Young Female Chimps Cradle Stick-Toys like Dolls

[4th law of robotics]

. . . .

Scientists studying chimps in a national park in Uganda have found that all the youngsters like to play with sticks. They poke them into holes and just carry them around. But the female chimps also seem to act out nurturing them, holding the sticks close and bringing them into their nests at naptime. Males prefer to use the sticks to whack each other. Sound familiar?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=girls-tend-to-nurture-boys-tend-to-10-12-20



Presumably these chimps are free from our social conditioning. I think studies like these are interesting because they show many behaviors that some like to claim are entirely conditioned are in fact pretty well hardwired in.

No we shouldn't assume all girls like to play with dolls and act nurturing and all boys like to hit each other and avoid nurturing. But we shouldn't be surprised (and definitely not concerned) when of their own free will, many fit in to gender specific roles.

We need more studies like this to further suss out which behaviors are ingrained and which are likely taught.

But anyway I just thought it was an interesting article and hopefully conversation starter.

[MadrasT]

1. Comment 3 summed up my reaction.

I'm no Scientist...

But it seems folly to me to immediately assume 'nature' is the source of this behaviour.

Isn't it possible that we (creatures in general) are genetically programmed to learn from our like-gendered ancestors, rather than those behaviours being themselves genetically predisposed?

Could it not be that young female chimps recognize that they are female, and choose to mimic their female elders? This would mean that the nurturing behaviours are learned, rather than genetic.

Really, the only way I can see to test this would be to completely separate chimps from their peers from the moment of birth, and completely isolate them from any display of nurturing behaviour... but I suspect that would cause it's own set of issues that probably spoil the reliability of the experiment.

Excerpt for the unfortunate "it's" error in the last sentence. I wouldn't have written that.

I am not say "it IS learned"... just that it is still POSSIBLE it is learned.

[opiate69]

2. I would say it`s most likely a combination of innate qand learned.

[4th law of robotics]

3. Some humans tried this experiment quite deliberately

I'm trying to find the free original work online but Spiro did some interesting studies on the Israeli Kibbutz system referenced here (http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_2_boys_girls.html)

Essentially they deliberately tried to raise everyone to be the same, completely free of gender stereotypes. This was quite an intensive process in a closed community made up of people who all shared the same ideals. Parents saw their kids for a few hours a day then they were sent off to be raised communally. Men and women shared domestic and field work and political rule equally.

After a generation they found the women were demanding the right to spend more time with their children, the men had mostly taken control of the government and field work (not by force, but by natural migration) and all sorts of gender differences in play and behavior had cropped up again in the younger generations.

You couldn't have created a better experiment to study the role of nature v nurture on gendered behaviors in humans (literally you could not, getting consent would have been impossible for such a multi-generational study).

So there you go.

If it were simply a case of training many pseudo-progressive (because they're still trying to force kids to adhere to an ideal they came up with) parents would be facing a lot fewer frustrations as their gender-neutral daughters play dress up with their fire trucks and their gender-neutral sons play war with their dolls.

/also . . . who taught the young chimps that they were girls or boys? At some point they must have figured out that they naturally tend to spend more time with one gender group than the other. Does some older chimp explain to them which role they fall in to?

[MadrasT]

5. Interesting thing with the Kibbutz.

I will check that out. Thanks.

These kinds of things interest me because I am a woman who has zero interest in children, nurturing, community, clothes, decorating, blah blah blah... I basically have almost no stereotypical "feminine" traits and instead have lots of stereotypical "masculine" traits (assertive, logical, low levels of empathy-and-emotion, highly independent, huge drive to succeed and achieve, mechanically inclined, etc.)

Since I am an "outlier" I am always curious about how I got to be this way, and how other people got to be the way they are.

My parents raised me in a very gender-neutral way, and I don't even know for myself how much was nature and how much was nurture.

I wasn't allowed to have dolls and I wasn't dressed up as a girl... but I didn't really have much of an urge to want to play with dolls or wear frilly girl clothes, either. They raised me gender neutral, I feel gender neutral. But which came first?

Anyway, enough rambling...

[4th law of robotics]

6. Nature seems to like the bell-curve

So for something easy, let's say height, you can find a significant difference in means between men and women. However you will always have outliers: men who are shorter than most women. Or women who are taller than most men.

No description of humans (particularly the multi-factorial and difficult to measure subject of behavior) will ever accurately contain absolutes.

We don't even all have 46 chromosomes. But we can talk in generalities that apply pretty well to the majority of the population with the assumption that there *will* be people who don't fit.

[lumberjack_jeff]

8. "But which came first?"

Exactly.

Parents are weak in the face of denying what children really want. I find it hard to believe that a parent would (or even could) deny a doll (of one sort or another) to a child who truly wants one, or that they could compel a uninterested kid to learn about wrenches and hammers.

[lumberjack_jeff]

7. A distinction without a difference.

We're programmed to behave like our fathers is functionally no different than being programmed to behave in manlike ways.

But it's a disproven theory anyway.

male primates behave like male primates even when raised in captivity and presumably lack male role models to show them how to play with toy trucks.

[Warren DeMontague]

10. I personally do think there are a lot of gender-type behaviors that are innate.

I doubt the chimps are learning the behavior, nevertheless it would be a simple thing to control for, experimentally- by cutting a group of little ones off from their parents. Which is the sort of experimentation I am opposed to, ethically, certainly for the sole purpose of scoring points on someone's womyns studies sociology professor vs. evo-psych biologist scorecard.

(Im not opposed to animal experimentation, but the the ethics of the particular experiment need to be weighed against the potential gain. A drug that could save a human child's life, for instance.)

I also think its a more scientifically valid assertion than saying something like "cave men and women showed compassion for each other... Unlike today" !

[4th law of robotics]

12. " . . . unlike today"

Because back then they buried women.

Nowadays that's illegal. Women are by law tossed in the trash heap.



What a ridiculous study that was.

/or more fairly, what a ridiculous conclusion that was from a straightforward study.

[Warren DeMontague]

13. It was just a goofy fucking thing to say.

Unlike today.

Yes, "today" men and women don't show compassion for each other.

What. The. Fuckitty. Fuck.

[rrneck]

4. Don't know much biology...

But it seems to me that since organisms adapt to function in particular environments, and a given cultural environment is stable enough to allow those changes to occur, a genetic propensity to function in a particular cultural environment could develop.

[4th law of robotics]

11. Every good study has outliers . . .

[TreasonousBastard]

14. I have my own anecdote...

years ago I was involved with a woman who had twins a year or so before I met her. She told me she was amazed that from the time they started crawling about they were very definitely male and female. The girl was drawn to color while the boy was drawn to movement and the girl favored dolls and frilly clothes while the boy favored balls, bats, and such and ignored frilly things.

Just one of no doubt thousands of observations that in itself means little, but considering the complex physical, genetic, and chemical differences between human males and females-- some things must be hardwired.