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2. Global Problems of Population Growth: Sex and Violence Among the Apes
Poziom:
Temat: Społeczeństwo i nauki społeczne
Prof: How many of you
saw The New York Times
yesterday morning?
What did you see?
Student: The girls who
had been splashed with acid by
the Taliban on the way to
school.
Prof: Yes,
so the front and center story
in The Times is--let me
get my pointer.
So this girl--so in Afghanistan
one of the ways of suppressing
women is to keep them from
getting any education.
When these girls go to
school--because,
you'll learn a lot about that
in the course of why they want
to go to school and why their
parents want them to go to
school.
They go to school and three
guys came up on a motorcycle--
a motor scooter and they just
ask the girls,
"Are you going to
school?"
They're walking to school in
the morning, and the girls said,
"Yes."
Threw acid in their faces,
and this story is about that
kind of thing happening right
now in Afghanistan.
When this happened,
the girl--everybody was of
course very scared but the
parents--
one set of parents that were
quoted here said,
"You must go to school
even if you're killed."
That going to school is more
important than their lives in
these communities and you'll
understand a lot later why.
Now one other notable thing
happened--so that's quite
amazing.
I talked about it on Tuesday
and Wednesday morning up comes
The New York Times story.
This happens every year.
I think there's a spy in the
class.
The next thing is a student
said she loved the lecture,
but what did she love about it?
She loved the dung beetles,
and so she sent me her own
personal picture of dung
beetles, here,
and she waxed a little bit
poetic about them.
"I have to let you know
that dung beetles are among my
favorite animals.
The best part is watching the
males agonize over rolling the
ball over to the hole while the
female rides relaxed,
just planting her eggs inside
it.
The ultimate feminism,
if you ask me."
Now the student wants to remain
anonymous, so that you all don't
think that she's a little kinky
maybe;
nothing wrong with that.
This is--we're very liberal
minded here in this class.
Now how many of you were not
here last time?
A few of you,
so I should give a very short
summary of what went on last
time.
I was describing the basic
biology of how the social
organization of the species is
organized around their sex and
reproductive function.
For virtually all species of
higher then single cell
organisms, the female puts a lot
of--makes big eggs,
a lot of investment;
she doesn't make that many eggs.
They're rare and expensive.
The male sperm is very tiny;
he can make a huge amount of
them, and so they are plentiful
and very cheap.
Males then, given the excess of
sperm, that males can inseminate
many females.
The males then must compete for
the females,
and they have two mechanisms,
either sperm competition where
the sexual system is polygamous,
promiscuous,
and many males will mate with
the same female;
the same female will mate with
many males,
and then the sperms themselves
will compete by a whole variety
of mechanisms to see which sperm
will fertilize the egg.
The other male strategy is to
physically fight with other
males to gain control of the
female or to compete in some
other way like displaying your--
the peacock with this enormous
tail displaying,
'I've got a more beautiful tail
than you do,' or we talked about
birds dancing.
The males dance for a long time
and display their mental ability
to dance coordinatedly and their
beauty and stamina to the
females.
Then the females choose.
The females also have two
strategies.
Obviously this is a great
simplification.
The females also have two
strategies, one is to get
resources from the male,
as in the dung beetle.
The dung balls are full of
nitrogen which is very rare,
and so they feed this to the
female,
and the female then can produce
more eggs in it,
which is evolutionarily very
good for both the male and the
female.
Or the female wants to choose
the male with the best genes;
in some ways the males have to
display what are the best genes,
and best just means those that
are successful reproductively.
Sometimes bigger is better;
sometimes smaller is better;
sometimes fast is better;
sometimes slow is better;
better does not mean anything
and fitness--the word fitness,
which you've heard,
does not mean anything other
than 'leaves more offspring.'
It can be any kind of phenotype
you can imagine,
any kind of body type,
any kind of ability or the
opposite.
In some ecological situations
being fat is good,
and other times being skinny is
good.
The females either watch the
male's display,
watch the peacock's tail,
or observe the end of fighting
between the males;
that one male becomes dominant
then the female is happy to
copulate with that male.
When males fight,
the males tend to get large
because that helps them in the
fight.
Evolution makes them larger,
and they get larger than the
females, and once they're larger
than the females,
they can start coercing the
females.
And that's really the origin
of--the biological origin of--a
lot of male/female violence.
Males can either--to gain
access to female--
they can either fight with
other males which can be very
difficult and you're liable to
get damaged or killed,
or just coerce a female who's
smaller and less strong,
and so you get male coercion of
females.
In primates,
it's the last sort of--
in primates and the great
apes--we are all great apes--
in particular,
this tendency toward male
violence onto females is carried
to--
is most prominent.
The reason is,
we invest enormously in our
young.
We spend a very long time with
the young, taking care of them,
and therefore,
the females who do most of the
investment can't have very many
young;
they can't have them very
rapidly.
In the great apes,
aside from humans,
which we'll talk about next
time as an exception,
it takes five to ten years.
The females don't have a
second--they have a child--
a baby, then they wait five to
ten years before having a baby
again,
so eggs are very difficult to
come by.
In a group of chimps,
maybe one egg a year is
available for fertilization,
and the males compete like
crazy by every possible
mechanism,
including a lot of violence,
to get access to that single
egg.
One anecdote about the
relationship of sociology and
sexuality has to do with
orangutans,
who are the most distantly
related of the great apes from
us.
They are just--they are very
clever, like all the great apes,
and they use all kinds of ways
of being attractive to a male
and vice versa.
One of the ways they use,
like we do, is intellectual
brilliance.
I think Yale students are
evolved especially to use
intellectual brilliance to be
attractive.
My college girlfriend,
I fell, I guess,
in love with her,
because she could do the Latin
and I couldn't.
I was hopeless.
She was--I was just stunned at
how well--how good--how well she
did it.
Anyway, in 1978 a graduate
student from Stanford went to
the orangutan research station
in Borneo and his job was
language.
They--a lot of people want to
show how close or how different
great apes are from humans,
so language is a special human
ability.
But the great apes have a
certain degree of it and he
wanted to find out how much.
He taught an adult female named
Rinnie sign language and the
guy's name was Gary Shapiro,
Rinnie was his mate.
It turns out she was a
brilliant student,
she really should have been at
Yale, but she was stuck in
Borneo and didn't have the money
to come here.
Gary just could not believe how
fast Rinnie learned the
language, and so he was just
glowing and he loved Rinnie,
and his research project.
