Darwinism Isn’t Extinct Yet
When Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was published in 1859, many scientists found a kind of tough religion in its vision of life as a gladiator’s contest in which members of a given species compete and only the fittest survive.
In the early 1990s, a new generation of “sociobiologists” began to put a kinder, gentler face on Darwinism. Pointing to two groups of primates that did not seem to place much value on competition and domination, they argued that the peaceful, egalitarian attitude of these primates showed that aggressiveness and the drive for power are not biologically inevitable.
The first group, female chimpanzees, were thought to rarely challenge one another for dominance. The second, bonobos or pygmy chimps, have been widely hailed as gentle and egalitarian creatures that substitute noncoercive sex for competition and aggression.
However, recent studies are casting a skeptical light on the new Darwinism, suggesting that it may be based as much on wishful interpretation as on scientific evidence.
Last week, the eminent animal behaviorist Jane Goodall, with colleagues Anne Pusey and Jennifer Williams, published in Science Magazine the results of a 35-year study of chimps in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park. They conclude that contrary to conventional belief, female chimps are preoccupied with struggling for dominance, for those who succeed in the contest are likely to have “significantly higher infant survival, faster-maturing daughters and more rapid production of young.”
Soon after establishing a game reserve in Gombe in 1960, Goodall described chimpanzees as playful and affectionate inhabitants of a paradise in the treetops. Female dominance behavior escaped her notice, Goodall writes, because it is expressed not through the easily visible fights that the males have but through subtle rituals that allow high-ranking females to establish core territories with the most abundant food.
Scientists like Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham suggest that those studying bonobos today may be overlooking subtle behavior just as Goodall did in the 1960s, for knowledge about bonobos is perfunctory compared to that about chimps.
For instance, in his new book “Bonobo,” primatologist Frans de Waal writes that while members of other species often compete when resources are in short supply, bonobos are “quite tolerant” of such situations, using “sex to divert attention and change the tone of the encounter.” But in fact, scientists have yet to carefully observe bonobos in conditions of real scarcity.
While it’s unlikely that this debate will be resolved soon, we risk in the meantime letting these two species--our closest relatives, sharing over 98% of our genes--disappear from the wild. As Goodall says in her article, chimp populations are becoming “small and isolated”; bonobos are similarly endangered.
Conservation efforts must be encouraged. For while some romantic chimp theories are going bust, virtually all sociobiologists still think that wild primates do possess social tools, like conflict resolution, that man has yet to master. By continuing to protect and study our closest cousins, we may someday learn their secrets.
