Hi, I’m Dr. Leonard Rosenblum, Professor of Psychiatry at the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. I’m delighted to be one of the co-organizers of this First International Congress. My own work is on the study of non-human primates and what they have to tell us about what is normal, what is natural, what occurs in nature, amongst our closest animal relatives, so as to give us some idea about what sorts of behaviors seem perfectly reasonable and normal at the human level. So for example, not all sexual behavior in monkeys has to do with reproduction. Males interact with other males, females with females, they interact before puberty, they interact when there is no chance of there being a baby as a result, and they do it, apparently, to express various kinds of both pleasurable, aggressive sometimes, but all kinds of social interactions that take the form of sexual behavior, without it being for the purpose of producing other babies, much like is true in humans. So, for example, there are occasions in which monkeys will masturbate. There are occasions in which females will interact with other females, males with other males.

Another thing that’s rather important is that there are various kinds of social organizations in non-human primates that in a sense reflect the kind of range that has been true of humans over time, if not all at the present time. So there are some species of monkeys, for example, that are single male-female pair bonds. They raise their kids together, and they don’t live in large social groups. There are other species in which single males have a group of females that are sort of like a harem, in which these males mate only with that small group of females, and those females mate only with one male. And then there are many other species in which there are lots of males and lots of females living in rather large groups, and males and females sexually interact with one another over time.

An important point, however, is that monkeys, like many animals, are seasonal in their sexual activity, because monkeys have a long gestation, a long pregnancy, much like humans do but not as long as humans – humans are the longest, next to elephants – so they tend to mate in the fall of the year, wherever they live, in the north or the south hemisphere, so that they can give birth five, six, or seven months later, so that they can give birth when it’s spring, there’s lots of plants, the mother at the end of pregnancy can have enough nutrition to support herself and her baby, and then when she begins to nurse there’s lots of plants for them to live on, and so they can handle the baby’s growth quite well. So that means a lot of the rest of the year there may be no sexual behavior at all. It’s probably because we humans live with artificial light and good food (hopefully) throughout the year, that we can have active sexual lives virtually all the time, if all goes well and if we have the kind of partner that we prefer. Unfortunately, not everybody always does. That’s also true of monkeys and apes, and so there are other sources of sexual outlets for us, just as there are for monkeys and apes, when in need.

That’s the take-home message of our examination of – not animals that are our ancestors, it’s not that we descended from monkeys, or we descended from current chimpanzees. But the point is that we have a common ancestor, much as an extended family may have a common great-great-great-great grandfather, not necessarily this grandfather or this grandmother. So we have a common ancestor with today’s apes, monkeys, gorillas, chimpanzees, and so on, but we did not descend from them, they did not descend from us – we all had, way way back in time, a common ancestor. And that’s what pulls us together, that’s what gives us some kind of common heritage that allows us to understand something about humans by studying these first cousins of ours.