DavidMcC wrote:Mr.Samsa wrote:Not really, I was hoping for some experimental research on reciprocity and altruism in bonobos.
You seem to be confusing "caring" with "altruistic". The OP doesn't even mention altruism. Thus, you go on to rubbish science papers on the basis of a misunderstanding on your part.
You can nail @
Mr.Samsa on wording, but his concerns are valid. I recently read an excellent article on nutritional epidemiology at
http://garytaubes.com/2012/03/science-p ... -and-meat/ I don't find it particularly valuable for nutritional epidemiology, which I mostly do not care about, but what it says about science in general is quite good.
Basically, it's quite easy to find correlations. Searching for causal relationships is the hard part of science, and for this reason, it is omitted in a lot of research.
We know (or I guess we think we know) some things about bonobos and chimpanzees, including (maybe) the following:
1) In the words of George Carlin, bonobos make fuck, not kill.
2) Bonobos are smaller and weaker than chimpanzees.
3) They are on the other side of the Congo.
4) They don't compete with gorillas.
5) Do they have more oxytocin? Maybe. How many bonobo brains have been dissected to count receptors?
6) Bonobos are "led by females." I'm not even sure what that means. Female humans often say that male humans lead the world; male humans often say the same about female humans. Radar O'Reilly clearly led the 4077 M*A*S*H by one standard, Col. Potter by another. We can't even get our own species approximately right.
7) As for sex differences, female chimpanzees have been observed stealing and eating the infants of other female chimpanzees, and female humans have been observed sending young men to die in the Crimean War, neither of which is particularly caring.
8) Study of our closest relatives to any degree is in its infancy. It's younger than I am. I distinctly remember when organized warfare was discovered for the first time amongst chimpanzees, and I was already an adult.
In addition, apes dumber than chimpanzees and more removed from us have been observed behaving in quite different ways depending on the troupe (compare the Berkeley baboons to others).
Even if we were sure about everything on the list, it would take a lot of really good science to figure out what causes what. That's even without conflation from the warm fuzzy hippie glow that bonobos seem to have achieved in human folklore. Hell, even I would like to believe it. But science?