The primatologist Richard Wrangam once advanced the theory that tribe vs. tribe conspecific homicides - what he called coalitionary killing - are an evolved trait that was selected for in primates by some kind of pro-homicide selection pressures in the ancestral environment (where homicide reliably grants an advantage to the expected relative gene frequency of the perpetrator's genes).
I haven't kept up with biology for years and don't know what the current consensus on the topic is but it's interesting to consider if some environments naturally promote the unlucky inhabitants to harm each other.
It seems obvious to me - it's the combination of two ideas:
1. When competing for resources, killing your neighbour frees up resources, which you can take. Most species of animal and even plants do this to some extent.
2. By collaborating in a group, you can achieve more than individuals acting alone. This is the idea behind teams, companies, countries, etc.
It's definitely not obvious, given that many, many gregarious species may certainly have inter-group clashes and skirmishes at territory boundaries but no full-scale war. Animals in general avoid violence between conspecifics, for the obvious reason that it's rarely worth the risk of being hurt unless you're very sure you're going to win. Dying for your group is something you almost never see outside eusocial species. Never mind dying in your prime reproductive age!
Lions murdering prey to eat is a stable equilibrium.
Primates fighting each other is not.
Murdering for acquisition of a resource is short term advantage.
We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin. It's not something we even argue over. Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures. Murder = social cheating. No disagreement there either.
Or put another way - the 'self' can gain advantage with murder, but the group and species probably will pay for it long term.
I wonder if there are just things that species really have to learn over and over, particularly things like 'active deconfliction' etc..
> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin. It's not something we even argue over. Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures. Murder = social cheating. No disagreement there either.
There are plenty of people who advocate for war and consider it good, and plenty of disagreements over war.
People are usually in agreement that war / killing is bad when other people do it but will find all sorts of ways to justify themselves doing it when it is to their advantage. This isn't really contradictory, from an evolutionary perspective.
No disagreement across cultures? That’s downright funny, there isn’t even agreement over what counts as murder. Do you think a jihadi sawing off a head thinks they’re a murderer?
Cultures aren’t universal, and neither is your particular religious tradition.
I would caution against the use of "murder" so loosely. Lions don't murder their prey. They kill their prey. Murder occurs when one entity with personhood intentional kills another entity with personhood, where personhood is rooted in the ability to comprehend reality (intellect) and the ability to make free choices among comprehended alternatives (free choice). "Murder" thus has a moral dimension that mere killing does not. Personhood is the seat of moral agency; without personhood, murder simply cannot take place, only killing, and it is a category error to ascribe moral goodness or evil to an act committed by a non-person. A spider eating another spider of the same species isn't murder; it may very well be the nature of that species to function that way.
(Entailed also by personhood is social nature. So, murdering another person is bad, because it is opposed to the very nature and thus good of the murderer. It's why killing in self-defense and the death penalty for murder are themselves mere killing, but not murder. Justice is served against the injustice of the gravely antisocial.)
From a game theoretic perspective w.r.t. just resources, murder does not generally pay especially given the social nature of a species given how antithetical it is to the social, but even if it does in some constrained sense, there is a greater intangible loss for those with personhood. Speak to almost anyone who has murdered someone. They will tell you that it changes them drastically, and not in a good way.
It might also depend on mating dynamics. If females mostly prefer to all mate within the top few percent of males in a community, there might not be much to lose if some of the lower status males of them take their chances going on a war party to conquer/steal some females.
Sure but you can advance your genes even more by taking a woman for yourself. And if there are already enough other males to ensure the survival of the females and children then it might be worth some of the males going to war to get some females.
At some point the marginal utility of warring is better for both the individual and the group than the marginal utility of yet another non-reproducing male hanging around "helping" out their kin while eating the resources.
I noticed there was a respiratory epidemic that killed 25 chimps naturally quickly, one would imagine that would have quite a societal destabilizing impact?
My initial instinct is that they were just reestablishing social order among the group after such a dramatic event.
Edit : I just read the paper and the discussion does a good job at laying out the entire landscape that contributed to the disruption. Pretty fascinating but also totally explainable due to the circumstances explained, which in and of itself is wildly fascinating!
