Is monogamy unnatural?

Saturday 18 February 2012 12:05PM (view full episode)

Or, as Dr Chris Ryan’s talk at the Sydney Opera House was entitled: 'If you want fidelity, get a dog'.  He reviews the enjoyment of sex, evidence from prehistory, and even the charming behaviour of bonobos, to suggest that conventional monogamy is but a blip in human history. And, basically, doesn’t work.

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Robyn Williams: And yes, this is Science Show number 1,848, on RN; your world unhinged.

[Music: 'Always True to You in My Fashion', Ella Fitzgerald]

'True to you, darling, in my way'…do you know what Ella means? We'll spend this Science Show finding out. It's a dangerous idea, that infidelity is more of a natural human state than lifelong monogamy. I mean, when the phrase 'till death do us part' was coined for a marital commitment way back, marriage used to last about nine years, not 50. And what about your real human heritage lasting 200,000 years, of which only a trifle, about 10,000, have been spent in so-called civilisation. With civilisation came property, and women became part of the deal. Well, all this is in the book Sex at Dawn, written by Chris Ryan, and he's onstage at the Opera House in Sydney with an expectant and suitably nervous audience.

Christopher Ryan: I hope you're all over 18 because this is going to get a little racy. I'll be touching on the 'are all women sluts' theme. I'll be arguing that yes, all women are sluts, as are all men, and several species of ape, including Homo sapiens. I often hear from people, 'But we're not animals.' Yes, we are animals! Let's get that out of the way right off the bat here.

A confession:  When I was given the title for this talk I didn't really like it much: If You Want Fidelity, Get a Dog. It seems insulting to men, to women, possibly to dogs, and most of the dogs I've known are running around humping any leg they can find, so I'm not sure if they are a great model for fidelity. And then I thought, well, maybe those are just the male dogs, so we could say 'if you want fidelity, get a bitch'. That's not going to work either.

So I decided to just stick with the title they gave me and work with it. I realised that there is a beautiful passage in one of my favourite novels in the world, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, so some of you will remember, Tomas is the womaniser with a heart of gold, I guess you could call him, who is married to Tereza, and they have a dog named Karenin, which is very interesting because the dog I believe is male but they give it a female name and then they refer to it as he and she throughout the book. I don't know if that was a translation mistake or if that's the way it is in Czech, I imagine it is, which leads me to think that Karenin is the central character in the novel.

Anyway, Karenin is dying at the end of the novel and Tereza is there with the dog, and I'll just read you this brief passage:

'A sacrilegious thought came to Tereza that she could not shake off: the love that tied her to Karenin was better than the love between her and Tomas. Better, not bigger. Given the nature of the human couple, the love of a man and woman is inherently inferior to that which can exist, at least in the best instances, in the love between man and dog, that oddity of human history, probably unplanned by the creator. It's a completely selfless love. Tereza did not want anything of Karenin, she did not ever ask him to love her back, nor had she ever asked herself the questions that plague human couples; does he love me, does he love anyone more than me, does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his or her company.

And something else: Tereza accepted Karenin for what he was; she did not try to make him over in her image; she agreed from the outset with his dog’s life, did not wish to deprive him of it, did not envy him its secret intrigues. The reason she trained him was not to transform him (as a husband tries to reform a wife and a wife her husband), but to provide him with the elementary language that enabled them to communicate and live together.'

So ends the passage. She accepted him for what he was. Surely Kundera is correct, that this open, clear-eyed acceptance is the essence of love. Love of ourselves as much as love of one another. But accepting each other for what we are requires first knowing what sort of creature Homo sapiens is. This is related to what Julian Assange called ' the burden of truth' the other night. The truth may be embarrassing, tragic or difficult, but it offers the only path to freedom.

So what I'm going to be speaking about today is what sort of creature is Homo sapiens. I'm convinced that what we're told is false, at least as it pertains to human sexuality. Let's do a quick test. I'd like you all to think many of you have heard a heterosexual couple having sex? The neighbours, someone in the hotel, or, God help us, your parents? Okay, so just about everyone it looks like. Now raise your hand if the man was making more noise than the woman. One hesitant hand. Okay. According to what we call the standard narrative of human sexuality, women are passive, relatively asexual creatures with very little libido. So why the hell are they making all the noise? And why do they get to have multiple orgasms? How does that make sense?

The standard model, what we argue against, I should outline just briefly, is the idea that since time immemorial men have traded goods and services to women in exchange for sexual access. The underlying logic of this is 'if you're my woman…' (and I note that word 'my') '…and I bring home the bacon or the antelope or what-have-you and share it with you and our children and you have sex with no one but me, then I know those are my children'. And the underlying assumption there is that paternity certainty is part of human nature and always has been.

What Cacilda and I argue in Sex at Dawn is that this is not true, that this obsession with paternity certainty among men and therefore the obsession with controlling the sexual behaviour of women didn't enter human consciousness until the advent of agriculture, which is just 10,000 years ago at the most. As Robyn said, anatomically modern humans have existed for about 200,000 years, so we're looking at a maximum of 5% of our time on the planet in these conditions where we're really concerned in seeing women as property, seeing animals as property, seeing land as property. Before that we lived in hunter-gatherer bands that travelled around, and the underlying social motif of these bands was cooperation and sharing, not because they were noble savages but because when you're walking 15 kilometres a day you don't want to schlep around a lot of stuff, so you share it. It just makes sense.

If I go hunting, I'm going to get an antelope some days, Robyn is going to get an antelope other days, it doesn't make sense for us to hoard our food, it makes sense to share, especially because there is no refrigeration. There's an expression I heard once in Africa, 'The best place to store extra food is in your friend's stomach.' It makes perfect sense, right?

Okay, so that's what we're arguing against, the standard model that men are trading protection, meat, shelter, status and so on for exclusive access to a woman's sexuality. That's why we say in the book that Darwin says your mother is a whore, because Darwin proposed that women are trading sex for stuff.

So how do we know, how do you possibly know how people behave sexually in prehistory? Well, we looked at primatology, particularly the apes that are closer to humans, which are bonobos and chimpanzees. It's funny, when you read the standard mainstream discussions of human sexuality that try to justify monogamy as a natural human behaviour, they often talk about birds because birds are nesting. The penguins, ’Ah, the march of the penguins, they're just like us!’  We're not birds. If you wanted to understand the dog behaviour, you look at foxes and wolves, you don't look at swans and rats. But look out for that when you're reading about human sexual evolution.

So, we look at primates that are closest to us and therefore most relevant to us. Bonobos and chimps are as close to humans as an Indian elephant is to an African elephant genetically, closer actually. We look at anthropology, we look at societies around the world that live in ways that are similar to the way our ancestors lived before the advent of agriculture and private property. So we look at hunter-gatherers in the Amazon, Papua New Guinea and many other places around the world.

