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!
Don't think of it as individuals, but as individual genes. A group of 10 with the same genes, that can eliminate a group of 10 with different genes by losing one individual (because they were fighting to the death, while their opponents did not) is 9 copies up.
An alternative view is that in groups with alphas that father most offspring, and status is based on the individual's ability to risk death. Genes in an individual of low status are already 'dead' so manufacturing instincts and hormonal responses that increase violence does not have a downside.
The extreme version of this would be insects like ants and certain types of bees, where the vast majority of individuals are biologically incapable of reproduction, and serve the one or few queens that are capable.
dying in your prime reproductive age!
I guess dying because you think you’re going to impress’s a mate and stay alive is quite common.
On the contrary, that's very uniquely and peculiarly human stupidity, possibly caused by the fact that our brains take so long to fully mature. In other species, competing for mates (just like territory) is typically highly ritualized exactly because getting seriously hurt is the opposite of adaptive.
I feel that rituals of this nature work because they are backed implicitly by the threat of violence, which must be actualized from time to time in order for the ritual to hold force. Just like in human cultures.
Maybe google "Terminal Investment"
>I guess dying because you think you’re going to impress’s a mate and stay alive is quite common.
based on my memory of readings in the matter I don't think so, most animal species "impress a mate" is either
1. do mating ritual better than others
2. actually directly compete with rival who has mate to win mate.
In the second more rare scenario the actually directly compete with rival tends to be very ritualized, and thus when you lose you don't actually get significantly hurt.
In the ritualized combat for mates some species have evolved to points in which accidents become a major problem, for example Stags locking antlers in combat for does.
Obviously this is a scenario where you want to impress and stay alive but it doesn't work out, but it is relatively rare in the species that has evolved antlers to the point where it happens, and it is rare for species to have similar problems, generally the one who loses these competitions does not die, they just assume a lower status.
So all that said the human tactic of Bob, hold my beer while I impress Cindy by riding this croc, is a pretty rare tactic for getting a mate.
In fairness, i dont think dying to impress a girl is particularly common among humans either.
I was just thinking, perhaps all the fiction that has this as a plot point chooses it because of the man bites dog nature of the incident.
that's true, but among humans the "impressing a girl" pattern seems to be more open ended as to how you will do it, and thus you end up with croc-riding accidents at times.
I really did some extremely dumb things in my twenties that I'm extremely lucky didn't kill me.
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..
If one tribe's men kills all the men in the other tribe, that's double the number of women, and double the number of children. A large, permanent improvement in genetic fitness. Not temporary at all.
Most predators have a well delimited territory.
Inside their territory, they will attempt to kill any other predator who could compete with them and who belongs to a weaker species. This is a necessary strategy, because any territory has a limited productivity and it cannot sustain too many predators that want to eat the same kind of prey. Thus predators either specialize into separate niches, e.g. some eat mice, some eat rabbits and some eat deer, or they kill each other if they want the same food, to eliminate the competition.
They will also attempt to repel outside their territory any predator of the same species with them. They will seldom attempt to actually kill a predator of their own species, but that mainly because this would be risky, as in a fight to death they could be killed themselves, so ritualized harmless fights are preferred.
The difference with some primates like chimpanzees and humans, is that competitors of the same species may be treated as other predators treat only predators from different, weaker species.
The reason might be that when you cooperate within a bigger team, you may have the same advantage against competitors that a stronger predator has against a weaker predator, e.g. a wolf against a fox.
Thus a fight to death may be chosen, because the bigger team has good chances to win the fight. So chimpanzees start wars for the same reason why Russia attacks Ukraine or USA attacks Iran, those who have more weapons and more money believe that they can win the war, so they start it.
Most other predators do not start wars against their own kind, because in a balanced fight the winner is unpredictable.
How can it be that groups pay for it long term when many of the successful apex predators exhibit interspecies murder and territorialism.
Wow. I just read that whole wikipedia article and had a fantastic time. Thank you very much for sharing
But to comment on your point: species DO pay for it in the long term when members murder or teratorialism.
Lions are not cannibals. Some lions are cannibals. A successful group of lions cannibals existing (and what a brutal and awesome-in-the-biblical-sense story it is!) does not mean that it pays for the lion species as a whole to have groups of cannibals existing.
In fact, I could only see the “proliferation of groups like this committing atrocities” reach a tipping point for a species - not murdering when this murdering happens will make you cease to exist. So if the species doesn’t have a reason to reach the extreme where this NEVER happens, then it will quickly reach the point where this ALWAYS happens
This is simply not true, in time of severe distress and survival pressure humans are clearly capable of mass killings. It happened so many times throughout history. For example a famine forces a human group to take over rivals resources or when defending own group against agressive rivals.
Of course it's true, and that there are 'acute moments of distress' doesn't disprove the claim.
'Murder' is nearly a universally negative social concept.
There zero cultures wherein arbitrary killing is considered acceptable
Nobody ever said that these murders are arbitrary. They're the opposite of arbitrary. They're coalition-based murders against men in the opposite tribe. Highly targeted and intentional. Not random.
> 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.
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> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin
The idea of sin is designed to fix less than ideal human tendencies. If anything, this being the biggest sin means murder is the most inherent bad trait of humans.
> Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures.
That's not a given. Look at the Old Testament, it professes that you shall not kill, but is also full of laws that are upheld by death, stories of just killings, etc and the whole thing is written via dictation from a war god.
In cultures where honor is a big thing, it can be seen as just to kill those who bring dishonor or to maintain honor.
In cultures where purity/cleanliness is a big thing, it can be seen as just to kill those who are impure/unclean.
Not as simple as murder bad
All cultures, even it seems primates, discriminate between notions of 'arbitrary murder' and 'justice' implying different things.
And it's all roughly consistent.
Arbitrary murder is always 'wrong' across cultures.
Self defence is almost always considered reasonable and a form of justification.
Even basic cultures developed sense of 'justice' as retribution or punishment.
It gets a bit more complicated in terms of organized violence, but even there, it's generally always considered moral in the posture of defence, just as it were a single person defending themselves.
For other things, it's more complicated.
And of course 'war parties' and 'arbitrary retribution' has always been there, aka 'they slighted us, we harm them' absent true moral justification. That's always been problematic, admittedly.
Also "and the whole thing is written via dictation from a war god." this is not an appropriate assertion (not nice or welcome)
> Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures.
Numbers 31.17-18
> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin
Very strong statement given the massive killing of kettle and poultry per second.
Also given all the wars including those currently raging - I think is rather untrue.
Besides the killing a lion does is not over resources, it’s the resource itself.
Among the Yanomami (per Napoleon Chagnon), killing outsiders was not “murder,” it raised status. Men who killed had more wives. Violence was cyclical and regulated, not collapse. Humans are not universally anti-killing, mainly in-group.
That pressure kept population density low and groups mobile. Less surplus, less accumulation, weaker incentives for technological scaling. Over ~10,000+ years this maintained a relatively stable human–environment equilibrium.
“The weirdest people in the world” - has a very good roots cause analysis of all this.
Basically banding into groups and guarding against outsiders is the default human behaviour. It just works that way if you do a game theory analysis of our social structures. They usually don’t scale too well, but that’s what we revolved to do as social creatures.
It’s actually and very counter intuitively the Catholic Church that lead us to individualism, common laws, nationalism, even the Industrial Revolution and the scientific method.
It sounds bizarre but if you follow the historical logic, in a round about way it has paved the way for the modern world, which the rest of human civilisation was forced to adopt, either to compete or at gunpoint.
There are few books I read in a year that change the way I look at the world, “The Weirdest people in the world” was definitely one of them.
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Yes, good point. But generally, that's not the case. Though what you hint at is a bit more present in all cultures than what we would like to admit.
As far as 'population stability' though ... quite a lot of systems achieved this kind of stability without quite the same kind of social order.
But good point.
You're confusing interpersonal murder with tribal conflict.
Personal murder is tightly controlled now. But this is a fairly recent development. In many periods it was tolerated under various forms, including slavery, blood feud, honour killings, and state-sanctioned murder as punishment, or political process.