Sudden power vacuums are often filled by the most opportunistic individuals in human culture. People who are frequently more concerned with personal gain over the collective well-being of the group. It's why assassinating heads of state usually just makes the situation worse.
Plenty of people stepped into power vacuums not to make themselves rich but to save their nation Napolean, Tito, Cincinnatus, arguably George Washington.
I think some of the individuals who died were key in linking the two groups (they were "the glue" that prevented disruptive aggression), and after they were gone, the split cemented and later turned into aggression.
I wonder if chimps are sophisticated enough to believe in omens? Perhaps they saw the sudden deaths are some sort of sign that the established structure was weak or immoral.
I could imagine if you where friends with someone and a bunch of their friends suddenly and mysteriously died, personally, I wouldn't kill that friend, but I might call the cops.
If anyone is interested in going more in-depth on this, there's a four episode documentary series on Netflix called Chimp Empire [1]. I just saw it last week and it's fascinating stuff. You get to know the individual chimps in-depth (they all have names) and get to see conflicts in this "civil war" unfold. Plus I learned a lot about social and "political" dynamics among chimps.
There's also the 1,5h documentary Rise of the Warrior Apes which is sort of a "prequel" to Chimp Empire. It was filmed over a period of 20 years in the same location and documents how the researches originally came upon this unusual chimpanzee tribe. The production values are not nearly as polished as in Chimp Empire but in my opinion it was still an interesting watch if you find this kind of stuff fascinating. The researchers themselves talk a lot in this.
For those of us who are unlikely to make time to watch a 4-part documentary, are there any particular lessons about social/political dynamics that you learned that stuck out to you or felt particularly prescient?
> For those of us who are unlikely to make time to watch a 4-part documentary, are there any particular lessons about social/political dynamics that you learned that stuck out to you or felt particularly prescient?
I watched the entire 4-part documentary and loved it. In general the series gives you a raw look into the a-b-c's of primate politics. Chimps just like us and the rest of our ape cousins are preoccupied with hierarchy, status and accumulation of resources which guides every single action they take from birth until death.
What is different about Chimp Empire is that it is presented in a much more compelling way relative to the standard (dry) academic literature or popular science texts (i.e. Chimpanzee Politics by Frans De Waal).
Even after finishing the documentary I've found myself connecting events in the series with current geopolitcal issues. One event in the show that stuck out to me was a battle between two rival camps over a single fruit tree. Gaining control over that tree was a critical factor in determining the survival of the two rival groups. To us, post neolithic age and industrial revolution, it's an amusing watch. But to chimps, a single fruit tree in their territory is everything. It is life and death. While there's a difference in scale, the same underlying motivations - in my mind - currently explain what is going in the middle east and eastern europe.
Also, the documentary is great case study in how, loneliness and introversion can be absolutely lethal in the wild. The politics in each Chimp community can get quite toxic but participation isn't really optional. You either play the game or quite literally die.
If you really want a good intellectual exercise, I recommend watching Chimp Empire in its entirety and then The Expanse right after. Try to tell me they are not the same show :P
There's a post that says illness killed some important leaders (who were friends) on both sides of the camp. Once these leaders died, the two groups realized they didn't have anything in common with each other so they're fighting.
There are far too many documentaries that omit or slant information for documentaries as a category to be considered informational. Especially ones on Netflix.
I hope nobody decides to violate the prime directive and take sides in the chimp war.
To the extent that they have good memory, they live in a world of finite resources, and their behavior was shaped by the forces of game theory as applied to tribes, this is more or less inevitable. You can read that as defeatism or just math. We can't overcome the force of game theory, but we can make it work for us by making our transactions increasingly transparent and repeatable, so that cooperation is more successful than defection.
Prime directive doesn't apply because they are part of our home planet. Our actions or in-actions can improve or worsen their living conditions. Their natural world is gone anyway. We've changed it already.
> To the extent that they have good memory, they live in a world of finite resources, and their behavior was shaped by the forces of game theory as applied to tribes, this is more or less inevitable. You can read that as defeatism or just math. We can't overcome the force of game theory, but we can make it work for us by making our transactions increasingly transparent and repeatable, so that cooperation is more successful than defection.