Interestingly, in the Amazon you find a dozen or so societies that all have the same belief about how babies come to be, and they have no shared language, they have no contact with each other, so this is a belief that sprung up simultaneously in all these different societies. The belief, it's called partible paternity, and the belief is that a fetus is literally composed of accumulated semen. When women start to menstruate, they're a little bit pregnant, but it doesn't turn into a baby until they've accumulated enough semen that it reaches a tipping point, and then it starts growing and it becomes a child.

Like others everywhere, these women want to have the strongest, healthiest, funniest, best looking baby. So what do they do? They make sure they have sex with the funniest guy, the best looking guy, the strongest guy, the best hunter, to get some of the essence of each of these men into the baby. So this, again, undercuts in a very strong way the conventional view of human sexual evolution.

We look at comparative primate anatomy, which we'll get into a little bit later, much to the embarrassment of all of us. Psycho sexuality, what turns us on and off, what sort of porn do people watch, what sort of problems to people have in relationships. And then we triangulate from all these different sources of data.

Chimps and bonobos are equidistant to humans because the line that led to humans and the line that led to chimps and bonobos split off about five million to six million years ago and then this line split one million to three million years ago. So if you ever read that chimps are our closest primate relative, it is not true. Similarly, bonobos are not our closest primate relative. Chimps and bonobos are equidistant from us and therefore equally relevant as animal models for human evolution.

So, what are bonobos like? Bonobos are very different from chimpanzees, although they are very closely related. They look almost the same, but Frans de Waal, the great primatologist, said that chimps use violence to get sex, bonobos use sex to avoid violence. Very different approach to social life. Chimps have a male-dominated, very hierarchical, very aggressive social order. If you throw some food into an enclosure of chimpanzees, all hell breaks out. The dominant males will take control of the food, share it out with their coalition partners. If there happens to be a female who is in oestrus, she might get some of it, if there is a lot of food it will filter down eventually a little bit, but they get all the good stuff. If you throw...well, we'll see what happens if you throw some food into an enclosure of chimpanzees, I don't want to ruin the surprise for you.

Bonobo social life is female centred. The females rule the society. The males are a little bit bigger than the females but if a male attacks the female, all the females will gang up and attack that male, put him in his place. Men might be uncomfortable by that, but I'm telling you, when women rule a society, the men get laid a more. Everybody's happier. In chimpanzee society you see murder, you see warfare, you see rape, you see infanticide, you see every form of nastiness you can think of. In 40 years of observing bonobos in the wild and captivity, there has never been witnessed a case of any of those things, not one murder, not one infanticide, not one rape. So it's a very successful society. But obviously it's a society in which paternity certainty is not a concern.

Bonobo sexuality is strikingly similar to human sexuality. They have sex face-to-face, they stare into each other's eyes, they tongue kiss, which is really creepy. I have videos of that but I won't show you that. And what's interesting is that a little maths experiment in your head; think of how many times you've had sex in your life...and...sorry, are you weeping? Somebody down here looks really sad. Masturbation included, all right. And then think of how many children you had. So what is the ratio? A thousand to one or more, for most of us. There are very few animals in the world who have that sort of a ratio of sex acts to birth. People often say to me, 'You make us sound like animals.' No, animals are way less horny than we are. There are very few animals in the world who have sex for non-reproductive purposes. Oral sex, anal sex, hand jobs, you know, very few animals do this. Most animals only have sex when the female is ovulating, and they only have conventional, Vatican approved sex.

So keep that in mind. And the animals who do have a lot of non-reproductive sex are humans, chimps, bonobos and dolphins, all highly intelligent, highly social animals. The argument that we make in the book is that human sexuality, just in a nutshell, is not primarily about reproduction, which should seem obvious when you look at the ratio. Gorillas have sex 10 to 15 times per child. We have sex 1,000 or more. So obviously fewer than 1% of our sexual activities results in a birth. So it is not primarily about reproduction, it's about something else. And what we say in the book is that it's about establishing and maintaining complex social bonds, complex social networks. That's why it's common to these highly social, highly intelligent species.

Now we're going to see what happens when you throw some food into an enclosure of bonobos. The video please.

Robyn Williams: What the audience is seeing now are bonobos, young and old, with some holding luscious fruit. And those who want some of it approach priapically, or offering their other parts, and then…yes, they're copulating.

Christopher Ryan: Very Garden of Eden.

Robyn Williams: Afterwards we can see that the food is shared, and then others offer themselves and have ever-so-easy sex, and then share some more fruit. As the audience watches this simian orgy, Dr Chris Ryan picks up a bowl of apples and winks at me, and yes, I think he's preparing to chuck the fruit into the Opera House audience to see whether they will emulate the bonobos.

Christopher Ryan: Bonobo Handshake is a book by Vanessa Woods, who is an Australian woman, she is married to a very prominent primatologist and she went to live with him in Congo where he was working with bonobos, and she wrote a lovely book called Bonobo Handshake and she provided me with that. So let's do a little experiment and see…pass them around. Share, you have to share the apples. All right, so if you're going to break out into an orgy, hold on for another 30 minutes or so, we'll get to that after. And believe me, it wouldn't be the first talk of mine that's divulged into an orgy.

Very interestingly, Darwin himself knew there was a problem with his theory of sexual selection because he couldn't figure out why do these apes have these sexual swellings to show that they are ovulating? It didn't make any sense to him because, according to his theory, which has been accepted in the mainstream, men are always looking for sex and women are never looking to sex. Women are just sitting back and choosing the best provider for her children, it's a business deal for a woman. Women don't enjoy sex. At least Darwin's wife didn't.

Seriously, the working title for our book when we pitched it to publishers was What Darwin Didn't Know about Sex, and it was going to be all about how paltry his sex life was and how that if Darwin had gotten laid a bit more, history would have been completely different.

Okay, so what the hell is going on here? It looks an awful lot like a chimp sexual swelling to me, but maybe that's just me, I don't know. I have to admit, I look out into an audience and I see a bunch of horny apes, I don't know what you see, or a mirror.

So we see reflections of our primate past all around. I'm not going to show any hard-core porn up here, other than what we just saw, but there are many indications that these primordial triggers still function within us. This is called the Butt Bra, you can order it online. We all know about Beyonce and 'shake your money-maker' and the rest of it. If that's not reverting to our primate past, I don't know what is. And it's not only the women.

I don't know if you can see, this is a gorilla lying back in the sun, which is a pretty relaxing place to be, and there's nothing there. A gorilla's balls are generally tucked up inside his abdomen, whereas a bonobo…I don't know if you can see what's happening there…bonobo testicles and chimp testicles are the size of chicken eggs, big AA eggs. The Italian is a friend of ours, he allows me to use this image. In fact I think he's very happy to have me use this image.

