Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our normal comment rules apply to all other comments.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[removed]

Maybe we should get ahead of this and just hand them the planet now.

Well that doesn't explain why we have Facebook now does it?

This is how tribes and genetic diversity are established.

Last time I checked, Facebook wasn’t exactly brimming with people who care about others. Admittedly, I haven’t been on Facebook for about 6 years. Maybe it’s transformed itself and is now a shining beacon of compassion and humanity.

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

If humans were like this we would probably be less likely to go to war. Humans are so quick to break up into tribes and develop an us vs them mindset

[removed]

Hopefully we can evolve to be more like them unless their behavior is uniquely tied to their small population and lack of predators.

Hopefully it’s possible to have an intelligent, populous species that still displays those personality improvements - either via education, mating for xenophilia, or more ethically controversial approaches.

Hopefully we can replicate some of this behavior either among ourselves or in the AI we create, unless the bonobo is a unique situation due to isolation and abundant food supplies.

I think it’s hard to rule out that being a major factor that might be unrealistic for Humans situation but it is definitely interesting how Bonobos are an actual make love not war society.

Yeah, and unfortunately STDs are a much bigger deal among us than them (although that might be a numbers issue). There were years during the AIDS pandemic that more people died from making love than making war iirc.

[removed]

Does this mean my mom is a bonobo

Bonobos solve a lot of their problems by banging each other. If only the human world were so simple.

Post a link for that, where more people died from AIDS than war.

Didn’t AI become fascist in like 3 days? What am I thinking of, anyone?

War deaths per year: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace

AIDS: https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet

[removed]

[removed]

Maybe you're thinking of Tay, that was closed after 16h of use only, in 2016

No of course not it did not turn fascist, but you could make it say stupid things easily, and people did just that.

It's a chatbot, not an actual being capable of thinking.

My ex is like this. She can be horrible to people close to her but will bend over backwards to please anybody she doesn't know.

She also has an interest in bonobos. Maybe they're her people?

Edit: typo

It seems advantageous to evaluate the emotional state of a stranger, more than an acquaintance. I don't need to explain why.

#In 2020 690 000 aids related deaths according to the pdf from unaids.

49 000 deaths due to state based conflicts according to the graph on ourworldindata.

other sources

Ourworldindata also has a page on HIV/AIDS which mentions 890 000 deaths in 2019.

That's the description of me to the tee, as well.

>Bonobos, unlike humans, are more interested in the emotions of strangers than acquaintances

From article:

>>Bonobos, along with chimpanzees, are the monkey species most closely related to humans because of a common ancestor.

This is a pretty drastic mistake...how reliable can the rest be...? Read with very skeptical frame of mind.

Human babies are more interested in something novel...like seeing a person wearing glasses will command the attention of a tot unfamiliar with seeing people wearing glasses.

[removed]

[removed]

Bonobo society is run by a council of middle aged and older females that will have sex with the females of other packs as a way to establish friendliness. Image every summit being a milf orgy

Relatively peaceful lesbian great apes with little to no concept of in-group? Sounds awesome!

24 hours after humans adopt bonobo ethics:

“Why does it hurt when I use the bathroom?”

STDs would have to suck in a species with a human-like population.

Peace treaties involving omnisexual orgies

Because they already know their groups emotions

Narcissists can present this way. They privately take advantage of and abuse people who (they think) won't leave, but buddy up to other people to win them over, always looking for more ego supply to groom.

I’m a Bonobo at heart then.

[removed]

We have a children's book for sale here featuring two monkeys called Chimp and Zee. I mean the distinction between ape and monkey can be tricky with say Barbary Apes, but we should at least give the kids a fighting chance of getting it right early.

[removed]

That actually sums up the situation fairly well, scarily enough. After a while it felt to me that she saw people more as resources than anything else.

Yeeaahh, that's exactly how narcs think. They don't see other people. They see toys, puppets, and sources of admiration for their egos. Relationships are transactional and shallow even tho at the start the narcs will pretend that they're not.

I'm glad that this person is your ex. Narcs are pretty much evil.

[removed]

[removed]

I do think people tend to think too broadly about evolutionary factors. It’s likely a very small amount of factors that drive the changes. Current humans definitely seem to be most susceptible to health issues so that’s probably a huge driver in general. It may not always seem that way but things are generally peaceful enough to procreate. Unfortunately being smart ceased to be a key factor a few society models ago also.

This is probably helpful when their bigger, more aggressive chimpanzee cousins get the boys together to do a little monkey murder.

Stds exist already. Also condoms are a things. If stds stopped people from having sex we would have died out a long time ago. ALSO, if our entire culture revolved around sex as means of problem solving we would have as much prophylactic technology as we currently have military technology.

pansexual I think

[removed]

Cause Bonobos are into strange

Oh I thought it was an actual AI Thank you for getting back to me, appreciate the detail.

This is supposed to be a science sub! Mistakes like this shouldn't be viewed as acceptable...especially when it occurs in a research paper! Or, have scientific standards actually fallen this low?

>We have a children's book for sale here featuring two monkeys called Chimp and Zee.

This didn't occur in a children's book. This mistake was made in a science research paper!

Come on, mods! You gonna let this slide?

Bonobos have also been observed eating their own young.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18454-hippy-apes-caught-cannibalising-their-young/

Im just gonna go ahead and believe that there's an alien species out there somehow that is super sexy on it's super sexy planet having all kinds of super sex and there are no social problems

Wouldn't that be cool

imagine catching neanderthal gonorrhea

[removed]

[removed]

Thank you! I was wondering what the fitness benefit was from this! Although it’s weird to me that humans haven’t picked this up since we are so genetically similar. Or maybe we have…?

[deleted]

This seems directly contrary to the existence of reddit

It's not a research paper, it's a summary article on the university website. What's more, and someone Dutch can correct me, I believe the distinction doesn't exist there in the same way, it's all 'apen', so it's more an error in translation than anything else.

>Bonobos live in a relatively stable ecological environment in Congo, where there is enough food available. Under those circumstances, there is less need for competition with other groups and peaceful interaction with strangers might even be beneficial for the conservation of the species. Early humans, on the other hand, lived in nomadic groups that had to compete with other groups of humans for food. Under such circumstances, it is probably evolutionarily more beneficial to favor individuals from your own group over strangers.'

Bonobos are not pacifists. They sound less violent because they're often contrasted with warmongering chimpanzees and bonobo's unique way of resolving conflict is mentioned a lot more than their more hostile ways of doing so.

>While bonobos are more peaceful than chimpanzees, it is not true that they are unaggressive. In the wild, among males, bonobos are half as aggressive as chimpanzees, while female bonobos are more aggressive than female chimpanzees. Both bonobos and chimpanzees exhibit physical aggression more than 100 times as often as humans do. Although referred to as peaceful, bonobo aggression is not restricted to each other, and humans have also been attacked by bonobos, and suffered serious, albeit non-fatal, injuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo#Peacefulness

The next line in Wikipedia is

Bonobos are far less violent than chimpanzees, though, as lethal aggression is essentially nonexistent among bonobos while being not infrequent among chimpanzees.

I did not examine any of the primary sources but a lot of these statements are a little vague and potentially open to misinterpretation since they likely have specific relevance only.