He was going to get famous,
probably being to teach more
language than anyone else has
ever taught to an ape.
Rinnie took all this attention
quite personally.
She thought there was something
going on between the two of
them;
it wasn't all intellectual.
She waited for Gary and nothing
happened,
so one day she took the
dominant role,
as I've heard Yale girls
sometimes do,
and she took Gary by the hand
and did the obvious things to
try to seduce him.
There's Gary,
what is he going to do?
Well he wasn't very up for
this, like many Yale guys that
I've heard of,
and so Gary just pushed her
away not thinking an awful lot
about it,
but being a scientist,
he hadn't read his literature.
He does not know that there is
no wrath like the wrath of woman
scorned.
Thereafter, she lost all
interest in signing,
would not cooperate in the
lessons, ruined his PhD thesis
project.
So let that be a warning guys.
We've talked about--we talked
last time about orangutans--
of the great apes,
those five species,
including us--we talked about
the rape that orangutans do;
we talked about the infanticide
that gorillas do,
and now we come to chimpanzees
who have yet another system.
Again, always coping with this
idea of the rarity of female
eggs.
Unlike the orangutan and the
gorilla, the males are not
solitary.
The standard--the most common,
there is no standard;
there are millions of species
and they do millions of
different things.
The most standard mammal thing
is for the males in some way to
fight with each other and they
push other males away and one
male gets one or several
females.
There are exceptions to this
but that's the most common sort
of way.
Chimpanzees don't do this.
They live in a group of males,
and in fact the males that are
born into a group stay with the
group,
so this a male group that
genetically has been staying
together for as far back as one
can tell.
Males basically never transfer
groups;
they never leave a group,
so these are basically a long
line, one family set of males.
Within that community--let's
see, I think I have some slides
of this.
Ah, that's a picture of the
orangutan that fell in love with
the grad student.
We'll come to Jane Goodall in a
minute.
Given that there are males
together, what they do then is
compete for dominance and a lot
of that is physical fighting.
Their dominance position gives
them access to food and to
females.
When a chimp wants to move up
in the dominance hierarchy,
he may go through a long period
where they're sort of jockeying
in various ways,
and I'll describe some of the
jockeying going on.
Largely big displays,
beating the chest,
if there's anything around,
shaking branches,
stomping on the ground,
hollering, but they don't
fight.
But eventually,
if in fact a reversal of
dominance position is going to
take place, a real fight almost
always does occur,
not always successfully.
Jane Goodall describes one of
these,
Sherry--and they give names to
each of the chimps--
Sherry, a younger male,
was moving up in the hierarchy,
an aggressive young male.
You know some of those.
He had beat out some of the
lower ranking young males,
but the next one on his list
was named Satan.
You can tell from the name this
was not a wise move.
Satan was not the Alpha male,
but was higher than Sherry.
They had a huge fight.
When it was over,
Sherry was bleeding from bad
wounds on his shoulder,
both hands, his back,
his head, and one leg.
Sherry escaped and ran away
screaming loudly.
This was apparently such a bad
experience that Sherry never
again attempted to dominate any
other male.
He had been whipped,
and he learned whatever his
instincts may or may not have
been about aggression,
he learned that's not his game;
he never tried this again.
They do a lot of threats and
displays as--
prior to these fights--but if
there's going to be a real
reversal,
there's usually a fight and the
fight's can get very severe.
In the wild,
the loser just runs away and
they don't carry the fight to
the death,
and by the end of the lecture
you should understand why they
don't want to kill each other.
In a zoo, when the chimps are
in captivity,
the males can't escape and then
that proximity leads to a
prolongation of the violence and
sometimes to death.
Frans de Waal,
who you'll do some reading from
him;
he describes one fight where
the loser had an ear gone,
the other ear torn,
his hands and feet badly mauled
with several bones exposed,
and some fingers and toes
missing.
A gash stretched from one
shoulder to the opposite hip,
and toes were missing,
and this guy was really beat
up.
They took him to a human type
hospital and tried to fix him
up.
It didn't work; he died.
Within a group the fights
basically never end in death.
In captivity they do end in
death;
that's within-group fighting.
This finding your place in the
dominance hierarchy is a very
serious business.
You can either win and go up or
you can lose and stay and either
die or get badly physically
damaged or be relegated to a low
place.
Humans call dominance hierarchy
'status,' and when I use
dominance, think status.
We don't always use the word
here but think--
one of the other things if you
want to compare chimps and
humans,
think of the various things
that humans do for status.
Chimps live in groups of about
40 individuals,
with a dozen or so adult males,
approximately the same number
of females,
and, as with orangutans that
I've described to you,
the female they have a big
range, 15 square kilometers,
40 square kilometers,
something like that and they
wander about this.
The females,
when they have a young,
are usually fairly isolated,
not necessarily,
not all the time,
but mostly they're by
themselves with their young.
It's a very stable group that
always stays together.
As I told you last time,
the mother is never out of
either touch,
or sight, or hearing of their
young for five or more--five to
ten years.
The males, on the other hand,
wander around also but they
bond together.
They travel together and they
are very often in parties,
and they go around searching
for food and patrolling the
borders of the territory.
They also of course visit the
females,
go around see which
females--what the sexual status
of females is and I showed you a
slide last time of a male
smelling a female's sexual
secretions to figure out what
status she's in.
This looks like something that
I've already talked about here.
Is this repeating?
All right, so I don't remember
whether I did this.
The females are usually quite
promiscuous with their sex
partners.
In the community followed by
Jane Goodall,
in each estrus cycle,
each female had at least one
bout of intercourse with every
male in the group.
Did I--I did do this yesterday.
Forget this;
I don't know how this happens.
How do the males do
their--operate in their
dominance hierarchy?
It's not all violence.
One aspect is violence but they
also make friends with other
males.
Single males cannot be
successful;
it's a very,
very social situation.
These animals are very clever;
they know each other
individually;
they know each other's
propensities,
which ones are dominant,
which ones are not,
which ones are smart,
which ones are not,
which ones they can fool,
which ones they can't fool,
and so on.
So they do a lot of social
manipulation to try to get
allies in their dominance
fights.
In these friend relations you
mostly see it as a grooming
thing.
Males and females spend a lot
of time with each other
grooming, and what is grooming?
Chimps, like all kinds of other
animals are infested with
parasites, which can carry
diseases and be very dangerous,
so they have to get rid of
them.
So one chimp will sit there and
the other chimp will come by and
spread the fur very carefully
and then if there's an insect--
it's good for the person from
whom they take the insect
because that insect is no
longer-going to parasitize
them--
and it's good for them,
they get a little bit of
protein.
