This weekend, I was discussing evolutionary biology with a friend, and she mentioned the surprising research about bimaturism in Orangutans. Roughly 50% of orangutans are the result of rape by males who mask their sexual maturity by repressing secondary sex traits, and the other 50% result from females willingly mating with the dominant male, who does have the visible secondary sex traits.
This behavior in the bimatured orangutans is called “sneak-and-rape” by evolutionists, and implies that these orangutans are in the same class as the guy who contacted Craiglist “erotic services” providers, then pretended to be a police officer and raped them.
It’s interesting to see people identifying with the dominant male Orangutan as the “good guy”. People tend to look at Gorilla mating patterns and perceive the dominant male to be little more than a rapist, while the female who sneaks away from the dominant male to mate with horny weaker males is anthropomorphized as being a real force for women’s liberation. The obvious inconsistency in empathy here doesn’t seem to disturb most people.
The real problem, which I pointed out to my friend, is the irresponsible use of words like “sneak” and “rape”, which practically guarantee that readers will anthropomorphize. In humans, both words immediately invoke a sense of judgment, a sense of morals, a sense of fairness. But such sentiments are meaningless in the case of apes.
Free will implies consciousness and memory. It isn’t clear that apes have developed the requisite consciousness and memory to have the ability to make free choices, so it is a bit presumptuous to speak of an orangutan being forced to do something against his or her will. And even if the orangutans had free wills, the phrase “sneak and rape” implies further that male orangutan has a Theory of Mind (ToM) in which he would be aware of what the dominant male and the females’ willed.
The evidence for apes possessing any Theory of Mind is very weak and speculative. If they do, it’s not a primary force. Chimpanzees are the most promising, and even in the case of chimps, the research shows:
“although 8-15 year-old chimpanzees showed more self-directed behavior in the presence of mirrors than 1-5 year-olds, the frequency of this behavior declined sharply between ages 15 and 39. The latter finding suggests either that, unlike humans, (1) chimpanzees typically acquire a self-concept as children and then promptly lose it on reaching adulthood, or (2) that self-directed behavior in the presence of mirrors is not a valid measure of self-conception.”
Finally, the research into Theory of Mind suggests that apes such as Orangutans can, at best, operate within two orders of intentionality. Morals require at least 4 orders of intentionality. So even in the most enthusiastically anthopormophized scenario, it’s a form of sneaky mind-rape to use such morally loaded words when discussing Orangutans.
People love to point to Gorilla and Bonobo research to prove that humans are simply horny primates dominated by evolution. And when I pointed out the imprecision of “sneak-and-rape” in this context, the retort was predictable: “Humans don’t really have free will, either!”, “Choice is an illusion!”, and so on.
Regardless of our sophistry about predestination, it is an empirically established fact that humans are the only creatures who possess higher-order intentionality. This unique capacity to know good and evil is exactly what Dickie Dawkins employs in his crusades against anyone who dares to question the orthodoxy of materialistic reductionism.
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