alt Hacker NewsThe primatologist Richard Wrangam once advanced the theory that tribe vs. tribe conspecific homicides - what he called coalitionary killing - are an evolved trait that was selected for in primates by some kind of pro-homicide selection pressures in the ancestral environment (where homicide reliably grants an advantage to the expected relative gene frequency of the perpetrator's genes).
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.
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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.
Given how easily we can separate people into "ingroups" and "outgroups" and always fall into the same behavioral patterns regarding them, even if the actual markers for the ingroups and outgroups are completely arbitrary, it really seems likely this is biological and not just cultural.
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.
> primatologist
sometimes I feel like that at work
Don't ant colonies also go to war? I've seen that happen before and it's quite interesting - I read a theory somewhere that part of the purpose of this was to prevent overpopulation, so in the long run _both_ ant colonies do better since they don't "cooperate" and end up overpopulating.
For whatever reason, bonobos living under similar environmental constraints don’t do this. This suggests to me that the behavior is strongly controlled by genetics. Makes one wonder about the warmongers in our own species if they harbor some warmonger gene.
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.)
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Worth adding some nuance to the Wrangham framing here — he's not wrong exactly, but de Waal spent decades documenting the flip side: chimps reconcile, console each other, maintain coalitions in ways that don't fit the "demonic males" narrative cleanly. Both are true, and which one you see probably depends a lot on which population you're studying and under what conditions.
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.