Is There Bias in Bonobo Behavior?

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Is it true that in one colony of bonobos, what it is to be a female bonobo with the kind of expected gender role is significantly different from what it would be like in a different colony? I don't think we have solid evidence for that, but you would expect it because we do know that there is biased learning going on. For example, recent study of orangutans in the forest showed that young females eat exactly the same fruits as their moms. Young males, they vary and they eat sometimes fruits that the model never touches. That's because they take the example for them, the models are adult males that they see on occasion eating.

Frans de Waal is a Dutch-American primatologist and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University. He is the author of, among other books, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes and Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Frans de Waal discuss how primate empathy forms the basis for human morality; the precedent for diversity in human gender and gender roles that exists in non-human primates; and why, despite attempts to separate human behavior from human biology, you can’t have one without the other.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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