They spend hours and hours
doing this.
Males to males,
males and females with each
other, and females to females;
everybody does it with everyone
else, and one of the things that
the observers do is count how
much time each individual spends
grooming the other.
The person--the chimp who's
being groomed has this wonderful
expression on their face,
they're clearly enjoying this;
it's like a nice massage.
The purpose of this
friendliness or one of the
purposes is to help the males
when they engage in dominance
fights.
Jane Goodall describes one of
these: Goliath,
one of the males that we'll
talk about later.
Late one evening he arrives in
camp all by himself,
and he seems a little on edge.
Every so often he stands
upright and stares back at the
direction from which he had
come.
He seems nervous and startles
at every sound.
Six minutes later,
three adult males appear on one
of the trails,
and one is the high-ranking
Hugh.
They pause, they seem him;
they pause, their hair on end,
then abruptly they charge down
toward Goliath but he--
in the time that they were sort
of waiting,
he then has disappeared quietly
into the forest.
For the next five minutes these
three big guys thrash around the
underbrush, they're looking for
him, but he has successfully
escaped.
He is afraid,
obviously one against three,
he's afraid.
The next morning Hugh returns
to camp with two companions.
A few minutes later
Goliath--Goliath the one that
had run away before--
charges down,
dragging a huge branch,
that's one of their display
kinds of things,
and then he runs straight at
Hugh and attacks him.
The guy that ran away last
time, one against three is still
one against three,
but now he's the attacker;
very strange.
It's not until the battle is
already in progress where
they're grappling and hitting
each other, that it becomes
obvious why he has done that.
There's a--the dominant male,
one of the very--
not the Alpha but one of the
strong dominant males is a very
big one called David Graybeard,
and while this fight has just
begun,
David Graybeard appears from
the undergrowth and he gives a
display,
and whoa and gives some pant
hoots and he's clearly on Hugh's
side,
and had obviously been with
Hugh just before Hugh came in,
so now he had an ally and then
the outcome of the fight was
very different.
Suddenly Goliath leaps right
onto Hugh,
grabbing his hair and shoulder,
pounding on his back with both
feet,
and Hugh gives up and he
manages to pull away and runs
off screaming and defeated.
The guy that was--I think I got
the names right,
the guy who was scared last
night, when he has an ally,
is now the winner.
The females are almost as good
as males in the dominance
coalitions against each other.
Their behavior to arrange these
coalitions is extremely complex
and manipulative as I've said.
They spend huge amounts of
their time trying to organize
these coalitions,
and then as soon as there
is--so several males will be in
a coalition,
one of them will get to be
Alpha, almost immediately after
they become Alpha,
the other two go out and form
other coalitions to try to
displace him.
We have some of our faculty
members like that.
Last night I was reading a book
about renaissance intrigue,
and it was amazing how some of
the big dukes,
like the Medicis and the
Sforza, and then you have some
of these smaller guys,
and then you have the Pope
who's got his own army,
and there's this constantly
floating crap game of who's
going to be allies with who and
as soon as someone gets--
one of these principalities
gets to be dominant,
the coalition rearranges and
everyone else goes against him.
You can read the history of
Europe in the nineteenth century
where there's all this balance
of power stuff or you can read
the newspaper today,
and it's all balance of power
where they're shifting alliances
and we--
Japan and Germany were our
great enemies,
now they're their our great
allies,
and et cetera.
Russia was an ally in World War
I and II, and then they were an
enemy, and then they were an
ally again, now maybe be an
enemy again.
It's--it really doesn't read
terribly differently.
The purpose of all this
fighting for status is of course
to gain access to females.
There's some degree of food,
and we'll talk about whether
food is a real scarce item for
them or not,
it's usually not a scarce item,
but access to females--
I think I mentioned this last
time is dependent on the status
of males.
It's not simply size and
aggressiveness at all that
determines dominance but how
good a social manipulator the
individuals are,
especially females.
If a male has not been nice to
the female, which means sharing
food with them.
They go and hunt Colubus
monkeys, and if they catch a
monkey how much of the meat gets
shared,
how much grooming they do,
and if the male is boorish,
the other chimps will simply
shun him.
They just--when he comes up and
tries to start some kind of
friendly interaction,
they just turn their back on
him and walk away.
He's shunned and isolated.
The point is,
no matter how strong,
physically strong and violent a
single male is,
he can never be Alpha without
the support of the community.
It really is,
not quite democratic,
but has aspects of a democratic
choice,
and that the male must have the
consent of the community before
he can become dominant.
This social acceptance,
the value of your peers,
and your social status is
really the deciding factor in
who will be dominant and
therefore who will pass on their
genes into the next generation.
Now going back to the females,
when the sex behavior of
chimpanzees was first being
observed,
the observers were quite struck
with the obvious promiscuity of
the females.
The females just didn't seem to
care who mated them.
We discussed that last time,
in each mating cycle a female
will be mated by every single
male in the troop,
in Jane Goodall's troop,
sometimes not quite so
extremely.
That was kind of surprising
given the theory that I've
described to you,
that females should want
something from the males.
They should want to choose
either the male with the best
genes,
or the male who's giving them
the biggest gift,
or something and this just sort
of compliance under any
circumstance,
it was obvious that that's what
they were observing but it
didn't make any sense.
Finally, they observed
more--the chimps were obviously
not terribly easy to observe and
over a lifetime so you know
what's going on,
and the story is this,
that when chimps are young,
either males or female,
the juveniles are under the
domination of their mothers and
the females meet with each other
every so often,
so any female can dominate any
young independent of sex.
You really, if you just looked
at the social behavior,
you wouldn't be able to
distinguish a boy infant and a
girl infant.
I'll give you some reading,
about human societies,
many what we call 'primitive
human societies' have the same
thing,
that even the words for a young
boy is the same as for a girl,
that they're not distinguished,
only at some sort of puberty
right do the boy--
do the biological boys become
socially constructed boys,
in a sense.
In chimpanzees--so when they're
little the females dominate
them,
but of course the males start
growing big and in adolescence
they start to get up to the same
size of the female,
and then what happens is that
these young males come and start
attacking the females for no
obvious external reason.
When this first happens the
female is still bigger and she
swats him away and he runs off
screaming,
but as he gets bigger,
he comes back and seems to sort
of choose one female at a time
starting up on--
there's some mild dominance
hierarchy among females,
not very strong but a little
bit there.
