martedì 18 ottobre 2016

CHAPTER FOUR The Ape in the Mirror - christopher ryan sex at dawn

CHAPTER FOUR The Ape in the MirrorRead more at location 1082
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Genetically, the chimps and bonobos at the zoo are far closer to you and the other paying customers than they are to the gorillas, orangutans, monkeys, or anything else in a cage. Our DNA differs from that of chimps and bonobos by roughly 1.6 percent, making us closer to them than a dog is to a fox, a white-handed gibbon to a white-cheeked crested gibbon, an Indian elephant to an African elephant or, for any bird-watchers who may be tuning in, a red-eyed vireo to a white-eyed vireo.Read more at location 1092
Note: VCINANZA Edit
The ancestral line leading to chimps and bonobos splits off from that leading to humans just five to six million years agoRead more at location 1096
Note: BIFIRCAZIONE Edit
with the chimp and bonobo lines separating somewhere between 3 million and 860,000 years ago.Read more at location 1098
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gorilla peeled away from the common line around nine million years ago, orangutans 16 million, and gibbons, the only monogamous ape, took an early exit about 22 million years ago.Read more at location 1099
Note: c Edit
Homo sapiens sapiens: New York, New York. Chimps and bonobos are practically neighbors, living within thirty miles of each other in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Yorktown Heights, New York. Both just fifty miles from New York, they are well within commuting distance of humanity. Gorillas are enjoying cheese-steaks in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Orangutans are in Baltimore, Maryland, doing whatever it is people do in Baltimore. Gibbons are busily legislating monogamy in Washington, D.C. Old-world monkeys (baboons, macaques) are down around Roanoke, Virginia.Read more at location 1103
Note: IMMAGINE GEOGRAFICA Edit
For bonobos, a turbocharged sexuality utterly divorced from reproduction is a central feature of social interaction and group cohesion.Read more at location 1116
Note: BONOBO SESSO E RIPRODUZIONE Edit
The payoff is “a more intense form of social cooperation between males and females” leading to “a more intensely cooperative social group, a more secure milieu for rearing infants, and hence a higher degree of reproductive success for sexier males and females.”3 The bonobo’s promiscuity, in other words, confers significant evolutionary benefits on the apes.Read more at location 1118
Note: COESIONE FACILITÁ DI SOPRAVVIVEMZA Edit
The only monogamous ape, the gibbon, lives in Southeast Asia in small family units consisting of a male/female couple and their young—isolated in a territory of thirty to fifty square kilometers.Read more at location 1122
Note: GIBBONI MNOGAMI Edit
Monogamy is not found in any social, group-living primate except—if the standard narrative is to be believed—us.Read more at location 1124
Note: MONOGAMIA E SOCIALITÁ Edit
Primates and Human NatureRead more at location 1129
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If Thomas Hobbes had been offered the opportunity to design an animal that embodied his darkest convictions about human nature, he might have come up with something like a chimpanzee.Read more at location 1130
Note: CHIMPS HOBBESIANA Edit
Chimps are reported to be power-mad, jealous, quick to violence, devious, and aggressive. Murder, organized warfare between groups, rape, and infanticide are prominent in accounts of their behavior.Read more at location 1132
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“killer ape”Read more at location 1134
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Dale PetersonRead more at location 1135
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Chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human war, making modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, 5-million-year habit of lethal aggression.”Read more at location 1136
Note: GUERRAGONDAI Edit
The baboon model was abandoned when it became clear that they lack some fundamental human characteristics: cooperative hunting, tool use, organized warfare, and power struggles involving complex coalition-building. Meanwhile, Jane Goodall and others were observing these qualities in chimpanzee behavior. Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky—an expert on baboon behavior—notes that “chimps are what baboons would love to be like if they had a shred of self-discipline.”Read more at location 1140
Note: NO BABBUINI MA CHIMPS Edit
Table 1: Social Organization Among Apes7Read more at location 1148
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Bonobo Egalitarian and peaceful, bonobo communities are maintained primarily through social bonding between females, although females bond with males as well. Male status derives from the mother. Bonds between son and mother are lifelong. Multimale-multifemale mating.Read more at location 1150
Note: BONOBO Edit
Chimpanzee The bonds between males are strongest and lead to constantly shifting male coalitions. Females move through overlapping ranges within territory patrolled by males, but don’t form strong bonds with other females or any particular male. Multimale-multifemale mating.Read more at location 1153