So there's a reason for this. You can read the bodies of the mammals and tell what their sexual habits are, just from looking at their bodies, not the individual but the species. So I can look at a human body and I can tell you our ancestors were promiscuous simply by the fact that we have testicles located outside our body, that the human penis is the longest, arguably, if not close to the longest, relative to body size, and certainly the thickest. It has a special shape with the flared head. We have the repeated thrusting action, which is not common to mammals. The repeated thrusting action combined with the flared head creates a vacuum within the vaginal tract that pulls pre-existing semen back from the ovum to give your boys are better shot, so to speak. There is so much information in the human body. That when a woman has an orgasm, the pH of her vaginal environments changes to favour the sperm of the man who provoked the orgasm. There's so much information that points in this direction.

I'm not a very visual guy in terms of art. That is the only chart I've ever made, but man, I love it. There's so much information here. Okay, these are the apes. You've got human, bonobo, chimp, gorilla, orangutan, and gibbon. Gibbon is considered a lesser ape, it lives in Asia. The others are all in Africa.

Now, what do you see? You see what's called body size dimorphism. See how much bigger the male gorilla is than the female? In a species where the males fight each other and then the winner dominates the females, the evolutionary pressure is on the males to get bigger and stronger. So you have male gorillas and other species that have similar mating systems. The males are much bigger than the females, whereas in strictly monogamous species like the gibbon, males and females are the same size, they are nearly indistinguishable. In promiscuous groups you have about a 15% to 20% difference in male body size compared to female body size.

Okay, so you've got the body size dimorphism, you've got the testicles outside the body or inside the body, you've got the relative length of the penis compared to overall body size, you've got sexual swelling, the bonobo and the chimps in the female. In the human, sexual swelling is in the breasts, interestingly, and if you're wearing a Butt Bra, I guess I should put something down there. And you've got face-to-face sex only in the human and the bonobo, all the rest are rear entry.

It's not only humans or primates that have large testicles outside the body…I'm sorry, I just think that's too funny. I just think, what has my life come to that I'm showing slides of squirrel balls…I don't know. And actually it's not just animals that have large testicles. I don't know if you do this in Australia but in the States everyone's driving around with 'Bumper Nuts'. Don't ask me why. Despite being American I have no idea what's going on in America.

Arthur Miller said an era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted. Essentially the message of the book is not that there's anything wrong with monogamy, it's not an argument against monogamy. My parents have been married for 50 years, happily, monogamously, as far as I know, and if not I don't want to know, Mom, Dad, if you're watching this. The point is not that there's anything wrong with being monogamous, the point is that you shouldn't expect it to be easy. The reason it's not easy is because it's in direct conflict with our evolved predispositions.

So any propaganda that tells you that the reason you're not as attracted to your husband as you were ten years ago when you got married is because there's something wrong with him, there's something wrong with you, there's something wrong with your marriage. That's bullshit, there's nothing wrong with you. You are Homo sapiens. We are not designed to have sex with the same person over a lifetime. The fact that we're choosing to do that, many of us, is an artefact of our free will and our higher intelligence and so on. But we should do that understanding how difficult it is, we should do that understanding that, like vegetarianism, it's a choice that we're going to have to pay for, and so we should enter into it with a more evolved, if you will, understanding of what we're getting into. Just because you've chosen to be a vegetarian doesn’t mean bacon is going to stop smelling good. On that note, I'll come and have a seat.

Robyn Williams: A couple of questions from me first. It's highly appropriate that you're talking about pleasurable sex in Australia because it was invented here 360 million years ago, actually in Western Australia in a place called Gogo, appropriately, where John Long the scientist found the first umbilicus in a Devonian fish. And if you think about it, it's most unlikely to get a tender part of your body in someone else's unless it's worthwhile.

Christopher Ryan: It doesn't work if it's too tender.

Robyn Williams: Exactly. But you've got to want to do it, and therefore there has to be a pay-off, it has to be fun. And so I'm reminded, from what you said at the beginning, of one of the titles of Geraldine Brooks…you know, she's a novelist, won a Pulitzer Prize, comes from Australia, and she wrote a book called Nine Parts of Desire, as if there are ten parts, and women have got nine of them. And she was writing about a particular sort of religion, Islam, and so forth, and ways in which men have tried to put paid to that. You know, 90% of sexual desire is in the woman and I've only got 10%, I've got to put this under control somehow. And I want to ask you whether you think that's what happened 10,000 years ago and 5,000 years ago and 2,000 years ago, and whether it's been a completely unnatural thing that cannot last, in other words, as we become more and more truly civilised, those nine parts need to be released.

Christopher Ryan: It's funny, because on one hand the conventional wisdom is that women aren't very interested in sex, they're not sexual beings the way men are, and yet you look around the world and there are so many institutions designed to control female sexuality. And the image we use in the book is it's like a barbed wire electrified razor fence around a kitty-cat. What's going on there? And one of the most important ways of controlling female sexuality is to deny it even exists and to shame women who dare to express it openly.

Robyn Williams: Stop them driving cars, for example.

Christopher Ryan: Yes.

Robyn Williams: We know where they're going.

Christopher Ryan: Or (not to break the spirit) but surgically with clitorotomies and foot-binding, and there are so many ways of constraining female sexuality. In our society one of the more interesting ways that it's been done about 100 years ago in late 19th, early 20th century, the number one reason for a woman in the US and England to go to a doctor…and probably many other countries but this is where the records were kept…the number one reason was for treatment of hysteria. So, we all know, what is hysteria? The symptoms are sleeplessness, moodiness, overall body aching, over-lubricated nether regions. Hysteria was sexual frustration.

And so how did doctors treat these sexually frustrated women who came to their offices? With a vulvalar massage. Vulvalar massage was described as being like that game where you pat your head and rub your stomach, and it was very hard for male doctors to learn. But there is one hand doing a circular motion here and the other hand doing a little thing here. And these doctors were swamped, they had women lined up. And of course it was a perfect ailment because nobody died and nobody got better, so they just kept coming back.

Robyn Williams: Of course you illustrate that by looking at the fifth, or was it the sixth, electrical household invention. You just imagine, in the household you had the washing machine…

Christopher Ryan: The toaster.

Robyn Williams: Yes. Which came fifth?

Robyn Williams: The vibrator. And the reason is that these doctors, their arms hurt, 'I can't do this anymore.' And this was the age of mechanisation and Henry Ford and all that, so they called up some tinkerers and engineers and said, 'Can you make something that will do this?' So the first vibrators, we've got some pictures on our website, there's a wonderful book The Technology of Orgasm by Rachel Maines, I think it's called, a wonderful book about this. And she's got pictures in there of the first vibrators, and they were like diesel powered, hanging from chains. There was literally a steam-powered vibrator.

So anyway, the point is that female sexual pleasure is intrinsic to women's health, every bit as much as orgasm and sexual pleasure is intrinsic to males' health. And anyone that denies that doesn't understand what happens in a women's body when she has an orgasm. It's a hormonal bath. There's the joke, 'You're glowing today. We know what happened last night!' Yes, it's true, it's very important. So anyway, that's a long answer to a brief question.

Robyn Williams: Anyway, here's a couple of guys on stage talking about female sexuality…

Christopher Ryan: Yes, we should have beers, right? Where's the beer?

