Part 8:5E Dismissing maternal love as training to manage complex social situations still left the extraordinarily cooperative lives of bonobos, and of our ape ancestors, to somehow be explained

While both the dishonest S/MIH and the EDSC Model have been relied upon to dismiss the mother-infant bond as being nothing more than a mother nourishing and protecting her offspring, and training them in the art of managing complex social situations, a big problem remained: how to account for the remarkable cooperative behaviour of bonobos, and our own unconditionally selfless moral instincts? So the question now is, what nurturing-of-love-denying ‘explanation’ did mechanistic scientists come up with to ‘solve’ this problem?

Initially, they tried to portray the competitive aggression and violence that can be found in all ape species (except bonobos) as evidence of what our ape ancestors were supposedly like. But when it was found that bonobos didn’t fit this model, human-condition-avoiding mechanistic scientists tried to ignore the anomaly they represented. And then, when those scientists could no longer ignore the extraordinary integration that is so apparent in bonobo society, they conceded that bonobos are cooperative but found a way to explain how they became cooperative that did not invoke, or credit in any way, nurturing. (At this point, it should be stated that, just as our fear of the human condition and resulting denial of it has been so great that we, the upset human race, have hardly been aware that we are living in denial of it, our fear of the truth of the importance of nurturing in human development and resulting denial of it has also become so developed and entrenched in us that we are hardly aware that we are practicing it. It is almost instinctive in us now to avoid the significance of nurturing in human history, as though it’s a rule we live by but with only a subliminal awareness that we are abiding by it.)

In regard to the initial strategy stated above—of relating our aggressive behaviour to that of apes—as was explained in Part 4:11, ever since Darwin presented his idea of natural selection, humans have been misrepresenting it as a ‘survival of the fittest’ process, and using that misinterpretation to support the reverse-of-the-truth-lie that, just like other animals, we humans have competitive, selfish and aggressive instincts that our intellect has to heroically control. Chimpanzees appeared to support this lie—they were obviously human-like, and so were used as a model for our ancestors, with anthropologists such as Raymond Dart and Robert Ardrey pointing to chimpanzees’ intense and violent male competition, rape, infanticide and inter-group warfare as being indicative of the behavioural heritage of our ancestors. Dart argued for the ‘predatory transition from ape to man’ (‘The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man’, International Anthropological and Linguistic Review, 1953, Vol.1, No.4), while Ardrey was even more emphatic, saying that ‘Man had emerged from the anthropoid background for one reason only: because he was a killer’ (African Genesis, 1961, p.29 of 380). More recently, in 1999, a leading anthropologist and author of Demonic Males, Richard Wrangham, put forward the so-called Chimpanzee Violence Hypothesis, which claimed that ‘selection has favored a hunt-and-kill propensity in chimpanzees and humans, and that coalitional killing has a long history in the evolution of both species’ (‘Evolution of Coalitionary Killing’, Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, 1999, Vol.42). Both theories were immensely popular obviously because the idea that our instincts are wildly aggressive made our intellect’s supposed role as mediator seem all the more heroic. While it all amounted to a reverse-of-the-truth lie (because, as explained in Part 4:6, our instincts are loving while our intellect is the offending, divisive influence), it was, nevertheless, a very human-condition-relieving thesis.

Incidentally, even though we do now have fossil evidence supporting the love-indoctrination explanation for our moral instincts, without the living evidence that the bonobos provide, it would be very difficult to prove the nurturing of love explanation for our unconditionally loving moral nature. Thank goodness for bonobos!

Yes, with their peaceful and gentle society, the bonobos exposed this initial strategy for the lie it was, but in doing so exposed themselves to the wrath of mechanistic science as an unbearably exposing and confronting reminder of our now immensely angry, egocentric and alienated, unloving and unloved lives. So, as stated, mechanistic science’s strategy to deal with this problem was to simply ignore the anomaly that bonobos represented. Indeed, this strategy was so successful that the first in-depth study of bonobos, which only occurred in 1954, was ‘ignored and forgotten by the scientific community’ (Frans de Waal & Frans Lanting, Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape, 1997, p.11 of 210) because it dared to describe them as ‘an extraordinarily sensitive, gentle creature, far removed from the demoniacal primitive force of the adult chimpanzee’ (E. Tratz & H. Heck, ‘Der africkanische Anthropoide “Bonobo”: Eine neue Menschenaffengattung’, Säugetierkundliche Mitteilungen, Vol.2). In fact, it was this ongoing denial that led de Waal and the photographer Frans Lanting to title their 1997 collaboration, Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape. This book, which acknowledged rather than ignored the extraordinary sensitivity of bonobos, was, not surprisingly, vilified: ‘De Waal’s bonobo research came under sustained attack’ (Douglas Foster, The Future of Bonobos: An Animal Akin to Ourselves, accessed Sept. 2004 at: see <www.wtmsources.com/122>) from anthropologists such as Craig Stanford who wrote in a paper that ‘It is clear that much of the research on these two intensively studied apes [in the case of bonobos, I would argue ‘superficially’ studied] remains fraught with untested assumptions’ and that ‘reported differences have been inflated’ (‘The Social Behavior of Chimpanzees and Bonobos: Empirical Evidence and Shifting Assumptions’, Current Anthropology, 1998, Vol.39, No.4). Responding to Stanford’s criticisms, de Waal insightfully wrote that ‘Two strategies have emerged to keep bonobos at a distance so as to preserve chimpanzee-based scenarios of human evolution, which traditionally emphasize warfare, hunting, tool use, and male dominance. The first strategy is to describe the bonobo as an interesting but specialized anomaly that can be safely ignored as a possible model of the last common ancestor (see Wrangham and Peterson 1996). The second strategy, adopted by Stanford, is to minimize the differences between the two Pan species: if bonobos behave, by and large, like chimpanzees, there is no reason to question the latter species’ prominence as a model’ (ibid).

The problem that emerged with these dismissive strategies was that modern technology has increasingly made the bonobos more accessible, and their extraordinarily integrative behaviour, that is so different to chimpanzees, almost impossible to ignore. Bonobos, the French documentary that was referred to in Part 8:4F, is a case in point.

The fact is, with their extraordinarily loving behaviour, bonobos have represented an ever-growing thorn in the side of a mechanistic scientific fraternity that desperately wanted to avoid their significance. And since bonobos couldn’t be ignored forever, something had to be done to at least minimise their confronting presence. What happened was that while their ‘extraordinarily sensitive, gentle’, peaceful, cooperative behaviour could not very well be denied (and, in any case, there was a growing desire among ideal-behaviour-emphasising-but-human-condition-avoiding left-wing biologists to be able to emphasise cooperativeness and gentleness), it was hoped that at least a way could be found to explain why bonobos were cooperative in a manner that still avoided acknowledging the unbearable significance of their remarkable nurturing, maternal behaviour. And the way that was found was through a theory known as the ‘Social Ecological Model’ that sought to explain social behaviour in terms of ecological factors that influence social interactions.

Before describing this Social Ecological Model it should be mentioned that mechanistic science has employed a similar strategy of evasion to dismiss fossilised evidence of our species’ cooperative past.