Human By far the most diverse social species among the primates, there is plentiful evidence of all types of socio-sexual bonding, cooperation, and competition among contemporary humans. Multimale-multifemale mating.Read more at location 1156
Note: UOMO Edit
Gorilla Generally, a single dominant male (the so-called “Silverback”) occupies a range for his family unit composed of several females and young. Adolescent males are forced out of the group as they reach sexual maturity. Strongest social bonds are between the male and adult females. Polygynous mating.Read more at location 1159
Note: GORILLA Edit
Orangutan Orangutans are solitary and show little bonding of any kind. Male orangutans do not tolerate each other’s presence. An adult male establishes a large territory where several females live. Each has her own range. Mating is dispersed, infrequent and often violent.Read more at location 1162
Note: ORANGO Edit
Gibbon Gibbons establish nuclear family units; each couple maintains a territory from which other pairs are excluded. Mating is monogamous.Read more at location 1165
Note: GIBBONE Edit
Doubting the Chimpanzee ModelRead more at location 1167
Note: T FORSE I CHIMPS NN SONO COSÌ TRUCI Edit
While chimps are extremely hierarchical, groups of human foragers are vehemently egalitarian. Meat sharing is precisely the occasion when chimp hierarchy is most evident, yet a successful hunt triggers the leveling mechanisms most important to human foraging societies.Read more at location 1169
Note: GERARCHIE. CHIMPS. UOMINI Edit
while data from the chimps studied by Goodall and others at Gombe appear to support the idea that a ruthless and calculating selfishness is typical of chimpanzee behavior, information from other study sites may contradict or undermine this finding.Read more at location 1176
Note: EGOISMO IN DUBBIO Edit
difficulties inherent in observing chimpanzee behavior in the wild,Read more at location 1177
Note: x Edit
There are also questions concerning how violent chimps are if left undisturbed in their natural habitat. As we discuss in Chapter 13, several factors could have profoundly altered the chimps’ observed behavior.Read more at location 1181
Note: VIOLENTI SE DISTURBATI ? Edit
Morris BermanRead more at location 1183
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if we “change things such as food supplies, population densities, and the possibilities for spontaneous group formation and dissolution,…all hell breaks loose—no less for apes than for humans.”Read more at location 1183
Note: ALTERAZIONI Edit
Richard Dawkins,Read more at location 1186
Note: x UB HOBBESIANO Edit
“Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”Read more at location 1187
Note: EGO Edit
Human groups tend to respond to food surplus and storage with behavior like that observed in chimps: heightened hierarchical social organization, intergroup violence, territorial perimeter defense, and Machiavellian alliances. In other words, humans—like chimps—tend to fight when there’s something worth fighting over. But for most of prehistory, there was no food surplus to win or lose and no home base to defend.Read more at location 1197
Note: IL RUOLO DECISIVO DELLE SVORTE: NELLA PREISTORIA NN C ERANI!!! Edit
In Search of Primate ContinuityRead more at location 1201
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Just as the chimpanzee seems to embody the Hobbesian vision of human origins, the bonobo reflects the Rousseauian view.Read more at location 1210
Note: HOBBES E ROUSSEAU Edit
De Waal sums up the difference between these two apes’ behavior by saying that “the chimpanzee resolves sexual issues with power; the bonobo resolves power issues with sex.”Read more at location 1212
Note: SESSO E POTERE Edit
“In war as in romance, bonobos and chimpanzees appear to be strikingly different. When two bonobo communities meet at a range boundary at Wamba…not only is there no lethal aggression as sometimes occurs in chimps, there may be socializing and even sex between females and the enemy community’s males.”Read more at location 1220
Note: WSR E ROMANCE Edit
Just imagine that we had never heard of chimpanzees or baboons and had known bonobos first. We would at present most likely believe that early hominids lived in female-centered societies, in which sex served important social functions and in which warfare was rare or absent. FRANS DE WAALRead more at location 1232
Note: PACIFISTI Edit
Bonobos have no formalized rituals of dominance and submission like the status displays common to chimps, gorillas, and other primates. Although status is not completely absent, primatologist Takayoshi Kano, who has collected the most detailed information on bonobo behavior in the wild, prefers to use the term “influential” rather than “high-ranking” when describing female bonobos.Read more at location 1240
Note: EGALITARISMO Edit
Those looking for evidence of matriarchy in human societies might ponder the fact that among bonobos, female “dominance” doesn’t result in the sort of male submission one might expect if it were simply an inversion of the male power structures found among chimps and baboons. The female bonobos use their power differently than male primates.Read more at location 1246
