HOW PRIMATE RESEARCH WAS HIJACKED BY SEXIST IDEOLOGUES<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/cdn.theatlantic.com\/thumbor\/ayJz9tc_ZzLl66RbhWJ4ZwbMmqc=\/0x110:1497x1981\/648x810\/media\/img\/2022\/05\/05\/CC_Giggs_GenderAnimals_Full-1\/original.jpg\")
<\/picture><\/div>Natalya Balnova<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n\n\nThis article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from <\/i>The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. <\/i>Sign up for it here.<\/i><\/a><\/small><\/p>\nOne morning in<\/span> January 1961, following a breakfast of baby cereal, condensed milk, and half an egg, a male chimpanzee from Cameroon known to his handlers as Ham was strapped into a pressure-controlled capsule, loaded aboard a NASA rocket, and shot into space. No human had yet been where he was headed. At the time of Ham\u2019s foray to the stars, physicians still feared that crucial bodily functions (including swallowing<\/a> and cardiac activity) might not weather the weightlessness of astronautic flight. When Ham returned to Earth\u2019s surface with only a bruised nose to show for the adventure, he entered history as the first hominoid to endure outer space.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nChimpanzees\u2014along with their cousins the bonobos\u2014are our closest living relatives. Little wonder we are prone to view them as human prototypes. At least 96 percent of our DNA is shared<\/a>, and we have many anatomical traits in common, including some of the same blood groups and skeletal features such as delicate sinuses. Using a chimpanzee to aid in \u201chuman rating\u201d a NASA space vehicle for astronauts was a test of our mutual fragility. It was also a symbolic gesture, marking space travel as the culmination of our evolutionary trajectory into social beings and tool-users sophisticated enough to leave Earth. One way to understand the moment when Ham was flung into that inhuman realm where the universe skims the planet would be to say that we were, as a species, looking to our ancestral past to forge the frontiers of our future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\nDifferent: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>FRANS DE WAAL<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\nBitch: On the Female of the Species<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>LUCY COOKE<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\nThe story of our evolutionary congruence with primates is perhaps our most powerful collective origin myth. It has a lineage that is scientific: The prehistoric ancestry of Homo sapiens<\/i> shares a bough of the tree of life with several primates, including gorillas and orangutans, but most recently forked from that of the chimpanzees and bonobos, about 6 million to 8 million years ago. But that lineage isn\u2019t purely a matter of science. The conjoined heritage of apes and humans has been put to political use, invoked by those seeking to explain aspects of human society as an intractable function of our inner ape. Others have been motivated by that very debate to assert fundamental differences between people and our primate kin.<\/p>\n
Now in his 70s, Frans de Waal, the preeminent Dutch American primatologist, has a career\u2019s worth of perspective on the major through lines of simian research, and an abiding interest in how his field\u2019s findings have been drawn on to support narratives of intrinsic human tendencies. De Waal\u2019s own work with chimpanzees in the 1980s loaned the term alpha male<\/i> to the zeitgeist. He has decried its contemporary connotations<\/a> of chest-beating chauvinism as a departure from the actual strategies of chimp leadership, which can include more generous and prosocial deeds than acts of bullying.<\/p>\n
<\/picture><\/div>This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from <\/i>The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. <\/i>Sign up for it here.<\/i><\/a><\/small><\/p>\n One morning in<\/span> January 1961, following a breakfast of baby cereal, condensed milk, and half an egg, a male chimpanzee from Cameroon known to his handlers as Ham was strapped into a pressure-controlled capsule, loaded aboard a NASA rocket, and shot into space. No human had yet been where he was headed. At the time of Ham\u2019s foray to the stars, physicians still feared that crucial bodily functions (including swallowing<\/a> and cardiac activity) might not weather the weightlessness of astronautic flight. When Ham returned to Earth\u2019s surface with only a bruised nose to show for the adventure, he entered history as the first hominoid to endure outer space.<\/p>\n Chimpanzees\u2014along with their cousins the bonobos\u2014are our closest living relatives. Little wonder we are prone to view them as human prototypes. At least 96 percent of our DNA is shared<\/a>, and we have many anatomical traits in common, including some of the same blood groups and skeletal features such as delicate sinuses. Using a chimpanzee to aid in \u201chuman rating\u201d a NASA space vehicle for astronauts was a test of our mutual fragility. It was also a symbolic gesture, marking space travel as the culmination of our evolutionary trajectory into social beings and tool-users sophisticated enough to leave Earth. One way to understand the moment when Ham was flung into that inhuman realm where the universe skims the planet would be to say that we were, as a species, looking to our ancestral past to forge the frontiers of our future.<\/p>\n The story of our evolutionary congruence with primates is perhaps our most powerful collective origin myth. It has a lineage that is scientific: The prehistoric ancestry of Homo sapiens<\/i> shares a bough of the tree of life with several primates, including gorillas and orangutans, but most recently forked from that of the chimpanzees and bonobos, about 6 million to 8 million years ago. But that lineage isn\u2019t purely a matter of science. The conjoined heritage of apes and humans has been put to political use, invoked by those seeking to explain aspects of human society as an intractable function of our inner ape. Others have been motivated by that very debate to assert fundamental differences between people and our primate kin.<\/p>\n Now in his 70s, Frans de Waal, the preeminent Dutch American primatologist, has a career\u2019s worth of perspective on the major through lines of simian research, and an abiding interest in how his field\u2019s findings have been drawn on to support narratives of intrinsic human tendencies. De Waal\u2019s own work with chimpanzees in the 1980s loaned the term alpha male<\/i> to the zeitgeist. He has decried its contemporary connotations<\/a> of chest-beating chauvinism as a departure from the actual strategies of chimp leadership, which can include more generous and prosocial deeds than acts of bullying.<\/p>\n