> primatologist

sometimes I feel like that at work

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.

Back in the old days people were much more unabashed about such things. What's the purpose of your very small collection of city states? Obviously to expand, and smash any neighboring states. If you succeed, kill all the men and take their women as slaves. This was much of civilization for a long time.

I’m trying to find the source, but I remember a primatologist claiming that humans and chimpanzees are the only two species that embark on genocide. Not being satisfied with simply defeating the enemy, but actively hunting them down to ensure they can’t harm you again. In other words, precluding retreat. (Which creates its own game-theoretical backlash: never retreat.)

My initial instinct is that they were just reestablishing social order among the group after such a dramatic event.

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!

Tja, IAMNAH, but my impression is that there is much more diversity to history than that. Not all groups attempted to expand, and among those who did there are many who swallowed up close by groups without violence (rather through 'cultural victory' so to say). It might even be the norm historically.

It's definitely not obvious, given that many, many gregarious species may certainly have inter-group clashes and skirmishes at territory boundaries but no full-scale war. Animals in general avoid violence between conspecifics, for the obvious reason that it's rarely worth the risk of being hurt unless you're very sure you're going to win. Dying for your group is something you almost never see outside eusocial species. Never mind dying in your prime reproductive age!

> 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.

If anything, I'd say plants do it more. Everything in the garden is trying to kill everything else.

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 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..

Important to remember that we as humans no longer compete for resources.

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.

Except in this instance the conflict erupted after the population size was reduced due to disease so it's not entirely clear this was caused by the scarcity of resources. Nor is it clear what selective advantage mutually destructive wars would have assuming plenty of resources. The researchers posit group relational dynamics being the primary factor.

> When competing for resources, killing your neighbour frees up resources, which you can take

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.

orangutans deal with similar and are notorious for being peaceful

It's really common.

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

Evidence is limited but orcas might also do that to great white sharks. The orcas seem to sometimes work together to exterminate sharks from an area in a way that goes beyond just hunting them for food.

No, the outright political warfare in the US you are alluding to began much earlier than 2020. Things were getting quite ulhealthy already back in 2015/2016, probably even earlier. The "black swan" for this deep division was (I believe) not the epidemic, but the proliferation of the smartphone and social media, and the earlier transitioning of traditional news to infotainment format.

I mean, it's understandable; having to endure a lockdown _with_ Doordash was really rough on our civilization.

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?

Loved this series. It was tragic. The cycle of violence, trauma, isolation, male performance.

That depends on which side of "our values" you are talking about.

Are you orange team or green team?

> Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures.

Numbers 31.17-18

Ya, imagine not being able to pay for the doordash because your job was nonessential. Real rough indeed being hungry.

It's refuted by the Buddhist nationalists killing Rohingya Muslims. Not sure about the concept of evidence. For best epistemology you'd have to say "if this was false, we'd see evidence X, and we don't, or evidence Y, and we don't see that either, and nobody's thought of what evidence Z might be, so here we are, it seems true so far."

This got me thinking. Do chimpanzees try and mate with pre pubescent young or is that somehow nature gated?

I'd attribute it to 2008 financial collapse, and in general, the pressure put on the middle class that began a decade earlier.

And I genuinely believe blaming things on social media and news is just a diversion so we wouldn't look at the main issue.

> 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.

Sometimes they do it in their own species, but much more commonly they do it across species. Eucalyptus will kill all but eucalyptus. Redwood trees will form networks and help each other; even an albino redwood tree (no chlorophyll https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/white-wond...) can survive.

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

If one tribe's men kills all the men in the other tribe, that's double the number of women, and double the number of children. A large, permanent improvement in genetic fitness. Not temporary at all.

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, 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.

> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin

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.

> 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.

Scarcity of resources … what if maybe the disease made less “resources” available to these chimpanzees?

Yeah, mycorrhizal fungi, the gut microbiome, lichen, pet dogs, etc. Nature is completely brimming with examples of cooperation. It seems to me that more often than not, teaming up with organisms around you will unlock the ability to use more resources you would otherwise have access to. I would guess that this strategy is much more generative than attacking your neighbors and thereby risk your own security

We could hardly eat a fraction of what we eat today if we hadn't teamed up with microbes.

> usually involves killing not only rival males, but all of their offspring too

I think the distinction is between killing a line and killing a tribe. But granted, that’s valid.

Lions and Hyanas are well known for trying to exterminate each other's cubs (they rarely eat the carcases). Adults mostly avoid fighting each other as its too risky.

I think the difference is extermination from an area versus exterminating a line. Humans and chimpanzees will exceed their territory to eradicate foes. That, per this primatologist, is a unique adaptation.