It's only in the last few centuries that it's been prohibited, and the prohibition in practice is still partial in many countries. (See also, gun control.)
Tribal murder has been the norm for most of recorded history. There are very, very few periods in very, very few cultures where there was no tribal/factional murder in living memory, and far more where it was an expected occurrence.
And technology has always been close by. Throughout history, most tech has either been invented for military ends or significantly developed and refined for them.
You are juxtaposing murder with killing. Every culture has a strong taboo against unlawful killing, i.e., murder. What counts as murder has changed, but the taboo against murder itself has not.
But doesn't that distinction kind of prove the point? Essentially killing people is fine when society approves and not fine when society doesn't implies that there is no built in norm against killing, its just society's "rules".
> Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures.
Yeah, but almost all cultures consider killing people in war not to be "murder".
In addition to the standard cross-cultural sample, I find the Seshat database useful for checking universals.
https://seshat-db.com/sc/scvars/
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.
Sanctioned killing to defend or strengthen the tribe is generally not equated with murder.
> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder'
The quantity of murders in bad neighborhoods tends to contradict. Even seems like a matter of routine wealth acquisition. Yes, society tries to chase the murderers but, I know the figure for France, even only 40% of murders get solved.
We’ve just built a fragile social construct that not everyone recognizes, against murder, among wealthy societies mostly.
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.
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Why do you think that we can define personhood without much understanding of the interior life of anything other than humans? Why do you think personhood is even required for murder? Does your pet have enough of whatever makes personhood important to qualify? How about the source of your blt?
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.
I think that 'hom' in homicide stands for homo so killing of (hu)man. I read your comment as lions committing homicide on hyenas which I'm sure you don't mean.
Not on a gazelle. The great apes are at least hominids, so I can't complain about it being called "homicide", but a gazelle gets ... bovicide?
I'm not sure that the word formally exists yet, which implies that if you can popularize it then you could be first to the punch!
"My God, look at the hooves, this was bovicide without any doubt."
An act is composed of object (the act itself), intent (the purpose/end motivating the act/toward which it aims) and circumstances (the context).
Thus, murder is a species of homicide. The specific differences of murder relative to homicide is that it is voluntary, premeditated, and malicious.
The law merely recognizes this distinction. It doesn't construct some convention around homicide. Indeed, law in general is a particular determination of general moral principles within a particular jurisdiction.
So, a lion doesn't commit murder, because a lion's actions are involuntary and neither malicious nor premeditated. Also, while a lion can kill a person or non-person, it is not capable of homicide, because its meaning specifically pertains to the killing of one person by another.
A lions actions are voluntary and premeditated
Plenty disagreements everywhere. Under (usually fake) ideas of not enough resources for everyone, so the strongest must survive.
Nazi planned to exterminate several whole ethnicities. If you think it was (or is) unversally accepted as "Bad" -- think again. Most developed countries had Nazi parties, including US and Canada. Some sympathize today. Several Middle East governments publicly claim that murders/rapes/kidnappings of people from another particular country is just and honorable, and will be rewarded in heavens.
Ancient Spartans (reportedly) killed their own weak children. In order to become a citizen every Spartan must have killed a man (non-citizen). It was considered good and just (by citizens).
In many cultures tribal warfare was paramount, even before states (and some remote tribes practice it even today). It was considered good and just.
And we honor our veterans, and for a good reason. (Without them, we would be captured/killed by other veterans, and honor them anyway). Modern civilizational culture is a thin patina on top of our primal behavior.
I was thinking about your last point about why we honor veterans. In the US it’s not really the case that without them we’d be captured or killed. All our conflicts in the last several generations have been us invading or fighting in foreign lands against forces that were not attacking us. All our modern military personnel are willfully employed and well compensated and given lifetime benefits for that.
The US engages in preventive wars, generally. For example, the wars in Korea and Vietnam were ultimately fought to prevent the USSR from becoming more dominant than the USA and ultimately to prevent it from becoming so strong that in an eventual direct confrontation they would be able to cause a lot of destruction in the US. Iran is similar: they seem to want to prevent Iran from getting nukes which could then be used to destroy Israel, which the US considers its protectorate.
But this is a super slippery slope. It’s essentially the same excuse Russia used in Georgia and now Ukraine: they are near neighbors geographically and culturally that must be stopped from joining the enemy alliance in order to prevent the enemy from attacking Russia in turn, which would be much easier should those countries be part of NATO. But where do you stop? Should Cuba be allowed to join Russia military alliance? Should Mexico be allowed to join BRICS? According to US foreign policy, the answer is always no, because of “national security”.
> And we honor our veterans, and for a good reason. (Without them, we would be captured/killed by other veterans, and honor them anyway). Modern civilizational culture is a thin patina on top of our primal behavior.
This is too cynical a take. "Tribal" warfare (what, Africa, North America?) seems to not be anything compared to civilizational war machines. Evidence shows it instead is two groups shooting arrows at eachother or engaging in non-bladed physical combat - think the PRC vs India in the mountains - with maybe one death. Sort of a mutually accepted way to "blow off steam."
Given that these kinds of battles exist throughout history, alongside catastrophic civilizational ethnocides, we can't assume one or the other is our "core primal behavior." Seems we have a tendency to both, depending on circumstance.
What is universally true though, preceding our capability to organize into warbands, is the fact that our evolutionary advantage is derived from our social nature. We rule the planet because we're so social we're the only species that invented language so as to communicate very complex topics. So in terms of "natural order" for humans, and adaptive behavior, it clearly is cooperation.
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.
This is one theory for crime. You could think of crime as a high variance high risk strategy to improve mating status. You might then expect most criminals to be young men, and for the straight crime rate to be higher than the gay crime rate. And indeed both of these are true.
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Well now you are talking about humans and human females don't actually only mate with a small minority of high status males.
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.
>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.
We argue over it all the time by disagreeing on what counts as "murder." Taking lives in war? Not murder. Taking civilian lives in war? Well the enemy often uses civilians as cover, what else can one do? The state takes someone's life? Not murder, just the cost of civil society. Abortion? Murder, obviously. Bombing an abortion clinic? Not murder, because killing killers in God's name is justified.
So what even is "murder?" It isn't simply the taking of a human life. It isn't even the taking of an innocent human life. It isn't even the taking of a human life with premeditation. Murder is an arbitrary line societies draw between the killing they find useful and the killing they don't. It's a legal and moral fiction.
I mean, the United States practically murdered an entire continent of civilizations and cultures and the only people who even care are the descendants of the few Natives we missed. How have we paid for that long term? We're a goddamn global hegemon and nuclear superpower that threatens to annihilate civilizations just for shits and giggles. Murder seems to be working out pretty well for us.
Murder is a synonym for kill but you can differentiate between them to make a point that one particular instance of such a caused-death is worse. Is more reprehensible.
The semantics of the word are as fluid as the opinions of those who you are trying to explain the situation to, using such distinctions.
If you think the death was wrong, it is a murder. If you think the death was right, it was a murder, killing, assassination, or any such word. Language is obviously not as black and white as the example I gave, but the point stands.
I agree with your definition but think it’s too narrow, and thus missing the point of the original argument. I don’t agree with lo_zamoysk‘s original point. I think lions CAN murder. I think when they commit cannibalism it’s only when they murder other lions. All other deaths lions cause, lion or other animal, are killings (maybe murder maybe not). But when Lion A kills and eats Lion B, Lion A would have much preferred to get food another way. It’s a lot more likely Lion A is motivated by something other than hunger, like so many of Lion A’s - or even any Lion’s - kills are.
Motivations are required for murder. The word “murder” ascribes motivation to a killing.
> 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.
If anything, I'd say plants do it more. Everything in the garden is trying to kill everything else.
Sometimes they do it in their own species, but much more commonly they do it across species. Eucalyptus will kill all but eucalyptus. Redwood trees will form networks and help each other; even an albino redwood tree (no chlorophyll https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/white-wond...) can survive.
A plant that killed all offshoots of itself would not survive. But plants much more often make perfect genetic copies than animals do, so the selfish gene can explain this behavior
Important to remember that we as humans no longer compete for resources.
