It seems unfair for us humans to brag about our superiority over our monkey forbearers, but as long as we people are in charge of both scientific research and the media, chimpanzees will always be second banana.
This is especially true when it comes to talk about our children. Take this story I spotted in the New York Times: “On Teamwork, at Least, Chimps and Children Vary.” The story reports on new research by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, where biologists had chimps and kids do the same simple tasks where they had the option to either work alone or with a partner. If they were successful, the reward was the same – candy or bananas, depending on the participants’ species - whether they worked solo or in pairs.
The Times reported that the chose to work together about 78 percent of the time, while the chimpanzees chose to work with a buddy just 58 percent of the time. The scientists aren’t sure why that is, but one theorized that kids may just enjoy working together, and said that additional study is needed to figure it out.
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I must say that my own kids frequently make our living room look and sound like the monkey house at the , and that like the chimps, they have not mastered the art of working together. Mostly it goes a little something like this: Big sister Lucy is playing quietly and calmly with something, little brother Isaac sees her and wants to do whatever it is she’s doing, and then he goes over and starts pulling apart her toy or game and throwing the pieces willy nilly around the room. Then both kids start . So nobody is getting any banana or candy rewards in my house just yet. In those moments, I could go for a little solitary chimp behavior out of my little monkeys.
