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Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers

bbc.com

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Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers

#231

Post by xg15 »

OgsyedIE wrote: post #32

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…

Given how easily we can separate people into "ingroups" and "outgroups" and always fall into the same behavioral patterns regarding them, even if the actual markers for the ingroups and outgroups are completely arbitrary, it really seems likely this is biological and not just cultural.

Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers

#232

Post by Epa095 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #229
rcbdev wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a "Tja, IMANAH"?

My guess: Tja - German for "well". IMANAH - I am not a historian.

Yeah, you got it! After 30 years on the internet I should know by now whats understandable for others and what's not (I honestly just realized that English speakers don't say 'tja'), but alas.

Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers

#233

Post by slfnflctd »

timcobb wrote: post #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 think…

Agreed. I came to the conclusion years ago that we are going to keep having the same problems until we engineer our way out of them by altering our biology-- either genetically or with implanted augmentation devices (or both).

I have yet to see a convincing counter argument to this hypothesis.

Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers

#235

Post by jvanderbot »

londons_explore wrote: post #38
OgsyedIE wrote: post #32

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…

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.

There's a simple energy argument for both predation and war. It is energetically cheaper to take than to build. If you can take with low risk, there is no (energetic) reason to not do so.

Collaboration is the exception. That collaboration is everywhere in many forms is a testament to the power of natural selection.

Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers

#236

Post by trollbridge »

OgsyedIE wrote: post #32

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…

Don't ant colonies also go to war? I've seen that happen before and it's quite interesting - I read a theory somewhere that part of the purpose of this was to prevent overpopulation, so in the long run _both_ ant colonies do better since they don't "cooperate" and end up overpopulating.

Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers

#237

Post by lamasery »

Epa095 wrote: post #232
mike_hearn wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess: Tja - German for "well". IMANAH - I am not a historian.

Yeah, you got it! After 30 years on the internet I should know by now whats understandable for others and what's not (I honestly just realized that English speakers don't say 'tja'), but alas.

We have a sound we usually spell “yeah”, which can also be an informal “yes” but can also server roughly the role of a “Well, “. The same spelling is sometimes employed for a cheer that might otherwise be spelled “yay” and sounds very different, though.

I can think of at least one regionalism or dialect that has something that I bet sounds similar to yours, that might even be used the same way yours is: “valley girl”.

The real tell was the spelling. We don’t usually use “T” to harden a phoneme at the start of a word—we do later, though, as in “itch”—and we don’t use “J” that way. “Ch” is probably the closest we’ve got to what you were going for with “j”. If a native English speaker were trying to reproduce the sound you’re going for in text, they’d not have spelled it that way unless trying to make it appear foreign.

Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers

#238

Post by Xiaoher-C »

OgsyedIE wrote: post #32

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…

Worth adding some nuance to the Wrangham framing here — he's not wrong exactly, but de Waal spent decades documenting the flip side: chimps reconcile, console each other, maintain coalitions in ways that don't fit the "demonic males" narrative cleanly. Both are true, and which one you see probably depends a lot on which population you're studying and under what conditions.

Ngogo (which I think this is) is in a fragment under real agricultural pressure. I'd be cautious about drawing evolutionary-psychology conclusions from a group that may be responding to a dramatically compressed territory rather than some baseline ancestral program. Same chimps in intact forest might look quite different.

Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers

#239

Post by atentaten »

>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.

Aren't religion, ethnicity and political beliefs strong factors in human relational dynamics?

Re: Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers

#240

Post by delichon »

XorNot wrote: post #226
delichon wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In evolution the winners are the ones who survive to reproduce, and that includes 100% of our ancestors.
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