We have more than enough resources to go around for 10 billion people.
The limiting factor is in intelligence and dexterity. In other words, we get richer when we are more.
We very much do compete for resources. People die of famine, thirst, exposure, and other lack-of-resources-related causes every day. That we could theoretically feed everyone doesn't matter when people compete for more than their fair share.
These are distribution problems. Usually intentional.
There is enough food to feed everybody.
Emm, what? You are aware of all the wars going on right now?
Yes and? They are not about natural resources.
Literally about land, oil, rare earth minerals…
You can claim that and it's a comfortable thing to believe but that does not make it true.
If you want to convince somebody who actually seeks truth, you have to make an argument how any country who has started a war recently has had a net economic profit.
Except in this instance the conflict erupted after the population size was reduced due to disease so it's not entirely clear this was caused by the scarcity of resources. Nor is it clear what selective advantage mutually destructive wars would have assuming plenty of resources. The researchers posit group relational dynamics being the primary factor.
Scarcity of resources … what if maybe the disease made less “resources” available to these chimpanzees?
orangutans deal with similar and are notorious for being peaceful
orangutans murder eachother too sometimes. Their hand grip is enough to crush another's skull, and occasionally they do so.
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> When competing for resources, killing your neighbour frees up resources, which you can take
I don't think it's that straightforward. War is usually extremely wasteful for all involved, even the victor. Plus it puts the whole group at risk, if it spirals out of control.
Yeah, mycorrhizal fungi, the gut microbiome, lichen, pet dogs, etc. Nature is completely brimming with examples of cooperation. It seems to me that more often than not, teaming up with organisms around you will unlock the ability to use more resources you would otherwise have access to. I would guess that this strategy is much more generative than attacking your neighbors and thereby risk your own security
We could hardly eat a fraction of what we eat today if we hadn't teamed up with microbes.
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> primatologist
sometimes I feel like that at work
Back in the old days people were much more unabashed about such things. What's the purpose of your very small collection of city states? Obviously to expand, and smash any neighboring states. If you succeed, kill all the men and take their women as slaves. This was much of civilization for a long time.
Tja, IAMNAH, but my impression is that there is much more diversity to history than that. Not all groups attempted to expand, and among those who did there are many who swallowed up close by groups without violence (rather through 'cultural victory' so to say). It might even be the norm historically.
I’m trying to find the source, but I remember a primatologist claiming that humans and chimpanzees are the only two species that embark on genocide. Not being satisfied with simply defeating the enemy, but actively hunting them down to ensure they can’t harm you again. In other words, precluding retreat. (Which creates its own game-theoretical backlash: never retreat.)
Evidence is limited but orcas might also do that to great white sharks. The orcas seem to sometimes work together to exterminate sharks from an area in a way that goes beyond just hunting them for food.
Lions and Hyanas are well known for trying to exterminate each other's cubs (they rarely eat the carcases).
Adults mostly avoid fighting each other as its too risky.
I think the difference is extermination from an area versus exterminating a line. Humans and chimpanzees will exceed their territory to eradicate foes. That, per this primatologist, is a unique adaptation.
Killing off another species isn't that much like genocide, which involves killing off a rival genetic line of the same species, but orcas do that too: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29559642/
I don't think this falls under definition of genocide
> we suggest that infanticide is a sexually selected behaviour in killer whales that could provide subsequent mating opportunities for the infanticidal male and thereby provide inclusive fitness benefits for his mother.
I can see gene fitness benefit but mating opportunities, how?
"hey, me and maman uh killed your baby, wanna pump out a replacement real quick?"
It's really common.
In species where a prominent male has a harem of multiple females. This usually involves killing not only rival males, but all of their offspring too. Here's a Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide_(zoology)
In species which keep territories, animals will kill rivals of the same species, but because it's not targeted it's not genocidal, unless the species eusocial, in which case it can result in massive genocidal wars, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=War_in_ants
> usually involves killing not only rival males, but all of their offspring too
I think the distinction is between killing a line and killing a tribe. But granted, that’s valid.
I noticed there was a respiratory epidemic that killed 25 chimps naturally quickly, one would imagine that would have quite a societal destabilizing impact?
> a respiratory epidemic that killed 25 chimps naturally quickly, one would imagine that would have quite a societal destabilizing impact?
there were several seemingly destabilizing factors, sort of a perfect storm, each contributing to further disconnect and polarization.
the group grew too large (and displaced other groups), but then ended competing for the best food among themselves, and having trouble socializing and bonding in such a large group.
subgroups forming, first fluid but eventually creating a split
loss of older alpha males exacerbating competition between males
loss of the few individuals that still maintained some relationship with the other group (the last one doing so actually died in that epidemic while the split was already well underway)
it is indeed an amazing read. my take away is that the root cause was mainly the group becoming too large, this affected socialization and cohesion, and thus the group was unable to cope with everything that came after.
Makes me wonder if civil war is more common for larger countries. Reminds me of the phenomenon where Latin American countries pretty much all broke up after independence from Spain.
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.
Just like in human analyses of geopolitical situations, the explanations that rely on broad abstractions of human nature or resource competition and paint a teleological narrative always end up breaking down when you do a deep dive into the history and specific circumstances. When you get into the nitty gritty of every unique geopolitical situation it's actually much more difficult to pull out a generalizable lesson imo. At some point we have to accept that we can't cross the same river twice
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.
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What they don't tell here, but a german researcher told yesterday on radio, was that the initial conflict arose in the 90ies, when one large group of Ngogo chimpanzees raided a nearby group and killed all males. Thus they came later to that insanely large number of 200 members, which a decade later lead to this conflict with the two groups already seperated. Similar to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War observed by Jane Godall.
Also missing is the Killer Ape theory of the sixties which led to the research that chimpanzees have much higher lethal conflict numbers than humans.
Also, this Ngogo group is highly researched, and many many films where made about them.
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.
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> We can't overcome the force of game theory
Game theory isn't a force. It's just one way of modeling behavior through one sense of rationality, and it rarely maps neatly onto actual human behavior.
It may be easier to think of evolution as the force, and game theory strongly influencing the fitness test. Those who play the games of mating and predator/prey more optimally reproduce more. We descend from billions of generations of the winners.
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.
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.
> 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) 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 (isolating us in separate groups) would make the split complete enough that we would decisively start butchering each other.
> But it seems to me the lesson from this paper is that this (isolating us in separate groups) would make the split complete enough that we would decisively start butchering each other.
of course, and historically we can see that from the past 300 years leading up to ww1 and ww2; every empire was in it for themselves and very nationalistic, mercantilism ruled the day, and lots of crazy theories such as phrenology and eugenics started to appear leading to all kinds of atrocities...
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Anyone read Goliath's Curse? The author (Kemp) is extremely opposed to the more Pinker-ish idea that humans in their natural consition led lives that were nasty, short, and brutal; dismissing this sort of thing as overblown.
Kemp had the very anarchist friendly theory that it's states (Goliaths) and / or the conditions that lead to them that lead to violence.
His evidence is most convincing when it's looking at the paleolithic, as h sapiens made its way out of Africa ... but maybe this is not a natural state as they had not yet reached any population limits so migration was always an alternative to conflict?
So wait - after a respiratory virus, let's call it SARS-C, that killed > 10% (25/200 = 12.5%) of their population, they split into two major groups that are now at each other's throats, when before they had a generally-ok alliance / relationship?
Where have I seen this before.. Think.. Think..
No, the outright political warfare in the US you are alluding to began much earlier than 2020. Things were getting quite ulhealthy already back in 2015/2016, probably even earlier. The "black swan" for this deep division was (I believe) not the epidemic, but the proliferation of the smartphone and social media, and the earlier transitioning of traditional news to infotainment format.
I'd attribute it to 2008 financial collapse, and in general, the pressure put on the middle class that began a decade earlier.
And I genuinely believe blaming things on social media and news is just a diversion so we wouldn't look at the main issue.
Earlier than that, this brand of social/economic/racial/sexual/etc aggrievement and reactionary politics was bred via 80s-90s AM talk radio.
