Word: bonobos
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...Harvard, we are supposed to get a liberal education. For most of us, this means learning about the occasional Samurai, Bonobo or Greek Hero. But for many, this also means learning about the premiere performances of five of the world's greatest pieces of classical music...
...Wise assesses the scene with a professional eye. He concedes that Marbury is a wimp. He praises Alice for her social graces. And he calculates that for the moment, Christopher and Siena, dervishing through the terrible twos, are less articulate, less mentally developed, than a reasonably accomplished chimpanzee or bonobo (pygmy chimp), each of whom would easily outdistance the twins in communication skills, memory and complex consciousness of the world around them. So: Should the chimps, who possess better minds, have some of the legal protections that the twins, by birth, enjoy...
...share this interest in infertile, social sex with a few other species: dolphins, bonobo apes and some birds. But even if sex is too good for human beings to give up, more and more people will abandon it as a means of reproduction. Many people born from in-vitro techniques are themselves infertile--they inherit the infertility from their genetic parents. So infertility is bound to increase, and with it the demand for IVF. Add to this the demand from gay men and women and from those with private eugenic motives--ranging from not wanting to pass on inherited disease...
Plus--need it be said?--the human sexual impulse, like that of the bonobo, is not as tightly coupled to reproduction as certain pro-family moralists like to think. Even in so-called primitive hunter-gatherer societies, such as that of the Australian Aborigines, women have always managed to invent forms of contraception--herbal drinks, pessaries to block the cervix, oils to bog down the sperm. Then there is homosexuality, a reproductively senseless but nevertheless deeply compelling sexual strategy for millions of both sexes. Not to mention masturbation, celebrated by rapper Foxy Brown's chart-topping song...
...your story on the bonobo great apes, I would like to note that for the past 50 years I have studied the social behavior of monkeys and apes. Popular books on the subject, preoccupied with male power and violence, repeatedly underplay the central role of the female in human evolution...