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

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.

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.

Among the Yanomami (per Napoleon Chagnon), killing outsiders was not “murder,” it raised status. Men who killed had more wives. Violence was cyclical and regulated, not collapse. Humans are not universally anti-killing, mainly in-group.

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.

> 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 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.

> 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.

You're confusing interpersonal murder with tribal conflict.

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.

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.

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.

> Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures.

Numbers 31.17-18

In practice, social groups (from tribes to big nations) tend to treat murder very differently from killing in war.

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.

> Lions murdering prey to eat is a stable equilibrium.

Lions kill and dont eat children of other lion aliances.

In addition to the standard cross-cultural sample, I find the Seshat database useful for checking universals. https://seshat-db.com/sc/scvars/

No disagreement across cultures? That’s downright funny, there isn’t even agreement over what counts as murder. Do you think a jihadi sawing off a head thinks they’re a murderer?

Cultures aren’t universal, and neither is your particular religious tradition.

> Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures.

Yeah, but almost all cultures consider killing people in war not to be "murder".

Sanctioned killing to defend or strengthen the tribe is generally not equated with murder.

> It's not something we even argue over. Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures.

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.

Plenty disagreements everywhere. Under (usually fake) ideas of not enough resources for everyone, so the strongest must survive.

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.

It might also depend on mating dynamics. If females mostly prefer to all mate within the top few percent of males in a community, there might not be much to lose if some of the lower status males of them take their chances going on a war party to conquer/steal some females.

I would caution against the use of "murder" so loosely. Lions don't murder their prey. They kill their prey. Murder occurs when one entity with personhood intentional kills another entity with personhood, where personhood is rooted in the ability to comprehend reality (intellect) and the ability to make free choices among comprehended alternatives (free choice). "Murder" thus has a moral dimension that mere killing does not. Personhood is the seat of moral agency; without personhood, murder simply cannot take place, only killing, and it is a category error to ascribe moral goodness or evil to an act committed by a non-person. A spider eating another spider of the same species isn't murder; it may very well be the nature of that species to function that way.

(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.

> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder'

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 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.

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.