The talking points that were ascendent in the Tea Party era to 2016, and are still ascendent today, were honed at that time in that sphere. Limbaugh said words 30-40 years ago that breathed life into a reactionary movement 20 years later and shaped its theory.
You can keep following the thread back, but I think this form of weaponized aggrievement took its shape at that time, its literal memes were potent and virulent back then, they just needed the right environment to really spread.
I always viewed social media as a catalyst, not the main cause. We've always have this at smaller scales / more local scales, throughout the human history. Social media just lets bob meet alice in a virtual plane, while they couldn't meet and share ideas before. But the ideas, even if reinforced by tech, were always there.
2008 was the big one, but i really think the ball started rolling after 9/11...
Really though it all started with the federalist papers.
As this article shows, it already started in the chimp-human common ancestor.
Knowing what we know now, imagine how much it would have accelerated back then if the elites hadn’t been able to smother out the Occupy movement. Wild to think about
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I mean, it's understandable; having to endure a lockdown _with_ Doordash was really rough on our civilization.
Ya, imagine not being able to pay for the doordash because your job was nonessential. Real rough indeed being hungry.
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
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.
Was the fruit tree important for its fruit? Surely there are other fruit sources, no?
It's a forest, not an orchard, and most species fruit only once a year.
The most important is the strangler fig tree as it produces fruit multiple times a year.
A clear demonstration of the value of knowledge.
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.
Funny how many people presume collective conflicts and violence are uniquely a human thing. Chimpanzees, lions, and wolves are some of the species where this kind of behavior is best known and documented.
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.
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I think the novelty here is that this was the same group which underwent a schism of sorts, and over the course of relatively few years became two completely separate groups antagonistic to each other.
edit: I'm rate-limited, so here's my answer to your comment of:
> I remember watching a nature documentary many years ago with exactly that scenario. The original group killed all the splitters.
It does seem like a very similar scenario, so now I'm confused.
I remember watching a nature documentary many years ago with exactly that scenario. The original group killed all the splitters.
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 escalator in 2015, back then everyone thought it was hilarious!
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Am reading Sapiens now, missed it the first time around. Incredible book. The point it makes isn't the killing among chimps being surprising. It is not relative non killing among humans- current day events notwithstanding. Contra the BBC, various human storytelling manifestations- religion/culture/etc- make large scale coordinated peaceful actions possible.
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.
Are you saying this was a case of top-whistling?
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.
Say that we, primates, have evolved some sort of social structure that values and depends on ‘us’, and antagonises ‘others’.
That would explain that sort of behaviour as well as our human shenanigans (country/religion/“race”/politics/football team/etc).
Perhaps some groups are biased towards ‘us’ (i.e. more accepting), and other groups are biased towards ‘other’ (i.e. more hostile).
The death of a few key individuals can absolutely remove all the commonality between two groups. Seems to have happened with those chimpanzees, and happens all the time in human groups.
It is sad though that this is happening, on top of all the shit that is going on.
> 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.
It's probably all about genes: my genes say I have to kill you now because you aren't spreading my genes. This might be a component of human ethnic violence, but not a strong one, since we can think thoughts, such as that would be a shitty thing to do.
yeah but some people still think "imagine" is profound and real
> 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.
Why is it weird? Religion, ethnicity and political beliefs are argued all the time, even here on HN, as the reason for why shit happens.
Also, what is a "blood feud" in the primates? Chimps seeking revenge for the murder of another Chimp? Why was the first Chimp killed then? I think "blood feud" is a good start, but why? The paper sort of explores possible reasons.
> 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.
I don't know what you mean, the "noble savage" is a discredited racist trope. Chagnon is worth considering but surely you're aware of the academic criticism of his work and methods? It wasn't because of the "noble savage", that would be a lazy dismissal of the criticism. He didn't have the final word on the topic.
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.
It's refuted by the Buddhist nationalists killing Rohingya Muslims. Not sure about the concept of evidence. For best epistemology you'd have to say "if this was false, we'd see evidence X, and we don't, or evidence Y, and we don't see that either, and nobody's thought of what evidence Z might be, so here we are, it seems true so far."
Unless you think that Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, Daoism, or the many millions of polytheistic cults are not man made religions, then you are completely wrong. Wars and atrocities have been fought using every religion and ideology in history as a pretext.
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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.
Just like kids on a playground; only more brutal. Thank you, ancient chimp brain.
"The third factor was the deaths of 25 chimpanzees, including four adult males and 10 adult females, as a result of a respiratory epidemic, in 2017, a year before the final separation. One of the adult males who died was "among the last individuals to connect the groups", the research paper said."
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There's a theory that humans (and likely chimps as well) have a cognitive upper limit to the number of stable relationships they can maintain (i.e. Dunbar's number[1]). Also, there is the idea that most people have nowhere near that many relationships, but some people are super connectors. They know everyone in the community and tie it together, even if the average member of the community doesn't know most other people in it.
It almost sounds like, before the conflict, the tribe was at or a little beyond their "Dunbar's number"[1] and then several of their super-connectors died. Suddenly the community, despite its losses, was too big and not connected enough to remain stable. Minor conflicts arose, individuals started choosing sides, and there wasn't anyone with connections to both sides able to bridge the gap and calm things down.
I'm not a sociologist/anthropologist/etc., so I'm probably woefully misinformed and spewing nonsense here. I'd love to hear what someone up to date on this stuff thinks actually happened.
> ”Chimpanzees are “very territorial", and have "hostile interactions with those from other groups"”
So just like humans, then.
"give a man a chimpanzee and he ll put it in a cage and feed bananas for 8 years and give a chimpanzee a man and he ll go to civil war for 8 years"
> If chimpanzees - one of the species closest to humans genetically
People seem to talk a lot about chimpanzees and their closeness to humans, and comparative behavior, but a lot less is said about the other closest species, the bonobo monkey.
Their society is very peaceful and things like infanticide, a popular pastime in chimpanzee society, is absent among bonobos.
The most notable trait of bonobos is that everyone has sex with every one else, constantly, (almost) regardless of relation, gender or age.
You'd think humans could learn much from such a peaceful species, but most people don't even know they exist.
We really got Planet of the Apes before GTA VI
I find it interesting that the BBC published this at a time they are already under heavy criticism for their coverage of the war in the Middle East (where they didn’t blink at Trump’s genocidal threats and published an article claiming that Iranians wanted to be nuked).
Now we’re saying that war is just natural. It must be a coincidence.
I wonder if there is a spill over effect to other species/ ecosystems
I thought the general premise is that humans can't form social groups bigger than around ~200. Which scans for me personally, its a struggle to maintain so many relationships. At which point group dynamics break down and factions begin to form. We have mental tech to try to minimise these issues, like nationalism or identity politics. We back these through cultural expression like dress, language, writing, the printing press, radio or the internet today.
Personally I feel like the effects of counter-culture are understated in humanity because I think it might drive a lot of human behaviour and its a natural outcome when a grouping grows beyond people's ability to maintain it. Counter-culture also offers a solid explanation for human insanity such as anti-vax which imho makes much more sense couched as:
"I hate that guy and that guy is keen on getting vaccinated, so fuck vaccinations, they're awful".
I would imagine one could find similar outcomes as this study of chimps, in human groupings too, albeit such experimentation would be unethical. Which is why I imagine it will eventually become a reality show someday: Lets play 400 friends or 200 enemies! Day 4: lets reduce the available food by 50% and see what happens... etc, etc.
That's absolutely bananas!
fascinating. so if humans are more like chimpanzees than not, then we are a group based animal that distrusts/fears other groups unless some strong leaders are able to bridge the gap? its an over simplification but then you have to ask, what defines a group? language? location? appearance? religion? wrt politicians, their job should be (amongst other things), bridging gaps between groups, instead of what we see going on in the world now.
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.
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.
To be clear, sapiens didn’t descend from neanderthals or Denisovans, our species lived alongside those and interbred with them. The common ancestor of sapiens and neanderthals was probably around 500,000 years, probably heidelbergensis. So half a million years is “short” but also still Homo, and something you would almost definitely identify closer to human than ape.
