I haven't kept up with biology for years and don't know what the current consensus on the topic is but it's interesting to consider if some environments naturally promote the unlucky inhabitants to harm each other.
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.
I remember reading, not sure if it's from de Waal, about chimp "raiding parties", where groups of young males will get excited and loudly vocalise as they gather together and head towards a neighboring territory, but when they get close they all go very silent, and will attack individuals from a neighboring troop if they sufficiently outnumber them. They tend to target the face and genitals when attacking other chimps, a different behaviour to when they're hunting monkeys, for example. I think Wrangham mentions that some chimps will hold the targeted individuals' limbs while others attack.
Aside from the brutality, these behaviours seem too cogently goal-directed and sophisticated to just be responses to environmental pressures. There's some deeper reasons involved, imo, even if the severity of the violence is exacerbated by resource and territorial pressures.
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.
An alternative view is that in groups with alphas that father most offspring, and status is based on the individual's ability to risk death. Genes in an individual of low status are already 'dead' so manufacturing instincts and hormonal responses that increase violence does not have a downside.
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.
I guess dying because you think you’re going to impress’s a mate and stay alive is quite common.
If anything, I'd say plants do it more. Everything in the garden is trying to kill everything else.
A plant that killed all offshoots of itself would not survive. But plants much more often make perfect genetic copies than animals do, so the selfish gene can explain this behavior
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 disagreement there either.
Or put another way - the 'self' can gain advantage with murder, but the group and species probably will pay for it long term.
I wonder if there are just things that species really have to learn over and over, particularly things like 'active deconfliction' etc..
Just to use your own example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapogo_lion_coalition
There are plenty of people who advocate for war and consider it good, and plenty of disagreements over war.
People are usually in agreement that war / killing is bad when other people do it but will find all sorts of ways to justify themselves doing it when it is to their advantage. This isn't really contradictory, from an evolutionary perspective.
(Entailed also by personhood is social nature. So, murdering another person is bad, because it is opposed to the very nature and thus good of the murderer. It's why killing in self-defense and the death penalty for murder are themselves mere killing, but not murder. Justice is served against the injustice of the gravely antisocial.)
From a game theoretic perspective w.r.t. just resources, murder does not generally pay especially given the social nature of a species given how antithetical it is to the social, but even if it does in some constrained sense, there is a greater intangible loss for those with personhood. Speak to almost anyone who has murdered someone. They will tell you that it changes them drastically, and not in a good way.
That's not a given. Look at the Old Testament, it professes that you shall not kill, but is also full of laws that are upheld by death, stories of just killings, etc and the whole thing is written via dictation from a war god.
In cultures where honor is a big thing, it can be seen as just to kill those who bring dishonor or to maintain honor.
In cultures where purity/cleanliness is a big thing, it can be seen as just to kill those who are impure/unclean.
Not as simple as murder bad
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, some eat rabbits and some eat deer, or they kill each other if they want the same food, to eliminate the competition.
They will also attempt to repel outside their territory any predator of the same species with them. They will seldom attempt to actually kill a predator of their own species, but that mainly because this would be risky, as in a fight to death they could be killed themselves, so ritualized harmless fights are preferred.
The difference with some primates like chimpanzees and humans, is that competitors of the same species may be treated as other predators treat only predators from different, weaker species.
The reason might be that when you cooperate within a bigger team, you may have the same advantage against competitors that a stronger predator has against a weaker predator, e.g. a wolf against a fox.
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.
Most other predators do not start wars against their own kind, because in a balanced fight the winner is unpredictable.
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 relatively stable human–environment equilibrium.
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.
Cultures aren’t universal, and neither is your particular religious tradition.
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.
Personal murder is tightly controlled now. But this is a fairly recent development. In many periods it was tolerated under various forms, including slavery, blood feud, honour killings, and state-sanctioned murder as punishment, or political process.
It's only in the last few centuries that it's been prohibited, and the prohibition in practice is still partial in many countries. (See also, gun control.)
Tribal murder has been the norm for most of recorded history. There are very, very few periods in very, very few cultures where there was no tribal/factional murder in living memory, and far more where it was an expected occurrence.
And technology has always been close by. Throughout history, most tech has either been invented for military ends or significantly developed and refined for them.
Lions kill and dont eat children of other lion aliances.
This is not true at all. Not even close. Sneaky backstabbing murder by a group member against another group member in violation of implicit group norms has probably always been "bad", but "go out and murder some random human" was a rite of passage for many cultures, raids against other groups for no reason at all except for fun and maybe women were typical across perhaps the majority of groups for thousands of years, and history is full to the brim of wars prosecuted for no particular reason at all.
This goes well into the historical period and there are doubtless groups today still with the same attitude. Why did the Athenians murder the entire male population of Melos despite their neutrality? Because the strong do what we can while the weak suffer what they must.
