Chapter 6:6 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 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 the light they shed on our own unconditionally selfless moral instincts? So the question now is, what nurturing-of-love-denying ‘explanation’ did human-condition-avoiding mechanistic scientists come up with to ‘solve’ this problem?

The answer is that mechanistic scientists initially 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 the peace-loving bonobos didn’t fit this model, they attempted to ignore the anomaly they represented altogether—and even maintain that despite the evidence, bonobos were no different to the other, competitive, aggressive primate species. And then, when these 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—recall in chapter 2:2 how Resignation needed to be described to re-connect us to the real horror of the human condition—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 practising 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 chapter 2:9, ever since Darwin presented his idea of natural selection, humans have been misrepresenting it as a ‘survival of the fittest’ process, 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 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, ‘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 the 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). Obviously these theories were immensely popular 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 chapter 2, 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’ (‘The Future of Bonobos: An Animal Akin to Ourselves’, Alicia Patterson Foundation, 2002; see <www.wtmsources.com/122>) from primatologists such as Craig Stanford who argued that bonobos are not, in fact, extraordinarily gentle and cooperative, but competitive and aggressive like chimpanzees. Stanford wrote 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). (Another illustration of the use of this second strategy was provided in par. 208, when it was documented how E.O. Wilson attempted to suggest that bonobos and chimpanzees were indistinguishable because both ‘do not share’ and both ‘hunt in coordinated packs’. However, as was demonstrated there, even the most basic research shows that Wilson had to fudge the evidence to support his lie.)

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 par. 418, 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 or misrepresented 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 be credibly denied (and, in any case, there was, as will be explained shortly in ch. 6:9, 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 the Social Ecological Model it should be documented how mechanistic science has dismissed the fossilised evidence of our species’ cooperative past by employing a strategy of evasion almost identical to that which has been applied to the bonobos.