Shared social structures and behaviors can last through much longer periods of time than 8 million years. For example take bees and ants sharing a common ancestor in the 100 of millions of years age.
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.
I don’t consider myself politically correct but this headline is outright racist
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!
Don't think of it as individuals, but as individual genes. A group of 10 with the same genes, that can eliminate a group of 10 with different genes by losing one individual (because they were fighting to the death, while their opponents did not) is 9 copies up.
An alternative view is that in groups with alphas that father most offspring, and status is based on the individual's ability to risk death. Genes in an individual of low status are already 'dead' so manufacturing instincts and hormonal responses that increase violence does not have a downside.
The extreme version of this would be insects like ants and certain types of bees, where the vast majority of individuals are biologically incapable of reproduction, and serve the one or few queens that are capable.
dying in your prime reproductive age!
I guess dying because you think you’re going to impress’s a mate and stay alive is quite common.
On the contrary, that's very uniquely and peculiarly human stupidity, possibly caused by the fact that our brains take so long to fully mature. In other species, competing for mates (just like territory) is typically highly ritualized exactly because getting seriously hurt is the opposite of adaptive.
I feel that rituals of this nature work because they are backed implicitly by the threat of violence, which must be actualized from time to time in order for the ritual to hold force. Just like in human cultures.
Maybe google "Terminal Investment"
>I guess dying because you think you’re going to impress’s a mate and stay alive is quite common.
based on my memory of readings in the matter I don't think so, most animal species "impress a mate" is either
1. do mating ritual better than others
2. actually directly compete with rival who has mate to win mate.
In the second more rare scenario the actually directly compete with rival tends to be very ritualized, and thus when you lose you don't actually get significantly hurt.
In the ritualized combat for mates some species have evolved to points in which accidents become a major problem, for example Stags locking antlers in combat for does.
Obviously this is a scenario where you want to impress and stay alive but it doesn't work out, but it is relatively rare in the species that has evolved antlers to the point where it happens, and it is rare for species to have similar problems, generally the one who loses these competitions does not die, they just assume a lower status.
So all that said the human tactic of Bob, hold my beer while I impress Cindy by riding this croc, is a pretty rare tactic for getting a mate.
In fairness, i dont think dying to impress a girl is particularly common among humans either.
I was just thinking, perhaps all the fiction that has this as a plot point chooses it because of the man bites dog nature of the incident.
that's true, but among humans the "impressing a girl" pattern seems to be more open ended as to how you will do it, and thus you end up with croc-riding accidents at times.
I really did some extremely dumb things in my twenties that I'm extremely lucky didn't kill me.
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..
If one tribe's men kills all the men in the other tribe, that's double the number of women, and double the number of children. A large, permanent improvement in genetic fitness. Not temporary at all.
Most predators have a well delimited territory.
Inside their territory, they will attempt to kill any other predator who could compete with them and who belongs to a weaker species. This is a necessary strategy, because any territory has a limited productivity and it cannot sustain too many predators that want to eat the same kind of prey. Thus predators either specialize into separate niches, e.g. some eat mice, some eat rabbits and some eat deer, or they kill each other if they want the same food, to eliminate the competition.
They will also attempt to repel outside their territory any predator of the same species with them. They will seldom attempt to actually kill a predator of their own species, but that mainly because this would be risky, as in a fight to death they could be killed themselves, so ritualized harmless fights are preferred.
The difference with some primates like chimpanzees and humans, is that competitors of the same species may be treated as other predators treat only predators from different, weaker species.
The reason might be that when you cooperate within a bigger team, you may have the same advantage against competitors that a stronger predator has against a weaker predator, e.g. a wolf against a fox.
Thus a fight to death may be chosen, because the bigger team has good chances to win the fight. So chimpanzees start wars for the same reason why Russia attacks Ukraine or USA attacks Iran, those who have more weapons and more money believe that they can win the war, so they start it.
Most other predators do not start wars against their own kind, because in a balanced fight the winner is unpredictable.
How can it be that groups pay for it long term when many of the successful apex predators exhibit interspecies murder and territorialism.
Just to use your own example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapogo_lion_coalition
Wow. I just read that whole wikipedia article and had a fantastic time. Thank you very much for sharing
But to comment on your point: species DO pay for it in the long term when members murder or teratorialism.
Lions are not cannibals. Some lions are cannibals. A successful group of lions cannibals existing (and what a brutal and awesome-in-the-biblical-sense story it is!) does not mean that it pays for the lion species as a whole to have groups of cannibals existing.
In fact, I could only see the “proliferation of groups like this committing atrocities” reach a tipping point for a species - not murdering when this murdering happens will make you cease to exist. So if the species doesn’t have a reason to reach the extreme where this NEVER happens, then it will quickly reach the point where this ALWAYS happens
This is simply not true, in time of severe distress and survival pressure humans are clearly capable of mass killings. It happened so many times throughout history. For example a famine forces a human group to take over rivals resources or when defending own group against agressive rivals.
Of course it's true, and that there are 'acute moments of distress' doesn't disprove the claim.
'Murder' is nearly a universally negative social concept.
There zero cultures wherein arbitrary killing is considered acceptable
Nobody ever said that these murders are arbitrary. They're the opposite of arbitrary. They're coalition-based murders against men in the opposite tribe. Highly targeted and intentional. Not random.
> 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.
> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin
The idea of sin is designed to fix less than ideal human tendencies. If anything, this being the biggest sin means murder is the most inherent bad trait of humans.
> Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures.
That's not a given. Look at the Old Testament, it professes that you shall not kill, but is also full of laws that are upheld by death, stories of just killings, etc and the whole thing is written via dictation from a war god.
In cultures where honor is a big thing, it can be seen as just to kill those who bring dishonor or to maintain honor.
In cultures where purity/cleanliness is a big thing, it can be seen as just to kill those who are impure/unclean.
Not as simple as murder bad
All cultures, even it seems primates, discriminate between notions of 'arbitrary murder' and 'justice' implying different things.
And it's all roughly consistent.
Arbitrary murder is always 'wrong' across cultures.
Self defence is almost always considered reasonable and a form of justification.
Even basic cultures developed sense of 'justice' as retribution or punishment.
It gets a bit more complicated in terms of organized violence, but even there, it's generally always considered moral in the posture of defence, just as it were a single person defending themselves.
For other things, it's more complicated.
And of course 'war parties' and 'arbitrary retribution' has always been there, aka 'they slighted us, we harm them' absent true moral justification. That's always been problematic, admittedly.
Also "and the whole thing is written via dictation from a war god." this is not an appropriate assertion (not nice or welcome)
> Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures.
Numbers 31.17-18
> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin
Very strong statement given the massive killing of kettle and poultry per second.
Also given all the wars including those currently raging - I think is rather untrue.
Besides the killing a lion does is not over resources, it’s the resource itself.
Among the Yanomami (per Napoleon Chagnon), killing outsiders was not “murder,” it raised status. Men who killed had more wives. Violence was cyclical and regulated, not collapse. Humans are not universally anti-killing, mainly in-group.
That pressure kept population density low and groups mobile. Less surplus, less accumulation, weaker incentives for technological scaling. Over ~10,000+ years this maintained a relatively stable human–environment equilibrium.
“The weirdest people in the world” - has a very good roots cause analysis of all this.
Basically banding into groups and guarding against outsiders is the default human behaviour. It just works that way if you do a game theory analysis of our social structures. They usually don’t scale too well, but that’s what we revolved to do as social creatures.
It’s actually and very counter intuitively the Catholic Church that lead us to individualism, common laws, nationalism, even the Industrial Revolution and the scientific method.
It sounds bizarre but if you follow the historical logic, in a round about way it has paved the way for the modern world, which the rest of human civilisation was forced to adopt, either to compete or at gunpoint.
There are few books I read in a year that change the way I look at the world, “The Weirdest people in the world” was definitely one of them.
Yes, good point. But generally, that's not the case. Though what you hint at is a bit more present in all cultures than what we would like to admit.
As far as 'population stability' though ... quite a lot of systems achieved this kind of stability without quite the same kind of social order.
But good point.
You're confusing interpersonal murder with tribal conflict.