Robyn Williams: Which brings in the fact that your wife was writing the book with you, in a way. And I want to put the question like this:  Okay, so far, yes nine parts of desire and the vocalisation and the intense sexuality in young women until the babies are born, and then it's kind of over. What does your wife say when you ask questions like that, as someone who works in..?

Christopher Ryan: She says, 'What the hell are you talking about? What do you mean it's over?'

Robyn Williams: Did you have that sort of discussion with her about the literature, about the science of female sexuality and whether in fact there is a kind of ebbing after the deal is done, after the children are born and after the house is set up?

Christopher Ryan: Well, if there's an ebbing it's due to the pressures of domesticity, it's certainly not a biological phenomenon. I'll tell you one thing, ebbing does happen in some couples. There is a very important study done by Claus Wedekind in Switzerland years ago, he wanted to understand why is it that women's sense of smell is so much stronger than men's. There must be some reason, there must be some important information that women are picking up from smell. Because to guys like us sitting in a bar talking about women, we don't talk about how good they smell, it's just a non-issue for most men, whereas women, if a guy could be George Clooney, but if he smells wrong it is a deal-breaker, forget about it.

So he wanted to understand what is going on here. He found men who were very low in one aspect of their immune response, I won't get into the technicalities, but let's say there are five different elements in the immune system, major histocompatibility complex it's called. And so he would find a man who was low in number one but okay in the others, and another man low in two but okay in the others, and so on. He had these men wear a T-shirt for three days, no deodorant, no shower, no soap, day and night, put the T-shirt in a Ziploc bag, and then he got women volunteers who also had these deficiencies in their immune response. His theory was that the women would never find the smell of a man attractive if he was low in the same thing she was because then they would likely have unhealthier babies.

He found 80% of the women chose exactly as anticipated, completely backed up his hypothesis. But 20% of the women, roughly, seemed to choose randomly. They weren't choosing the opposite, they weren't...he couldn't figure out what the pattern was. He ran the test again, same results. Then he went back and asked the women if they were taking birth control pills. The women who chose randomly were on the pill. So the pill apparently interferes with this ability to sense the immune response of a man. So think about how many couples meet each other when the woman is on the pill, they get together, they get married, they have a kid, she is off the pill now, and suddenly he's repulsive!

Robyn Williams: I like it, yes.

Christopher Ryan: I mean, it's funny but it's not, right? But I always try to get that story out when I'm speaking, just because even if it is not directly related, it is so important. If you're going to marry him, go off the pill for a while, use something else. Sniff him out before you marry him.

Robyn Williams: One more question from me and then will go to the mics. One thing that you don't answer in the book quite, which I find very mysterious, you mention the chimps who are fighting... our own history suggesting with some anthropologists that we were at war all the time, these hunter-gatherers. Why were we at war? Why was there all this fighting going on? What was the point?

Christopher Ryan: Well, I completely dispute that vision of prehistory. I think that is what we call in the book the neo-Hobbesian fantasy of prehistory. There was nothing to fight over because there were no accumulated resources. So are you really going to risk your life to go fight some other group? For what? They don't have anything.

Robyn Williams: For your wife, for new wives? No?

Christopher Ryan: New get together, spring parties. The thing about...seriously, when two groups of bonobos come together they don't fight, they copulate, they don't fight. If two groups of chimps come together, they fight. So what we're proposing in the book is that it seems our ancestors were more along the bonobo line than the chip line, at least on that level.

Robyn Williams: There are books like Richard Wrangham's The Demonic Male, which have a very harsh picture of ways in which can't go past them, and so you cannot have this flexibility of lifestyle…

Christopher Ryan: There's a chest-thumping quality to some of those books. In bonobos, sexual contact happens between everybody except mother and son. So brother to sister…female to female is about the most important sexual contact that happens in bonobos, it's called GG rubbing, genital rubbing. The two females come up back to back, you saw some of it in the video, come up back to back and do a sort of quick…like that. It's like the book says, it is a bonobo handshake, it's just a 'howya doing?' And that serves to cement these bonds between females that keep bonobo society peaceful and functional.

Chimps are a little less sexual...significantly less sexual than bonobos are. The ratio of sex acts per birth is lower, the amount of time that the females show that they're in oestrus is lower. I say 'show' because sometimes the genital swellings are false advertising, so the female is not actually ovulating but she swells anyway and sex happens anyway. Whereas bonobos, the females are swollen 80% to 90% of their cycle.

But yes, the adult to child taboo doesn't seem to exist in bonobos other than mother to son. To me those are all echoes of very primitive things. Lipstick...what's up with lipstick? It's mimicking a sexual swelling. There are several different arguments about breasts, what's going on with female breasts, because it's sort of a mystery. The fat deposits in human female breasts are in no way necessary to milk production. So they are a display of some sort. And there's one other species of primate that has swollen breasts on the female. And like humans, it's a primate that stands upright, I think they're in Ethiopia, I don't remember the name of the species.

So the best known theory that makes the most sense to me is that when our ancestors went from being knuckle walkers like chimps and bonobos to upright, the sexual display of the swollen genital area shifted to the front because that's where the attention was now. And so that's why cleavage looks just like a butt crack. Sorry, but it does. I'm sure some of you have noticed that, it's not only me.

Robyn Williams: I've been astounded by a number of friends of mine living in a monogamous relationship who insist that if one of them puts a foot wrong (in other words has a dalliance in a strange conference in another land for one night) it's over. Okay, your relationship is fantastic, but it's so important that if there is one peccadillo, everything collapses, the house, the possessions, the kids, everything is over. People say that, it's incredible to me.

Christopher Ryan: I'd just like to say my wife doesn't feel that way…

Robyn Williams: So, he's doing book signing afterwards! Next question please.

Question from the audience: It seems to me like without monogamy and without man-made contraceptions, in our culture we have a serious problem with STDs, so my first question is where does all that come into your theories? And the second question, which is not related to that at all, is where does homosexuality come into those theories?

Christopher Ryan: Thank you for mentioning that. I'll start with the second part. We don't explicitly talk about homosexuality a lot in the book because we're arguing against mainstream theories of human evolution which don't incorporate homosexuality at all, they see it as some sort of genetic oddity. But the theory of human sexual revolution that we propose incorporates homosexuality, just like with the bonobo video that you saw had a lot of homosexual interaction, because when you see sexuality, as I said earlier, as a means of establishing and maintaining social bonds in a highly complex social creature, homosexuality is no longer a conundrum. There is no problem. Homosexuality is only mysterious if you assume that sex is primarily about reproduction. But if it is not primarily about reproduction, that is no longer a mystery.

Robyn Williams: Sure, in your book you quote Joan Roughgarden who actually has said that 450 different animal species show homosexual behaviour quite routinely.