I haven't seen Chimp Empire, but it reminds me of the story of the Baboons where the alpha males died, and the entire society changed: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/teacher...

(It also features a very amusing photo at the top that makes it look like the subject is the biologist Robert Sapolsky.)

There are far too many documentaries that omit or slant information for documentaries as a category to be considered informational. Especially ones on Netflix.

there for sure are, but they are nsfw and will never be aired in a netflix documentation

They use sex as a weapon.

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.

Earlier than that, this brand of social/economic/racial/sexual/etc aggrievement and reactionary politics was bred via 80s-90s AM talk radio.

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.

I always viewed social media as a catalyst, not the main cause. We've always have this at smaller scales / more local scales, throughout the human history. Social media just lets bob meet alice in a virtual plane, while they couldn't meet and share ideas before. But the ideas, even if reinforced by tech, were always there.

Prime directive doesn't apply because they are part of our home planet. Our actions or in-actions can improve or worsen their living conditions. Their natural world is gone anyway. We've changed it already.

This is reality TV with animals. Like any reality TV show, the events and reactions are manipulated. I wouldn't put any credibility on this.

There's also the 1,5h documentary Rise of the Warrior Apes which is sort of a "prequel" to Chimp Empire. It was filmed over a period of 20 years in the same location and documents how the researches originally came upon this unusual chimpanzee tribe. The production values are not nearly as polished as in Chimp Empire but in my opinion it was still an interesting watch if you find this kind of stuff fascinating. The researchers themselves talk a lot in this.

Knowing what we know now, imagine how much it would have accelerated back then if the elites hadn’t been able to smother out the Occupy movement. Wild to think about

I think some of the individuals who died were key in linking the two groups (they were "the glue" that prevented disruptive aggression), and after they were gone, the split cemented and later turned into aggression.

Just like in human analyses of geopolitical situations, the explanations that rely on broad abstractions of human nature or resource competition and paint a teleological narrative always end up breaking down when you do a deep dive into the history and specific circumstances. When you get into the nitty gritty of every unique geopolitical situation it's actually much more difficult to pull out a generalizable lesson imo. At some point we have to accept that we can't cross the same river twice

Don't think of it as individuals, but as individual genes. A group of 10 with the same genes, that can eliminate a group of 10 with different genes by losing one individual (because they were fighting to the death, while their opponents did not) is 9 copies up.

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.

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.

You've equated war and murder, but the distinction between the two is one of the brightest lines in many law codes. Murder is a private act committed by private individuals, while war is a public act of friend against foe (distinguished as a public enemy in contrast to private ones).

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.

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

This is simply not true, in time of severe distress and survival pressure humans are clearly capable of mass killings. It happened so many times throughout history. For example a famine forces a human group to take over rivals resources or when defending own group against agressive rivals.

> 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.

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.

> Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures.

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

We very much do compete for resources. People die of famine, thirst, exposure, and other lack-of-resources-related causes every day. That we could theoretically feed everyone doesn't matter when people compete for more than their fair share.

Emm, what? You are aware of all the wars going on right now?

orangutans murder eachother too sometimes. Their hand grip is enough to crush another's skull, and occasionally they do so.

Killing off another species isn't that much like genocide, which involves killing off a rival genetic line of the same species, but orcas do that too: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29559642/

There's a post that says illness killed some important leaders (who were friends) on both sides of the camp. Once these leaders died, the two groups realized they didn't have anything in common with each other so they're fighting.

> 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 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

I'm on the other end. Finally some content to watch before bed.

Love quiet documentary type things in that scenario.

Bonus if there's a lot of episodes.

2008 was the big one, but i really think the ball started rolling after 9/11...

I'd suggest reading some David Graeber. Viewing everything through the lens of game theory, as if it was some physical law, is very much off the mark.

That’s one way to look at it. It’s fairly common to view nature this way. I wonder where it comes from.

I remember the time, in some film I watched, researchers intervened to save penguins trapped in a crater. A holy moment that was.

I wonder if chimps are sophisticated enough to believe in omens? Perhaps they saw the sudden deaths are some sort of sign that the established structure was weak or immoral.

> We can't overcome the force of game theory

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.

8 million years is a drop on the geological time scale, but on a species scale that’s an eternity. We went from Neanderthals and Denisovans to sapiens in a fraction of that time.

Which side is the bottom?

Sudden power vacuums are often filled by the most opportunistic individuals in human culture. People who are frequently more concerned with personal gain over the collective well-being of the group. It's why assassinating heads of state usually just makes the situation worse.

> 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.

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.

Apparently Bonobos regularly have sexual relations with infants.