Personal murder is tightly controlled now. But this is a fairly recent development. In many periods it was tolerated under various forms, including slavery, blood feud, honour killings, and state-sanctioned murder as punishment, or political process.
It's only in the last few centuries that it's been prohibited, and the prohibition in practice is still partial in many countries. (See also, gun control.)
Tribal murder has been the norm for most of recorded history. There are very, very few periods in very, very few cultures where there was no tribal/factional murder in living memory, and far more where it was an expected occurrence.
And technology has always been close by. Throughout history, most tech has either been invented for military ends or significantly developed and refined for them.
You are juxtaposing murder with killing. Every culture has a strong taboo against unlawful killing, i.e., murder. What counts as murder has changed, but the taboo against murder itself has not.
But doesn't that distinction kind of prove the point? Essentially killing people is fine when society approves and not fine when society doesn't implies that there is no built in norm against killing, its just society's "rules".
> Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures.
Yeah, but almost all cultures consider killing people in war not to be "murder".
In addition to the standard cross-cultural sample, I find the Seshat database useful for checking universals. https://seshat-db.com/sc/scvars/
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.
Sanctioned killing to defend or strengthen the tribe is generally not equated with murder.
> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder'
The quantity of murders in bad neighborhoods tends to contradict. Even seems like a matter of routine wealth acquisition. Yes, society tries to chase the murderers but, I know the figure for France, even only 40% of murders get solved.
We’ve just built a fragile social construct that not everyone recognizes, against murder, among wealthy societies mostly.
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.
Why do you think that we can define personhood without much understanding of the interior life of anything other than humans? Why do you think personhood is even required for murder? Does your pet have enough of whatever makes personhood important to qualify? How about the source of your blt?
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.
I think that 'hom' in homicide stands for homo so killing of (hu)man. I read your comment as lions committing homicide on hyenas which I'm sure you don't mean.
Not on a gazelle. The great apes are at least hominids, so I can't complain about it being called "homicide", but a gazelle gets ... bovicide?
I'm not sure that the word formally exists yet, which implies that if you can popularize it then you could be first to the punch!
"My God, look at the hooves, this was bovicide without any doubt."
An act is composed of object (the act itself), intent (the purpose/end motivating the act/toward which it aims) and circumstances (the context).
Thus, murder is a species of homicide. The specific differences of murder relative to homicide is that it is voluntary, premeditated, and malicious.
The law merely recognizes this distinction. It doesn't construct some convention around homicide. Indeed, law in general is a particular determination of general moral principles within a particular jurisdiction.
So, a lion doesn't commit murder, because a lion's actions are involuntary and neither malicious nor premeditated. Also, while a lion can kill a person or non-person, it is not capable of homicide, because its meaning specifically pertains to the killing of one person by another.
A lions actions are voluntary and premeditated
Plenty disagreements everywhere. Under (usually fake) ideas of not enough resources for everyone, so the strongest must survive.
Nazi planned to exterminate several whole ethnicities. If you think it was (or is) unversally accepted as "Bad" -- think again. Most developed countries had Nazi parties, including US and Canada. Some sympathize today. Several Middle East governments publicly claim that murders/rapes/kidnappings of people from another particular country is just and honorable, and will be rewarded in heavens.
Ancient Spartans (reportedly) killed their own weak children. In order to become a citizen every Spartan must have killed a man (non-citizen). It was considered good and just (by citizens).
In many cultures tribal warfare was paramount, even before states (and some remote tribes practice it even today). It was considered good and just.
And we honor our veterans, and for a good reason. (Without them, we would be captured/killed by other veterans, and honor them anyway). Modern civilizational culture is a thin patina on top of our primal behavior.
I was thinking about your last point about why we honor veterans. In the US it’s not really the case that without them we’d be captured or killed. All our conflicts in the last several generations have been us invading or fighting in foreign lands against forces that were not attacking us. All our modern military personnel are willfully employed and well compensated and given lifetime benefits for that.
The US engages in preventive wars, generally. For example, the wars in Korea and Vietnam were ultimately fought to prevent the USSR from becoming more dominant than the USA and ultimately to prevent it from becoming so strong that in an eventual direct confrontation they would be able to cause a lot of destruction in the US. Iran is similar: they seem to want to prevent Iran from getting nukes which could then be used to destroy Israel, which the US considers its protectorate. But this is a super slippery slope. It’s essentially the same excuse Russia used in Georgia and now Ukraine: they are near neighbors geographically and culturally that must be stopped from joining the enemy alliance in order to prevent the enemy from attacking Russia in turn, which would be much easier should those countries be part of NATO. But where do you stop? Should Cuba be allowed to join Russia military alliance? Should Mexico be allowed to join BRICS? According to US foreign policy, the answer is always no, because of “national security”.
> And we honor our veterans, and for a good reason. (Without them, we would be captured/killed by other veterans, and honor them anyway). Modern civilizational culture is a thin patina on top of our primal behavior.
This is too cynical a take. "Tribal" warfare (what, Africa, North America?) seems to not be anything compared to civilizational war machines. Evidence shows it instead is two groups shooting arrows at eachother or engaging in non-bladed physical combat - think the PRC vs India in the mountains - with maybe one death. Sort of a mutually accepted way to "blow off steam."
Given that these kinds of battles exist throughout history, alongside catastrophic civilizational ethnocides, we can't assume one or the other is our "core primal behavior." Seems we have a tendency to both, depending on circumstance.
What is universally true though, preceding our capability to organize into warbands, is the fact that our evolutionary advantage is derived from our social nature. We rule the planet because we're so social we're the only species that invented language so as to communicate very complex topics. So in terms of "natural order" for humans, and adaptive behavior, it clearly is cooperation.
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.
This is one theory for crime. You could think of crime as a high variance high risk strategy to improve mating status. You might then expect most criminals to be young men, and for the straight crime rate to be higher than the gay crime rate. And indeed both of these are true.
Well now you are talking about humans and human females don't actually only mate with a small minority of high status males.
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.
>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.
We argue over it all the time by disagreeing on what counts as "murder." Taking lives in war? Not murder. Taking civilian lives in war? Well the enemy often uses civilians as cover, what else can one do? The state takes someone's life? Not murder, just the cost of civil society. Abortion? Murder, obviously. Bombing an abortion clinic? Not murder, because killing killers in God's name is justified.
So what even is "murder?" It isn't simply the taking of a human life. It isn't even the taking of an innocent human life. It isn't even the taking of a human life with premeditation. Murder is an arbitrary line societies draw between the killing they find useful and the killing they don't. It's a legal and moral fiction.
I mean, the United States practically murdered an entire continent of civilizations and cultures and the only people who even care are the descendants of the few Natives we missed. How have we paid for that long term? We're a goddamn global hegemon and nuclear superpower that threatens to annihilate civilizations just for shits and giggles. Murder seems to be working out pretty well for us.
Murder is a synonym for kill but you can differentiate between them to make a point that one particular instance of such a caused-death is worse. Is more reprehensible.
The semantics of the word are as fluid as the opinions of those who you are trying to explain the situation to, using such distinctions.
If you think the death was wrong, it is a murder. If you think the death was right, it was a murder, killing, assassination, or any such word. Language is obviously not as black and white as the example I gave, but the point stands.
I agree with your definition but think it’s too narrow, and thus missing the point of the original argument. I don’t agree with lo_zamoysk‘s original point. I think lions CAN murder. I think when they commit cannibalism it’s only when they murder other lions. All other deaths lions cause, lion or other animal, are killings (maybe murder maybe not). But when Lion A kills and eats Lion B, Lion A would have much preferred to get food another way. It’s a lot more likely Lion A is motivated by something other than hunger, like so many of Lion A’s - or even any Lion’s - kills are.
Motivations are required for murder. The word “murder” ascribes motivation to a killing.
> 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.
If anything, I'd say plants do it more. Everything in the garden is trying to kill everything else.
Sometimes they do it in their own species, but much more commonly they do it across species. Eucalyptus will kill all but eucalyptus. Redwood trees will form networks and help each other; even an albino redwood tree (no chlorophyll https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/white-wond...) can survive.
