Giggling Chimps

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Muchos Munchbagger's picture

Bonobos are regarded as the most peaceful society on this planet. They fuck each other to mediate conflict (including missionary - ultra rare), have a matriarch as an alpha and treat all the child rearing as a collective resposibility. Basically they are the marxist hippies of the monkey kingdom.

 

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skeptoid's picture

All of that is true. I wonder: assuming we disappeared today and there was no major extinction event to block their progress, do you think in the soup of hominids that continued to evolve over the next few hundred thousand years or a few million years that the Bonobos would fare very well? Their lack of meat-eating suggests not, although through sub-species inbreeding they might pass some of their social and more docile traits onto the hominid that would emerge to dominate the planet again as we did.

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Muchos Munchbagger's picture

They already have socially evolved past us. They actually rule the world (peace &  love planet of the apes version not war version) but we'd never know about it because we're too busy deperately clutching onto insignficant  material fragments, voraciously  consuming resources, checking our twit accounts and asses in the mirror,  self congradulating every semi-meaningful invention that distances us further from nature and too enraptured by our squabbling about who's culture, land and ideas are the most precious.

Bonobo's 1 / Humans - 0.

When we finally perfect space travel and bleed out into the abyss to inhabit alien worlds, (we should make sure to pack our politics with us)...We can leave all our toxic remenants of our species behind for them to still revel and live peacefully in. 

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skeptoid's picture

I'm talking about the evolution of their behavior and intelligence/consciousness. They actually seem to me like an ape version of the cult from Wild Wild Country (minus the mass poisoning), but I don't think what they currently are could survive a process of evolution leading to our level of consciousness - I think they would merge with other hominids to produce essentially humans all over again, assuming a continuous evolution towards our level of consciousness (which is a silly assumption, but it's fun to imagine).

 

But based on the somberness of your comment, do you believe that our level or perhaps "type" of consciousness is an unfortunate aberration? It does produce a life of incredible suffering - a lot of the stuff you mention above that makes us look pretty bad is in my opinion people desperately dancing around the rim of an abyss that no other lifeform on this planet knows about. We are alone with the profound knowledge of life's suffering - animals can experience it, but they can't contemplate it and that strikes me as quite a mercy.

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Muchos Munchbagger's picture

Actually I wasn't being fully serious I thought it was word games about who truly rules this planet; All encompassing nature/biosphere or us despotic humans, who have strayed to exploit and dominate. But to still play along maybe our conscioness isn't natural or is since evolution thrives in mutation and at times violent inclination. I'll leave that one up for the metaphysical sphynx's, rogue philosphers & careful scientists of our time. All and all, another good point on topic would be that bonobo's are officially our closest genetic relatives of any other species. We are 1% away. 

 

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Muchos Munchbagger's picture

..Is that 1% the vast expanse and immense potential contained in human concsiousness? If so, now the topic is interesting to me.

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