Different: What Apes Can Teach Us About Gender
FRANS DE WAAL
(GRANTA, 288 PP, £20)
TABLET BOOKSHOP PRICE £18 • TEL 020 7799 4064
It's no secret that our thinking about sexual difference is in crisis. Our contem- porary era seeks to flee from essentialism – the idea that things have a fixed essence – in the name of a nebulous “freedom”, which ultimately aims towards the transcendence of all limits, including the physical. Categories of men and women, positioned awkwardly between biology, politics and our everyday experience, are being challenged in all domains of life. What would it take to bring us back down to earth, while simultaneously protecting what is sacred about us? Frans de Waal might not be the most obvious person to turn to for theological support, being a signed-up Darwinian and psychology pro- fessor, but his new popular primatology book tells us something about our current difficul- ties in understanding what it means to be part of a species where there are “two” of us, and where we are both similar and different. From an evolutionary perspective, human beings are somewhere between chimpanzees and bonobos, having split off from our com- mon ancestor between six and eight million years ago (“indications are that it was a long and messy divorce,” de Waal chuckles). We share 96 per cent of our DNA with these other primates and, de Waal argues, we also “share our socio-emotional makeup with them”. Chimps, though, are generally depicted as violent and territorial, whereas bonobos are seen as “hippie” monkeys, indiscriminately sexual and pacifist. It is intriguing to think about how we as a species fall between these two poles, and what differentiates us. We are “neotenous”, which means that we “stay young” compared to other animals. Indications of neoteny, according to de Waal, are “our naked skin, bulging cranium, flat face, and frontally oriented vulva”. We also, de Waal notes, “retain the playfulness and curiosity of juveniles”, playing, dancing and singing until we die. And we remain open and curious in the face of new knowledge.
