Damn, they've been polarized by social media too? Zuckerberg's greed knows no limits.
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Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
131–140 of 308 posts
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#134The 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…
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.
orangutans deal with similar and are notorious for being peaceful
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#135Anyone 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?
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#136The 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…
> primatologist
sometimes I feel like that at work
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#138I 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…
> 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 succ…
> 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.
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
2008 was the big one, but i really think the ball started rolling after 9/11...
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 disagreem…
> 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.