He goes and just gratuitously
attacks one female after another
and keeps doing it:
pushes her,
punches her,
bites her, pulls the hair,
and she fights back,
but eventually he's big enough
to cow her and he becomes
dominant to that female.
Then he goes to the next,
and the next,
and the next and eventually as
they go through adolescence,
the young males become dominant
to each female.
Then, that's not the end of it,
that every so often thereafter,
they again gratuitously attack
the females for no particularly
obvious reason.
Let me describe to you
one--read to you one of the
descriptions of these kind of
dominance attacks.
This is one of the people
in--studying in Jane Goodall's
group in Gombe in Tanzania and
this is--
she is recollecting:
"Nearly 20 years ago I
spent a morning dashing up and
down the hills of Gombe trying
to keep up with an energetic
young female.
On her rear end she sported
this small bright pink swelling,
characteristic of the early
stages of estrus."
She was just coming into her
fertile period and really wasn't
particularly fertile at that
time.
"For some hours our run
through the park was conducted
in quiet--
quietly, but then suddenly a
chorus of male chimpanzee pant
hoots shattered the tranquility
of the forest.
My female rushed forward to
join the males.
She greeted each of them,
bowing and then turning to
present her swelling rear end
for inspection."
You know, 'hey guys get
interested in me.'
She's young and a little
inexperienced,
she thought they would be real
hot-to-trot,
but didn't turn out,
and the males examined her kind
of perfunctorily and they saw
she wasn't really ready yet,
and so they resumed grooming
one another and showing no
interest in this young female.
The scientist here,
the anthropologist was rather
surprised by this indifference
to a potential mate.
Then she under--she sorted of
recalled and there's--well,
her swelling is really pretty
small so far so she' not ready,
so she realized it.
It would be a week or two
before she was really going to
be fertile.
Then they'll be really
interested.
She was sort of watching this,
the males basically grooming
each other, ignoring this
female, and then boom all of a
sudden they attacked.
"The attack came without
warning.
One of the males charged toward
us," the anthropologist was
with the female,
"One of the males charged
toward us hair on end,
looking twice as large as my
small female and enraged.
As he rushed by he picked her
up, hurled her to ground,
and pummeled her.
She cringed and screamed.
He ran off, rejoining the other
male's seconds later as if
nothing had happened."
He attacks this one and then
nothing happened.
It was not so easy for the
female to return to normal.
She whimpered and darted about,
darted nervous glances at her
attacker and he--she was worried
he was going to just charge at
her again.
The primatologist continues
that in the years that followed
she saw many such assaults like
this.
What's the purpose of this?
These attacks do not end in
sex, so they're not rape.
What happens is the male
establishes a dominance over the
female.
She's afraid of him--as I told
you they of course know each
other individually and remember
over many,
many years and so these attacks
during adolescence when they
establish their dominance,
and then the continual
reminders that they're dominant
and they can coerce them at any
minute is what the purpose of
this is.
So when she does come into
estrus and all the males are
around and there's only a very
short window of opportunity when
he may--
she may be alone,
the other males are fighting or
not paying attention for a
moment--
remember he only needs 15
seconds, remember I described
that last time for a bout of
intercourse--
he has 15 seconds before the
other males are going to come
and interrupt him.
The last thing he wants is for
her to resist.
She has to be compliant in that
very short time,
sort of a like a private in an
army,
don't ask questions do whatever
you're told immediately,
and this prior violence the
purpose of this prior violence
is to cow the females into
submission at that moment when
they need this submission.
That is the chimp system.
It's--to our eyes it's not a
very pretty kind of system and
you can think how much of that
we still do something similar
and that's up to you to decide.
We've described now three other
great apes,
aside from us,
and there's the fourth great
ape species which you probably
have heard of,
called Bonobos,
and for a long time--
they're very similar to the
chimps.
I showed you last time the
evolutionary tree.
They split off from chimps and
Bonobos have split off very
recently, so they're still very
much the same.
The Bonobos are a little bit
smaller;
the difference in size between
males and females is not so
great.
Their behavior is enormously
different.
There's almost no violence in a
Bonobo troop.
The various Bonobo troops don't
get into violent attacks with
each other.
What they do is have sex a lot,
that anything that comes--
anything that in a chimpanzee
would elicit violence--
competition for food,
competition for females,
whatever--they have sex,
and somehow that diffuses it.
They do everything you can
dream of--somehow there's
something wrong.
Anyway, what happens is,
males or females may initiate
the sex bout.
They often do it face to face
which is not a usual animal sort
of thing,
and the picture that I had,
and I don't know where they--
why they're not being pulled
up--is first a male and a female
copulating,
sort of face to face and what
you'd recognize immediately what
was going on,
and they seem happy about that.
Then I have another slide of
two females going at it,
and what they do is they stand
face to face and rub their
genital regions together.
Of course what do the
primatologists call that?
Genital-genital rubbing,
perfectly neutral.
Now the locals where these
Bonobos live they are much--they
understand better,
and so what do the locals call
it?
Hoka, hoka.
So there's a long picture of
hoka, hoka.
In previous years I had--I
won't tell you this story,
very interesting
story--afterwards.
The question is--there's
essentially no dominance of the
males over the females,
or very little dominance of the
males over the females.
You don't see this violent
theme happening.
You read about this,
there's several readings on
Bonobos because I don't have
time in the lecture to talk so
much about them,
but it seems that what's going
on is --
Bonobos live one side of the
Congo River and chimpanzees the
other side,
and on the side where Bonobos
are, there are also gorillas and
so they compete for the same
food source.
I'm sorry, on the side where
the chimps are they're
also--have I got this right?
Gorillas--and so they compete
for the food source,
there's not that much food so
the chimps have to forage pretty
much alone,
the females get isolated,
and therefore they're subject
to male dominance.
In the Bonobos territory
there's more--a greater food
density so the females can stay
together and forage as a party.
As you will read,
there's female power;
the females stay together,
and if a male comes and tries
to dominant one of the females,
her sisters support her and
beat the male off.
So in evolution they've sort of
given up trying that trick,
and now everybody copulates
with everybody else.
What do we call that when
there's this great promiscuity?
What's the form of competition
going on?
Sperm competition,
and so one of the ways that the
Bonobos evolve is that they're--
in evolution the testes get
bigger and bigger,
and so you measure the ratio of
testes size in a Bonobo which
has a lot of sperm competition
to chimpanzees which have a lot
less,
very little because they
fight--the males fight each
other,
and what you find is that as a
fraction of total body size,
the Bonobo testes are much
larger than the chimpanzee
testes.