A plant that killed all offshoots of itself would not survive. But plants much more often make perfect genetic copies than animals do, so the selfish gene can explain this behavior
Important to remember that we as humans no longer compete for resources.
We have more than enough resources to go around for 10 billion people.
The limiting factor is in intelligence and dexterity. In other words, we get richer when we are more.
We very much do compete for resources. People die of famine, thirst, exposure, and other lack-of-resources-related causes every day. That we could theoretically feed everyone doesn't matter when people compete for more than their fair share.
These are distribution problems. Usually intentional.
There is enough food to feed everybody.
Emm, what? You are aware of all the wars going on right now?
Yes and? They are not about natural resources.
Literally about land, oil, rare earth minerals…
You can claim that and it's a comfortable thing to believe but that does not make it true.
If you want to convince somebody who actually seeks truth, you have to make an argument how any country who has started a war recently has had a net economic profit.
Except in this instance the conflict erupted after the population size was reduced due to disease so it's not entirely clear this was caused by the scarcity of resources. Nor is it clear what selective advantage mutually destructive wars would have assuming plenty of resources. The researchers posit group relational dynamics being the primary factor.
Scarcity of resources … what if maybe the disease made less “resources” available to these chimpanzees?
orangutans deal with similar and are notorious for being peaceful
orangutans murder eachother too sometimes. Their hand grip is enough to crush another's skull, and occasionally they do so.
> When competing for resources, killing your neighbour frees up resources, which you can take
I don't think it's that straightforward. War is usually extremely wasteful for all involved, even the victor. Plus it puts the whole group at risk, if it spirals out of control.
Yeah, mycorrhizal fungi, the gut microbiome, lichen, pet dogs, etc. Nature is completely brimming with examples of cooperation. It seems to me that more often than not, teaming up with organisms around you will unlock the ability to use more resources you would otherwise have access to. I would guess that this strategy is much more generative than attacking your neighbors and thereby risk your own security
We could hardly eat a fraction of what we eat today if we hadn't teamed up with microbes.
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> primatologist
sometimes I feel like that at work
Back in the old days people were much more unabashed about such things. What's the purpose of your very small collection of city states? Obviously to expand, and smash any neighboring states. If you succeed, kill all the men and take their women as slaves. This was much of civilization for a long time.
Tja, IAMNAH, but my impression is that there is much more diversity to history than that. Not all groups attempted to expand, and among those who did there are many who swallowed up close by groups without violence (rather through 'cultural victory' so to say). It might even be the norm historically.
I’m trying to find the source, but I remember a primatologist claiming that humans and chimpanzees are the only two species that embark on genocide. Not being satisfied with simply defeating the enemy, but actively hunting them down to ensure they can’t harm you again. In other words, precluding retreat. (Which creates its own game-theoretical backlash: never retreat.)
Evidence is limited but orcas might also do that to great white sharks. The orcas seem to sometimes work together to exterminate sharks from an area in a way that goes beyond just hunting them for food.
Lions and Hyanas are well known for trying to exterminate each other's cubs (they rarely eat the carcases). Adults mostly avoid fighting each other as its too risky.
I think the difference is extermination from an area versus exterminating a line. Humans and chimpanzees will exceed their territory to eradicate foes. That, per this primatologist, is a unique adaptation.
Killing off another species isn't that much like genocide, which involves killing off a rival genetic line of the same species, but orcas do that too: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29559642/
I don't think this falls under definition of genocide
> we suggest that infanticide is a sexually selected behaviour in killer whales that could provide subsequent mating opportunities for the infanticidal male and thereby provide inclusive fitness benefits for his mother.
I can see gene fitness benefit but mating opportunities, how?
"hey, me and maman uh killed your baby, wanna pump out a replacement real quick?"
It's really common.
In species where a prominent male has a harem of multiple females. This usually involves killing not only rival males, but all of their offspring too. Here's a Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide_(zoology)
In species which keep territories, animals will kill rivals of the same species, but because it's not targeted it's not genocidal, unless the species eusocial, in which case it can result in massive genocidal wars, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=War_in_ants
> usually involves killing not only rival males, but all of their offspring too
I think the distinction is between killing a line and killing a tribe. But granted, that’s valid.
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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?
> a respiratory epidemic that killed 25 chimps naturally quickly, one would imagine that would have quite a societal destabilizing impact?
there were several seemingly destabilizing factors, sort of a perfect storm, each contributing to further disconnect and polarization.
the group grew too large (and displaced other groups), but then ended competing for the best food among themselves, and having trouble socializing and bonding in such a large group.
subgroups forming, first fluid but eventually creating a split
loss of older alpha males exacerbating competition between males
loss of the few individuals that still maintained some relationship with the other group (the last one doing so actually died in that epidemic while the split was already well underway)
it is indeed an amazing read. my take away is that the root cause was mainly the group becoming too large, this affected socialization and cohesion, and thus the group was unable to cope with everything that came after.
Makes me wonder if civil war is more common for larger countries. Reminds me of the phenomenon where Latin American countries pretty much all broke up after independence from Spain.
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.
Just like in human analyses of geopolitical situations, the explanations that rely on broad abstractions of human nature or resource competition and paint a teleological narrative always end up breaking down when you do a deep dive into the history and specific circumstances. When you get into the nitty gritty of every unique geopolitical situation it's actually much more difficult to pull out a generalizable lesson imo. At some point we have to accept that we can't cross the same river twice
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.
What they don't tell here, but a german researcher told yesterday on radio, was that the initial conflict arose in the 90ies, when one large group of Ngogo chimpanzees raided a nearby group and killed all males. Thus they came later to that insanely large number of 200 members, which a decade later lead to this conflict with the two groups already seperated. Similar to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War observed by Jane Godall.
Also missing is the Killer Ape theory of the sixties which led to the research that chimpanzees have much higher lethal conflict numbers than humans.
Also, this Ngogo group is highly researched, and many many films where made about them.
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.
> We can't overcome the force of game theory
Game theory isn't a force. It's just one way of modeling behavior through one sense of rationality, and it rarely maps neatly onto actual human behavior.
It may be easier to think of evolution as the force, and game theory strongly influencing the fitness test. Those who play the games of mating and predator/prey more optimally reproduce more. We descend from billions of generations of the winners.
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.
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.
BBC Dynasties https://youtu.be/2Co_hmLenD8
> 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) 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 (isolating us in separate groups) would make the split complete enough that we would decisively start butchering each other.
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Anyone read Goliath's Curse? The author (Kemp) is extremely opposed to the more Pinker-ish idea that humans in their natural consition led lives that were nasty, short, and brutal; dismissing this sort of thing as overblown.
Kemp had the very anarchist friendly theory that it's states (Goliaths) and / or the conditions that lead to them that lead to violence.
His evidence is most convincing when it's looking at the paleolithic, as h sapiens made its way out of Africa ... but maybe this is not a natural state as they had not yet reached any population limits so migration was always an alternative to conflict?
So wait - after a respiratory virus, let's call it SARS-C, that killed > 10% (25/200 = 12.5%) of their population, they split into two major groups that are now at each other's throats, when before they had a generally-ok alliance / relationship?
Where have I seen this before.. Think.. Think..
No, the outright political warfare in the US you are alluding to began much earlier than 2020. Things were getting quite ulhealthy already back in 2015/2016, probably even earlier. The "black swan" for this deep division was (I believe) not the epidemic, but the proliferation of the smartphone and social media, and the earlier transitioning of traditional news to infotainment format.
I'd attribute it to 2008 financial collapse, and in general, the pressure put on the middle class that began a decade earlier.
And I genuinely believe blaming things on social media and news is just a diversion so we wouldn't look at the main issue.
Earlier than that, this brand of social/economic/racial/sexual/etc aggrievement and reactionary politics was bred via 80s-90s AM talk radio.
The talking points that were ascendent in the Tea Party era to 2016, and are still ascendent today, were honed at that time in that sphere. Limbaugh said words 30-40 years ago that breathed life into a reactionary movement 20 years later and shaped its theory.
You can keep following the thread back, but I think this form of weaponized aggrievement took its shape at that time, its literal memes were potent and virulent back then, they just needed the right environment to really spread.
