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Sticks and stones may break some bones…unless you’re a young female chimp. In that case, you’re more likely to cradle your stick like a dollie. That finding appears in the journal Current Biology.
If you have kids, you’ve no doubt noticed that, generally speaking, girls like to play with dolls while boys gravitate toward swords and trains. Study after study has shown this to be true. But is it instinct? Parental influence? Or the result of some sort of preschool peer-pressure? One way to find out is to look to the animal kingdom, where there are no gender-specific playthings. Earlier studies of monkeys in captivity have shown that, given a choice, females do prefer dolls whereas males will reach for a truck. But what about how the animals play in the wild?
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?
—Karen Hopkin
[The above text is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
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7 Comments
Add CommentOMG - what a novel observation!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't know what the score of nature vs. nurture is, but chalk up another one for nature...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm no Scientist...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut 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.
Yes it sounds familiar. It sounds like a thousand other tenuous, insinuating arguments for the immutability of gender roles I've heard. Only more tenuous.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou can always find males poking their sticks into holes. But that doesn't mean they want a truck.
You can read more about this amazing bit of research - and see some lovely pics of the Kanyawara chimps by Californian photographer Suzi Eszterhas - in the Feb issue of BBC Wildlife Magazine
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd yes I did commission the article from Richard Wrangham, who was working on the Current Biology article at the same time...
Your scenario seems to require a lot of reasoning of young chimps. Is there some reason that brain 'chemistry' could not produce the observed behavior? In particular, I doubt that gender associations would be so statistically significant if it was logically determined - there'd likely be quite a bit more 'luck' involved.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm no scientist either, but I think studies have indicated that some kind of bonding must occur for normal emotional development even in chimps. In humans I think that it is generally agreed that the bonding process is crucial between mother and baby, even to the extent that babies early behavior is clearly directed to evoke bonding reactions in parents, especially mothers. If I recall correctly, there are also even differences in sex hormone levels in the womb depending on (or is it determining?) the sex of the baby, and that those intrauterine levels directly affect developmental characteristics.
Regarding your test suggestion, I suspect that any early sex behavior modeling involves adults more than peers, and that a completely isolated baby would suffer more severe behavioral deficits than just sex identification.
I'm not trying to say everything is nature, in fact I think that most developmental characteristics are determined by a required combination of nature, nurture and environment. But I'm no scientist...
to make "The above text is an exact transcript of this podcast", here's a correction:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisit is "But what about how juvenile animals play in the wild? "
instead of,
"But what about how the animals play in the wild?"