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.
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.
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.
I guess dying because you think you’re going to impress’s a mate and stay alive is quite common.
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...
The argument is essentially: how come daring people to do something gross or embarrassing is so common? There's a weird social dynamic in being the one who goes through with it, and it frequently promotes group cohesion.
So maybe the point of it isn't the act or social dominance, but to get people to display normal emotional responses - safe people will be embarrassed, or hesitant or display social support queues or disgust if they have normal emotional processing. The psychopaths? They'll struggle - particularly at that age where the opportunity to learn to blend hasn't had time to develop.
Basically a group of guys egging each other on to do the riskier dive into the pool or something aren't trying to impress a mate, they're actually filtering for people who don't emotionally react correctly to whatever the dare is.
based on my memory of readings in the matter I don't think so, most animal species "impress a mate" is either
1. do mating ritual better than others
2. actually directly compete with rival who has mate to win mate.
In the second more rare scenario the actually directly compete with rival tends to be very ritualized, and thus when you lose you don't actually get significantly hurt.
In the ritualized combat for mates some species have evolved to points in which accidents become a major problem, for example Stags locking antlers in combat for does.
Obviously this is a scenario where you want to impress and stay alive but it doesn't work out, but it is relatively rare in the species that has evolved antlers to the point where it happens, and it is rare for species to have similar problems, generally the one who loses these competitions does not die, they just assume a lower status.
So all that said the human tactic of Bob, hold my beer while I impress Cindy by riding this croc, is a pretty rare tactic for getting a mate.
Luckily the apartment manager came driving up at the right time, probably saving my life.
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.
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
But to comment on your point: species DO pay for it in the long term when members murder or teratorialism.
Lions are not cannibals. Some lions are cannibals. A successful group of lions cannibals existing (and what a brutal and awesome-in-the-biblical-sense story it is!) does not mean that it pays for the lion species as a whole to have groups of cannibals existing.
In fact, I could only see the “proliferation of groups like this committing atrocities” reach a tipping point for a species - not murdering when this murdering happens will make you cease to exist. So if the species doesn’t have a reason to reach the extreme where this NEVER happens, then it will quickly reach the point where this ALWAYS happens
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.
> 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.
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.
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 lead us to individualism, common laws, nationalism, even the Industrial Revolution and the scientific method.
It sounds bizarre but if you follow the historical logic, in a round about way it has paved the way for the modern world, which the rest of human civilisation was forced to adopt, either to compete or at gunpoint.
There are few books I read in a year that change the way I look at the world, “The Weirdest people in the world” was definitely one of them.
I'll have a look at that book however: what were the other books?
As far as 'population stability' though ... quite a lot of systems achieved this kind of stability without quite the same kind of social order.
But good point.
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
And it's all roughly consistent.
Arbitrary murder is always 'wrong' across cultures.
Self defence is almost always considered reasonable and a form of justification.
Even basic cultures developed sense of 'justice' as retribution or punishment.
It gets a bit more complicated in terms of organized violence, but even there, it's generally always considered moral in the posture of defence, just as it were a single person defending themselves.
For other things, it's more complicated.
And of course 'war parties' and 'arbitrary retribution' has always been there, aka 'they slighted us, we harm them' absent true moral justification. That's always been problematic, admittedly.
Also "and the whole thing is written via dictation from a war god." this is not an appropriate assertion (not nice or welcome)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Read carefully
I did, perhaps read my post carefully.
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.
'Murder' is nearly a universally negative social concept.
There zero cultures wherein arbitrary killing is considered acceptable
Numbers 31.17-18
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.
Cultures aren’t universal, and neither is your particular religious tradition.
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.
But when I said "we honor our veterans" I did not speak of USA, I spoke of any country veterans.
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 eachother or engaging in non-bladed physical combat - think the PRC vs India in the mountains - with maybe one death. Sort of a mutually accepted way to "blow off steam."
Given that these kinds of battles exist throughout history, alongside catastrophic civilizational ethnocides, we can't assume one or the other is our "core primal behavior." Seems we have a tendency to both, depending on circumstance.