We've seen four different
models of male/female
relationships:
the rape in orangutans,
infanticide in gorillas,
battering in chimps,
and total promiscuity in
Bonobos.
One of the questions that you
can ask is which one most
resembles the human condition?
Well it turns out that if you
do the statistics,
in human's, rape is relatively
rare.
Of course we all know that it
happens, but it's not a frequent
event.
Infanticide,
which you'll see happens very
frequently, but not against the
will of the mother.
The males, unrelated males,
killing the infants of other
females is a very,
very rare event in humans,
again it happens,
but it's quite rare.
The common form of male/female
human violence,
what do we call it?
Battering, right.
Battering is extremely common
almost all over the earth and
for as far back in history as we
know.
Various studies have been done
in different places.
In Punjab in North India,
75% of scheduled cast women,
that's lower caste women,
reported being beaten
frequently by their husbands.
There's an agreement there,
75% of the men report beating
their wives.
In Bangladesh 47% of the women
report having been beaten.
A study of ten countries
ranging from Japan to Ethiopia
showed that in most sites
between 30% and 56% of ever
partnered women,
had experienced both physical
and sexual violence.
Of course these are almost
certainly,
whenever you collect statistics
on something that is not exactly
appreciated in the society,
you're getting a very low
report.
These are certainly under
reports because people don't
want to report it,
but also when you ask about not
just casual,
a little bit of violence,
but, 'Have you been severely
beaten,' in a society where 75%
of the women are beaten
frequently,
the standard for what they're
going to call severe is going to
be very high.
If you used our understanding
of male/female battering the
numbers would clearly be much,
much higher.
What's interesting is there's a
fair amount of collusion between
the males and the females in
this beating,
this battering.
Both--in the culture--both the
men and the women feel that it
is the husband's right to beat
the woman, and it's justified.
It's the woman's due.
She should be beaten,
and they talk about this quite
openly;
40% to 80% again in different
surveys, 40% to 80% of wives
agree that a beating is
justified if a wife neglects
household chores or is
disobedient.
Again, disobedient probably has
a much more minor meaning--
disobedience worth a beating
would not be even considered
disobedience by us maybe,
probably very minor.
Severe beating is almost
uniformly justified and condoned
for many reasons,
including for example,
a husband--a woman disobeying
her husband's orders.
If a husband gives a woman a
direct order and she does not
follow it, she gets beaten.
It's her duty to obey her
husband and they describe it--
the women talking to each other
and talking to investigators
describe it as selfish when she
follows what she wants to do,
which of course there is always
conflict between what Person A
wants to do and Person B,
then they said,
'I was selfish,
I deserved a beating.
Or they say that of another
woman, 'She was selfish and she
deserves a beating.'
In the U.S.
of course we haven't escaped
this, this has now become--
it was hush hush for a very
long time,
but now it's fairly open
because of the feminist
movement,
and the numbers are something
like 50% of U.S.
women will be physically abused
by the men with whom they live,
so again this is partner
violence.
Six million will be really
battered and that's way more
than rape, and auto accidents,
and muggings,
and every other kind of mishap
put together.
Battering seems to be both the
chimpanzee mode of violence,
it's not the orangutan,
it's not the ape,
and it's certainly not--not the
orangutan,
not the gorilla,
and certainly not the Bonobo,
but humans seems to engage in
the same kind of violence as
chimpanzees.
The most wonderful quote that I
have describing this is from a
Palestinian woman and she says,
"Men have small brains.
If you feed them,
cook for them,
and clean for them,
maybe then they will not beat
you."
That's a great tag.
Okay, so now I've spun a nice
story for you,
the way chimpanzee's social
organization around sex and
reproduction.
I don't know if any of you have
noticed there's something really
wrong with the story.
Wrong, incomplete,
incorrect, anybody think of
anything?
What have I described to you?
I've described to you on the
first hand that these males
fight with each other their
whole lives.
A male, he has not much else to
do, than feed and think about
his part in the dominance.
In the whole year there's going
to be one or two females ready
to be inseminated,
and what do they do the whole
rest of the year?
They're fighting for dominance,
and finally you get to have an
Alpha male,
and most of the time he's in
strong control and really can
control all the other males.
That's the naked ape kind of
story which you've heard.
Wait a minute,
what else have I also told you?
Every time the female comes
into estrus she does it with
everybody.
Those two stories don't jibe
with each other.
There's some contradictory
thing going on there,
and that's the next part of the
whole story that we have to
figure out.
Why, since the Alpha male could
easily win when there's a really
strong Alpha male--
could easily keep all the other
males away from the females,
it's only a couple of weeks
that she's at all fertile,
and he's spent the whole year
being boss.
Why doesn't he keep the other
males away and get all the
sexual activity for himself?
It's an interesting--it's a
surprising thing and it tells
you that something is missing
from the story.
This is where Jane Goodall
comes in;
she's responsible for almost
everything about chimpanzees and
the whole field of primatology.
She's a real hero of mine.
I'm angry that Yale has never
given her an honorary degree
even though she lives right here
in Connecticut.
It's really--that's shameful.
What's her story?--Just a
little bit of personal interest:
she was 23 years old in 1960
and she--in her biography,
she always loved watching
animals.
She would go into the hen house
and just sit there and her
mother couldn't find her,
and then look where the hens
are, well that's where Jane is.
She's not from a family that
was sort of education bound.
She had not been to a
university;
she had no particular career,
but she was invited to visit a
friend in Africa and--
in a lot of England,
at that time,
Africa is sort of a very
romantic kind of place,
because every young person
wants to go and see Africa.
She took a job as a waitress
because she wasn't trained to do
anything else,
and saved up enough money so
she could get this steamboat
passage to Kenya.
She took a boat to Kenya in
1960.
She met up fairly soon with
Louis Leakey in the expatriate
community, the English community
there.
Louis Leakey you may have heard
of.
His family has done all the
paleontology,
all the digging up of Lucy--I
think Lucy's one of theirs,
and all of the other skeletons,
and sort of rewritten the
history of human evolution.
The idea being basically there
were lots of branches that--
our species just didn't grow
out of chimpanzees but there
were lots and lots of species
floating around and all the
others went extinct and what
survived is us.
Here comes this young woman and
she doesn't really have a job
and she needs some support,
and she loves Africa and she
loves animals,
and Leakey gets an idea that
well, no one has been able to go
out and see what chimpanzees do.