Makes me wonder if civil war is more common for larger countries. Reminds me of the phenomenon where Latin American countries pretty much all broke up after independence from Spain.

The extreme version of this would be insects like ants and certain types of bees, where the vast majority of individuals are biologically incapable of reproduction, and serve the one or few queens that are capable.

Wow. I just read that whole wikipedia article and had a fantastic time. Thank you very much for sharing

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

All cultures, even it seems primates, discriminate between notions of 'arbitrary murder' and 'justice' implying different things.

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)

These are distribution problems. Usually intentional.

There is enough food to feed everybody.

I don't think this falls under definition of genocide

> 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?"

BBC Dynasties https://youtu.be/2Co_hmLenD8

To be clear, sapiens didn’t descend from neanderthals or Denisovans, our species lived alongside those and interbred with them. The common ancestor of sapiens and neanderthals was probably around 500,000 years, probably heidelbergensis. So half a million years is “short” but also still Homo, and something you would almost definitely identify closer to human than ape.

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.

Hey everyone! I found a sideless one over here! Get 'em!!

I could imagine if you where friends with someone and a bunch of their friends suddenly and mysteriously died, personally, I wouldn't kill that friend, but I might call the cops.

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.

>I guess dying because you think you’re going to impress’s a mate and stay alive is quite common.

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.

Of course it's true, and that there are 'acute moments of distress' doesn't disprove the claim.

'Murder' is nearly a universally negative social concept.

There zero cultures wherein arbitrary killing is considered acceptable

Yes and? They are not about natural resources.

Really though it all started with the federalist papers.

Great comment. Dawn of Everything changed a lot how I viewed early humanity.

It may be easier to think of evolution as the force, and game theory strongly influencing the fitness test. Those who play the games of mating and predator/prey more optimally reproduce more. We descend from billions of generations of the winners.

>Which side is the bottom?

i'll tell you this if it helps, for the cohort he wishes to join he meant to say top.

Plenty of people stepped into power vacuums not to make themselves rich but to save their nation Napolean, Tito, Cincinnatus, arguably George Washington.

Humans dying to impress a mate are super rare in reality. And even among humans dying to impress ... it is more likely to happen in male only groups where men try to impress and dominate other men.

Maybe google "Terminal Investment"

I feel that rituals of this nature work because they are backed implicitly by the threat of violence, which must be actualized from time to time in order for the ritual to hold force. Just like in human cultures.

Nobody ever said that these murders are arbitrary. They're the opposite of arbitrary. They're coalition-based murders against men in the opposite tribe. Highly targeted and intentional. Not random.

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

Might as well be human.

In fairness, i dont think dying to impress a girl is particularly common among humans either.

Literally about land, oil, rare earth minerals…

Was the fruit tree important for its fruit? Surely there are other fruit sources, no?

Might have to do this, better than rewatching the same rotation of sitcoms.

To be honest, we are fighting now over a 30kms wide strait ... also critical in a certain policitcal survival of sorts.

  > 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.

of course, and historically we can see that from the past 300 years leading up to ww1 and ww2; every empire was in it for themselves and very nationalistic, mercantilism ruled the day, and lots of crazy theories such as phrenology and eugenics started to appear leading to all kinds of atrocities...

I was just thinking, perhaps all the fiction that has this as a plot point chooses it because of the man bites dog nature of the incident.

I really did some extremely dumb things in my twenties that I'm extremely lucky didn't kill me.

that's true, but among humans the "impressing a girl" pattern seems to be more open ended as to how you will do it, and thus you end up with croc-riding accidents at times.

You can claim that and it's a comfortable thing to believe but that does not make it true.

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.

> and game theory strongly influencing the fitness test

Does it? I don't think reproduction is very influenced by game theory.

Right but this is rare enough for "power vacuums" to generally be regarded as a bad thing and not a good thing.

If they frequently had great people step in, we'd just produce them artificially all the time.

Are you saying this was a case of top-whistling?

We don't descend from winners, we descend from whoever survived and it's not an individual competition.

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.

It's a forest, not an orchard, and most species fruit only once a year. The most important is the strangler fig tree as it produces fruit multiple times a year.

A clear demonstration of the value of knowledge.

In the chimps’ defense, they don’t have the technical ability to make the fruit tree obsolete, or tactical framework to identify it as a chokepoint.

Morgan Freeman narrates some good ones on netflix. Works better/faster than melatonin

In evolution the winners are the ones who survive to reproduce, and that includes 100% of our ancestors.

The cultural ramifications of choosing one word over another are significant though. "Winner" is a loaded term.

> In evolution the survivors reproduced, and that includes 100% of our ancestors.