women select for the worst in men. In some cases they don't select all.
Women dont need protection from men. Men usually aren't that bad. Rape and attack against women is pathological.

Heck we cant even get Catholic priest to follow their vows because the characteristic of sex with multiple partners is so persistent.

Men who go into the priesthood tend to be gay. That's what it's for. They bang each other as well as little boys.

 

[Revo]

@Pimp you make some good points. The concept of women having to be protected from male coercion is a very rare occurrence, and when it does happen it is because someone is stepping outside of society be it modern society or prehistoric hunger gather society.

As far as how women select there are today massive cultural pressures to select for very unproductive and harmful features such as picking a mate based on pure masculine presence and power which gives her good genes but is bad for her and her child in just about every other way (the bad boy). Then they select men for marriage based on males ability to be an economic provider but maybe someone she is not particularly interested in (the nice guy) leading to the inevitable divorce a few years later. All common in our society. This is also known as the dual mating strategy. And if you look at the dual mating strategy through the lens of the prehistoric non-monogamous hunter gathers you see that it makes more sense. They are able to select for the best genes and also select for good providers without causing problems for herself or her child.

 

[CarbAppreciator]

Good for Bonobos, they should enjoy their last days before they get genocided by the much faster evolving chimps.

 

[pimpnamedraypeat]

@Revo people who act like women are angels and their sexual proclivites are moral dogmas set down by god himself....those people are dumb.

Good for Bonobos, they should enjoy their last days before they get genocided by the much faster evolving chimps.

Doesn't matter had sex

 

[meatbag]

Good for Bonobos, they should enjoy their last days before they get genocided by the much faster evolving chimps.

Actually they would probably just hook-up if history has any say on the matter Probably the bonobos would just seduce the chimps since that seems to be what bonobos who don't know each other do ;
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/chimps-and-bonobos-had-flings-and-swapped-genes-past
"The genetic analysis indicates that this inbreeding happened during two time periods: 1.5 million years ago bonobo ancestors mixed with the ancestor of the eastern and central chimps. Then, just 200,000 years ago, central chimps got another boost of bonobo genes, the team reports today in Science."

What makes you think the chimps are evolving faster and even that faster evolution would lead to superiority? There are bacteria that can evolve to thrive off of previously toxic substrates within only a few generations, does that make bacteria superior to humans?

 

[CarbAppreciator]

What makes you think the chimps are evolving faster and even that faster evolution would lead to superiority? There are bacteria that can evolve to thrive off of previously toxic substrates within only a few generations, does that make bacteria superior to humans?

Chimps use tools, have a more diverse higher quality(meat) diet, inhabit a much larger area, have more genetic diversity with higher infant investment, and probably a more sophisticated language.

...No, that species would be superior to other bacteria...

 

[Luann]

Sex with different partners can be a human desire, while monogamistic sex is, or at least has been until now, a cultural value and norm. Human is a complex species. Sometimes our own interests conflict. It's not the fault of PUFA's or an overstructured society when this happens. It just means that we're wonderfully made beings.

 

[meatbag]

Chimps use tools, have a more diverse higher quality(meat) diet, inhabit a much larger area, have more genetic diversity with higher infant investment, and probably a more sophisticated language.

...No, that species would be superior to other bacteria...

Well if we're comparing the two directly Bonobo's also use tools[1] and it seems more of their diet consists of non-plant material[2]. I think the Bonobos occupy less total area because they have less competition[3]. If they have every thing they need what's the point of moving? I'd be interested to see direct comparison between Bonobo and Chimpanzee language if you have one, I haven't read much about it.

But I'm really not sure about the evolutionary rate being beneficial, after all doesn't radiation induce genetic mutations which is supposedly the 'raw material' of evolution?

1~

<--Bonobo
"Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, are the most sophisticated tool-users among all nonhuman primates. From an evolutionary perspective, it is therefore puzzling that the tool use behaviour of their closest living primate relative, the bonobo, Pan paniscus, has been described as particularly poor. However, only a small number of bonobo groups have been studied in the wild and only over comparably short periods. Here, we show that captive bonobos and chimpanzees are equally diverse tool-users in most contexts. Our observations illustrate that tool use in bonobos can be highly complex and no different from what has been described for chimpanzees. The only major difference in the chimpanzee and bonobo data was that bonobos of all age–sex classes used tools in a play context, a possible manifestation of their neotenous nature. We also found that female bonobos displayed a larger range of tool use behaviours than males, a pattern previously described for chimpanzees but not for other great apes. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the female-biased tool use evolved prior to the split between bonobos and chimpanzees." (A comparison of bonobo and chimpanzee tool use: evidence for a female bias in the Pan lineage - ScienceDirect)