Note that the conclusions of the paper, while acknowledging the problem of access to resources, are different. They also do not conclude that this is "more or less inevitable":
> The lethal aggression that followed the fission at Ngogo informs models of intergroup conflict. All observed attacks were initiated by the numerically smaller Western group, contradicting simple imbalance-of-power models that predict an advantage for larger groups. Persistent offensive success by Western males suggests that cohesion supported by enduring relationships can outweigh numeric disadvantage. Our observations are also relevant for predictions from parochial altruism. Because cohesion among the Western cluster preceded overt hostility, external threats may be unnecessary to foster cooperation. Cohesion among members of the wider Ngogo group, however, may have weakened when external threats from adjacent groups decreased after territorial expansion in 2009.
and
> This study encourages a reevaluation of current models of human collective violence. If chimpanzee groups can polarize, split, and engage in lethal aggression without human-type cultural markers, then relational dynamics may play a larger causal role in human conflict than often assumed. Cultural traits remain essential for large-scale cooperation, but many conflicts may originate in the breakdown of interpersonal relationships rather than in entrenched ethnic or ideological divisions. It is tempting to attribute polarization and war that occur in humans today to ethnic, religious, or political divisions. Focusing entirely on these cultural factors, however, overlooks social processes that shape human behavior—processes also present in one of our closest animal relatives. In some cases, it may be in the small, daily acts of reconciliation and reunion between individuals that we find opportunities for peace.
Which sounds kinda hopeful!
My own observations is that the preconditions for the split that led to open warfare between the two Chimp groups was:
1. The nonviolent (illness) death of a few key individuals that linked both groups, and...
2. The complete stop of interbreeding. Once the two groups stopped interbreeding, the split was finalized and they became truly hostile.
Stretching this a bit, it makes me think of those (usually white supremacists, but not always) who claim "multiculturalism" is to blame for all the world's problems, and if only every ethnic or religious group stayed in their lane and didn't mix with the other, we could all live in peace. But it seems to me the lesson from this paper is that this would make the split complete enough that we would decisively start butchering each other.
> If chimpanzees - one of the species closest to humans genetically - could do so without human constructs of religion, ethnicity and political beliefs, then "relational dynamics may play a larger causal role in human conflict than often assumed", they added.
That's a weird thing to say. Studies of primitive tribes showed decades ago that they only seem to fight each other for a handful of reasons. Religion, ethnicity and political beliefs aren't among them. Fighting over resources, women and blood feuds are.
Supposedly academic anthropology had difficulties accepting these findings, especially the Yamomamö studies by Chagnon where he documented them going to war to steal each other's women, as it contradicted the popular idea of the noble savage.
It makes sense. Convincing someone to go kill other people so they can take their stuff and rape their women isn't that hard. The personal benefit is front and center, it aligns easily with human nature.
Convincing someone to go kill other people so you can get their stuff is a lot harder. You have to get creative with the reasons, and even then you had better be giving those fighters their cut unless you've really managed to get them fully committed to whatever excuse to made up. It helps a lot if there is some kind of wedge issue you can exploit, which is where religion and ethnicity come in handy.
No religion other than Christianity and Islam fought for a man made religion. They haven't slowed down after wiping out thousands of cultures and tribes
The Western Ngogo are clearly trying to spread the values of democracy and equality to the backwards Central Ngogo society that also happens to also have resources important to the Western Ngogo
Central Ngogo has complained that every time it's tried to democratically elect a leader, that leader had been overthrown by Western Ngogo—creating an environment that is hostile to anyone other than WN having a so-called "democracy". CN has also criticized WN as ultimately just being "oligarchy with extra steps" and creating an empire that requires the subjugation of CN.
I always wondered when Planet of the Apes would begin. We can see it now:
a) Chimpanzees going to war.
b) Humans ending humans.
Both is presently in the making, if one looks at the geopolitical scale and looks at damage caused by drones; a) is probably not yet full scale. Chimpanzees may be better diplomats than humans.
Animals have inner lives as well. They have their own thoughts and feelings. And sometimes those feelings are anger and their thought is to kick the shit out of those assholes over there.
Fuck man, my cats occasionally scrap with each other. I know it's not anything they've learned from the people in my house because we don't go full Wrestlemania on each other.