Christopher Ryan: Right. So it's not a mystery, it fits into the human sexual repertoire perfectly, and in fact most women experimentally are bisexual. If you give testosterone shots to heterosexual men they become more obsessed with women. If you give it to gay men they become more obsessed with men, to lesbians they become more obsessed with women. If you give the same shot to a heterosexual woman she becomes more obsessed with everybody.

Robyn Williams: And what about STDs?

Christopher Ryan: In prehistory STDs weren't a big issue because you didn't have the sort of population density that we have now that allows these viruses to spread very rapidly. And there's also quite a lot of evidence that our ancestors had much higher immunological response to the sorts of pathogens that would have been present. So it wasn't a big issue in the timeframe that we talk about in the book. As far as today, yes, of course. It's important to understand, our book isn't advocating anything other than compassion, as you were saying, if there is a we were talking about with the vegetarianism, the fact that you had a pepperoni pizza doesn't mean you're no longer a vegetarian. You can still be a vegetarian, you just had a pepperoni pizza. I see monogamy the same way. It's like, well...Dan Savage, who is a very well-known social critic in the US, coined the term monogamish. We're not monogamous but we're monogamish. Which freaks me out because I grew up in Pennsylvania where there are lots of Amish people.

Question from the audience: Why do you think in popular culture violence is so much more acceptable than sex?

Christopher Ryan: Because we are cultivating violence and repressing sex, I think. We talk about a wonderful meta-analysis done by James Prescott who wanted to understand what is the relationship between sex and violence, if you could find something that would hold up across cultures. So he went to the anthropological databank, and he correlated...he said okay, let's look at how long women breastfeed their babies and how much body contact varies between infants and adults. So mothers holding babies, other women holding other women's babies, men holding babies, whatever, how much time the baby is getting body contact. And on the same side, the freedom of expression of adolescent sexuality. So as soon as the kids start feeling sexual they are free to fool around.

On the other side, look at interpersonal and intergroup violence. And what he found was that in all societies except one, which I think was the Comanche, the more body contact and longer the breastfeeding and more freedom for sexual behaviour in adolescence, the lower the violence. And vice versa. So it is pretty clear to me that we live in a society that is, at least especially in the United States, a warlike society. We're creating warriors, we're cultivating that killer aggressive image, behaviour. And one of the ways to do that is to increase the amount of sexual frustration in the society. And I think it expresses itself in many ways. I think a lot of misogyny comes about because of boys from 13 or 14 or whenever they start feeling sexual until they actually have a sexual life, those are very tough years for a lot of boys. And some of that desire, that frustrated desire can curdle into hatred. I'll be writing about that in the next book more.

Robyn Williams: It's also a case that with the media, a piece of violence is so much quicker than real sex, which takes 15 minutes to build up.

Christopher Ryan: You're bragging, aren't you!

Robyn Williams: Always.

Question from the audience: I think you could pretty much say that it may be the difference between us and bonobos is the complexity of emotions that we have. So I'd just like to understand your view on emotion and sex in humans.

Christopher Ryan: I'm in favour. I think you're right, I think that we are not only a highly sexual species, we're a highly loving species, but the question is how does love interact with sexuality, and I think that's something that we all have to explore ourselves and in our partnerships. In my opinion, love and sex are like wine and cheese, they are great together. But cheese isn't bad, you know, and wine isn't bad either. I love people I don't have sex with, I've had sex with people I didn't love, but yes, it is best when it is together. But I think we get into a lot of trouble when we mistake sexual attraction for love, and I think a lot of people do that. That attraction wears off after a few years and you're stuck with somebody you don't even like. I think men are more susceptible to that then women are, frankly.

Question from the audience: Let's talk about male sexuality. I have been working with couples in their relationships and their sexual lives for many years now, and a topic like this is generally what I would hear a guy say who is having a whole lot of affairs and say to his woman, 'If you want fidelity, get a dog. I'm not naturally that way.' I'm hearing you argue that actually men and women, fidelity is a hard act for both, and that naturally probably neither would go for sexual fidelity. However, what I found out is that even if women jump up and down and cry and scream and reproach men for years afterwards when they have an affair, they often stay with them. But a man very rarely forgives a woman for an affair. What is going on with male sexuality that it is so linked to their identity?

Christopher Ryan: As I saw where you are going with that, I flashed to my inbox full of penis enlargement offers, I think they are related. I think that men are often extremely insecure sexually. Men often have a magical belief about the penis, that if a woman experiences another man's penis she is going to leave me because it curves left instead of right or it is bigger, longer, whatever. Women are laughing. I don't hear the men laughing. Women know how ridiculous that is. I really think that we have...just as we cultivate violence, as we were saying earlier, I think we live in a society that cultivates sexual ignorance. I think we have a very adolescent approach to sexuality that leads many of us into a lot of trouble.

So to answer your question I think that men have an adolescent sense of sexuality and relationships often, and they have a childish understanding of the importance of sex. We wrote this big book about sex and at the end of it the message is sex isn't that big a deal, that's sort of our endpoint in the book. It's like, why are you destroying your family because she had a lover? You know, you weigh those two things; the importance of your family, the importance of your children, the importance of long-term stability, the importance of this friendship that you've been building up over 20 or 30 years, and you're going to drop all that because she screwed some guy in the hotel? Come on, grow up!

Question from the audience: A reasonably common theory that I've come across and experienced, that I've come into contact with, is men sexually peaking at a much earlier age, 18, 19, and women sexually peaking in their mid-30s. Do you accept this in your model of the world, and if so, do you think there's any evolutionary rationale for that?

Christopher Ryan: That brings us to Robyn's 15 minutes.

Robyn Williams: Twenty-one!

Christopher Ryan: There are different ways of determining sexual peak. If you're looking at how many orgasms you can have per hour, yes, about 15, 16 is probably the male peak. But most women wouldn't consider that to be a particularly exciting lover. So I think women do peak later in life in our society, but that has more to do with them coming into their ownership of their emotions and feeling assertive and comfortable, fighting through the thicket of bullshit that surrounds them. And I think men also have to overcome some of that stuff.

But it's very interesting, this relates to another point, that if you look at 99% roughly of the sexuality research that is published, the subjects are American undergraduates. So they've got a bunch of 20-year-old girls sitting in their Psych 1.01 class at eight o'clock in the morning with fluorescent lights and they're asking them about how many lovers you're going to have in your life, and they extrapolate that to say, well, women on average only want three lovers in a lifetime. It has nothing to do with what a woman in her 30s or 40s or 50s would say, and has nothing to do with what a woman sitting in a jacuzzi with George Clooney would say...I nearly said George Clinton, that would be...Lord knows what she'd say. So I think it depends how we define what 'peak' is, but I think men in their 50s and 60s are the best lovers by far. Don’t you?!

Robyn Williams: Christopher, finally, before you go to sign outside, in 50 years time, given that the pill was invented 50 years ago, became available 50 years ago, very short time, one generation, one and a half, two generations, in 50 years time in the best of all possible worlds, how can you see perhaps our societies, Australia, America, behaving sexually?

