Comments on: Bonobos: the self-domesticated ape?

By: Ed Yong

Ed Yong — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:15:46 +0000

Good call. Woods is married to Hare

By: Kate McWilliams

Kate McWilliams — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:23:00 +0000

For those looking for a slightly less scientific take, but with a lot more sex, I recommend the Bonobo Handshake by Vanessa Woods.

By: Brian Schmidt

Brian Schmidt — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:03:27 +0000

Alex, I agree what hypothetically happened with bonobos is by definition natural selection in that there’s a genetic effect and wasn’t caused by humans. What I’m suggesting may have happened though is that the cause isn’t

terrestrial food > cooperation a more viable strategy > cooperators flourish > genetic mutations promoting still more cooperation/domesticity get favorably selected

but instead

cooperation meme originates > outcompetes domination/intra-group violence meme in the memetic space of bonobo brains > cooperating females sexually select cooperating males > genetic mutations promoting still more cooperation/domesticity get favorably selected

In the second scenario, the process is strengthened if terrestrial food somehow promotes cooperation, but the scenario doesn’t require that to be the case. The spread of the meme could be a sufficient condition to initiate the genetic change.

By: Nicholas

Nicholas — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:52:30 +0000

Long ago, before World War II, German anthropologist had an idea of human evolutionary development as basically a process of domestication. This is quite similar.

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:36:30 +0000

@Chris, there are already a few papers that argue humans are self-domesticated apes, or atleast that our sedentary lifestyle has caused changes similar to those in domesticated animals. It depends a lot on how you define domestication.

By: Pam

Pam — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:08:11 +0000

Robert Sapolsky studied baboons and reported on the troop that lost all its dominant males to disease (contracted from a human garbage dump’s contaminated meat). He was actually studying the biology of stress at the time. Ten years later (I believe) he revisited the troop and discovered that a matriarchal dominance had reduced the aggression among males in the tribe. This may be the source of the link Toos mentions in #12. Here is a you-tube video link (please ignore the unseemly and impertinent diatribe in the comments): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZcTvFqzxA0

By: chris y

chris y — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:15:36 +0000

You could, if you wanted to write a just-so story about it, argue that there's a correlation between self-domestication and changes in appearance in the other well attested case, the hominins. H. sapiens, neanderthalensis, and to a lesser extent earlier Homo have a lot of neotenous features compared to Australopithecus, Paranthropus or Pan. And neoteny seems to be common trait in many domesticated species. After all, there has to be some reason why we're such weird looking apes; I'm sure somebody could get a paper in an Ev. Psych. journal out of it.

By: Lilian Nattel

Lilian Nattel — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:08:35 +0000

The body language in the apes photo says it all–I don’t know if the poses are deliberately chosen or characteristic. Now if only humans could self-select for niceness.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:49:50 +0000

@Brian, cultural or behavioural components of primate biological variation may indeed be extremely strong, but this does not mean that they are not affected by natural selection. Natural selection is able to act on any type of inherited variation that influences reproductive success, whether it is behavioural or morphological .

By: Toos

Toos — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 01:53:06 +0000

Brian, I can’t exclude that such a change in culture couldn’t cause change in looks, though perhaps only under certain circumstances [like isolation by that river]. In this case, culture could be the cause of “self-domestication”-effects in appearance. What I don’t see is, why the one should completely exclude the other. The more because Hare doesn’t say at all it would have happened frequently.