8 million years is a drop on the geological time scale, but on a species scale that’s an eternity. We went from Neanderthals and Denisovans to sapiens in a fraction of that time.
The primatologist Richard Wrangam once advanced the theory that tribe vs. tribe conspecific homicides - what he called coalitionary killing - are an evolved trait that was selected for in primates by some kind of pro-homicide selection pressures in the ancestral environment (where homicide reliably grants an advantage to the expected relative gene frequency of the perpetrator's genes).
I haven't kept up with biology for years and don't know what the current consensus on the topic is but it's interesting to consider if some environments naturally promote the unlucky inhabitants to harm each other.
It seems obvious to me - it's the combination of two ideas:
1. When competing for resources, killing your neighbour frees up resources, which you can take. Most species of animal and even plants do this to some extent.
2. By collaborating in a group, you can achieve more than individuals acting alone. This is the idea behind teams, companies, countries, etc.
Combine the two ideas, and you get war.
It's definitely not obvious, given that many, many gregarious species may certainly have inter-group clashes and skirmishes at territory boundaries but no full-scale war. Animals in general avoid violence between conspecifics, for the obvious reason that it's rarely worth the risk of being hurt unless you're very sure you're going to win. Dying for your group is something you almost never see outside eusocial species. Never mind dying in your prime reproductive age!
Yes, but war is worse for all parties generally.
Lions murdering prey to eat is a stable equilibrium.
Primates fighting each other is not.
Murdering for acquisition of a resource is short term advantage.
We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin. It's not something we even argue over. Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures. Murder = social cheating. No disagreement there either.
Or put another way - the 'self' can gain advantage with murder, but the group and species probably will pay for it long term.
I wonder if there are just things that species really have to learn over and over, particularly things like 'active deconfliction' etc..
> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin. It's not something we even argue over. Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures. Murder = social cheating. No disagreement there either.
There are plenty of people who advocate for war and consider it good, and plenty of disagreements over war.
People are usually in agreement that war / killing is bad when other people do it but will find all sorts of ways to justify themselves doing it when it is to their advantage. This isn't really contradictory, from an evolutionary perspective.
No disagreement across cultures? That’s downright funny, there isn’t even agreement over what counts as murder. Do you think a jihadi sawing off a head thinks they’re a murderer?
Cultures aren’t universal, and neither is your particular religious tradition.
I would caution against the use of "murder" so loosely. Lions don't murder their prey. They kill their prey. Murder occurs when one entity with personhood intentional kills another entity with personhood, where personhood is rooted in the ability to comprehend reality (intellect) and the ability to make free choices among comprehended alternatives (free choice). "Murder" thus has a moral dimension that mere killing does not. Personhood is the seat of moral agency; without personhood, murder simply cannot take place, only killing, and it is a category error to ascribe moral goodness or evil to an act committed by a non-person. A spider eating another spider of the same species isn't murder; it may very well be the nature of that species to function that way.
(Entailed also by personhood is social nature. So, murdering another person is bad, because it is opposed to the very nature and thus good of the murderer. It's why killing in self-defense and the death penalty for murder are themselves mere killing, but not murder. Justice is served against the injustice of the gravely antisocial.)
From a game theoretic perspective w.r.t. just resources, murder does not generally pay especially given the social nature of a species given how antithetical it is to the social, but even if it does in some constrained sense, there is a greater intangible loss for those with personhood. Speak to almost anyone who has murdered someone. They will tell you that it changes them drastically, and not in a good way.
Murder is a crime, homicide is the act. A lion doesn’t murder because it isn’t capable of breaking human law, but it can sure commit a homicide.
It might also depend on mating dynamics. If females mostly prefer to all mate within the top few percent of males in a community, there might not be much to lose if some of the lower status males of them take their chances going on a war party to conquer/steal some females.
I think that’s too narrow. You can also advance your genes by helping your sisters or other close relatives have offspring.
Sure but you can advance your genes even more by taking a woman for yourself. And if there are already enough other males to ensure the survival of the females and children then it might be worth some of the males going to war to get some females.
At some point the marginal utility of warring is better for both the individual and the group than the marginal utility of yet another non-reproducing male hanging around "helping" out their kin while eating the resources.