You are confusing your modern-day HN-poster social norms with some constant of human nature.
Further, murder may be restricted to the killing of publicly acknowledged members of the public "friend" group, i.e. citizens, while the killing of outsiders living with the "friend" group, like slaves, is considered something else in the law.
When we codify morals as laws, we usually make a heavy and deliberate distinction between private and public, and between citizen and non-citizen. This is probably related to the nature of a social animal.
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 and a certain fame. Quite a lot for famously war-like people.
In comparison, the Carthaginians are gone completely, only fans of history know anything about them. And they are gone because they lost a series of wars all too decisively.
The quantity of murders in bad neighborhoods tends to contradict. Even seems like a matter of routine wealth acquisition. Yes, society tries to chase the murderers but, I know the figure for France, even only 40% of murders get solved.
We’ve just built a fragile social construct that not everyone recognizes, against murder, among wealthy societies mostly.
Numbers 31.17-18
War is termed throughout the bile as being just and necessary.
Philosophically speaking, we define murder as being done for personal selfish reasons; i.e greed, jealously, hatred/anger
Yeah, but almost all cultures consider killing people in war not to be "murder".
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/kidnappings of people from another particular country is just and honorable, and will be rewarded in heavens.
Ancient Spartans (reportedly) killed their own weak children. In order to become a citizen every Spartan must have killed a man (non-citizen). It was considered good and just (by citizens).
In many cultures tribal warfare was paramount, even before states (and some remote tribes practice it even today). It was considered good and just.
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.
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.
We have more than enough resources to go around for 10 billion people.
The limiting factor is in intelligence and dexterity. In other words, we get richer when we are more.
Collaboration is the exception. That collaboration is everywhere in many forms is a testament to the power of natural selection.
I don't think it's that straightforward. War is usually extremely wasteful for all involved, even the victor. Plus it puts the whole group at risk, if it spirals out of control.
We could hardly eat a fraction of what we eat today if we hadn't teamed up with microbes.
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.
sometimes I feel like that at work
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".
In species where a prominent male has a harem of multiple females. This usually involves killing not only rival males, but all of their offspring too. Here's a Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide_(zoology)
In species which keep territories, animals will kill rivals of the same species, but because it's not targeted it's not genocidal, unless the species eusocial, in which case it can result in massive genocidal wars, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=War_in_ants
I think the distinction is between killing a line and killing a tribe. But granted, that’s valid.
However there must have been some opposite instinct that prevented monkeys from just wiping themselves out. I hope so, for our sake.
I noticed there was a respiratory epidemic that killed 25 chimps naturally quickly, one would imagine that would have quite a societal destabilizing impact?
there were several seemingly destabilizing factors, sort of a perfect storm, each contributing to further disconnect and polarization.
the group grew too large (and displaced other groups), but then ended competing for the best food among themselves, and having trouble socializing and bonding in such a large group.
subgroups forming, first fluid but eventually creating a split
loss of older alpha males exacerbating competition between males
loss of the few individuals that still maintained some relationship with the other group (the last one doing so actually died in that epidemic while the split was already well underway)
it is indeed an amazing read. my take away is that the root cause was mainly the group becoming too large, this affected socialization and cohesion, and thus the group was unable to cope with everything that came after.
Edit : I just read the paper and the discussion does a good job at laying out the entire landscape that contributed to the disruption. Pretty fascinating but also totally explainable due to the circumstances explained, which in and of itself is wildly fascinating!
To the extent that they have good memory, they live in a world of finite resources, and their behavior was shaped by the forces of game theory as applied to tribes, this is more or less inevitable. You can read that as defeatism or just math. We can't overcome the force of game theory, but we can make it work for us by making our transactions increasingly transparent and repeatable, so that cooperation is more successful than defection.
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.
Does it? I don't think reproduction is very influenced by game theory.
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.
I remember the time, in some film I watched, researchers intervened to save penguins trapped in a crater. A holy moment that was.
Note that the conclusions of the paper, while acknowledging the problem of access to resources, are different. They also do not conclude that this is "more or less inevitable":
> The lethal aggression that followed the fission at Ngogo informs models of intergroup conflict. All observed attacks were initiated by the numerically smaller Western group, contradicting simple imbalance-of-power models that predict an advantage for larger groups. Persistent offensive success by Western males suggests that cohesion supported by enduring relationships can outweigh numeric disadvantage. Our observations are also relevant for predictions from parochial altruism. Because cohesion among the Western cluster preceded overt hostility, external threats may be unnecessary to foster cooperation. Cohesion among members of the wider Ngogo group, however, may have weakened when external threats from adjacent groups decreased after territorial expansion in 2009.
and
> This study encourages a reevaluation of current models of human collective violence. If chimpanzee groups can polarize, split, and engage in lethal aggression without human-type cultural markers, then relational dynamics may play a larger causal role in human conflict than often assumed. Cultural traits remain essential for large-scale cooperation, but many conflicts may originate in the breakdown of interpersonal relationships rather than in entrenched ethnic or ideological divisions. It is tempting to attribute polarization and war that occur in humans today to ethnic, religious, or political divisions. Focusing entirely on these cultural factors, however, overlooks social processes that shape human behavior—processes also present in one of our closest animal relatives. In some cases, it may be in the small, daily acts of reconciliation and reunion between individuals that we find opportunities for peace.