They knew by that time they
were our closest relative.
They didn't really understand
about Bonobos at that time,
and Bonobos didn't live where
he was anyway,
and so he says to her,
"Are you interested at all
in going out and trying to
observe chimpanzees?"
She says, "Yes,
yes, yes!"
He says, "you know,
they don't like humans.
They run away,
and if they don't run away
they'll probably try to attack
you.
These are big,
violent beasties,
and you may be in physical
danger."
She says "Yeah,
yeah, yeah I want to do
it."
He says, "You're an
attractive young woman
and…what did I say 23 or
something?
"There aren't going to be
any men around.
You're going to be living in
the jungle basically by
yourself.
Are you sure you want to do
it?"
"Yeah, yeah,
yeah I want to do it."
He says "You know,
it's going to take you ten
years before you're going to be
able to see anything,
you have to get them accustomed
to you so that you can even
observe them,
then you'll have to be able to
watch them over long periods of
time to understand their social
behavior,
do you really want to do
it?"
Yes, she decides to do it.
She later on recounts this
discussion where he said it
would take ten years,
and she said if I had done it
for only ten years I would not
have seen the violence that I
did eventually see.
In fact, in took 25 years
before she saw the events that
I'm going to describe to you.
The violent events that I'm
going to describe are in
chimpanzee communities about
once a generation.
More or less like humans,
if you take the time say in the
West between--
the Napoleonic War,
the 1870 War,
a little bit long from the
French Franco-Prussian War,
to World War I,
World War II -- seem to do it
more or less every generation or
so,
ballpark 25 years,
and that's very variable and
chimpanzee violence has that
same sort of a character to it.
In 1962 she started observing a
group of--
it was a large group,
much larger than is usual,
there were 19 adult and
adolescent males,
and then along with females and
the young.
The main thing that they were
watching was the social
behavior.
They weren't really interested
in the physiology or that kind
of stuff at the time;
it was really the social
behavior.
They watched who was doing what
with whom,
and one of the things they
noticed were two individuals
that they considered best
friends,
Goliath and Jomio,
and they spent a very long time
grooming each other and all
friendly interactions.
They saw these two individual
interacting over six years and
it was nothing but friendly.
Gradually this large group--she
had started banana feeding the
group.
in order to be able to see them
she would put out bananas and
they would come and get it and
they would get used to her that
way.
For a long time other
scientists thought she may have
distorted the behavior,
but it turns out everything she
saw has been seen again when
there was no banana feeding,
so that was not a real issue.
She watched this group for many
years, six years or so,
and then things started to
change.
Gradually the two groups
started separating,
there was sort of a northern
mountain hill with a ravine and
a southern mountain and hill,
and one group started
spending--one subset of this one
big group started spending more
time on the northern hill and
another group on the southern
hill.
And the northern group was
somewhat larger but not a huge
difference.
There were eight fully mature
males in the northern group and
only six in the southern group,
along with three females,
for instance in the southern
group.
First she just--they just
watched how much time they
spent.
They recorded everything and
they started seeing the group
split a little bit.
Then when--but it wasn't
absolute, they were still seen
in each other's territory,
but after a while they never
saw males alone in the wrong
territory;
they started traveling only in
groups when they were in the
other territory.
It was clear that they were
beginning--this one group was
beginning to fission into two
rather separate groups.
One day six northern males,
most of the males were observed
traveling together in their own
northern territory,
but they were near the border.
They were kind of patrolling
what was becoming the border,
and they heard calling from the
south.
They became silent and then
moved very quickly directly to
where they had heard the
calling.
What they saw was Godi,
a southern male;
he was feeding up in a tree and
not doing anything in
particular.
He noticed them coming and he
jumped down and ran away,
but Humphrey,
one of the northern guys,
chased after him and tackled
him.
Then--Humphrey was big--once he
had tackled him,
he got on top of him,
and held down his--
sat on his face actually and
held his hands,
another one came in and held
down the feet,
so they basically immobilized
Godi and then they started
attacking him.
The others--remember there's
six males,
two to hold him down,
they attacked--
ripped off his skin,
gashes on the face,
on the nose,
on the mouth,
puncture in the leg,
puncture wounds in the ribs,
and eventually he was beaten so
badly that he was just
motionless,
plopped out there.
Then the attackers just left.
They didn't kill him or
anything, they just left,
but he was so badly wounded
that he died shortly thereafter
anyway.
Seven weeks later three
northern males attacked Dee,
another southern male.
Dee runs up a tree and starts
trying to escape by jumping from
branch--
from tree to tree,
but these are big animals and
sometimes they grab a not strong
enough branch.
He grabs a branch,
it cracks, and he's left
dangling.
So they pulled him down,
and the three males that had--
doing the attack kept beating
him, and he first huddled up and
then he lay flat on the ground
no longer even trying to escape.
There were females in party,
at this point when he was not
so much a danger anymore he was
pretty motionless,
they joined in,
and the females then started
dragging him.
He was faintly squeaking as
they dragged him along the
ground and in the dragging the
skin was torn from him and then
they started biting him and
flaying off his skin with their
teeth,
and then after he was
sufficiently done they just
left.
He actually lived for a few
months;
his spine and his pelvis were
protruding from outside the
skin.
His scrotum had shrunk to one
fifth of its normal size.
He died.
A whole year passes.
Five males attack Goliath.
Goliath is the one we talked
about already,
who by this time is an
extremely old male with teeth
worn down to the gums,
so clearly not a threat to
anybody,
he was too old to be a threat,
and Jomio,
who had been his previous
grooming partner,
and had been watched for six
years - they were buddies - and
he's part of the attacking party
and he attacks Goliath just like
any of the others.
Goliath was beaten for 20
minutes and he tries to protect
his head,
but eventually he's too beaten
and just gives up and lies
still,
and in this particular case the
adolescent males were along,
and they watched this.
They stay a safe distance away
but they're watching this and
they get all very excited,
they hoot and holler,
and jumping all around--
you've probably seen
kids--human kids behave that
way.
Then again, once Goliath was
pretty much immobilized they ran
in and contributed their degree
of violence to this.
Again, same story,
they didn't bother to kill him,
they just went away,
but he died.
This continues and one after
the other,
and three years after the first
kill,
the northern males caught Sniff
who was the last remaining
southern male.
Satan was one of the attackers,
you've heard Satan before,
and he grabbed him by the neck
and sucked blood from his nose,
he had been cut in the nose;
he sucked the blood.
