Our Inner Ape, Franz De Waal

In Our Inner Ape, Franz de Waal investigates our closest evolutionary ancestors the chimpanzees and bonobos. Waal examines the implications of the social lives of primates and its effect on our understanding of the social and political lives of human societies.

Science has found that our closest evolutionary ancestors are chimpanzees and bonobos. These two ape species could not be more different. Chimpanzees are violent, aggressive, power-hungry, and brutal creatures that live in a hierarchical society controlled by the strongest alpha male. Bonobos are happy, peaceful, empathetic, caring, sensitive, and erotic creatures that live in a female dominated egalitarian society. According to Waal, “our own nature is an uneasy marriage of the two”. Our social nature is cruel and compassionate. The chimpanzee explains the violent side of human nature and the bonobo explains our altruistic, empathetic, sympathetic, and caring nature.

Chimpanzees and bonobos are equally relevant for our understanding of human evolution. Waal affirms this when he says, “If the chimpanzee is our demonic face, the bonobo must be our angelic one.” In Our Inner Ape, Waal states many anecdotes of social and political aspects of primates’ societies and compares them to social and political lives of human societies. In doing so he comes to the conclusion that many aspects of our social and political tendencies come from our evolutionary ancestors.

Chimpanzees and bonobos have powerful checks and balances in their societies to ensure structure and cooperative peace. This is very similar to human society and human politics; we give up certain rights in exchange for an authority figure whose job is to ensure cooperative peace, this is similar to Locke and Hobbes explanation for human government. Waal gives an example in which two chimpanzees team up to take down the chimpanzee in power. This is very similar to human politics, coalitions are key and there are strengths in numbers. Humans and chimpanzees are power-hungry by nature and will use relationships in order to fortify their dominance and become more powerful. Human politics may not be as physically violent but they are excruciating mentally, but political murders are not unheard of in human society. Hobbes identifies this power-drive that chimpanzees and humans share. In the bonobo society an elder female collectedly rules over the group, this is very similar to congress and parliament.