Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
black faces framed with a line of white, orange fur at their throats, the rest of their bodies brown
and khaki—have come under their care.
But the way humans use symbols is not simple. We know the transformative power of an icon,
how it can serve as a reminder of a quality that humans possess. By aligning ourselves with it, we
find our behavior subtly changed, our consciousness shifting away from a categorical identification
with chimpanzee behavior. We have found aspects of our society that we increasingly value repres-
ented in a non-human species—equality between the sexes, group cohesion, the lack of war. Like
bonobos, we enjoy non-procreative sex, and we form social bonds more easily than do chimps, who
wage war when intruders come into their territory. We can travel into distant rainforests and discuss
the preservation of resources and species, and speak, as BCI does, of a family model for their or-
ganization. We do not have to be naive about bonobos to see them as a symbol, and to diminish the
value of this symbol does not serve us well, either when we are using it to protect the few remaining
rainforests or the creature itself.
During my stay in Kokolopori, I repeatedly saw that the symbol of the bonobo does draw people
together. When villagers dance and praise the work done for bonobos, when schoolchildren learn
the ancient folktales or when traditional singers, funded by Vie Sauvage and BCI, travel from vil-
lage to village, performing songs about bonobos, the result is as palpable as that of Westerners hear-
ing Biblical parables that encourage virtue.
In
Apes, Language, and the Human Mind
, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and her co-authors, Stuart G.
Shanker and Talbot J. Taylor, remind us of our illusions of superiority and its risks. They address
language as the long-held bastion of humanity, and examine it in a way that the Congolese villagers
who greet us repeatedly with song might understand well.
Language is a funny thing. It permits us to think that we know things that indeed we do not
know. It permits us to talk about things rather than to do them and to think we have actually
done something by talking rather than by acting. It permits us to think that by talking in uni-
son, we can come to act in unison—forgetting that the more feeble the link between word
and deed the less likely words are to alter deeds. Should we wish to act in unison, it is far
better that we sing than that we speak.
Language is a funny thing. It permits us to think that other species are not able to com-
municate the purposes or intentions of their actions to one another, nor to coordinate their
behaviors, nor to plan their actions. It permits us to think this because it permits us to avoid
hearing the kind of talking that other species are doing.