Note: MATRIARCATO Edit
Despite their submissive social role, male bonobos appear to be much better off than male chimps or baboons. As we’ll see in later discussions of female-dominated societies, human males also tend to fare pretty well when the women are in charge. While Sapolsky chose to study baboons because of the chronically high stress levels males suffer as a result of their unending struggles for power, de Waal notes that bonobos confront a different sort of existence, saying, “in view of their frequent sexual activity and low aggression, I find it hard to imagine that males of the species have a particularly stressful time.”Read more at location 1249
Note: I MASVHI SE LA SPASSANO Edit
bonobos “display many of the sexual habits people exhibit on the streets, in the bars and restaurants, and behind apartment doors in New York, Paris, Moscow, and Hong Kong.” “Prior to coitus,” she writes, “bonobos often stare deeply into each other’s eyes.” And Fisher assures her readers that, like human beings, bonobos “walk arm in arm, kiss each other’s hands and feet, and embrace with long, deep, tongue-intruding French kisses.”Read more at location 1268
Note: LA FISCHER Edit
Remember, we are genetically equidistant from chimps and bonobos.Read more at location 1276
Note: PERCHÈ I CHIMP SÌ I BONOBO NO Edit
female bonobos resume sexual behavior within a year of parturition.” Both these otherwise unique qualities of bonobo sexuality are shared by only one other primate species: Homo sapiens.Read more at location 1281
Note: IL PARTO. ALTRA SIMILITUDINE. Edit
Fisher assumes the advent of pair bonding four million years ago despite the absence of any supporting evidence.Read more at location 1298
Note: ASSUNZIONE SENZA EVIDENZE Edit
Here we have crystalline expression of the Flintstonizing that can distort the thinking of even the most informed theorists on the origins of human sexual behavior. We’re confident Dr. Fisher will find that what she calls “fundamental differences” in sexual behavior are not differences at all when she looks at the full breadth of information we coverRead more at location 1305
Note: FLINTSTONISATION Edit
de WaalRead more at location 1317
Note: x Edit
He calls for a new scenario that “acknowledges and explains the virtual absence of organized warfare among today’s human foragers, their egalitarian tendencies, and generosity with information and resources across groups.”Read more at location 1320
Note: LA RIFORMA DI DE WAAL Edit
By projecting recent post-agricultural preoccupations with female fidelity into their vision of prehistory, many theorists have Flint-stonized their way right into a cul-de-sac.Read more at location 1322
Note: DEF FLINSTONIZZAZIONE Edit
Modern man’s seemingly instinctive impulse to control women’s sexuality is not an intrinsic feature of human nature. It is a response to specific historical socioeconomic conditions—conditions very different from those in which our species evolved. This is key to understanding sexuality in the modern world. De Waal is correct that this hierarchical, aggressive, and territorial behavior is of recent origin for our species. It is, as we’ll see, an adaptation to the social world that arose with agriculture.Read more at location 1323
Note: LA GELOSIA NN È UN ISTINTO Edit
Human and bonobo females copulate throughout menstrual cycle, as well as during lactation and pregnancy. Female chimps are sexually active only 25–40 percent of their cycle. Human and bonobo infants develop much more slowly than chimpanzees, beginning to play with others at about 1.5 years, much later than chimps. Like humans, female bonobos return to the group immediately after giving birth and copulate within months. They exhibit little fear of infanticide, which has never been observed in bonobos—captive or free-living. Bonobos and humans enjoy many different copulatory positions, with ventral-ventral (missionary position) appearing to be preferred by bonobo females and rear-entry by males, while chimps prefer rear-entry almost exclusively. Bonobos and humans often gaze into each other’s eyes when copulating and kiss each other deeply. Chimps do neither. The vulva is located between the legs and oriented toward the front of the body in humans and bonobos, rather than oriented toward the rear as in chimps and other primates. Food sharing is highly associated with sexual activity in humans and bonobos, only moderately so in chimps. There is a high degree of variability in potential sexual combinations in humans and bonobos; homosexual activity is common in both, but rare in chimps. Genital-genital (G-G) rubbing between female bonobos appears to affirm female bonding, is present in all bonobo populations studied (wild and captive), and is completely absent in chimpanzees. Human data on G-G rubbing are presently unavailable. (Attention: ambitious graduate students!) While sexual activity in chimps and other primates appears to be primarily reproductive, bonobos and humans utilize sexuality for social purposes (tension reduction, bonding, conflict resolution, entertainment, etc.).Read more at location 1341
Note: TAVOLA BONOBO/UOMO/CHIMPS Edit