In my post on “Demonic Males” I noted that unlike chimpanzees, bonobos do not hunt monkeys. Whoops. Guess I’ll have to update that old post. The link from there didn’t work for me, so here’s a little more at a different post.
On an unrelated note, via Volokh a paper on judicial interpretation that should be made into a children’s book.
Entitled to an Opinion 
October 13, 2008 at 8:18 pm
[…] they show no inclination to eat them, even after accidentally killing them through play (UPDATE: Turns out to be wrong). The authors hypothesized a reduced bloodlust and a link between war and […]
October 14, 2008 at 11:08 am
How difficult it is for people to accept that the ‘hippie’ perception of the world is simply, obviously wrong.
I for one blame the lingering cultural influence of Christianity. Never accepted when it was powerful, its ethical claims slipped into the ‘common wisdom’ as soon as people stopped taking the religion seriously. Now people who reject the more unlikely dogmas implicitly accept its other harmful teachings.
October 14, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Hey TGGP, just got the The Myth of Natural Rights. Nice shout out to Jeffrey Friedman in there.
October 14, 2008 at 4:26 pm
I thought you might like it, although I wrote it before I knew you (I think).
October 18, 2008 at 5:24 pm
melendwyr summarizes several of the Unqualified Reservations posts from a year or so ago. Unconsciously? Moldbug is absolutely right about the “secularized Xtianity is extremely dangerous” thing; whether people agree because they’ve read him, or because it’s becoming common knowledge, I don’t know.
Bonobos are much more like idealized adolescent female culture than hippy culture. Between their hugging and orgies, gangs of female bonobos will corner, beat, and often amputate fingers of low-status males. Low-status males, and the human handlers who work with bonobos, often lose fingers this way. As a low-status (bookish, unaggressive, not small or round enough to be cuddly) male, this behavior is depressingly familiar (though I still have all ten).
(Of course, when studied in captivity, well-fed bonobos are a little bit more like hippies. Whatev.)
October 18, 2008 at 5:25 pm
I was serious about the missing fingers, though it may not look that way since for some reason I used the word “amputate” instead of the phrase “chew off”.
October 18, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Are females really into orgies? I think it was the male leadership of the New Left that was most into free-love, the second-wave feminist backlash (perhaps inspired by rapists like Bill Ayers) was considered quite anti-sex. Dworkin or somebody else wrote a book about intercourse saying it (at least the heterosexual penetrative sort) needed to be abolished to liberate women.
I hadn’t heard that bit about violence between bonobos before.
October 19, 2008 at 1:33 pm
All of the apes have a well-developed talent for violence of various types. Humans and bonobos included.
October 19, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Wrangham claims that only among humans and chimpanzees do adult males murder each other.