## Metadata - Author: [[Angela Saini]] - Full Title: The Patriarchs - Category: #books ## Highlights - Female leadership is seen not just among bonobos, but also among killer whales, lions, spotted hyenas, lemurs, and elephants - Once, while giving a lecture in Germany about the power of the alpha female bonobo, de Waal recalls, ‘at the end of the discussion there was a German professor, an older man, who stood up and said, “What is wrong with those males?” He clearly felt they should be dominant.’ - ‘Patriarchy is universal,’ Goldberg tells me. ‘The fact that every society is that way, to me suggests strongly that there is some biological element, and to some extent it’s inevitable.’ In a book review at the time for the journal American Anthropologist, Eleanor Leacock, the chair of anthropology at the City College of New York, was bothered by how little real science there was in Goldberg’s theory. His answer to male domination was a frustratingly tautological one: It was natural for it to exist, and it existed because it was natural - But as primatologist Frans de Waal explains, when animal researchers talk about male dominance, they’re almost always referring to males trying to assert dominance over each other – not over females