I blame social networks!
Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
221–230 of 308 posts
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Humans dying to impress a mate are super rare in reality. And even among humans dying to impress ... it is more likely to happen in male only groups where men try to impress and dominate other men.
There's an alternate hypothesis about that which is that a lot of adolescent level risky behavior may actually be a way to weed out psychopaths.
The argument is essentially: how come daring people to do something gross or embarrassing is so common? There's a weird social dynamic in being the one who goes through with it, and it frequently promotes group cohesion.
So maybe the point of it isn't the act or social dominance, but to get people to display normal emotional responses - safe people will be embarrassed, or hesitant or display social support queues or disgust if they have normal emotional processing. The psychopaths? They'll struggle - particularly at that age where the opportunity to learn to blend hasn't had time to develop.
Basically a group of guys egging each other on to do the riskier dive into the pool or something aren't trying to impress a mate, they're actually filtering for people who don't emotionally react correctly to whatever the dare is.
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Technically you're right, because of your use of "only", but it is a fact that a minority of males reproduced, vs a majority of females, with historic ratios of 2:1 to 4:1.
The skew is weaker nowadays, but still more men are childless than women, and it is correlated with wealth to some extent.
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Quite the opposite. In my observations, the time shortly after OWS was a major inflection point.
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Weord position to defend. So: modern wars are not about resources because there's enough food to feed everybody, those wars that are widely understood to be about resources (oil, land) are "distribution problems" and not about resources, and the only way to prove that they are is to show a country-wide economic benefit to the victor directly related to the war...
Confidently dismissing others based on your own weird definitions and shifting goalposts does not make you seem as knowledgeable as you think.
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
We don't descend from winners, we descend from whoever survived and it's not an individual competition.
If the only place a particularly beneficial mutation appears is wiped out by chance volcanic eruption, that's just how it is - the survivors who weren't near the volcano go on to reproduce.
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ok, so what do you think these wars are about?
Ukraine: Personal Grandeur by Mr Putin.
Iran: Security, hate, personal Grandeur
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What is a "Tja, IMANAH"?
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What is a "Tja, IMANAH"?
My guess:
Tja - German for "well".
IMANAH - I am not a historian.
Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
#230> Commenting on the study in Science, he wrote: "Humans must learn from studying the group-based behaviour of other species, both in war and at peace, while remembering that their evolutionary past does not determine their future."
Why not? On what timescale? Rosy amorphous statements like this are borderline triggering for me these days-- why conclude a piece like this with some sort of unsubstantiated wishful thinking Disney ending? We see what we see, and it's been, oh what, a million years since chimps and humans diverged, and humans are melodramatic and vicious as ever. Why, on top of that, are we so hard into drinking our own Kool-Aid?