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

291–300 of 308 posts

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

#291

Post by bjourne »

bawolff wrote: post #285
bjourne wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you are being deliberately obtuse here. Or maybe you are just dumb? Most societies have no concept of trading based on private knowledge and certainly no taboo against that activity. Hence, there is no universality. Your poor attempts at coming up with counterexamples proves my point.

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

#292

Post by graemep »

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…

I will agree with some of those - although i would say Christianity rather than the Catholic Church specifically for most of it.

The Catholic Church did ban marrying first cousins and some other relatives (there is a complicated rule) which broke up clans. It also deserves a lot of credit for the scientific method, although that was not a deliberate strategy - it just emerged from theology and lots of educated people within in.

On laws and nationalism, there were many states and legal systems that predate it. Rome or Athens in Europe, empires, kingdoms, even a republic or two elsewhere. Legal systems go back to Hammurabi. Breaking up clans (requiring better laws) and distinguishing between secular and religious laws are something it deserves credit for.

I am puzzled by what the Church contributed to the Industrial Revolution though.

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

#293

Post by krapp »

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…

Look up Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act[0], manifest destiny[1] and the American Indian Wars[2]. The Trail of Tears[3]. Here's a whole Wikipedia list for massacres of native Americans[4]. Here's one for native American genocide[5]. The United States had a policy of extermination towards native peoples. Read about the history of boarding schools for native Americans[6]. This isn't propaganda, it's fact.

The narrative you're trying to present here, where the relationship between settlers and natives was mostly peaceful and amicable, is whitewashing history. Sometimes it was, but presenting the exceptions as if they were the rule is deceptive. It's the same kind of gross distortion that led to the "happy slave" narrative, that American slaves for the most part enjoyed slavery because some of them got to live in houses and had families and apparently amicable relationships with their masters. And there were plenty of Nazis who had Jewish friends - Hitler's personal chauffeur was Jewish. But the Holocaust still happened.

Most natives didn't give up their lands willingly, nor did they volunteer for the reservations or boarding schools (which were themselves part of a system of forced cultural assimilation and genocide[7]) because they agreed that the white man's God had granted their lands to them. And even if it is true that disease killed many (sometimes intentionally, as with the case of smallpox blankets) the remainder were still victims of genocide.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Removal_Act

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny

[2]https://www.history.com/articles/native-americans-genocide-u...

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears

[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Massacres_of_Native_A...

[5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Native_American_genoc...

[6]https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/a-century...

[7]https://eji.org/news/history-racial-injustice-cultural-genoc...

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

#294

Post by Amezarak »

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".

I struggle to think of a society that didn't have some regulation on what you can eat. They almost all have taboos against various meats especially. Can you give me some examples?

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

#295

Post by adrian_b »

the_af wrote: post #241
adrian_b wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gr…

Smaller groups do not start aggression simultaneously against the entirety of a bigger group.

They seize the opportunity when a smaller group than themselves is separated from the remainder of the big group, and then they overpower the smaller group.

Then they repeat this until they eliminate the bigger group.

My point was that animals understand very well the advantages of belonging to the bigger group at the moment of starting a fight, and they will start the fight only when they estimate that they will win.

The same happens with other social predators. A big group of hyenas will harass or even kill other predators, like leopards or lionesses, which would make them run away when in a small group.

Humans and chimpanzees are probably better at planning a long-term strategy about how to use their advantage in numbers in order to eliminate rivals. Other predators might use their advantage in numbers when an opportunity happens, but they might not perform a surveillance of the actions of a neighbor community, to discover when it becomes possible to use the bulk of their mates against a smaller group of the neighbors that happens to be separated from the others during their foraging activities.

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

#296

Post by bawolff »

bjourne wrote: post #291
bawolff wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think you are being deliberately obtuse here. Or maybe you are just dumb? Most societies have no concept of trading based on private knowledge and certainly no taboo against that activity. Hence, there is no universality. Your poor attempts at coming up with counterexamples proves my point.

> Most societies have no concept of trading based on private knowledge and certainly no taboo against that activity

Yes, obviously. That is my point.

But if you insert the word "unlawful" the statement becomes true, vaccously (in the formal meaning of that word) most of the time.

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

#297

Post by hunterpayne »

krapp wrote: post #293
hunterpayne wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Look up Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act[0], manifest destiny[1] and the American Indian Wars[2]. The Trail of Tears[3]. Here's a whole Wikipedia list for massacres of native Americans[4]. Here's one for native American genocide[5]. The United States had a policy of extermination towards native peoples. Read about the history of boarding schools for native Americans[6]. This isn't propaganda, it's fact. The…

You are doing exactly what you are accusing me of. That is, cherrypicking to support a narrative. Maybe you should learn the entire history of the Seminole instead of just one event. Perhaps you would learn that they were paid by European monarchies to attack settlers in an entirely different country, about 500 miles from their lands. You might also learn that after the Trail of Tears, they moved back to Florida when the reservation system was dismantled (a bit before WWI). You would also learn that they built casinos and are one of the wealthiest groups in the US today. Your narrative comes from communist propaganda and in no way describes the majority of their history. You seek to turn them into children with no agency.

PS Those European countries who paid the Seminole to attack the US, they tried the same thing with about 6 other tribes, all of whom turned them down.

PPS The only event that meets the dictionary definition of a genocide in North America was natives killing natives, so that one tribe could control fur trading around the great lakes region and not have to share with other tribes.

PPPS 90% of natives died due to disease, not warfare. Nothing Europeans could do after setting foot in the New World could have prevented that without modern medicine.

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

#298

Post by larodi »

mariodiana wrote: post #257
larodi wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin Very strong statement given the massive killing of kettle and poultry per second. Also given all the wars including those currently raging - I think is rather untrue. Besides the killing a lion does is not over resources, it’s the resource itself.

Since you're using Biblical language, I just want to point out that you're not Biblically accurate. Murder isn't the original sin.

no for sure its not. its giving birth or rather - conception.

Psalm 51:5 — "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me."

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

#299

Post by vostrocity »

stuxnet79 wrote: post #33
culi wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those of us who are unlikely to make time to watch a 4-part documentary, are there any particular lessons about social/political dynamics that you learned that stuck out to you or felt particularly prescient?

> For those of us who are unlikely to make time to watch a 4-part documentary, are there any particular lessons about social/political dynamics that you learned that stuck out to you or felt particularly prescient? I watched the entire 4-part documentary and loved it. In general the series gives you a raw look into the a-b-c's of primate politics. Chimps just like us and the rest of our ape cousins are preoccupied wi…

As an introvert, I've often how wondered how introversion developed and why it became a helpful adaptation.

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

#300

Post by jbboehr »

larodi wrote: post #298
mariodiana wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you're using Biblical language, I just want to point out that you're not Biblically accurate. Murder isn't the original sin.

no for sure its not. its giving birth or rather - conception. Psalm 51:5 — "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me."

This is a pretty terrible misrepresentation of original sin. I see you managed to copy it straight out of the Wikipedia page and completely ignore the sentence before it:

> In Christian theology, original sin is the condition of sinfulness that all humans share, which they inherit from the the Fall of Adam and Eve. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin

Post reply on HN