Where else does rape play a significant role in society? It sure does here. Well, one other place is in The Common Chimpanzee society.
The Common Chimpanzee is the more common and more vicious of the two. Hunting in troops, common chimps live in tribes led by an alpha male and characterized by complex social relationships, similar to the situation with humans. Among these chimp societies, as in many others, rape and murder are commonplace. Common chimps are substantially more aggressive than Bonobos, and have been known to attack and kill humans on occasion. This is not very difficult if the human is unarmed, as chimps have over 5 times the upper-body strength of a typical human male. These chimps are omnivorous, and have a substantial amount of meat in their diet.
It is strange that this pattern is what the republican party seems to covet as meaningful these days. They seem to think the American electorate is sympathetic to such ideas. Read on below for more.
Here's another discussion of these ideas:
During a series of genocidal massacres in Rwanda and Burundi that at one point left 10,000 human bodies floating ashore on Lake Victoria, a Harvard anthropologist traveled to war-weary Central Africa to investigate the origins of human violence. But instead of studying the fighting Hutu and Tutsi tribes, professor of anthropology Richard Wrangham plunged into the "time machine" of the rainforests to examine Homo sapiens' closest genetic relatives, the chimpanzees and pygmy chimpanzees, or bonobo apes.
In a new book, Demonic Males (Houghton Mifflin), which Wrangham wrote with science writer Dale Peterson, he reveals how he found a glimmer of hope that humanity could reduce its violence and overcome its five-million-year rap sheet of murder and war. Wrangham bases his optimism on the discovery that bonobos create peaceful societies in which males and females share power--while the biologically similar chimpanzees live in patriarchal groups in which males regularly rape, beat, kill, and sometimes even drink the blood of their own kind.
Wrangham's theory is that human civilization would be more civilized if women seized more political power through elections and used it to counterbalance the male instinct to constantly define "enemies" and attack them. To make this advance, however, women must first abandon a tendency they share with female chimpanzees: to reward and select aggressive males as their mates. "The example of the bonobos reminds us that females and males can be equally important players in a society," says Wrangham. "And by giving us a model in which female action works in suppressing the excesses of male aggression, the bonobos show us that in democracies like our own, women's voices should be heard more than they are."
Perhaps the most revolutionary discovery that Wrangham and other researchers have made through patient observation of Central African apes is that warfare is not uniquely human. Scholars had long thought that it was. As recently as 1987, an international group of 20 distinguished scientists signed what they called the Seville Statement on Violence, declaring that war "does not occur in other animals" and is almost entirely "a product of culture."
But as early as 1974, researchers in Gombe National Park in Tanzania had been startled to observe chimpanzee males organizing gangs of a half-dozen or so members and launching lethal raids into the territory of neighboring chimps. These were clearly not food-gathering expeditions. The chimps did not stop to eat, and they did not make any of their normal calls and shouts. Instead, they crept silently into the territory of a neighboring group and hid until they saw a lone chimp. Screaming with excitement, they would ambush the victim, hold him immobile and beat him to death, sometimes twisting the victim's leg until the muscles ripped, or tearing off flaps of skin while he was still alive. In one well-documented case in Tanzania, a group of male chimpanzees used such ambushes to eliminate a whole band of neighbors.
So if the connection is not another way that we can think about having come from common ancestors as the chimps then maybe god intended us to behave like them? It gets pretty weird at this point. Could this be another trend?
Further research found that such violence was not limited to chimpanzees. Male gorillas, for example, were observed ripping infants out of their mothers' arms and smashing them to the ground in often-successful attempts to entice the mothers to mate with them. One theory is that the male gorillas do this to demonstrate their strength and to show how valuable they would be as protectors.
You may wonder why a scientist would write a diary like this but even we have to marvel at what is possible if you reject everything science has learned and open discourse to any belief structure that can bully its way into our fickle press. After all the press proved long ago that, not being alpha males, they are going to print any nonsense that sells. We have tabloids that are noted for this but the only real difference is that the MSM has this thin veil of rationality that it uses to cover its lust for sensationalism and stirring up people against each other to make the plutocrats that they serve happy.