This doesn't surprise me. We've known for decades that chimpanzees groups make war on other chimpanzee groups. Eight years is a long time, though.
Here is the paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4944 - it's interesting.
I noticed there was a respiratory epidemic that killed 25 chimps naturally quickly, one would imagine that would have quite a societal destabilizing impact?
My initial instinct is that they were just reestablishing social order among the group after such a dramatic event.
Edit : I just read the paper and the discussion does a good job at laying out the entire landscape that contributed to the disruption. Pretty fascinating but also totally explainable due to the circumstances explained, which in and of itself is wildly fascinating!
Sudden power vacuums are often filled by the most opportunistic individuals in human culture. People who are frequently more concerned with personal gain over the collective well-being of the group. It's why assassinating heads of state usually just makes the situation worse.
Plenty of people stepped into power vacuums not to make themselves rich but to save their nation Napolean, Tito, Cincinnatus, arguably George Washington.
Right but this is rare enough for "power vacuums" to generally be regarded as a bad thing and not a good thing.
If they frequently had great people step in, we'd just produce them artificially all the time.
I think some of the individuals who died were key in linking the two groups (they were "the glue" that prevented disruptive aggression), and after they were gone, the split cemented and later turned into aggression.
I wonder if chimps are sophisticated enough to believe in omens? Perhaps they saw the sudden deaths are some sort of sign that the established structure was weak or immoral.
I could imagine if you where friends with someone and a bunch of their friends suddenly and mysteriously died, personally, I wouldn't kill that friend, but I might call the cops.
Any founders out there using AI to solve this? ;)
Google tried, but no apes were impressed with nano-scale bananas.
The apes were so angry about it they claude the researchers eyes out.
Damn, they've been polarized by social media too? Zuckerberg's greed knows no limits.
Sandel said he first noticed them polarising in June 2015.
i remember seeing the chimpanzee descend that elevator in 2015, back then everyone thought it was hilarious!
If anyone is interested in going more in-depth on this, there's a four episode documentary series on Netflix called Chimp Empire [1]. I just saw it last week and it's fascinating stuff. You get to know the individual chimps in-depth (they all have names) and get to see conflicts in this "civil war" unfold. Plus I learned a lot about social and "political" dynamics among chimps.
[1]: https://www.netflix.com/title/81311783
There's also the 1,5h documentary Rise of the Warrior Apes which is sort of a "prequel" to Chimp Empire. It was filmed over a period of 20 years in the same location and documents how the researches originally came upon this unusual chimpanzee tribe. The production values are not nearly as polished as in Chimp Empire but in my opinion it was still an interesting watch if you find this kind of stuff fascinating. The researchers themselves talk a lot in this.
For those of us who are unlikely to make time to watch a 4-part documentary, are there any particular lessons about social/political dynamics that you learned that stuck out to you or felt particularly prescient?
> For those of us who are unlikely to make time to watch a 4-part documentary, are there any particular lessons about social/political dynamics that you learned that stuck out to you or felt particularly prescient?
I watched the entire 4-part documentary and loved it. In general the series gives you a raw look into the a-b-c's of primate politics. Chimps just like us and the rest of our ape cousins are preoccupied with hierarchy, status and accumulation of resources which guides every single action they take from birth until death.
What is different about Chimp Empire is that it is presented in a much more compelling way relative to the standard (dry) academic literature or popular science texts (i.e. Chimpanzee Politics by Frans De Waal).
Even after finishing the documentary I've found myself connecting events in the series with current geopolitcal issues. One event in the show that stuck out to me was a battle between two rival camps over a single fruit tree. Gaining control over that tree was a critical factor in determining the survival of the two rival groups. To us, post neolithic age and industrial revolution, it's an amusing watch. But to chimps, a single fruit tree in their territory is everything. It is life and death. While there's a difference in scale, the same underlying motivations - in my mind - currently explain what is going in the middle east and eastern europe.
Also, the documentary is great case study in how, loneliness and introversion can be absolutely lethal in the wild. The politics in each Chimp community can get quite toxic but participation isn't really optional. You either play the game or quite literally die.