Christopher Ryan: What I would like to see is a re-examination of family structure, in light of the economic collapse which seems to be the tsunami heading towards our shores, that allowed more cooperative child raising, more cooperative use of resources. There are all these McMansions in the US that are sitting empty because nobody can afford them, six bedrooms, four-car garage. Why can't three or four women and their kids and the men they're involved with form a family unit there, and form sort of a little tribal, cooperative society to take care of each other? So, what they do sexually, I don't know, that's up to them of course, but I think the idea that we are atomised into these little consumptive units doesn't help us. It might help General Electric, but it doesn't help us.

Robyn Williams: As Hillary said, it takes a village. Would you please thank Christopher Ryan.

I was on stage at the Opera House, the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, with Dr Christopher Ryan. His book, written with the help of his wife, is called Sex at Dawn, and it's won any number of awards.

Next week The Science Show comes from Vancouver and the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting.


Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá
Harper Collins


Robyn Williams
David Fisher

Comments (53)

Add your comment

  • Recher :

    18 Feb 2012 12:22:44pm

    The assertion was made that since there was no inter-tribe communication, it (I forget what it is) must have come about spontaneously and independently in twelve tribes.

    I'm not so sure. Example every tribe in Amazonia uses coca and they all use the same clone! Source Ethnobotany of NW Amazon Raffau & Schults

  • sharon lynne :

    18 Feb 2012 12:54:04pm

    top show good belly laugh for lunchtime keep up great work, cheers, sharon

  • Tom Hadley :

    18 Feb 2012 12:54:05pm

    Hi listening to Chris Ryan fascinating ! The question of masturbation as a way of sexual "relief" might be a good question.

  • David, Existentialist Society :

    18 Feb 2012 1:55:27pm

    It is only in the last decade that the human male (and his pre-human precursors) has had any way of knowing that the child his mate is carrying is his own.
    It is therefore contended that the propensity towards an extreme level of sexual jealousy by the human male is an evolutionary product.

      • krh :

        23 Feb 2012 2:07:15am

        i suggest you have a look at the offspring of Charlie Chaplin.

        I also recall a family picture of my grand parents and their 8 children, where facial likeness is appearant in every one. Likewise with my great grandparents on my mothers side.

        Furthermore, everyone can easily see that I and my siblings all stem from different sources.(My mother was no example of fidelity, as I traumathically withnessed time after time.

        No, by no means" only in the last decad..."

  • Recher :

    18 Feb 2012 2:03:16pm

    As interesting and entertaining as the talk was, there was no new information.

    There was a failure to tie it all down by hypothesizing the nature of our polygamous behaviour.

    Gone unmentioned was the physiological biological reality some women can not orgasm, that Homo sapiens males are the only primate to release a sedative upon ejaculation, women living together via underarm pheromones commence synchronized ovulation and positioning of the clitoris, and how this data and all that was mentioned can be sexplained.

    Our polygamous behaviour was set down and imprinted 'forever' back at least as early as when we were the consciousness of chimps and bonobos.

    Hypothesis that sexlains all the data, incl semen info, we had group sex with all available females during their ovulation including the short, old guy at the back of the line.

    Though Ryan mentions the biggest difference between men and women is women's acute sense of smell, unsaid is how much more a female sense of smell increases during ovulation.

      • Phoebus :

        01 Mar 2012 4:03:54pm

        "women living together via underarm pheromones commence synchronized ovulation"
        I can answer that one for you.
        It's an urban legend.

  • Stefan :

    18 Feb 2012 2:31:44pm

    Brilliant, funny and my jaw actually dropped at one point...I never realised that could really happen! Excellent!

  • Alan :

    18 Feb 2012 3:07:08pm

    A hilarious and informative program. We can learn a lot from those bonobos. Chris Ryan said "Darwin was a paltry sex." Into chooks, was he? Robyn Williams said he was a 15 minute man. Hey Robyn, listen to The Dominoes song "Sixty Minute Man" and get inspired to improve your rating.

  • marsha :

    18 Feb 2012 4:12:24pm

    here's a little poem about sex being no big deal

    Wrap it in plastic to prevent disease

    feeling so drastic you're down on your knees

    And all that angst for a tickle and a sneeze.

  • Grant :

    18 Feb 2012 5:10:07pm

    A brilliant, amusing and insightful 60 minutes of listening. Just what the ABC does best. I'll never enjoy wine and cheese again without thinking of Dr Chris.

  • Tantri :

    18 Feb 2012 6:14:57pm

    I was amazed as I heard 2 men talking at length and in great detail, about the means used by cultures to control women's sexuality. Not by the statements made, or their truth, but that it was so accepted. more than 20 years ago myself and some other 'rabid feminists' as we were seen then, made similar statements when defining patriarchy.
    So why is it so much more acceptable when two blokes say it?
    I'll bet no one accuses you of being lesbian, man haters.

    thanks for the program

      • naughtee :

        27 Feb 2012 9:17:27am

        No doubt that is true, however I'm sure 20 years ago, there were 2 men talking at length and in great detail about the means used by cultures to control women's sexuality... you just weren't going to the same parties back then.

  • snaglet :

    18 Feb 2012 7:52:29pm

    formidable radio! encore for sure :)

  • Joanna Amos :

    18 Feb 2012 8:19:09pm

    This talk was brilliant and confirms all I have believed myself concerning monogamy. We are all animals after all and his examples perfectly serve to bear out this theory.

  • warlock15 :

    18 Feb 2012 10:17:20pm

    It's not often one gets to hear such a a wonderful speaker. Funny, informative and so much more. I thoroughly enjoyed this episode of The Sciece Show. Thank you.

  • Ozeb :

    18 Feb 2012 11:06:34pm

    In my experience, one wife is enough! "Polygamy is its own punishment", said one wise sage.

  • pat moore :

    19 Feb 2012 4:35:04pm

    No argument about fish on bicycles but surely the grissly unwelcome question left hanging in the air was about human sexual violence and the double standards of male sexuality. The need for paternal assurity in patriarchal societies, chimp,gorilla or human, causes male coersion & control of the female by violence, religion, culture & laws. There won't be a return to communal paternity a la bonobos or Amazon indians. In the commonplace incidence of domestic violence, escapee-wife murder, prostitute murder, sexual abuse of children, the dominating brutality in modern pornography, the long race-wide history of rape and slavery in war (occupying the enemy's sexual territory/possession) isn't it evident that sexual violence is innate to man & presumably inherent in his DNA? Isn't this the dark mirror which he should be confronting? Instead of the titilating "Sex at Dawn" the book could just as well be called Rape and Murder at Dawn. And thanks Robyn for your 'unhinging's and 'undoing's..more truthful..and also unraveling?

      • pegasusflying :

        24 Feb 2012 1:57:15am

        Well written and very true, good you mentioned it on here

      • naughtee :

        27 Feb 2012 9:19:20am

        "isn't it evident that sexual violence is innate to man & presumably inherent in his DNA?"


