Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 308 posts

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

#281

Post by hunterpayne »

komali2 wrote: post #192
deepsun wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty disagreements everywhere. Under (usually fake) ideas of not enough resources for everyone, so the strongest must survive. Nazi planned to exterminate several whole ethnicities. If you think it was (or is) unversally accepted as "Bad" -- think again. Most developed countries had Nazi parties, including US and Canada. Some sympathize today. Several Middle East governments publicly claim that murders/rapes/kidnap…

> And we honor our veterans, and for a good reason. (Without them, we would be captured/killed by other veterans, and honor them anyway). Modern civilizational culture is a thin patina on top of our primal behavior. This is too cynical a take. "Tribal" warfare (what, Africa, North America?) seems to not be anything compared to civilizational war machines. Evidence shows it instead is two groups shooting arrows at eac…

Evidence doesn't support your conclusion. Try reading something from Steven Pinker on this topic. Your chance of dying violently in such tribal societies is easily 10x (or more) higher than in modern society.

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

#282

Post by hunterpayne »

krapp wrote: post #83
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…

[flagged]

"I mean, the United States practically murdered an entire continent of civilizations and cultures"

You realize that this is largely propaganda and doesn't honestly or accurately describe the actual history right? If a history teacher taught you this, you deserve to get a refund. The actual history is a lot more complex, subtle, nuanced, and driven by biology and trade more than warfare. Most of the deaths were caused by disease and trade drove the warfare in most cases. Also, the warfare was rarely strictly along ethic lines but it was at times.

Perhaps you are thinking of the Spanish or something...

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

#283

Post by acdha »

hunterpayne wrote: post #282
krapp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

"I mean, the United States practically murdered an entire continent of civilizations and cultures" You realize that this is largely propaganda and doesn't honestly or accurately describe the actual history right? If a history teacher taught you this, you deserve to get a refund. The actual history is a lot more complex, subtle, nuanced, and driven by biology and trade more than warfare. Most of the deaths were caused…

[flagged]

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

#284

Post by hunterpayne »

adsweedler wrote: post #185
krapp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Murder is a synonym for kill but you can differentiate between them to make a point that one particular instance of such a caused-death is worse. Is more reprehensible. The semantics of the word are as fluid as the opinions of those who you are trying to explain the situation to, using such distinctions. If you think the death was wrong, it is a murder. If you think the death was right, it was a murder, killing, assa…

Murder is a hyponym of kill, not a synonym. The inverse is that kill is a hypernym of murder.

PS I think I got that right, it could be the reverse.

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

#285

Post by bawolff »

bjourne wrote: post #280
Amezarak wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

No. What we are saying is that murder is a universal taboo. That the "arbitrary rules" of every social group on earth regulate killing demonstrates exactly that. It is precisely these rules that demonstrate universality. Some societies regulate what you can eat - halal/kosher. Most don't. Thus, there is no universal taboo against "unlawful eating".

> Thus, there is no universal taboo against "unlawful eating".

That's probably a poor choice of example given cannabilism is pretty uniformly condemned.

Even ignoring that, pretty much every society regulates food. The health inspector shutting down resturants is just as much of a regulation as religious rules like kosher & halal (and there is some reason to suspect that the original goal of those rules were at least partially health related and made a lot more practical sense with the technology available 2000 years ago)

Nonetheless, ignoring all that, i still think any self-referential taboo applies in all circumstances, and thus is kind of pointless to discuss.

E.g.

All societies regulate unlawful insider trading. Societies where all insider trading is lawful are still vaccously regulating unlawful insider trading.

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

#286

Post by seer »

constantius wrote: post #268
seer wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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?

Capital in the 21 century, how to win and influence people, Sidhartha, meditations by Marcus Aurelius, the mars trilogy, the nurture revolution.

These are off the top of my head.

The Catholic Church thing - yea that was quite unexpected for me, and apparently accidental for the church too - the basic premise was - they banned cousin marriage, and heavily enforced it throughout all of society - kings to peasants - this drove people to move around and settle outside of their home towns, driving up individualism and just changing the way our brains work on a neurological level - we have always been a close nit kin social structure animals.

The e book explains it quite well with tons of historical data, neuroscience, comparisons with different countries, continents and social structures.

It got me to “understand” India on a much deeper level since I moved here from Europe, and not get pissed off at people for “not thinking things through”. But also appreciate how small and consistent things can drive profound changes. Also how did china/ussr speed run the Industrial Revolution so quickly - spoiler alert - they copied the same “ban cousin marriage” thing

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

#287

Post by bluegatty »

hellojimbo wrote: post #110
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…

How can it be that groups pay for it long term when many of the successful apex predators exhibit interspecies murder and territorialism. Just to use your own example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapogo_lion_coalition

Totalitarianism is not 'murder', it's 'power'.

On an individual level, even in authoritarian situations murder is still immoral and illegal.

Even within the context of power it's still nominally immoral. Stalin did not kill people, he tortured them until they 'admitted their crimes'. That Stalin needed to present the blood-stained admission is very telling.

Even Bloody Mary couldn't just kill however, there had to be some kind of legitimate premise. Heretics, threats etc.. It's how QE1 survived.

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

#288

Post by inglor_cz »

hunterpayne wrote: post #279
inglor_cz wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice, social groups (from tribes to big nations) tend to treat murder very differently from killing in war. Sufficiently long term, everyone is dead, and I am not sure if we can tell those long-term effects that you foretell from random chance. The Roman Empire is very dead, but so is the Carthaginian one. Nevertheless, a lot survives from the Roman Empire: basics of law, their alphabet, descendant languages a…

Plenty of people know who Hannibal Barca was. But sure, they probably don't know anything else about Carthage. Fun fact, the main lesson from that war on the Carthaginian side was that you never let the merchants control the state in a time of war. There was a point where Hannibal was one siege away from erasing Rome from the history books and the leaders in Carthage called him back because sieges are expensive. This…

I think most people associate the name Hannibal with Silence of the Lambs, maybe 10-15 per cent will know that it was some ancient warrior, perhaps 5 per cent know that it was a Carthaginian general and 2 per cent will know that his surname was Barca. Let's not kid ourselves about actual knowledge of history...

My point wasn't about Hannibal, though. Carthage died in a very different way from Rome: none of its institutions or cultural developments survived, while we still encounter plenty of obviously Roman things in everyday life, starting with the letters we use and names of the months and ending with Latin names for diseases and animals. Pretty much the only thing that survives from Carthage is the faint memory of Hannibal and, for military history buffs, Cannae. Otherwise, the culture has been erased from this world.

The story of the callback is interesting and reminds me of the Mongols suddenly withdrawing from Europe in order to elect the new Khan.

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

#289

Post by poulpy123 »

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?

Not only strong factors but some of the main human relational dynamics. Of the three only ethnicity goes a bit being pure relational

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

#290

Post by poulpy123 »

mjanx123 wrote: post #168
O5vYtytb wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really though it all started with the federalist papers.

As this article shows, it already started in the chimp-human common ancestor.

Nope it all started with LUCA
Post reply on HN