Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

The horrors of everyday life among the chimpanzees recall similar events in our history. We find humans behaving like chimps at their worst in endless succession in the daily press, in modern popular fiction, in the chronicles of the most ancient civilizations, in the sacred books of many religions, and in the tragedies of Euripides and Shakespeare. A summary of human nature based on the plays of Shakespeare would define “man,” wrote Hippolyte Taine, asa nervous machine, governed by a mood, disposed to hallucinations, transported by unbridled passions, essentially unreasoning … and led at random, by the most determinate and complex circumstances, to pain, crime, madness, and death.¹⁶

We’re not descended from chimps (or vice versa); so there’s no necessary reason why any particular chimp trait need be shared by humans. But they’re so closely related to us that we might reasonably guess that we share many of their hereditary predispositions—perhaps more effectively inhibited or redirected, but smoldering in us nevertheless. We’re constrained by the rules that, through society, we impose on ourselves. But relax the rules, even hypothetically, and we can see what’s been churning and fermenting inside us all along. Beneath the elegant varnish of law and civilization, of language and sensibility—remarkable accomplishments, to be sure—just how different from chimpanzees are we?

For example, consider the crime of rape. Many men find depictions of rape arousing—especially if the woman is portrayed as enjoying it despite her initial resistance. Most American high school and college students (of both sexes) believe that a man is justified in forcing a woman to have sex—at least when the woman behaves provocatively.¹⁷ More than a third of American college men acknowledge some propensity to commit rape if they were guaranteed they could get away with it.¹⁸ The percentage goes up if some euphemism such as “force” appears in the question instead of “rape.” The actual risk of an American woman being raped in her lifetime is at least one chance in seven; almost two-thirds of the victims have been raped when they were minors.¹⁹

Perhaps men in other nations are less fascinated with rape than Americans are; perhaps mature men, with lower testosterone titers, are less comfortable with rape than adolescents are.²⁰ But it would be hard to argue that there’s no biological predisposition for men to rape.

While a range of causal factors have been proposed, most rapists turn out to be not slavering psychopaths, but ordinary men given the opportunity and acting on impulse,²¹ sometimes repeatedly and compulsively. Some students of the subject see rape as a biological strategy (entered into without his conscious understanding) to propagate the rapist’s genes;²²

others see it as a means for men (again largely unconsciously) to maintain through intimidation and violence their domination over women.²³ The two explanations do not seem mutually exclusive; and both seem to be operative in chimp society. Also, a significant minority of women are aroused by fantasies of rape, and, in one study, women who have been raped by an acquaintance seem disturbingly more likely to continue dating their assailants than those who were subjected only to attempted rape by an acquaintance.²⁴ This is at least reminiscent of the compliance pattern of female chimps.

Over a set of hereditary predispositions human society lays down a kind of stencil that permits some to be fully expressed, some partially, and some hardly at all. In cultures where women have roughly comparable political power with men rape is rare or absent.²⁵

However strong any genetic propensity toward rape might be, social parity appears to be a highly effective antidote. Depending on the structure of the society, many different brews of human proclivities can be elicited.

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Chimpanzee society has an identifiable set of rules that most of its members live by: They submit to those of higher rank. Females defer to males. They cherish their parents. They care for their young. They have a kind of patriotism, and defend the group against outsiders. They share food. They abhor incest. But they have, so far as is known, no lawgivers. There are no stone tablets, no sacred books in which a code of conduct is laid out. Nevertheless, there is something like a code of ethics and morals operating among them—one that many human societies would find recognizable and, as far as it goes, congenial.