Jared Diamond described humans as “the third chimpanzee” in his book with that title, written 20-some years ago. Frans de Waal, an eminent primatologist and writer, has recently written an excellent book that interweaves stories of humans and the other two chimps, bonobos and chimpanzees. Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are has chapters on power, sex, violence, and kindness, with plenty of moving and funny stories about the behavior of our nearest primate relatives and ourselves. I really enjoyed the compassion with which he told his stories of how the chimps and bonobos treated each other and interacted with humans, and found myself feeling almost as if I knew some of the apes he worked with. (And I found myself yawning when he described how contagious social behavior such as yawning can be.)
Chimps are more hierarchical. territorial, and aggressive, whereas bonobos are gentler and have highly developed erotic lives, using sex not purely for reproduction but also for social bonding and sharing pleasure. And then there are us humans. The book concludes with a chapter about humans as “the bipolar ape”; as much as I enjoyed the other parts of the book, the closing chapter was the high point for me. In it de Waal speaks of our need to understand ourselves and live well with the conflicting impulses and capabilities we have, the peacable and loving along with the competitive and aggressive, because they are all equally part of our animal nature. He says:
“We have the fortune of having not one but two inner apes, which together allow us to construct an images of ourselves that is considerably more complex than what we have heard coming out of biology for the past twenty-five years. The view of us as purely selfish and mean, with an illusory morality, is up for revision. If we are essentially apes, as I would argue, or at least descended from apes, as every biologist would argue, we are born with a gamut of tendencies from the basest to the noblest. Far from being a figment of the imagination, our morality is a product of the same selection process that shaped our competitive and aggressive side.”
In the closing chapter he also has some interesting things to say about how we need to take our nature into account in determining how best to live; e.g., that “Our societies probably work best if they mimic as closely as possible the small-scale communities of our ancestors.” It’s a challenge to preserve that kind of social environment somehow within the much larger groups we live in today. De Waal believes (and I agree) that while we have some behaviorial flexibility, there’s a limit to what kind of utopia we can set up for ourselves and expect to live happily in.
I highly recommend Our Inner Ape as an enjoyable way to learn more about who we are in the context of some of our primate relatives. You can read more at the Our Inner Ape home page, and you can listen to an interview with Frans de Waal from NPR’s Talk of the Nation.
