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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

#261

Post by somenameforme »

Sharlin wrote: post #127
ozim wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dying in your prime reproductive age! I guess dying because you think you’re going to impress’s a mate and stay alive is quite common.

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.

Most of every species gets pretty insane over mates. Evolution is about spreading your genes, not about prolonging your life. Obviously the latter is often useful to achieve the former, but not always. There are even numerous examples, such as black widows and bees, where death is even a part of procreation.

And I think the exceptions are often found to not really be exceptions. For instance chimps were once seen and framed, most famously by Jane Goodall, as peaceful animals who only engaged in violence when pushed to the extreme by some outside force. And in looking up info about bonobos I'm somewhat unsurprised to find that recent observations [1] are rather contrary to their reputation as the same sort of peaceful kumbaya type.

[1] - https://www.science.org/content/article/bonobos-hippie-chimp...

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

#262

Post by Amezarak »

bjourne wrote: post #250
bawolff wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair, it doesn't really seem worth mentioning to say humans are inherently biased against murder, which we then agree is a killing against that society's norms. Because the definitions of "murder" vary so hugely, you're essentially just saying "there is a taboo against breaking the arbitrary rules of your social group."

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

#263

Post by griffzhowl »

dumah wrote: post #253
griffzhowl wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points, but it any case, it's true that chimps in general treat group members very differently to outsiders isn't it? Those behaviours that de Waal mentions seem probably directed towards group members. Are there any documented chimp populations where chimps aren't violently aggressive towards members of other groups? I remember reading, not sure if it's from de Waal, about chimp "raiding parties", where groups…

How are resource and territorial pressures not environmental pressures?

They are. I just used different words to refer to the same idea

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

#264

Post by sjducb »

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.

Normally there are more than 2 actors, which changes the reward structure.

X spends resources to kill Y. This benefits X because X doesn’t have to compete with Y anymore.

However Z also gets the benefits because they don’t have to compete with Y either. In addition Z hasn’t spent any resources to eliminate Y so Z wins. The stable equilibrium is 100% strategy Z.

Most animals will use violence in self defence, or when fighting over a specific resource. They don’t kill to remove competition.

Chimps and humans are an exception to this. Likely it’s because the coalitional nature of human and chimp violence reduces the cost of inflicting the violence to near zero, and the costs are spread across the group, so it’s worth doing.

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

#265

Post by [deleted] »

sjducb wrote: post #264
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.

Normally there are more than 2 actors, which changes the reward structure. X spends resources to kill Y. This benefits X because X doesn’t have to compete with Y anymore. However Z also gets the benefits because they don’t have to compete with Y either. In addition Z hasn’t spent any resources to eliminate Y so Z wins. The stable equilibrium is 100% strategy Z. Most animals will use violence in self defence, or when…

[deleted]

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

#266

Post by bit-anarchist »

throw44i3je wrote: post #258
bit-anarchist wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty strong statement. You know the saying: strong statements require equally strong evidence.

What happened to African cultures? Who destroyed it?

Why should I be answering that question? If you have an explanation for the above then state it clearly, rather than hope for others to argue in your stead.

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

#267

Post by Andrex »

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…

I mean, kill everyone else and you can be sure your genes are the only one propagating. Makes sense to me.

However there must have been some opposite instinct that prevented monkeys from just wiping themselves out. I hope so, for our sake.

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

#268

Post by constantius »

seer wrote: post #181
toivo wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among the Yanomami (per Napoleon Chagnon), killing outsiders was not “murder,” it raised status. Men who killed had more wives. Violence was cyclical and regulated, not collapse. Humans are not universally anti-killing, mainly in-group. That pressure kept population density low and groups mobile. Less surplus, less accumulation, weaker incentives for technological scaling. Over ~10,000+ years this maintained a relati…

“The weirdest people in the world” - has a very good roots cause analysis of all this. Basically banding into groups and guarding against outsiders is the default human behaviour. It just works that way if you do a game theory analysis of our social structures. They usually don’t scale too well, but that’s what we revolved to do as social creatures. It’s actually and very counter intuitively the Catholic Church that…

Interesting claim, though not enough detail to disagree with constructively. I'd agree that the Catholic Church had a big influence on our history of course, though among the things you mention I would only count common laws as being intertwined with Church history, everything else pre-dating it or being independent of it in my understanding.

I'll have a look at that book however: what were the other books?

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

#269

Post by dboreham »

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…

> an evolved trait

This is obviously not correct. There's no way to encode "you must hate and kill the tribe next door" into DNA. Clearly this behavior is emergent in the population. Perhaps what's an evolved trait is "have neurons with some mixture of properties, and response to hormones that tends to produce angry homicidal assholes in the presence of competition for resources".

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

#270

Post by andrewflnr »

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?

Factors in. Not identical to. They might not have phrased that very well, but the point is that you don't need any relationship much more complex than personal acquaintance to fuel this kind of violence.
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