Which sounds kinda hopeful!
My own observations is that the preconditions for the split that led to open warfare between the two Chimp groups was:
1. The nonviolent (illness) death of a few key individuals that linked both groups, and...
2. The complete stop of interbreeding. Once the two groups stopped interbreeding, the split was finalized and they became truly hostile.
Stretching this a bit, it makes me think of those (usually white supremacists) who claim "multiculturalism" is to blame for all the world's problems, and if only every ethnic or religious group stayed in their lane and didn't mix with the other, we could all live in peace. But it seems to me the lesson from this paper is that this (isolating us in separate groups) would make the split complete enough that we would decisively start butchering each other.
> But it seems to me the lesson from this paper is that this (isolating us in separate groups) would make the split complete enough that we would decisively start butchering each other.
Kemp had the very anarchist friendly theory that it's states (Goliaths) and / or the conditions that lead to them that lead to violence.
His evidence is most convincing when it's looking at the paleolithic, as h sapiens made its way out of Africa ... but maybe this is not a natural state as they had not yet reached any population limits so migration was always an alternative to conflict?
Aren't religion, ethnicity and political beliefs strong factors in human relational dynamics?
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.
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 with hierarchy, status and accumulation of resources which guides every single action they take from birth until death.
What is different about Chimp Empire is that it is presented in a much more compelling way relative to the standard (dry) academic literature or popular science texts (i.e. Chimpanzee Politics by Frans De Waal).
Even after finishing the documentary I've found myself connecting events in the series with current geopolitcal issues. One event in the show that stuck out to me was a battle between two rival camps over a single fruit tree. Gaining control over that tree was a critical factor in determining the survival of the two rival groups. To us, post neolithic age and industrial revolution, it's an amusing watch. But to chimps, a single fruit tree in their territory is everything. It is life and death. While there's a difference in scale, the same underlying motivations - in my mind - currently explain what is going in the middle east and eastern europe.
Also, the documentary is great case study in how, loneliness and introversion can be absolutely lethal in the wild. The politics in each Chimp community can get quite toxic but participation isn't really optional. You either play the game or quite literally die.
If you really want a good intellectual exercise, I recommend watching Chimp Empire in its entirety and then The Expanse right after. Try to tell me they are not the same show :P
Love quiet documentary type things in that scenario.
Bonus if there's a lot of episodes.
(It also features a very amusing photo at the top that makes it look like the subject is the biologist Robert Sapolsky.)
Where have I seen this before.. Think.. Think..
And I genuinely believe blaming things on social media and news is just a diversion so we wouldn't look at the main issue.
The talking points that were ascendent in the Tea Party era to 2016, and are still ascendent today, were honed at that time in that sphere. Limbaugh said words 30-40 years ago that breathed life into a reactionary movement 20 years later and shaped its theory.
You can keep following the thread back, but I think this form of weaponized aggrievement took its shape at that time, its literal memes were potent and virulent back then, they just needed the right environment to really spread.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61662.Shadows_of_Forgott...
Also missing is the Killer Ape theory of the sixties which led to the research that chimpanzees have much higher lethal conflict numbers than humans.
Also, this Ngogo group is highly researched, and many many films where made about them.
People seem to talk a lot about chimpanzees and their closeness to humans, and comparative behavior, but a lot less is said about the other closest species, the bonobo monkey.
Their society is very peaceful and things like infanticide, a popular pastime in chimpanzee society, is absent among bonobos.
The most notable trait of bonobos is that everyone has sex with every one else, constantly, (almost) regardless of relation, gender or age.
You'd think humans could learn much from such a peaceful species, but most people don't even know they exist.
Are you orange team or green team?
Central Ngogo has complained that every time it's tried to democratically elect a leader, that leader had been overthrown by Western Ngogo—creating an environment that is hostile to anyone other than WN having a so-called "democracy". CN has also criticized WN as ultimately just being "oligarchy with extra steps" and creating an empire that requires the subjugation of CN.
edit: I'm rate-limited, so here's my answer to your comment of:
> I remember watching a nature documentary many years ago with exactly that scenario. The original group killed all the splitters.