What is universally true though, preceding our capability to organize into warbands, is the fact that our evolutionary advantage is derived from our social nature. We rule the planet because we're so social we're the only species that invented language so as to communicate very complex topics. So in terms of "natural order" for humans, and adaptive behavior, it clearly is cooperation.
(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.
"My God, look at the hooves, this was bovicide without any doubt."
Thus, murder is a species of homicide. The specific differences of murder relative to homicide is that it is voluntary, premeditated, and malicious.
The law merely recognizes this distinction. It doesn't construct some convention around homicide. Indeed, law in general is a particular determination of general moral principles within a particular jurisdiction.
So, a lion doesn't commit murder, because a lion's actions are involuntary and neither malicious nor premeditated. Also, while a lion can kill a person or non-person, it is not capable of homicide, because its meaning specifically pertains to the killing of one person by another.
The skew is weaker nowadays, but still more men are childless than women, and it is correlated with wealth to some extent.
At some point the marginal utility of warring is better for both the individual and the group than the marginal utility of yet another non-reproducing male hanging around "helping" out their kin while eating the resources.
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.
We argue over it all the time by disagreeing on what counts as "murder." Taking lives in war? Not murder. Taking civilian lives in war? Well the enemy often uses civilians as cover, what else can one do? The state takes someone's life? Not murder, just the cost of civil society. Abortion? Murder, obviously. Bombing an abortion clinic? Not murder, because killing killers in God's name is justified.
So what even is "murder?" It isn't simply the taking of a human life. It isn't even the taking of an innocent human life. It isn't even the taking of a human life with premeditation. Murder is an arbitrary line societies draw between the killing they find useful and the killing they don't. It's a legal and moral fiction.
I mean, the United States practically murdered an entire continent of civilizations and cultures and the only people who even care are the descendants of the few Natives we missed. How have we paid for that long term? We're a goddamn global hegemon and nuclear superpower that threatens to annihilate civilizations just for shits and giggles. Murder seems to be working out pretty well for us.
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, assassination, or any such word. Language is obviously not as black and white as the example I gave, but the point stands.
I agree with your definition but think it’s too narrow, and thus missing the point of the original argument. I don’t agree with lo_zamoysk‘s original point. I think lions CAN murder. I think when they commit cannibalism it’s only when they murder other lions. All other deaths lions cause, lion or other animal, are killings (maybe murder maybe not). But when Lion A kills and eats Lion B, Lion A would have much preferred to get food another way. It’s a lot more likely Lion A is motivated by something other than hunger, like so many of Lion A’s - or even any Lion’s - kills are.
Motivations are required for murder. The word “murder” ascribes motivation to a killing.
Collaboration is the exception. That collaboration is everywhere in many forms is a testament to the power of natural selection.
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.
If you want to convince somebody who actually seeks truth, you have to make an argument how any country who has started a war recently has had a net economic profit.
Confidently dismissing others based on your own weird definitions and shifting goalposts does not make you seem as knowledgeable as you think.
The Ukraine war was started because Putin wanted it to be his heritage that Ukraine is part of Russia. The Donbas has some mines but nothing that cannot be found eleswhere in the vast expanse of the Russian empire and nothing that Russia couldn't easily have bought with its oil money.
Iran: Security, hate, personal Grandeur
There is enough food to feed everybody.
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.
Tja - German for "well".
IMANAH - I am not a historian.
I can think of at least one regionalism or dialect that has something that I bet sounds similar to yours, that might even be used the same way yours is: “valley girl”.
The real tell was the spelling. We don’t usually use “T” to harden a phoneme at the start of a word—we do later, though, as in “itch”—and we don’t use “J” that way. “Ch” is probably the closest we’ve got to what you were going for with “j”. If a native English speaker were trying to reproduce the sound you’re going for in text, they’d not have spelled it that way unless trying to make it appear foreign.
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".
However there must have been some opposite instinct that prevented monkeys from just wiping themselves out. I hope so, for our sake.
> we suggest that infanticide is a sexually selected behaviour in killer whales that could provide subsequent mating opportunities for the infanticidal male and thereby provide inclusive fitness benefits for his mother.
I can see gene fitness benefit but mating opportunities, how?
"hey, me and maman uh killed your baby, wanna pump out a replacement real quick?"
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.