New Scientist - USA (2022-05-07)

7 May 2022 | New Scientist | 45

a feminist Darwinism – tell us about that.

The first goal of Darwinian feminism is to

pay attention to the female. If you look at

books about human evolution, they are

always about male qualities like warfare,

territoriality and hunting, and there is

very little discussion about what the women

were doing in all that time. Some have said

that the fittest individuals in our lineage were

the men – as if the women were just dragged

along in the evolution of the beautiful human

male. Pay attention to the females and then

you get to understand things like female

choice and female sexuality.

The anthropologist Sarah Hrdy paid

attention to why female chimps have so much

sex, not just with one male but with multiple

males. She realised that if infanticide is a big

risk, then having sex with lots of males may

help you because males won’t attack your

offspring. Males don’t know about paternity,

but seem to avoid attacking offspring of

females they have had sex with. And if that

is their rule, then it is a perfectly good strategy

for the females to have sex with a lot of males –

a female chimp who is having sex with a lot of

males is protecting herself.

Do we know why chimps evolved down

a male-dominant, aggressive route and

bonobos became peaceful and sex-loving,

with high-ranking females? Humans seem

to be somewhere in the middle.

There is speculation that bonobos lived in

an environment where they had no gorillas,

so they didn’t need to compete with them

for the ground vegetation, and that they

maybe had a richer forest. More food around

allows more individuals to travel together, as

they don’t need to spread out to find enough

food. This advantages the females, as they

have a strong tendency to defend each other

against males, and being together allows

them to do this collectively.

So it is thought that the ecology of the bonobo

allows closer female relationships compared

with that of the chimpanzee. That may be one

reason why female bonobos have taken the

dominant role. Chimps in West Africa are more

bonobo-like in the sense that they travel more

together and the balance of power between

male and female has shifted somewhat

towards the female. There is more female

leadership visible and less sexual coercion.

If you look at the recent history of primatology,

we have Jane Goodall’s work on tool use,

Toshisada Nishida’s work on cooperation

and your work on empathy and the inner lives

of primates. They all seem to be undoing

patriarchal assumptions of what was happening.

Yeah. [The discredited 20th-century British

zoologist] Solly Zuckerman was largely

responsible for those assumptions. People

still often believe that, in primates, the male

is the boss. The male decides. The females are

basically the slaves of the male. What kind of

nonsense is that! It comes from a management

mistake made by Zuckerman years ago at

London Zoo as a result of randomly throwing

male and female hamadryas baboons together

in an enclosure. In the wild, these primates

live in groups of one male and several females,

but the zoo put nearly 100 males together with

a handful of females. It became a bloodbath.

Then he, and others after him, presented this

kind of behaviour as representing the natural

order in primate society.

Are you prepared for any controversy

over your book?

I thought while writing it that the biggest

objection could come from those who deny

any biological influence on gender identity or

gendered behaviour, and have elevated gender

to a purely cultural thing. We can try to remove

biological sex from the gender concept, but

we will never fully succeed. Sex versus gender

is like nature versus nurture – we know that

the two are intertwined and should always

be discussed together, as neither can do

anything on their own. There is no behaviour

that is pure nature, without environmental

influences, and no behaviour that is pure

nurture, without biological influences.

But, in retrospect, I think my book is more

likely to upset people who have the traditional

view of just two genders and two sexes. ❚

Rowan Hooper is podcast editor

at New Scientist. His latest book

is How to Spend a Trillion Dollars

Chimpanzees

can become

more peaceful

in plentiful

environments

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“ When I talk about

the bonobo

clitoris, scientists

get nervous”