Bonobos, Culture and Human Uniqueness

In the TED Talk below Susan Savage-Rumbaugh argues that biology isn't what makes humans so different from other nonhuman apes, but rather it is our cultural developments and social learning which makes us so unique. Savage-Rumbaugh shows us bonobos who have been taught to communicate using pictographs, and points out how, in comparison, humans are uniquely endowed with ability to engage in symbolic cultural activity.

This insight is nothing new. For decades, anthropologists have clearly documented how our ability to use, learn and communicate using abstract symbols and complex language has given us a high degree of uniqueness in relation to other primates. It is our elaborate symbolic capacities that quite literally define what it means to be human.

However, there are also significant biological differences between our species and the bonobos: although only 1% of our genes differ, some of the differences are key in coding for proteins important for brain formation, and specifically the neocortex – the part of the brain that allows us to even have complex symbolic capacities. We are creatures forged by evolution - biological in every way.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the old debates about ‘nature v. nurture’ are clearly confused. Modern genetic science and detailed observation of human life clearly suggest that nature unfolds via nurture, and that nurture is in our nature. The various dichotomies at play in several mainstream and academic discourses – e.g., of biology opposed to psychology, mind and matter, nature and culture – are becoming so utterly inappropriate to the task of understanding the human condition that their continual use will only serve to obscure and confuse. We need a new discourse – we need a new vocabulary.



We are creatures who are part of the same immanent world of flow and force as every living thing on this planet. But does this mean we are not still, in some unique way, something... special?