      • nuance :

        15 Oct 2012 6:26:05am

        When men and women have heterosexual sex, with the man penetrating the woman, enjoying a moment of sublime bliss in a chaotic and painful world, and lay together and learn from each other and fall in love and raise babies together...

        ... that isn't violent, and its not rape.

      • ish the stomach :

        05 May 2013 7:17:35am

        Wasn't that the reason for comparing the Bonobo to the Chimp? Chimps show this violence, rape, infanticide and war-fare. The priority of Chimps male dominated social structure encouraged these things. male posturing conflicts are solved through violence. The bonobos were able to avoided violence through sex. But the first point that he clarified was that humans were equally related to both these genetic ancestors.

  • Alistair :

    19 Feb 2012 8:18:53pm

    Maybe you missed this same great talk on the Big Ideas page last November. :)

  • Felix Dance :

    20 Feb 2012 8:42:53am

    That's awesome!

  • Robert of Richmond :

    20 Feb 2012 2:14:25pm

    Great show. Follow the links from the big ideas site

    and download the video from The Festival of Dangerous Ideas November 2011 at the Opera House.

  • Andrew :

    20 Feb 2012 2:42:28pm

    is this what science has to offer the wider society when it comes to relationships?

    No wonder Alain de Botton is touring the country spruiking a secularism that "fills in the gaps" of our humanity - a humanity which goes largely unacknowledged by our science-based world

    I'm sure Robyn is getting plenty of back-slapping complements from his fellow-baby boomers about this "entertaining radio"

    But it was nothing more than reductive science pedaled by a single (highly articulate) practitioner which left this listener with an unfortunately all-to-common sense of degradation

    We are all so much more than this - yet our peak science program on RN appears delighted that, on one very narrow reading, we can all be compared to baboons

    i want my 8 cents back


      • Reductio ad absurdum :

        23 Feb 2012 12:49:17am

        Hardly sounds like a philosophy that could produce the beauty of the Sistine Chapel or Notre Dame, does it?

      • Brad :

        23 Feb 2012 2:29:37pm

        lighten up Andrew.

      • naughtee :

        27 Feb 2012 9:23:40am

        now there is a word

        "we are all so much more than this"
        unfortunately that is too true

  • Michael :

    20 Feb 2012 3:05:18pm

    sounds to me like we are half descended from chimps and half from bonobos. I advocate that we gene test people and put the chimpish somewhere safe leaving the rest of the world to get on with playing fruit salad.

      • naughtee :

        27 Feb 2012 9:24:26am

        Of course we are not descended from either, we share a common ancestor.

  • mary :

    20 Feb 2012 4:10:58pm

    I'm in my 60s now and i regret not understanding my own sexuality until my life is nearly over. Two things - 1. there are times when i could copulate with just about anyone (never did that and not sure it qwould be all that great but i'll never know now; and 2. i's certainly do it a lot differently; it would certainly last a hell of a lot longer - i'm talking days here. Not the man's fault just my own ignorance.

      • naughtee :

        27 Feb 2012 9:25:30am

        Yes not the man's fault, I place a large percentage of blame at the feet of organised religion.

  • Carol :

    20 Feb 2012 4:11:29pm

    My question for Mr Ryan would be: do bonobos ever say 'no'? I don't know if they ever get headaches, but do they ever refuse a sexual advance from another bonobo they don't 'like', or for any other reason?

  • Glen McBride :

    20 Feb 2012 4:26:18pm

    Christopher is a delightful speaker and entertainer. This old lemon he has raised needs some thunking he omitted.

    I think he has ignored the evidence - especially the fact that we evolved for women to have silent ovulation - most othe mammals make such a big deal of ovulation with well advertised oestrus to ensure that the promiscuous males are gathered for the event. Having monogamy meant that women could go out foraging and return to mix with males and females - but since she was having sex privately daily, she needed no advertising.

    Monogamy ensured that sex became private and separate from the group. This is something that probably developed from the consort pairs that senior males use to separate females from the troop when a female is in estrus. It stayed and remains private. But with monogamy (or even small scale polygamy in tiny tribes) monogamy allowed peaceful sex throughout tiny tribes with limited competition or disruption.

    Young animals commonly are relatively promiscuous, forming pairs several times before settling down to monogamy - Konrad Lorenz described this well in his greylag geese. Young animals are promiscous - big deal. Older ones may be serially monogamous but monogamy certainly becomes settled with age - familiarity is wonderful. What nonsense to suggest that humans were not designed for monogamy. The author is tooo young to have an opinion - and he should think more about those silent ovulations that evolved from the chimp/bonobo ancestor

      • naughtee :

        27 Feb 2012 9:35:16am

        "What nonsense to suggest that humans were not designed for monogamy."

        I think their point is, our physiology does not support monogamy.

        If we were designed for monogamy we'd produce very small amounts of semen, probably have internal testicles (as hanging them on the outside of the body is a risky strategy, albeit good for producing masses of the suckers) and would not have the very complicated "sperm-wars" systems that are in place today.

        Not to mention the actual shape and size of the human penis v vagina ensures the repeated thrusting motion actually sets up a suction which removes up to 25% of the previous males semen, after ejaculation the male member becomes immediately flaccid ensuring their contribution stays where it is...

        Remember this is physiology... that stuff takes a long time to evolve... I doubt we're meant to be monogamous, that system came very recently and is purely socially constructed.

  • Recher :

    20 Feb 2012 5:01:03pm

    Ryan and Co. are wrong when they assert, “What Cacilda and I argue in Sex at Dawn is that this is not true, that this obsession with paternity certainty among men and therefore the obsession with controlling the sexual behaviour of women didn't enter human consciousness until the advent of agriculture, which is just 10,000 years ago at the most.”

    The date is much earlier. The oppression of female sexuality commenced with the insight connecting fornication with pregnancy and birth.
    This light bulb moment following soon in the wake of the quantum shift in consciousness when we went from bonobo /- chimp state of self-awareness to ours where we are aware of being self-aware. Humanity’s unique ego consciousness dates to at least 120,000 years ago absolute minimum, but probably occurred before we separated from Neanderthal.

      • Gina :

        20 Feb 2012 8:41:17pm

        Doesn't alter the fact that if we're that self aware... we would be choosing an attitude towards sex that reduces the possibility of war.....aggression...and a litigation and male dominated society..

        Discovering the social system of the bonobos in the 90s was very liberating. It fit into our pholosophy....

        and it brought so much more meaning to...make love not war..

          • fred :

            22 Feb 2012 3:30:02pm

            Well that is the problem, your motivations to believe are based on political/ideological bias, and are not objective. So to so blindly accept his ideas in trying to draw unsupported parallels with bonobos and humans is just not a good idea.

            As said already, make love, not war was an experiment run before in the 60s, those communes, and even communism, failed as they are based on ideas that do not actually match reality. Ryan panders, but his ideas are a mile wide and an inch deep.

