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Najakcharmer -> RE: Bonobos aren't really so peace-loving after all... (8/9/2007 10:50:20 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Lordandmaster
Well, yeah, but apparently they bite off each other's fingers, too. I haven't exactly been following bonobo research; I was still at the Frans de Waal stage before reading this article.
Oh, there's been other whispers of malcontent in primatology about the not so consistently peaceful bonobos. They just haven't really made the mainstream, until now.
Thing is, you can study a society that has evolved elaborate rituals of courtesy and greeting, and you can also observe that under some circumstances they fail to observe those courtesies and instead punch each other in the nose. That doesn't make your study of those elaborate rituals invalid; it simply says they aren't infallible.
quote:
There's also a huge issue, according to the article, about the behavior of captive vs. wild bonobos. The happy-go-lucky sexual behavior that people talk about is much more prominent in captive bonobos. And since hardly anyone has observed bonobos in the wild (including, amazingly, De Waal himself, who has decided that he doesn't need to go to the Congo), their behavior in captivity has come to define the standard view of bonobos, even though it's artificial.
You're always going to see a dichotomy between wild and captive behavior, but social aggression is more likely to increase than to decrease as a rule. This is a lay publication so it's hard to glean quite enough from it to draw any conclusions, but what was hinted at was the size of the bonobo group being the catalyst for more violent activity (eg, hunting and intragroup aggression). A smaller group might tend to engage in less aggression, and consequently would present an incomplete picture of their natural behavior.
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