I always viewed social media as a catalyst, not the main cause. We've always have this at smaller scales / more local scales, throughout the human history. Social media just lets bob meet alice in a virtual plane, while they couldn't meet and share ideas before. But the ideas, even if reinforced by tech, were always there.
2008 was the big one, but i really think the ball started rolling after 9/11...
Really though it all started with the federalist papers.
As this article shows, it already started in the chimp-human common ancestor.
Knowing what we know now, imagine how much it would have accelerated back then if the elites hadn’t been able to smother out the Occupy movement. Wild to think about
I mean, it's understandable; having to endure a lockdown _with_ Doordash was really rough on our civilization.
Ya, imagine not being able to pay for the doordash because your job was nonessential. Real rough indeed being hungry.
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
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.
Was the fruit tree important for its fruit? Surely there are other fruit sources, no?
It's a forest, not an orchard, and most species fruit only once a year. The most important is the strangler fig tree as it produces fruit multiple times a year.
A clear demonstration of the value of knowledge.
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.
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...
Funny how many people presume collective conflicts and violence are uniquely a human thing. Chimpanzees, lions, and wolves are some of the species where this kind of behavior is best known and documented.
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.
I think the novelty here is that this was the same group which underwent a schism of sorts, and over the course of relatively few years became two completely separate groups antagonistic to each other.
edit: I'm rate-limited, so here's my answer to your comment of:
> I remember watching a nature documentary many years ago with exactly that scenario. The original group killed all the splitters.
Yeah, you're right. You probably remember this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
It does seem like a very similar scenario, so now I'm confused.
I remember watching a nature documentary many years ago with exactly that scenario. The original group killed all the splitters.
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 escalator in 2015, back then everyone thought it was hilarious!
Am reading Sapiens now, missed it the first time around. Incredible book. The point it makes isn't the killing among chimps being surprising. It is not relative non killing among humans- current day events notwithstanding. Contra the BBC, various human storytelling manifestations- religion/culture/etc- make large scale coordinated peaceful actions possible.
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.
Are you saying this was a case of top-whistling?
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.
Say that we, primates, have evolved some sort of social structure that values and depends on ‘us’, and antagonises ‘others’.
That would explain that sort of behaviour as well as our human shenanigans (country/religion/“race”/politics/football team/etc).
Perhaps some groups are biased towards ‘us’ (i.e. more accepting), and other groups are biased towards ‘other’ (i.e. more hostile).
The death of a few key individuals can absolutely remove all the commonality between two groups. Seems to have happened with those chimpanzees, and happens all the time in human groups.
It is sad though that this is happening, on top of all the shit that is going on.
> 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
It's probably all about genes: my genes say I have to kill you now because you aren't spreading my genes. This might be a component of human ethnic violence, but not a strong one, since we can think thoughts, such as that would be a shitty thing to do.
yeah but some people still think "imagine" is profound and real
> 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.
Why is it weird? Religion, ethnicity and political beliefs are argued all the time, even here on HN, as the reason for why shit happens.
Also, what is a "blood feud" in the primates? Chimps seeking revenge for the murder of another Chimp? Why was the first Chimp killed then? I think "blood feud" is a good start, but why? The paper sort of explores possible reasons.
> 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.
I don't know what you mean, the "noble savage" is a discredited racist trope. Chagnon is worth considering but surely you're aware of the academic criticism of his work and methods? It wasn't because of the "noble savage", that would be a lazy dismissal of the criticism. He didn't have the final word on the topic.
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.
It's refuted by the Buddhist nationalists killing Rohingya Muslims. Not sure about the concept of evidence. For best epistemology you'd have to say "if this was false, we'd see evidence X, and we don't, or evidence Y, and we don't see that either, and nobody's thought of what evidence Z might be, so here we are, it seems true so far."
Unless you think that Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, Daoism, or the many millions of polytheistic cults are not man made religions, then you are completely wrong. Wars and atrocities have been fought using every religion and ideology in history as a pretext.
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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.
Just like kids on a playground; only more brutal. Thank you, ancient chimp brain.
"The third factor was the deaths of 25 chimpanzees, including four adult males and 10 adult females, as a result of a respiratory epidemic, in 2017, a year before the final separation. One of the adult males who died was "among the last individuals to connect the groups", the research paper said."
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There's a theory that humans (and likely chimps as well) have a cognitive upper limit to the number of stable relationships they can maintain (i.e. Dunbar's number[1]). Also, there is the idea that most people have nowhere near that many relationships, but some people are super connectors. They know everyone in the community and tie it together, even if the average member of the community doesn't know most other people in it.
It almost sounds like, before the conflict, the tribe was at or a little beyond their "Dunbar's number"[1] and then several of their super-connectors died. Suddenly the community, despite its losses, was too big and not connected enough to remain stable. Minor conflicts arose, individuals started choosing sides, and there wasn't anyone with connections to both sides able to bridge the gap and calm things down.
I'm not a sociologist/anthropologist/etc., so I'm probably woefully misinformed and spewing nonsense here. I'd love to hear what someone up to date on this stuff thinks actually happened.
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[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
we can send them some of that vim donation money
Can we bet on this yet?
do they wear red and blue?
> ”Chimpanzees are “very territorial", and have "hostile interactions with those from other groups"”
So just like humans, then.
"give a man a chimpanzee and he ll put it in a cage and feed bananas for 8 years and give a chimpanzee a man and he ll go to civil war for 8 years"
> If chimpanzees - one of the species closest to humans genetically
People seem to talk a lot about chimpanzees and their closeness to humans, and comparative behavior, but a lot less is said about the other closest species, the bonobo monkey.
Their society is very peaceful and things like infanticide, a popular pastime in chimpanzee society, is absent among bonobos.
The most notable trait of bonobos is that everyone has sex with every one else, constantly, (almost) regardless of relation, gender or age.
You'd think humans could learn much from such a peaceful species, but most people don't even know they exist.
We really got Planet of the Apes before GTA VI
I find it interesting that the BBC published this at a time they are already under heavy criticism for their coverage of the war in the Middle East (where they didn’t blink at Trump’s genocidal threats and published an article claiming that Iranians wanted to be nuked).
Now we’re saying that war is just natural. It must be a coincidence.
I wonder if there is a spill over effect to other species/ ecosystems
I thought the general premise is that humans can't form social groups bigger than around ~200. Which scans for me personally, its a struggle to maintain so many relationships. At which point group dynamics break down and factions begin to form. We have mental tech to try to minimise these issues, like nationalism or identity politics. We back these through cultural expression like dress, language, writing, the printing press, radio or the internet today.
Personally I feel like the effects of counter-culture are understated in humanity because I think it might drive a lot of human behaviour and its a natural outcome when a grouping grows beyond people's ability to maintain it. Counter-culture also offers a solid explanation for human insanity such as anti-vax which imho makes much more sense couched as:
"I hate that guy and that guy is keen on getting vaccinated, so fuck vaccinations, they're awful".
I would imagine one could find similar outcomes as this study of chimps, in human groupings too, albeit such experimentation would be unethical. Which is why I imagine it will eventually become a reality show someday: Lets play 400 friends or 200 enemies! Day 4: lets reduce the available food by 50% and see what happens... etc, etc.
That's absolutely bananas!
fascinating. so if humans are more like chimpanzees than not, then we are a group based animal that distrusts/fears other groups unless some strong leaders are able to bridge the gap? its an over simplification but then you have to ask, what defines a group? language? location? appearance? religion? wrt politicians, their job should be (amongst other things), bridging gaps between groups, instead of what we see going on in the world now.
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.
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.
To be clear, sapiens didn’t descend from neanderthals or Denisovans, our species lived alongside those and interbred with them. The common ancestor of sapiens and neanderthals was probably around 500,000 years, probably heidelbergensis. So half a million years is “short” but also still Homo, and something you would almost definitely identify closer to human than ape.
Shared social structures and behaviors can last through much longer periods of time than 8 million years. For example take bees and ants sharing a common ancestor in the 100 of millions of years age.
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.
I don’t consider myself politically correct but this headline is outright racist