2~The bonobo is an omnivorous frugivore; 57% of its diet is fruit, but this is supplemented with leaves, honey, eggs,[56] meat from small vertebrates such as anomalures, flying squirrels and duikers,[57] and invertebrates.[58] In some instances, bonobos have been shown to consume lower-order primates.[59] Some claim bonobos have also been known to practise cannibalism in captivity, a claim disputed by others.[60][61] However, at least one confirmed report of cannibalism in the wild of a deceased infant was described in 2008.[62][63] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo)

Chimps: despite the fact that common chimpanzees are known to hunt, and to collect insects and other invertebrates, such food actually makes up a tiny portion of their diet, from as little as 2% yearly to as much as 65 grams of animal flesh per day for each adult chimpanzee in peak hunting seasons. This also varies from troop to troop and year to year. However, in all cases, the majority of their diet consists of fruits, leaves, roots, and other plant matter.[34][35]
(Common chimpanzee - Wikipedia)
3~ "Richard Wrangham has a hypothesis. Wrangham is a distinguished biological anthropologist and a professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard with more than four decades of experience studying primates in the wild. His work on chimpanzees dates back to his Ph.D. research at Tanzania’s Gombe National Park in the early 1970s and continues at Kibale National Park in Uganda. He addressed the subject of bonobo origins in a 1993 journal paper and then in a popular 1996 book, Demonic Males, co-authored with Dale Peterson. The crucial point in his hypothesis is the absence of gorillas, over the past one or two million years, from the left bank of the Congo River.

The reasons for that absence are uncertain, but the evolutionary consequences seem rather clear. On the river’s right bank, where chimps and gorillas shared the forest, the gorillas ate what gorillas still eat, mainly herby vegetation, and the chimps ate a chimp diet, mainly fruit, tree leaves, and occasionally meat. On the left bank dwelled that other chimpish animal, privileged by circumstance to be free of gorilla competition. “And that’s the formula,” Wrangham told me by phone from his office at Harvard, “that makes a bonobo.” The left-bank creatures, bolstering themselves on a rich chimpanzee diet when it was available and sustained by those staple gorilla foods when it wasn’t, lived a steadier life; they weren’t forced to break into small and unstable foraging groups, diverging, rejoining, scrambling for precious but patchily available foods, as right-bank chimps often are. And that fateful difference in food-finding strategy carried consequences for social behavior, Wrangham explained. The relative stability of foraging groups within a larger bonobo community means that vulnerable individuals usually have allies present at any given moment. This tends to dampen dominance battles and fighting. “Specifically,” he added, “females have other females as well as males available to protect them from those that might want to bully them.”

Another result of the foraging-group stability, he noted, involves the sexual rhythms of bonobo females. Unlike chimp females, they aren’t obliged by circumstance to present themselves always as extremely attractive, extremely ready for mating with all possible males during just short, periodic windows of time. “If you are a bonobo,” Wrangham said, and you live in a larger and more stable foraging group, “then you can afford to have a long period of sexual swelling.” A bonobo female doesn’t need to attract gaggles of frantically horny males on a short-term basis. She’s continually attractive, continually ready. “That greatly reduces the importance to the males of competing for dominance and bullying the females.” So the famed amity and sexiness of bonobo social life has, by Wrangham’s hypothesis, an unexpected source: the availability of gorilla foods uneaten by gorillas."

 

[CarbAppreciator]

Bonobos only use tools in captivity... I mean come on, no one expects the bonobos to just decide to develop tools, they need an environmental pressure to force that behavior ie they need competition. They also need competition to reform their mating habits. There is no mechanism for genetic refinement in their behavior, they just have a free for all and good genes get passed down along with the bad. If a new disease is introduced to them, they are all potentially susceptible because they all have the same genes. In chimps, they have many small troops where only the alpha passes the genes on. So each troop has their unique genetic line, if it's a good line it will outcompete the neighboring troops. Chimps are way more dynamic in this way, ie they are evolving. Bonobos just sit there in their tiny little area(compared to chimps' wide area), not changing or adapting to anything, ie not evolving.

 

[morgan#1]

‘

 

[Regina]

I just can't find the instance where Ray Peat said/wrote that young animals who were treated roughly grow up to be overly submissive to larger animals and bullying to smaller animals.
I'd greatly appreciate if anyone can point to where Peat spoke about this. Thx.

 

[DaveFoster]

 

[Regina]

must be the estrogenic grapefruit

 

[meatbag]

Here is a recent study on chimpanzees fighting each other in groups;

Chimpanzee friends fight together to battle rivals ​

We should use this study to justify warfare for the rest of human existence

 

[Cloudhands]

I love bonobos :)