Yeah, you're right. You probably remember this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
It does seem like a very similar scenario, so now I'm confused.
That's a weird thing to say. Studies of primitive tribes showed decades ago that they only seem to fight each other for a handful of reasons. Religion, ethnicity and political beliefs aren't among them. Fighting over resources, women and blood feuds are.
Supposedly academic anthropology had difficulties accepting these findings, especially the Yamomamö studies by Chagnon where he documented them going to war to steal each other's women, as it contradicted the popular idea of the noble savage.
Convincing someone to go kill other people so you can get their stuff is a lot harder. You have to get creative with the reasons, and even then you had better be giving those fighters their cut unless you've really managed to get them fully committed to whatever excuse to made up. It helps a lot if there is some kind of wedge issue you can exploit, which is where religion and ethnicity come in handy.
Why is it weird? Religion, ethnicity and political beliefs are argued all the time, even here on HN, as the reason for why shit happens.
Also, what is a "blood feud" in the primates? Chimps seeking revenge for the murder of another Chimp? Why was the first Chimp killed then? I think "blood feud" is a good start, but why? The paper sort of explores possible reasons.
> Supposedly academic anthropology had difficulties accepting these findings, especially the Yamomamö studies by Chagnon where he documented them going to war to steal each other's women, as it contradicted the popular idea of the noble savage.
I don't know what you mean, the "noble savage" is a discredited racist trope. Chagnon is worth considering but surely you're aware of the academic criticism of his work and methods? It wasn't because of the "noble savage", that would be a lazy dismissal of the criticism. He didn't have the final word on the topic.
We've known for decades that chimpanzees go to war, and during that war will happily slaughter each other.
That would explain that sort of behaviour as well as our human shenanigans (country/religion/“race”/politics/football team/etc).
Perhaps some groups are biased towards ‘us’ (i.e. more accepting), and other groups are biased towards ‘other’ (i.e. more hostile).
The death of a few key individuals can absolutely remove all the commonality between two groups. Seems to have happened with those chimpanzees, and happens all the time in human groups.
It is sad though that this is happening, on top of all the shit that is going on.
-------------
There's a theory that humans (and likely chimps as well) have a cognitive upper limit to the number of stable relationships they can maintain (i.e. Dunbar's number[1]). Also, there is the idea that most people have nowhere near that many relationships, but some people are super connectors. They know everyone in the community and tie it together, even if the average member of the community doesn't know most other people in it.
It almost sounds like, before the conflict, the tribe was at or a little beyond their "Dunbar's number"[1] and then several of their super-connectors died. Suddenly the community, despite its losses, was too big and not connected enough to remain stable. Minor conflicts arose, individuals started choosing sides, and there wasn't anyone with connections to both sides able to bridge the gap and calm things down.
I'm not a sociologist/anthropologist/etc., so I'm probably woefully misinformed and spewing nonsense here. I'd love to hear what someone up to date on this stuff thinks actually happened.
_______________________
a) Chimpanzees going to war. b) Humans ending humans.
Both is presently in the making, if one looks at the geopolitical scale and looks at damage caused by drones; a) is probably not yet full scale. Chimpanzees may be better diplomats than humans.
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 thinking Disney ending? We see what we see, and it's been, oh what, a million years since chimps and humans diverged, and humans are melodramatic and vicious as ever. Why, on top of that, are we so hard into drinking our own Kool-Aid?
I have yet to see a convincing counter argument to this hypothesis.
So just like humans, then.
Personally I feel like the effects of counter-culture are understated in humanity because I think it might drive a lot of human behaviour and its a natural outcome when a grouping grows beyond people's ability to maintain it. Counter-culture also offers a solid explanation for human insanity such as anti-vax which imho makes much more sense couched as:
"I hate that guy and that guy is keen on getting vaccinated, so fuck vaccinations, they're awful".
I would imagine one could find similar outcomes as this study of chimps, in human groupings too, albeit such experimentation would be unethical. Which is why I imagine it will eventually become a reality show someday: Lets play 400 friends or 200 enemies! Day 4: lets reduce the available food by 50% and see what happens... etc, etc.
Now we’re saying that war is just natural. It must be a coincidence.
Shared social structures and behaviors can last through much longer periods of time than 8 million years. For example take bees and ants sharing a common ancestor in the 100 of millions of years age.
Their wars are legendary. They never give up. Never surrender. And the cycle never ends. Children of war.
The end game of "the replacement theory" when everyone fully commits.
Animals have inner lives as well. They have their own thoughts and feelings. And sometimes those feelings are anger and their thought is to kick the shit out of those assholes over there.
Fuck man, my cats occasionally scrap with each other. I know it's not anything they've learned from the people in my house because we don't go full Wrestlemania on each other.