The inner you

For reasons that had to do with a good friend’s quest for the holy grail of Chinese hams, I found myself roaming the alleys of Quiapo with him a few days ago, seething with curiosity and the excitement amid what he called the "jetsam and flotsam" of urban humanity. I stayed close to him since I was a stranger to the terrain but for a split second, mountains of mangoes captured my full attention and I lost him. I asked the female merchant if he had seen where he went and she pointed to where he was – huddled among a bunch of boys over those cannons used for the New Year revelry.

"I tell you, no little boy ever missed thinking of wanting to blow up something," he told me this when I tapped on his shoulder to remind him that he came to Quiapo with someone and that was me. "Sure," I told my friend, "but you are nearing retirement age." "Well, it’s the inner child," he said. Now, if Frans de Waal were there with us in Quiapo, he would have said, Well, it’s more like the ‘inner ape.’" Then we three would have had an interesting discussion right there in Quiapo about what de Waal meant by that statement. All that against the background of hanging Chinese hams, honking jeepneys, yelling vendors and cannon fire from those boys who were, of course, just exhibiting that they were in touch with their "inner child."

But chances were Frans de Waal, a primatologist (a scientist who studies apes), was in Atlanta at the time, at Emory University in which he is a professor of Primate Behavior. Frans de Waal wrote a book called "Our Inner Ape. Why we are who we are" which was published late last year. In that book, he compared human behavior with the behavior of chimps and bonobos (which look like smaller and more erect chimps who breed, albeit rarely, with chimps). Some people feel very insulted when you make even the slightest reference to our ape ancestry. This is kind of a waste of energy if you get all worked up over that because simply being ignorant or repelled by scientific fact does not exempt you from it. It is written in 98.8 percent in codes in your cells, so pick a cell. You might as well divert that energy into understanding how that happened.  

About six million years ago, there was a split in our branch of evolution – from a common ape ancestor – one branch went on to become humans and the other to become chimps. Support for this was mostly from anthropological evidence but whola, we just completed the map of the chimp genome last year and now know in detailed evidence that we even share 98.8 percent of our genes with chimps – the closest to humans. In fact, our genetic kinship with chimps is what made the completion of the chimp genome one of the best scientific achievements of 2005 in the New Scientist and Wired Magazine. The complete chimp genome was published in the journal Nature last year. The human genome was completed in 2000 and now that we have the chimp genome, we now have clear evidence, written in three-letter codes ("letters" are any three from the basic nucleotide bases of DNA which is ATCG) what makes a human and a chimp – and 98.8 percent of the time, the codes turned out to be the same between Clint Eastwood and Clint, the name of the chimp whose body was used to decode the chimp genome.

This is what makes Dr. de Waal think that we all have our "inner ape." I read a review of his book in the New York Times last October 2005 by science writer Temple Grandin so when I saw the book in a bookstore a few weeks ago, I spent some time with it. De Waal found that both chimps and bonobos were capable of caring but the clear differences were in terms of sex and violence. The male-dominated chimp societies resorted to violence when it comes to "outsiders" even if these "outsiders" were once previously part of their one group. It was also noted that the leading cause of chimp death both in the wild and in zoos is chimps killing infant chimps. Chimps, it has been observed, have their own "inner Jekyll and Hyde." If de Waal is right, then this itching propensity of little boys and not-so-little-boys for aggression, to cook up possibilities of blowing up stuff, may be written in the genes we share with chimps (somewhere in the 98.8 percent). Well, it maybe so but I think the will to blow up something or not is somewhere in the 1.2 percent difference we have with the chimps; if at all, it is really in the genes.

I am not saying that women do not have the aggressive "inner chimp" but reading up on the bonobos, it would seem to me that the human female’s "inner chimp" is largely tempered by the "inner bonobo." The matriarchal bonobos are the "Woodstock hippie" version of primates, using sex and not violence, as a means to get or achieve anything. Grandin, an autistic science writer, even found the sexual habits too overt that she said they merited an ‘X" rating. Bonobos, it seems, just want to "make love, not war" and with everyone else at that so that the males do not have to rival each other on which babies were fathered by whom. That way, bonobo babies are cared by all. Thank goodness, neither bonobos nor chimps are capable of DNA tests, paternity suits, resulting telenovelas or reality shows for that matter or Animal Planet would also have their Bonobo or Chimp Big Brother version! I think we already have enough reality shows to want to change reality (for me, to one that will not have reality shows.)

So, inner child or inner ape? It all depends on the scientific lens we use to look at the mystery of ourselves, in terms of particular forms of behavior like aggression or sex. Psychologists look at the "inner child"; evolutionary psychologists, particularly primatologists, call it our "inner ape," given how genetically close we are to them. Other fields look at other things. What they find are evidence, not destiny. If you think that you can argue your "inner ape" to justify any criminal act of indiscriminate sex or violence, you better think again. In the first place, it will be difficult to invite Dr. de Waal to prove your case. Unless you also exhibit behavior long gone in humans – such as the habit of living in trees, swinging between them for work and playing all day long and chest-thumping – the code for human ethical conduct and not De Waal’s idea, will be the judge.

These scientific works like those of de Waal and of the international team of scientists who decoded the chimp genome do them in order to uncover the many layers of what makes us human – which also includes the things that we biologically share with those who are non-human. They also help us come up with cures and treatments that are genetically driven. Behaviorally, they help us better understand aspects of ourselves so that we are made more aware of them so we can temper our own inner apes. There may be something to gain in understanding that the "inner ape" is even more ancient than the "inner child" – that it escorts us into an even deeper, more ancient time to the insight that human life is only one product of a 3.8-billion-year life process.

It is a fascinating thought that had we not split from a common ancestor five million years ago, we would have still been simply content swinging on trees, eating bananas. Five million years that made for a 1.2-percent genetic difference now have us swinging from lane to lane with our jeepneys, surviving in urban jungles, selling bananas by the kilo in sidewalk markets like in Quiapo. Given this, we cannot escape the one science question that looms over the horizon: Will we ever run out of things to do with bananas another five million years from now? Find out for yourself what your "inner ape" has to say.

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