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Study: Chimpanzees Have Evolved To Kill Each Other
sciencehabit writes A major new study of warfare in chimpanzees finds that lethal aggression can be evolutionarily beneficial in that species, rewarding the winners with food, mates, and the opportunity to pass along their genes. The findings run contrary to recent claims that chimps fight only if they are stressed by the impact of nearby human activity—and could help explain the origins of human conflict as well.
What a load of PC "humans are the only baddies in the world" bollocks.
Chimpanzees have a well documented history of intra-group hierarchical violence, violence against females and extra-group murdering raids. This is nothing new. Anthropologists have known this stuff for decades.
You're right. In a one-on-one fight there is some sense in not killing your rival if he's willing to back down so that you don't have to expend extra energy trying to finish him off.
But when the battle becomes group against group the advantage of mercy is less clear. An enemy left alive has more choices. Rather than accepting that he can't defeat you he may come back with larger numbers. He may jump up and hit you from behind as soon as you turn to battle one of his companions.
In an environment of tribal warfare, it doesn't make sense to kill your local intra-tribal rival because he's likely to be your ally in the next inter-tribal battle.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
You see this from the anti-hunting and lunatic PETA crowd. "Humans are the only species that kill for pleasure or kill for reasons other than survival". Bill Maher (PETA member) said it several times last season of his Real Time show. Yet everything from orca whales to monkeys to domestic cats kills for reasons other than day-to-day survival.
They kill for fun, for the adrenaline rush, for sport, for territory, and sometimes simply out of instinct or curiosity. Cats leave trophies on their owners' back porches. They'll kill birds and mice and even bats and then leave the dead body for their owner to find. Killer whales just slaughter packs of seals for fun. Often times just killing them and not even eating them. Some animals are so naturally deadly like sharks that they cannot help killing something by simply "test" biting an animal to see if its good food. A shark bites a human but realizes the flesh is poor and there are too many bones, so it backs off for good, yet the human is dead because half his stomach and leg were chewed off entirely by the shark.
Fighting for mates is always one vs one, winner take all, and yes they are trying to kill their opponent.
Not true. In many animals, fights are intentionally non-lethal. Much like a fistfight, when both have knives. But if one unsheathes their claws (or whatever real weapon), then the other will too and they both run the risk of being maimed or killed. This works because the non-lethal dominance competition correlates pretty well with what would happen if they were fighting for real.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
There is no such thing as "right" or "wrong" in nature and no delusions of morality can change that.
But seriously, primate research is worthwhile on it's own. You can't directly prove connections between us and them; but that is not unlike a huge amount of science which relies upon observation, statistics and expert judgement calls. When they act similar that can be a clue or merely a coincidence but it warrants further investigation. It's a technique that allows for faster probing of the problem space. BESIDES, if you think that observing chimps influences their behavior (as the "skeptics" denier fanatics always claim) just imagine trying to study humans! Humans are way more difficult to study without influencing their behavior thereby tainting the study.
The biological connection is obvious; any "insights" they do in the research with a biological connection become useful even if at 1st they seem unjustified. The work can be applied in new ways later on if one proves there is no connection.
As far as pure human nature study by primate research; well, that is based upon theories which may or may not be proven some day in the future. You have the classic old Feud work on "base desires" which think about the primitive instinctive aspects behind the manifestations; his work in this area is the basis for modern propaganda (WW1 and really big after the Nazis used it so well. Today, it controls most consumers.) Following that success, one could approach further from that perspective - making our relation to primates and their more primitive state ideal.
Ultimately, I think most the work in the area ends up with the search for biological parallels between us. Say that HATE is really just a manifestation of FEAR; can you ever prove such a thing? nope. not in a hard science way; it's all subjective. But if you can study primates you might find more concrete proof with them on a biological level. A Turing machine is a lame computer nothing like your CPU but it's useful to prove things (the difference being that you can concretely prove the CPU is equivalent to the Turing machine and you can't with a chimp since they evolved differently even if they are nearly the same DNA.)
As far as evolutionary pressures-- the best theory for human brains was we already made it to the top of the food chain being as primitive as chimps and what made the apes of the plains smart was that they had to war against each other for resources. Just like humans have always done; my tribe and me against you and your tribe. Given how we are the most evolved distance running animals on earth, territorial borders are meaningless. Your group isn't going to give up after running down a lion to exhaustion for 20miles simply because you ended out of your usual turf.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Here's the funny thing folks, humans are animals too!
As far as anyone can tell humans have a much greater ability to engage in complex planning: to make decisions based on sophisticated predictions of future consequences from an array of different actions. If you're hanging out with your friend in your living room and he has to go to the bathroom, most likely he'll make some initial assessments of his options, gather more information to increase the accuracy of his predictions: "Would you mind if I used your bathroom? Actually, better use the one off the master bedroom the one down the hall isn't flushing very well these days.", and then act on his predictions. On the other hand, if you have a horse over to hang out in your living room then pretty soon you'll be up to your ankles in horse manure.
We have all the same urges and evolutionary pressures,...
Except that with our complex planning it's actually easy to satisfy our evolutionary urges without needing to resort to violence. And we're also able to realize that evolution is a natural law like gravity. That having children in order to be evolutionarily successful is like throwing oneself down a flight of stairs in order to be gravitationally successful - that evolution isn't what should happen - it's what does happen.
...a brain big enough to develop ... violence ... to fill the hole that our self abstinence from murder has left.
No. People engage in violence when they're not able to find any other way to satisfy their (evolutionary) needs. Typically, the people who engage in violence are the ones with the brains that are too "small" - which isn't to say that smart people are never backed into a corner where violence is the only option. But most people who use violence do so because they are unable to make good predictions about all the possible actions and consequences available to them.