Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by the_af » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #207

bluegatty wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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, som…

Good comment! But this left me thinking:

> 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.

In the two Chimpanzee "wars" discussed in Wikipedia (Ngogo and Gombe) it was the smaller group that started the aggression. They were objectively at a disadvantage, but managed to kill or drive off most of the chimps from the larger group. It's as if being focused on aggressive behavior was their advantage.

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

#242

Post by Infinint » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 2:23 PM UTC

atentaten wrote: post #239

>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?

We tend to get a lot of things backwards when considering the hows and whys of behavior. The underlying nature is diffuse and chaotic, hard to describe or point at. These superficial differences are built on top of or used to leverage our inclinations and so provide perfect looking reasons.

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

#243

Post by XorNot » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 2:31 PM UTC

delichon wrote: post #240

XorNot wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The cultural ramifications of choosing one word over another are significant though. "Winner" is a loaded term.

> In evolution the survivors reproduced, and that includes 100% of our ancestors.

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

#244

Post by netcan » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 2:33 PM UTC

Infinint wrote: post #242

atentaten wrote: post #239

>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?

We tend to get a lot of things backwards when considering the hows and whys of behavior. The underlying nature is diffuse and chaotic, hard to describe or point at. These superficial differences are built on top of or used to leverage our inclinations and so provide perfect looking reasons.

True.

That said... the term "underlying nature" may be part of that backwardsness.

We intuitively model human behavior as underlying beliefs and stuff leading to a rationale, leading to behavior. But really, it's often the other way.

There is an underlying behavior, behavioral pattern or whatnot. The rationale, beliefs and suchlike are overlying.

We do know these things exist, but tend to think of them as pathlogies and abhorations... like motivated reasoning. But, conscious reasoning following an intuitively reached conclusion is probably the standard model for human reasoning.

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

#245

Post by Jensson » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 2:48 PM UTC

Sharlin wrote: post #43

londons_explore wrote: post #38

Earlier 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.

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…

> Animals in general avoid violence between conspecifics

That seems to mostly just be true for oppressed species that doesn't already dominate. For example Orcas attack each other when they get into each other territory, as do ants. Humans dominate most land animals today so they probably lost most of that since humans already kill enough that killing each other is no longer a benefit for them.

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

#246

Post by timcobb » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

slfnflctd wrote: post #233

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.

Agreed, hard to imagine a different outcome with the same starting parameters.

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

#247

Post by throwaway27448 » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

delichon wrote: post #108

throwaway27448 wrote: post #85

Earlier 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.

> and game theory strongly influencing the fitness test

Does it? I don't think reproduction is very influenced by game theory.

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

#248

Post by samus » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 3:43 PM UTC

seizethecheese wrote: post #140

bluegatty wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's just the sin with the greatest consequences since it invokes the wrath of the groups the person being killed belonged to. Unlawful killings challenge the authority of those who determine which killings are lawful and which aren't, therefore destabilizing societies that are more complex than a hunter-gatherer group.

However, most religions do more than just declare murder to be a sin. They usually aim to foster bonds between relative strangers as well. And values like the guest-host relationship are held to apply to all humans and even to sentient non-humans.

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

#249

Post by constantius » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 3:44 PM UTC

Epa095 wrote: post #187

everdrive wrote: post #117

Earlier 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.

Going from "I'm not a historian" to "it might even be the norm historically" made me chuckle.

It wasn't the norm historically. Depends on what period of history you're talking about, but indeed not all groups attempted to expand, though it'd be equally true that most of these were because the group was not able to.

In terms of assimilation, it happened often that a cultural victory would still lead to military confrontation (before the fall of the Roman empire, many of their neighbours were, or considered themselves, romanised yet still either fought against Roman expansion or attempted to take territory from them for example). For as long as we have history, all the times I know of where a "group" assimilated into another group willingly, it was because the other group was militarily much more powerful and saw any peace as temporary: for example, Armenian kings giving away their kingdoms to Byzantium, to avoid uphill battles of resistance and to make sure their dynasty remained in power. And those times were very rare in history.

Of course, this might have been more common in pre-history (99% of our existence), but then again we have a lot of evidence to the contrary.

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

#250

Post by bjourne » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 4:07 PM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #150

bjourne wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Read carefully. Neither me nor bluegatty claimed humans were inherently biased against killing. We claimed that humans were inherently biased against murder - and the universal taboo proves our point.