Two males grabbed one leg each
and dragged him down into a
ravine and again the same thing,
they beat him up,
they left him to die,
and he did indeed die.
So Sniff was the last male in
the southern group.
The females were also not
spared.
Madame B who was a crippled
female, and her daughter Little
B both were in estrus,
so both were sexually ready,
sexually available,
but it didn't matter;
they were attacked.
They had a series of attacks on
the females over the course of a
year,
and in the last attack,
after she had stopped moving
completely,
Jomio--it was observed Jomio,
the male we've seen,
picked her up,
slams her down,
stomps on her,
rolls her over and over along
the slope,
and then he let her go.
When she tried to get up
another male comes in and slams
her to the ground again and beat
her again until she's senseless,
and she dies five days after
this attack.
Eventually the southern group
was totally wiped out.
They saw some killing of the
juveniles,
of the infants,
but they couldn't observe that
all and the presumption is that
the infants that they didn't see
actually being killed,
they lost their mothers,
they couldn't survive so they
just died in the jungle
somewhere.
But no individual from the
southern group was ever seen
again.
What happens then?
Now this northern group,
called the Kasakela Group,
is dominant.
They expand into the southern
territory;
now they have sort of basically
twice the size territory and
they sort of luxuriate in that
in some sense,
and it lasts all of a year.
Then they come in contact with
the next group to the south
which is even stronger than they
are.
They had nine--that community
had nine fully adult--fully
mature males.
In the next year that's--that
next southern group starts
attacking what was the northern
group and almost destroys them,
almost annihilates them.
They're pushed out of their
newly won territory and even
north of their 'pre-war
boundary' so they were worse off
than they were before their two
wars,
and in the meantime,
they were being pushed north
but there was another strong
community in the north pushing
south,
and it looked very bad for this
group.
Jane Goodall and her staff by
then,
which had grown fairly large,
was worried they had spent 20
years or 25 years studying these
individuals,
had all their history,
it was the only group that they
could really understand who the
individuals were,
and it really looked like they
were just going to be wiped out.
As it turned out,
they got lucky that just at the
time when it looked like her
group was going to be wiped out,
some of the adolescent males
turned fully mature and the
balance of power was
re-established.
When two groups are more or
less equally strong they don't
engage in fights.
These fights only happen when a
group from one community goes
and finds a single individual
from the other community,
and then they go and kill them,
or beat them up very badly.
The group that's attacking
basically does not take any
risks,
and in the course of these
three years,
the northern group lost nobody
and the southern group was
totally wiped out.
They only engage in this
violence when they're sure to
win.
You can read about human
primitive warfare as it has very
much this similar character.
As soon as this group got
strong enough by the luck of
adolescent males becoming fully
adult,
what they then--the two groups
would meet at the boundary,
they'd scream and yell at each
other and bang their chest and
all this kind of stuff and--
but then they'd back off and
retreat into their territory,
so Goodall's group was saved.
Now the question comes up,
as I mentioned,
does this have anything to do
with the banana feeding?
Did somehow Jane Goodall's
treatment of these animal
groups--
they saw a big group in the
beginning,
maybe that wasn't a natural
group, maybe it was two
different groups that came
into--
that sort of joined for the
purpose of getting bananas and
then they reverted to their
prior hostility-- separateness
and hostility.
There's no way to really know
that, and there are a whole lot
of other hypothesis why this
couldn't be the case,
that everybody knew.
Jane Goodall had herself,
before she saw this war,
published a lovely book saying
how peaceful chimps were,
and there was all this popular
literature about how humans were
rogue species.
We're the only ones that kill
each other;
we're the only ones that go to
war,
and we're really bad and it's
modern civilization or
capitalism,
or imperialism,
or all these cultural things
that have made humans such a bad
species because chimps,
who are our nearest relatives,
were just so wonderful.
People were thinking of all
kinds of reasons why what they
saw was not true.
Meanwhile the Japanese,
who were very,
very strong in this field,
and again females are really
almost dominant in this field;
they have the patience to go
there and watch for such a long
time,
but there's this--even in--both
in America and Japan,
and England,
the female researchers are some
of the very best.
They again, they observed a
group--the Japanese were in a
different part of Africa.
For ten years nothing but
peace, then during the second
decade,
so years ten to 20,
all six adult males of the
smaller community--
they also had several
communities--containing 22
members, vanished one by one.
Apparently due to the
aggression by males of the other
two much larger neighboring
communities which were dominant
because of their size,
size in the case meaning number
of adult males.
Now in this case they didn't
kill the females,
but one after another the
females of the annihilated
community transferred with their
offspring to the victorious M
group and the M group also got
control of K group's territory.
Now the exception to this
transfer of the females with the
young is that the adolescent
males were not allowed to--
did not transfer and probably
were not allowed to transfer,
and they just basically stayed
in the old territory and wasted
away and died without their
social community.
All the adult males were dead,
and the females had transferred
to other troops and they
apparently weren't allowed in.
Now is this--just sort of
random violence,
I mean it takes three years and
there are a fair number of
attacks,
but it wasn't like every week
they had another battle,
so it was sporadic.
Is this just sort of casual
violence or was there some kind
of planning in this?
Let me cut to the chase here,
so usually chimps--there are
many examples of this but we
only have time for one.
Usually the chimpanzees,
when they sleep at night,
the males will get together and
not like one tree and they
next--
they make nests up in the
trees, but within a reasonable
distance so they can call to
each other,
and they call to each other
before they go to sleep,
to know, 'where have you built
a nest; where are we all.'
They're usually fairly noisy
about that.
One night, Mariko Hasegawa,
a Japanese woman scientist,
was observing them and she
noticed and quite startlingly,
there was no pant hooting.
They weren't making any noise,
and she had never experienced
that before.
She was surprised,
and the next morning the troop
got up and started attacking a
neighboring troop.
They singled out a mother and
her infant and attacked and
killed them.
Why were they silent the
previous night,
which she had never seen
before?
It looks like not only each
individual was planning but it
was a group thing.
No one in the group was making
any noise, so this had somehow
been decided as a group effort
the night before.
When they're going to attack,
several males together will
leave the core of their range
and travel clearly purposely
toward the periphery rather than
just wandering around,
and I'll tell you a little bit
about the wandering.
It really has all the aspects
of being planned ahead and
purposive and this is really
something that they planned to
do.
The purpose of this violence is
not at all clear.
There's contending schools
about this.
The most obvious one is they
get more territory and therefore
they get more trees,
more food.