If you really want a good intellectual exercise, I recommend watching Chimp Empire in its entirety and then The Expanse right after. Try to tell me they are not the same show :P
Was the fruit tree important for its fruit? Surely there are other fruit sources, no?
A clear demonstration of the value of knowledge.
To be honest, we are fighting now over a 30kms wide strait ... also critical in a certain policitcal survival of sorts.
In the chimps’ defense, they don’t have the technical ability to make the fruit tree obsolete, or tactical framework to identify it as a chokepoint.
There's a post that says illness killed some important leaders (who were friends) on both sides of the camp. Once these leaders died, the two groups realized they didn't have anything in common with each other so they're fighting.
Might as well be human.
I'm on the other end. Finally some content to watch before bed.
Love quiet documentary type things in that scenario.
Bonus if there's a lot of episodes.
Might have to do this, better than rewatching the same rotation of sitcoms.
Morgan Freeman narrates some good ones on netflix. Works better/faster than melatonin
There are far too many documentaries that omit or slant information for documentaries as a category to be considered informational. Especially ones on Netflix.
Loved this series. It was tragic. The cycle of violence, trauma, isolation, male performance.
I haven't seen Chimp Empire, but it reminds me of the story of the Baboons where the alpha males died, and the entire society changed: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/teacher...
(It also features a very amusing photo at the top that makes it look like the subject is the biologist Robert Sapolsky.)
This is reality TV with animals. Like any reality TV show, the events and reactions are manipulated. I wouldn't put any credibility on this.
I hope nobody decides to violate the prime directive and take sides in the chimp war.
To the extent that they have good memory, they live in a world of finite resources, and their behavior was shaped by the forces of game theory as applied to tribes, this is more or less inevitable. You can read that as defeatism or just math. We can't overcome the force of game theory, but we can make it work for us by making our transactions increasingly transparent and repeatable, so that cooperation is more successful than defection.
I'd suggest reading some David Graeber. Viewing everything through the lens of game theory, as if it was some physical law, is very much off the mark.
Great comment. Dawn of Everything changed a lot how I viewed early humanity.
That’s one way to look at it. It’s fairly common to view nature this way. I wonder where it comes from.
I remember the time, in some film I watched, researchers intervened to save penguins trapped in a crater. A holy moment that was.
Prime directive doesn't apply because they are part of our home planet. Our actions or in-actions can improve or worsen their living conditions. Their natural world is gone anyway. We've changed it already.
> To the extent that they have good memory, they live in a world of finite resources, and their behavior was shaped by the forces of game theory as applied to tribes, this is more or less inevitable. You can read that as defeatism or just math. We can't overcome the force of game theory, but we can make it work for us by making our transactions increasingly transparent and repeatable, so that cooperation is more successful than defection.
Note that the conclusions of the paper, while acknowledging the problem of access to resources, are different. They also do not conclude that this is "more or less inevitable":
> The lethal aggression that followed the fission at Ngogo informs models of intergroup conflict. All observed attacks were initiated by the numerically smaller Western group, contradicting simple imbalance-of-power models that predict an advantage for larger groups. Persistent offensive success by Western males suggests that cohesion supported by enduring relationships can outweigh numeric disadvantage. Our observations are also relevant for predictions from parochial altruism. Because cohesion among the Western cluster preceded overt hostility, external threats may be unnecessary to foster cooperation. Cohesion among members of the wider Ngogo group, however, may have weakened when external threats from adjacent groups decreased after territorial expansion in 2009.
and
> This study encourages a reevaluation of current models of human collective violence. If chimpanzee groups can polarize, split, and engage in lethal aggression without human-type cultural markers, then relational dynamics may play a larger causal role in human conflict than often assumed. Cultural traits remain essential for large-scale cooperation, but many conflicts may originate in the breakdown of interpersonal relationships rather than in entrenched ethnic or ideological divisions. It is tempting to attribute polarization and war that occur in humans today to ethnic, religious, or political divisions. Focusing entirely on these cultural factors, however, overlooks social processes that shape human behavior—processes also present in one of our closest animal relatives. In some cases, it may be in the small, daily acts of reconciliation and reunion between individuals that we find opportunities for peace.
Which sounds kinda hopeful!
