Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
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Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#2They've been watching us and what we do to each other.
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#3They'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.
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#4If 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.
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#5I 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.
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#6Here 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?
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#7They've been watching us and what we do to each other.
That's a bit conceited.
Animals have inner lives as well. They have their own thoughts and feelings. And sometimes those feelings are anger and their thought is to kick the shit out of those assholes over there.
Fuck man, my cats occasionally scrap with each other. I know it's not anything they've learned from the people in my house because we don't go full Wrestlemania on each other.
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#8Here is the paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4944 - it's interesting. I noticed there was a respiratory epidemic that killed 25 chimps naturally quickly, one would imagine that would have quite a societal destabilizing impact?
My initial instinct is that they were just reestablishing social order among the group after such a dramatic event.
Edit : I just read the paper and the discussion does a good job at laying out the entire landscape that contributed to the disruption. Pretty fascinating but also totally explainable due to the circumstances explained, which in and of itself is wildly fascinating!
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#9Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#10I 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 tr…
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