Bonobo Revolution, Baby!
I’m out to increase evolutionary literacy in a world stunted by hierarchical gods and men. The first thing I find is that a lot of people have this idea of evolution as a ruthless competition — survival of the fittest, nature red in tooth and claw. But it isn’t as simple as that. For one thing, most creatures avoid it. They keep their energy consumption and risk of death low. They aren’t rushing into pointless battle as a general rule, unless it helps them get chicks.
Dominance hierarchies are an easy way to avoid unnecessary wasting of life and limb. A lot of animals opt for that — just puff up, and whomever concedes he’s smaller scoots off. To the victor go the spoils. The assessment is generally accurate, because the ancestors of the living paid a stiff evolutionary price for their mistakes. Survivors haven’t inherited much interest in actual fighting as a result but, as on the streets of New York City, the level of bluster is impressive. Again, whatever helps them get the chicks.
But the exponential politics of dominance are expensive. If you’re a long-lived social mammal, you need a great deal of brain power to keep track of who’s done what to whom. Female savanna baboons for instance, jockey for status in an extended multigenerational network of aunties and friends. The politics are deep.
Our own ancestors lived in dominance hierarchies for a very long time. We only parted ways with the Machiavellian chimpanzees 5 million years ago — the blink of an evolutionary eye, (right around the time land iguanas made it to the Galapagos). Chimps are all about intimidation and power. For them, sharing food is purely transactional, in expectation of an ally or a bootycall. The murder rate is high, with regular infanticide and cannibalism, and males make deadly war against neighboring troops. You need a big brain for this type of thing.
We share 98% of our DNA with our chimp cousins, and we are the most extreme example of the big-brain trend — our heads can’t get any bigger without toppling us over or getting jammed in the birth canal. Dominance runs in our genes. And yet…our infants recognize unfairness with horror. As adults, we can spot someone shifty almost immediately. If they con us the first time around, the gossip hounds help sniff them out. Folks won’t work with selfish asshats if they can avoid it, and ostracism and exile is pretty much a death sentence. Only sociopaths and those with absolute power and unlimited resources openly try to rule through force and fear. We’ll even lie to ourselves to keep a clear conscience — just to live with ourselves. We are not chimpanzees. Something else is going on.
The baboons provide a little insight. They thrive across much of Africa’s mosaic of grass and woodlands, foraging and sleeping in trees together as small bands with well-defined territories and daily habits. Their ancestors lived right alongside our own. In these savanna baboon societies, females stay where they are born. Matrilines tie these families together. The males are compelled to leave in search of strange females, and must fight their way into other troops. Dominance hierarchies define their lives, and everyone is in one. It’s how they do.
In Ethiopia, along the edge of the great Sahara desert, the ubiquitous savanna baboons give way to the strange hamadryas. The ancient Egyptians immortalized him as Thoth, whiskered muse of scribes and scholars, the one who weighs the souls of the dead.
Monkeys like a lot of water and nice trees to sleep in, but the desert offers little of either. The hamadryas baboons have to adapt. By day, they forage in small groups, while at night evading hungry leopards by sleeping on the rocky cliffs in large numbers. A flexible “team of teams” structure accommodates these contradictory requirements, allowing them to zip into a right-sized brigade of trusted collaborators tailored to any situation.
They are fascinating to observe: a leader male with rakish white mane and shocking-pink face leads a ragtag harem of harried females and their infants, keeping them mindful of his presence with flashing glares and sudden rushes and neckbites. He .likes to hold onto them. A scraggly young male mirrors him at the rear. The baboons have replaced the old dominance hierarchies with a simpler power schema: leaders, followers, and females.
Several harems may travel together as a clan, marked by matching faces … the Dusty Roses, Shrinking Violets, Deep Purples, and Shocking Pinks. My own genetic research showed that clan members are brothers, fathers, and sons, and the young male in the back is the leader’s nephew. He remains deferentially chaste while helping safeguard the family. Eventually, he’ll inherit his uncle’s females, while one of the little males brings up his own rear. In this habitat, you want to lock onto your future early, and don’t let go.
Several clans form a band at night or midday, analogous to those of the savanna baboons, but far more structured. Males cooperatively defend favorite watering holes and sleeping sites, and respect one another’s female possessions. If a band member is threatened, they collectively bark and yawn canine displays while forming a shield around females and youngsters. A twerky ritual rump presentation puts their dominance on safety. Bro, I got your back. Back at you, homie!
Unlike savanna baboons, hamadryas males stay where they are born, and know and trust each other intimately. The big surprise for us was that females stay too. Nobody is moving one way or the other. Band members are genetic cousins.
This close relatedness, along with their stereotyped cooperative behaviors and distinct classes of celibate and specialized individuals reminded me of honeybees and ants — superorganism societies. Superorganisms form defensible colonies of genetically distinct but closely related individuals that take on different roles, including reproduction. None can survive on their own, and members depend on one other to survive and reproduce in a fundamentally deeper way than other organisms do. If it takes a village, it’s a superorganism.
Superorganisms do not rely on dominance hierarchies to get things done together. They do not try to exclude one another from resources. There are no org charts or hierarchies of command. The queen gives no orders. Instead, members share a single reproductive purpose and a set of simple rules and do as they see fit, making lots of small, imperfect decisions, constantly communicating and course-correcting. Any one individual may not be too impressive, but hundreds of thousands — even millions — of individuals can collaborate on complex, dynamic real-time initiatives like building and maintaining air-conditioned structures, growing crops, and herding and milking domestic animals, with no central administration or — in the case of slime molds and fungal networks — even brains.