My own observations is that the preconditions for the split that led to open warfare between the two Chimp groups was:
1. The nonviolent (illness) death of a few key individuals that linked both groups, and...
2. The complete stop of interbreeding. Once the two groups stopped interbreeding, the split was finalized and they became truly hostile.
Stretching this a bit, it makes me think of those (usually white supremacists, but not always) who claim "multiculturalism" is to blame for all the world's problems, and if only every ethnic or religious group stayed in their lane and didn't mix with the other, we could all live in peace. But it seems to me the lesson from this paper is that this would make the split complete enough that we would decisively start butchering each other.
> If chimpanzees - one of the species closest to humans genetically - could do so without human constructs of religion, ethnicity and political beliefs, then "relational dynamics may play a larger causal role in human conflict than often assumed", they added.
That's a weird thing to say. Studies of primitive tribes showed decades ago that they only seem to fight each other for a handful of reasons. Religion, ethnicity and political beliefs aren't among them. Fighting over resources, women and blood feuds are.
Supposedly academic anthropology had difficulties accepting these findings, especially the Yamomamö studies by Chagnon where he documented them going to war to steal each other's women, as it contradicted the popular idea of the noble savage.
It makes sense. Convincing someone to go kill other people so they can take their stuff and rape their women isn't that hard. The personal benefit is front and center, it aligns easily with human nature.
Convincing someone to go kill other people so you can get their stuff is a lot harder. You have to get creative with the reasons, and even then you had better be giving those fighters their cut unless you've really managed to get them fully committed to whatever excuse to made up. It helps a lot if there is some kind of wedge issue you can exploit, which is where religion and ethnicity come in handy.
But... this isn't exactly news, is it?
We've known for decades that chimpanzees go to war, and during that war will happily slaughter each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
yeah but some people still think "imagine" is profound and real
No religion other than Christianity and Islam fought for a man made religion. They haven't slowed down after wiping out thousands of cultures and tribes
That's a pretty strong statement. You know the saying: strong statements require equally strong evidence.
So which side is fighting for our values?
I am siding with the group that opens bananas from the bottom.
Which side is the bottom?
Hey everyone! I found a sideless one over here! Get 'em!!
>Which side is the bottom?
i'll tell you this if it helps, for the cohort he wishes to join he meant to say top.
That depends on which side of "our values" you are talking about.
Are you orange team or green team?
negotiations on petrol rights still ongoing.
This got me thinking. Do chimpanzees try and mate with pre pubescent young or is that somehow nature gated?
The Western Ngogo are clearly trying to spread the values of democracy and equality to the backwards Central Ngogo society that also happens to also have resources important to the Western Ngogo
Central Ngogo has complained that every time it's tried to democratically elect a leader, that leader had been overthrown by Western Ngogo—creating an environment that is hostile to anyone other than WN having a so-called "democracy". CN has also criticized WN as ultimately just being "oligarchy with extra steps" and creating an empire that requires the subjugation of CN.
The book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan is a revelation in how close human behaviour is to those of chimps.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61662.Shadows_of_Forgott...
we can send them some of that vim donation money
That's absolutely bananas!
I always wondered when Planet of the Apes would begin. We can see it now:
a) Chimpanzees going to war. b) Humans ending humans.
Both is presently in the making, if one looks at the geopolitical scale and looks at damage caused by drones; a) is probably not yet full scale. Chimpanzees may be better diplomats than humans.
They've been watching us and what we do to each other.
That's a bit conceited.
Animals have inner lives as well. They have their own thoughts and feelings. And sometimes those feelings are anger and their thought is to kick the shit out of those assholes over there.
Fuck man, my cats occasionally scrap with each other. I know it's not anything they've learned from the people in my house because we don't go full Wrestlemania on each other.
We both do it because chimps and humans shared a common ancestor only 8 million years ago.
No bonobo wars though
there for sure are, but they are nsfw and will never be aired in a netflix documentation
They use sex as a weapon.
Their wars are legendary. They never give up. Never surrender. And the cycle never ends. Children of war.
The end game of "the replacement theory" when everyone fully commits.
8 million years is a drop on the geological time scale, but on a species scale that’s an eternity. We went from Neanderthals and Denisovans to sapiens in a fraction of that time.