          • fred :

            23 Feb 2012 11:04:39am

            Well no, because choosing "facts" to fit idealogy doesn't work. You only end up with absurid conclusions and theories because they area disconnected with reality. The communists throught it best they choose for everyone what they were, round pegs into square holes regardless, it fit their ideology, it didn't fit human nature. The same thing with those who tried to choose living in a commune much in the style this man is claiming is natural, it never worked, people are too smart for it, and jealous, and all the other emotions and motivations.

          • trass :

            24 Feb 2012 6:10:31am

            Well the problem is you can't choose.

            You know what they say, you can choose your opinion but you can't choose your facts.

            Ryan looks to disregard human intelligence and motivations like jealousy when he finds convenient, which is symptomatic of past blank slate thinkers. His new take on blank slate thinking is that he recasts his denial of human nature as a false understanding of human nature itself.

            It looks this pseudo science is fitting in with some peoples preexisting political bias which is why its selling and being promoted so uncritically on so many shows, but the fact is his claims are a mile wide and an inch deep, and have no support within evolutionary psychology circles at all.

  • AJNorth :

    20 Feb 2012 7:50:59pm

    As listeners know, we have a presidential campaign underway here in the states and I've taken the liberty of sending a link to this program to Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich -- who will doubtless be greatly enlightened.

  • Penny Martin :

    20 Feb 2012 9:07:24pm

    Another brilliant and thought-provoking Science Show - thank you, Robyn Williams. While we're at it, could the ABC powers that be please let us have Ockham's Razor unfolding at its former time slot of 9 on Sundays AND have it repeated as previously at predictable times during the night shift, so that our lives can unfold in predictable patterns too?

      • perspective :

        23 Feb 2012 3:00:59am

        yeah aids sphylis clamydia etc... all sound natural to me...

  • fred :

    22 Feb 2012 3:43:58pm

    This seems to be the old blank slate idealism of the 60s revamped for the new century, without learning anything from the past or present. People actually ran this experient, free love, sex, swingers parties, and of course communes where everything was never worked, jealousy and the simply fact that people have selfish motivations and posessiveness got in the way. Like it or not men do not like raising others children, you have to be naive to believe in the ideas this guy is professing, his ideas are not supportable by logic, he assumes people were not intelligent before agriculture, sorry, but the social competition and highly complex social interactions existed long before that and even with lower intelligent animals male do care about paternity. Male lions even kill the young of other males to drive the females back into heat.

    His claims do not match anything we've learned about brain science and competition theory we've been learning through the years. He has to completely ignore sexual jealousy and human intelligence for his idealistic notions to work at all, and that kind of says it all.

    This writer is just another pseudo science writer that is saying things that make women nod, its just pandering to the oprah audience. Its a bit disappointing that abc "science" has allowed him such an uncritical airing so he can sell his book.

    Trying to draw parrallels with aberations like the bonobo is questionable, you can find whatever you want in nature, some animals even change sexes within their lifetime. Some simply get by cloning themselves, there are plenty of dead ends in evolutionary trees. I've seen this type of book before, they scatter seeds of truth amoung their totally unsupported theories to give the appearance of scientific supported argument when it is nothing more than speculation.

    It looks to be working seeing that the sales rank on amazon is quite healthy, the book is flimsy science which caters to certain folks because it reinforces their preexisting political/social beliefs, regardless of how weak scientifically it is.

    This is just the new margaret mead, her writings and theories were quite popular for a while as they fit in with a certain groups preexisting social theories and idealistic notions...but the facts were her research was completely faulty.

    One is better off reading something like a billion wicked thoughts by Ogi Ogas , Sai Gaddam as it is based on actual research, or something by steven pinker.

    For anyone who wants to read some critical examination of this book and ryan, google up the review by L. SAXON on the amazon review oage of this book.

  • Ken Whitby :

    22 Feb 2012 5:28:27pm

    This must be a popular talk - it was also broadcast on Big Ideas (TV) late last year. The one called "If you want fidelity, get a dog".

  • fred :

    23 Feb 2012 2:31:24pm









  • Monika :

    23 Feb 2012 4:35:54pm

    I enjoyed the show, but for the assertion about women's breasts.

    We give birth to babies who can't support their own heads for 6 weeks or so, and who feed hour on/hour off round the clock. To try to hold a baby to a completely flat chest for that length of time would be extremely uncomfortable. Breasts allow you to hold and feed your baby in the crook of your arm, even on your lap, freeing up your hands. I saw a photo once of a tribal woman who had an older baby strapped to her back, feeding from a breast flipped over her shoulder.

    That long face to face intimacy with a mother who has the luxury of time (being supported by family/tribe or father of the child) could have led to the development in humans of language, facial expression and even a preference for sex front on - in which case no direction sign is necessary!

      • naughtee :

        27 Feb 2012 9:41:15am

        Baby pillows, I like that!

          • Monika :

            28 Feb 2012 10:33:27am

            If baby can't come to the nipple, then the nipple has to come to baby - but yes, breasts make a nice place to rest (especially if mum has been very well fed)

  • Glen McBride :

    24 Feb 2012 2:28:57pm

    Greetings Robyn
    Clearly there is always interest here which is why Chris Ryan wrote this book. Once an ape stood upright. Of curse males had been doing this for ages, walking across plains in long grass - safety. Baboons still do it. But getting females upright must have been the most horrific episode in our evolution. Always they were pregnant or carrying an infant. Many must have struggled to manage this posture and many would have failed. You just have to look at a late term pregnancy today to see the strains on a womans spine - this after millions of years. Ape spines had been designed for farmore millions of years as a sling, hanging everything inside from them. Standing up for women demanded enormous changes. Women needed help. finding whatever change that led to what I have called 'anytime sex' that bonobos evolved later must have guaranteed that males stayed with and helped with feeding of females thru that horrific time. Clearlyhumans and bonobos evolved a form of anytime sex. But our ancestors did it after standing up, bonobos did it while happily quadrupedal. In our case, protection and support of a male became important - females were never under such a strain in the bonobos - they had no need of help and monogamy. they worked out a different societal system.
    Look at my book on the subject

  • pat moore :

    01 Mar 2012 12:47:59pm

    Sure got we great apes homo"sapien"(wise guys?) chattering? Note to "degraded" Andrew..though they share a plethora of b's & o's, baboons are monkeys and bonobos are apes like us. How strange to think that being a sexually active animated animal is "degrading". Animals R US...Earth beings... and "Reductio", with plastic evolving brains and hands and imagination, very capable of conceiving and building a Sistene chapel and a Notre Dame, especially considering the latter was dedicated via "our lady" to the christian god built on top of and subsuming a spring, sacred to the overrun pagan Earth Mother Goddess religion? War, profiteering, domination and inflicting mass death on his own kind {'man is wolf to man' (& woman & all other species)} evidently get the greatest ape's inventive technological juices flowing on his way to inheriting his god's earth?

  • Stephen Kazoullis :

    16 Apr 2012 9:03:25pm

    You will need to define "natural" before you can proceed any further >