This collective intelligence brings flexibility, safety, and abundance. Superorganisms succeed by pooling tiny scraps of value that aren’t worth the effort for other creatures: splinters of wood, chopped up leaves, specks of nectar and pollen, molecules of water and nutrients, curating and tending them to create higher value. In this way, their colonies accumulate great wealth and weather the lean times. It’s a versatile strategy and a successful one.
Superorganisms don’t resolve things unilaterally — whether by dominance, tyranny of the majority, or committee-designed compromises that please no one. Their collective intelligence relies on the diversity and independence in its collaborators.
When a honeybee hive needs a new home for instance, scouts fly in different directions to search. When one finds something suitable, she returns to do a “waggle dance” — a series of symbolic movements that tells other scouts where it is. Some fly out to see for themselves. If it meets their approval, they return and dance for it. Soon the swarm will buzz with various dances, but eventually, one garners a critical threshold of support, and the entire hive makes a beeline for their new home — queen and all. It is nearly always the best choice.
These highly structured interactions mirror our own. We, too, rely collective intelligence, with shared costs, benefits, and simple rules of behavior. Evolutionary biologists like EO Wilson and Bernard Crespi agree — humans are superorganisms. Ubuntu — you can’t be human alone.
Everyone has their own role. The virgin queen mates with several males to assure her colony of sufficient diversity for the coming years. Her sterile workers spread her royal pheromone among all members, maintaining group identity and suppressing dominance — effectively holding space for collective intelligence to go to work. Hive members work in small ways throughout the colony to maintain diversity, independence, and shared purpose — what I refer to as distributed leadership. In this way, costs and benefits are equitably shared, and collective value is protected.
Neither baboons nor men have lost the desire for domination. The ritual male rump presentation disarms would-be competitors. A smile serves the same purpose for us — a highly modified chimpanzee fear-grimace puts our collaborators at ease. All superorganisms negotiate this tension between individual interests. Even sterile honeybee workers will lay eggs on occasion — essentially stealing from their nestmates. Roving workers remove the rogue larvae. Parasites and cheats always wait in the wings, but distributed leadership keeps them at bay.
Moochery from within isn’t the only concern. There are legitimate parasites as well — individuals of other species that would steal the colony’s collective value through deception. Some produce eggs that mimic their host’s favorite seeds or the scent of their larvae. The host carries them straight to the nursery or storeroom, where they hatch and devour any treasures. Slave-maker ants even use “propaganda pheromones” to induce confusion and infighting, allowing their own queen to steal in and usurp the host. The colony is duped into caring for her and the eggs she lays.
You can think of moochery and collaboration as alternate game strategies that circulate within a population — evolution is an arms race between trust and deceit. Which one has the upper hand oscillates back and forth. When everyone’s a cheat, you look for people you trust and prevent access to the value you grow together. Cheaters are locked out and their numbers decline until they game the system again. When everyone is trustworthy, parasites slip in easily because no one is looking for them. Sex itself evolved as an escalating lock-and-key password generator to thwart such attackers. Doesn’t sound too sexy, but it’s more fun than remembering passwords.
Foraging peoples are similarly vigilant in subverting power-seekers. When European colonists first encountered such societies, their requests to “take me to your leader” were met with obfuscation or humored with a visit to the half-witted or expendable. It wasn’t clear whether leaders even existed. But no one stepped forward because any hint of arrogance, dominance, or boastfulness would disqualify them from leading. Individuals in these societies universally insist on living as free-willed and independent equals, and select leaders for their honesty, patience, humility, and fairness: their ability to maintain an arena of diverse and independent possibilities, a place where collective intelligence can go to work.
Distributed leadership is difficult to muster in modern society, and our collective intelligence suffers for it. Our natural abilities are constrained by the structures we inhabit. We are fragmented in our work and isolated in our lives, made to compete against one another for paychecks and promotions bestowed by those of high-rank. Hierarchies police us for order and efficiency, eroding critical thinking skills and expertise. Folks don’t volunteer more than the minimum.
I am struck by the fact that, for tens of thousands of generations, we worked maybe two hours a day on average. Many foraging peoples still enjoy this kind of freedom, despite the world pressing in around them. Meanwhile, many of us are worked half to death, ground down in lives of generic despair, with neither time or resources to pursue the unique contributions that remain hidden within us. That tells me we are being parasitized. Most of us are working for someone else’s queen and our future is of no concern to her. Drinking the slave raiders’ lullaby nectar, we toil on, perversely fulfilling our owners’ purposes in ways that twist our intended function. A parasite’s strategy. It happens gradually — one lie or trick at a time, or quickly through force and confusion. Lies beget lies until we are strangers, with no sense of being among our relations. Like worker bees who somehow lose their queen on the journey toward a new home, their heart and soul and entire reason for being are severed. They drift, each askew, until death.
When narcissism gets the upper hand, the human niche flips — from gathering and tending scraps of value, transforming it into diverse possibility, into a voracious invader devouring opportunities before moving on. When the old stories speak of kingdoms of famine and of plenty, this may be what they meant.
This is how civilizations rise and fall.
Meanwhile, we have no reliable structures or processes for coming together around shared purpose, or for restraining social parasitism. Information does not flow freely because we lack trust. And we do not have the agency required to go to work on things we care about with the people we like.
We have the creativity and care we need. We have the answers within us. The challenge is one of structure and process — in other words, design. Designing our lives so collective intelligence can go to work. How can we increase it? How can we grow freedom and authenticity, transparency and shared purpose? How can we exclude the parasites that would steal from our collective efforts?
Exactly how is a question for another day. But deep in the forests of the Congo lives our other furry cousin, the small and shy bonobo. Bonobos are sisters to the chimpanzees, and we are equally related to them — 98% of our DNA is the same. Bonobo males don’t push folks around for one simple reason: females band together to shut them down. Apes are just prone to dominance, and we have to work together to restrain it. Bonobo revolution, baby!