They live largely on fruit and
largely figs,
there's a lot of figs trees in
all jungles,
and so they just wander around
and find a fruit tree and then
depending on how much fruit
there is they either go up and
eat themselves or they can call
over someone else and say,
'Hey I found a good fruit tree.'
Most of the time the chimps
have no problem finding food.
Jane Goodall had one of her
workers follow an adult male for
50 days--
never out of sight,
and one of the things they
noticed,
did he ever go looking for food?
In this 50 days,
never did he try to hunt food.
He would just sort of wander
through the jungle,
and every so often his foot
would step on a rotting fruit
and squish,
and he would notice it and look
up and there's a tree full of
fruit,
and climb up and eat and maybe
call over some others.
She was definitely of the
impression that food is not a
limiting factor for that.
Later, Ann Pusey,
another scientist,
came to the opposite
conclusion, that she noticed
there's some sort of dominance
hierarchy among females.
Those females would have more
fruity trees and where they
ranged,
do better reproductively,
and Richard Wrangham,
who you'll read some of his
stuff, he's a food man so
there's a whole group--
I'm not wildly convinced by the
evidence but I'm not in the
field.
There's a big thought that food
limitation is important.
For instance,
the difference between Bonobos
and chimps has been ascribed to
food density and the size of the
parties, and so forth.
One the problems with the food
idea is that they have fairly
large territories,
and the young,
healthy adults can basically
always find food.
They never seem to starve to
death.
It's the older individuals who
are quite sick and not so motile
that seem to have trouble
finding food,
and they can get in trouble in
the dry season when there's a
lot less fruit.
They're probably too weak
to--even when they have
Territory A,
they're too weak to even--they
just can barely search Territory
A,
and if you give them twice as
big a territory,
it may not do them any good
because they just don't have the
energy to go search it.
I think the field is moving
toward the idea that food is the
important thing.
The evidence that I've seen
doesn't convince me yet,
but again, I'm not an expert in
this whatsoever.
The other purpose of course is
to acquire females.
I've been going on and on about
how rare an egg is,
and so you'd think that's the
obvious reason,
but then you watch them go and
they kill the females,
even the females in estrus,
so that doesn't make a lot of
sense.
Although in the Japanese group,
sometimes the females do
transfer.
The story there is quite
interesting,
because as you know,
small groups of individuals,
if they interbreed,
if the group was sealed,
if the males are sealed and
they stay together in this one
community like forever,
generation after generation--if
the females also stayed there,
it would be an inbreeding group.
Inbreeding gives big genetic
problems,
so all species have to have
some mechanism of gene flow,
and they have to get genes in
from the outside and/or send
their genes out.
It turns out that in
chimpanzees the females have
access to other troops and they
go out and have intercourse when
they're away.
Exactly how this is done
because the males watch them
when they come into estrus--they
must disappear before coming
into estrus and have it out
there.
It's not really known,
but now they can do the
genetics and again something
like half of the babies are born
with fathers that are not from
the troop where they are
resident,
and very often the adolescent
females will just transfer
troops altogether.
It's very interesting,
when a female tries to
transfer, go into another group,
if she's never had a young
she's almost always accepted.
If she's had a young,
if she's not--
if she's already really in this
group because she's had a
young--
very often attacked or even
killed,
or kicked out,
so there's something for some
reason that's not understood at
all.
A virgin female basically is
much more acceptable for
transfer then an older female
and that's not really
understood.
That means since the females
are going to move around anyway,
and biologically and socially
it has to be that way,
it doesn't make a lot of sense
that they're doing this for--
to get extra females.
There's a lot of unknowns here.
Let me summarize this by--the
summary of the chimpanzee social
system.
The--come back to the question,
why do the males--why does the
Alpha male not dominate totally
to sexuality?
The reason is that these groups
fight each other.
A lot of--we don't really know
the reason why they fight but
they fight each other and the
winner is always the group--
so far--always the group that
has the most adult males and the
group that is the attacking
group basically takes no
casualties whatsoever,
so having a lot of adult males
is very important.
If an Alpha male got so
aggressive that he kicked out
all the other males,
he wouldn't last long.
The other communities would
come in and annihilate him.
Because of this fighting
between the communities,
the males have to stay
together, and once the males
have to stay together that means
they're going to compete for
females.
If the competition was such
that only the Alpha reproduced,
then evolution would push all
the other males into some other
strategy,
as we've seen the big and the
small orangutans,
and you're going to read about
a whole variety of sexual
strategies.
You think there's heterosexual
and homosexual.
No, there's lots of different
versions which you will read
about.
Evolution would push the other
males to fight all the time --
if they were not reproducing
they would then be pushed by
evolution to either fight all
the time with the Alpha male or
go away and try to start their
own troop, or do something.
That it's not a stable
situation when only one
individual can reproduce and
everyone else can't.
The males have to compete with
each other, all the males have
to have some chance of fathering
children.
This also has many subsidiary
advantages,
so every male thinks he could
be the father of any of the
young in the troop,
so they're all very protective.
Once it was seen that a mother
was coming back into estrus and
becoming sexually interested,
the Alpha male who was with her
was about to start copulating
with her.
Her young, who did not want
to--evolutionarily generally
doesn't want a brother,
because he wants all the
resources and attention of the
mother,
he gets in between them,
and starts fighting,
and in fact he bites the
scrotum of the Alpha male,
this little tyke.
It really clearly is sub--not
even adolescent yet.
What does the Alpha male do?
He stops, looks at him,
bends down, very gently picks
him up, takes him over here,
plops him down,
and goes back to the mother.
Because even though when that
infant was born,
that Alpha male was not the
Alpha, so it's probably someone
else's--
it might have been his,
so this uncertainty of
paternity is what the male--
all the males protect all of
the young.
Because there's males,
the males fight for this
dominance,
the males get bigger than the
females,
and then they can coerce the
females,
and so I think--and that's why
you see all this --
not only male on male violence
but male on female violence,
so I think the story does in
the end fit back together,
but the driving force seems to
be the fight between the
different groups of males,
which require males.
They've got to evolve a social
situation in which a lot of
males competing with each other
can hang together.
It's an interesting thing,
that it's because the battles
between the males are not
decisive--
the Alpha doesn't kill the
other--it's because the battles
between the males are not
decisive that the males then
turn on the females to do
violence with them.
Next time we will start on
humans and we will describe
humans, and you will make up
your own minds on how much of
this is relevant to humans or
not.
See you on Tuesday.
