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Comment by OgsyedIE | Hacker News Reader

The 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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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.

Good points, but it any case, it's true that chimps in general treat group members very differently to outsiders isn't it? Those behaviours that de Waal mentions seem probably directed towards group members. Are there any documented chimp populations where chimps aren't violently aggressive towards members of other groups?

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.

How are resource and territorial pressures not environmental pressures?

They are. I just used different words to refer to the same idea

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.

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!

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.

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.

> Animals in general avoid violence between conspecifics

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.

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.

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 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.

Most of every species gets pretty insane over mates. Evolution is about spreading your genes, not about prolonging your life. Obviously the latter is often useful to achieve the former, but not always. There are even numerous examples, such as black widows and bees, where death is even a part of procreation.

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...

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.

There's an alternate hypothesis about that which is that a lot of adolescent level risky behavior may actually be a way to weed out psychopaths.

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.

Maybe google "Terminal Investment"

>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.

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

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

I once tried to rappel off the side of an apartment building using a garden hose I stole from the building so I could get into my apartment that I was locked out of because my roommate had gone away for the weekend, this was not to impress a girl, it was to get changed to go to the club to meet a girl. I'm also afraid of heights.

Luckily the apartment manager came driving up at the right time, probably saving my life.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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..

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

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

Totalitarianism is not 'murder', it's 'power'.

On an individual level, even in authoritarian situations murder is still immoral and illegal.

Even within the context of power it's still nominally immoral. Stalin did not kill people, he tortured them until they 'admitted their crimes'. That Stalin needed to present the blood-stained admission is very telling.

Even Bloody Mary couldn't just kill however, there had to be some kind of legitimate premise. Heretics, threats etc.. It's how QE1 survived.

> 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.

You have to be in a very secure situation to think this way. You also ignore that a war can prevent more problems down the line though often it doesn't. When applying game theory to these situations, depending on how you rig the utility function, you can get any chosen strategy as optimal. So it is more about how you value outcomes and if you are estimating their probabilities correctly as to what is the right decision. By your logic, imprisoning or executing a serial killer isn't OK (let's say in this situation we know they are guilty).

Finally you are completely ignoring competition for resources in your analysis. What makes you think more monkeys has positive utility to individual monkeys? You hope that's true, but until you can speak to them, its going to be hard to know.

These are complex decision and you are acting as if there is always one "correct" answer to every situation. Heck, the trolley problem was conceived of to explain to people like you why your thinking is just plain wrong in some situations.

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.

Why do you think that we can define personhood without much understanding of the interior life of anything other than humans? Why do you think personhood is even required for murder? Does your pet have enough of whatever makes personhood important to qualify? How about the source of your blt?

> Why do you think that we can define personhood without much understanding of the interior life of anything other than humans?

Because the "interior life" is demonstrated by observable behavior. It is nonsensical to speak of animals with a "secret rationality" that exists apart form their behavior. This would be a dualistic position that posits that these animals are two things, not one: one that is rational, the other irrational in expression. This doesn't satisfy the demands of parsimony. In fact, it isn't even coherent.

The hallmark of rationality is language, and I mean language in the full sense, not merely signaling or expression of emotional state. The descriptive and argumentative functions are what are characteristic of rationality.

> Why do you think personhood is even required for murder?

Because, as I wrote, personhood is composed of rationality - the ability to comprehend reality - and the ability to make decisions freely among rationally comprehended alternatives. If you can't understand reality, then it is nonsensical to speak of having the ability to choose freely - that's why contracts signed by mentally incompetent people are void, because rational comprehension was a missing element and thus free consent. Without the ability to choose freely, we have no culpability for our actions. We had no choice in the matter! So, a non-person can only kill, but never murder.

> Does your pet have enough of whatever makes personhood important to qualify? [etc, etc]

I don't understand what your getting at. My pet is not a person, because my pet does not rationally comprehend reality. Comprehension is not mere sensation. Animals absolutely perceive the world. They have emotions. But rational comprehension is more than sense perception and brute imagination. It is abstraction, which is to say, the formation of intensional signs - universal concepts - like "human" and "mortal" from the sense experience of particular instances which allows me to form propositions like "every human is mortal" and from there inferences like "every human is mortal / Socrates is a human / therefore, Socrates is mortal".

No other animal that we know of demonstrates these capacities, and therefore, no other animal is personal.

If you examine the interior life of a human and its behavior you will find a LOT of complexity that doesn't appear in their behavior and if you tries to run a society simulator without modeling any part of that interior life it would probably be mostly wrong because that interior life matters.

Your position that you know to what degree the interior life of the animal is simple to the point of being able to understand them fully whilst modeling none of that implies that you don't understand them or the problem.

Murder is a crime, homicide is the act. A lion doesn’t murder because it isn’t capable of breaking human law, but it can sure commit a homicide.

Not on a gazelle. The great apes are at least hominids, so I can't complain about it being called "homicide", but a gazelle gets ... bovicide?

I'm not sure that the word formally exists yet, which implies that if you can popularize it then you could be first to the punch!

"My God, look at the hooves, this was bovicide without any doubt."

An act is composed of object (the act itself), intent (the purpose/end motivating the act/toward which it aims) and circumstances (the context).

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.

A lions actions are voluntary and premeditated

I think that 'hom' in homicide stands for homo so killing of (hu)man. I read your comment as lions committing homicide on hyenas which I'm sure you don't mean.

> 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

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)

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.

Good comment! But this left me thinking:

> 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.

Smaller groups do not start aggression simultaneously against the entirety of a bigger group.

They seize the opportunity when a smaller group than themselves is separated from the remainder of the big group, and then they overpower the smaller group.

Then they repeat this until they eliminate the bigger group.

My point was that animals understand very well the advantages of belonging to the bigger group at the moment of starting a fight, and they will start the fight only when they estimate that they will win.

The same happens with other social predators. A big group of hyenas will harass or even kill other predators, like leopards or lionesses, which would make them run away when in a small group.

Humans and chimpanzees are probably better at planning a long-term strategy about how to use their advantage in numbers in order to eliminate rivals. Other predators might use their advantage in numbers when an opportunity happens, but they might not perform a surveillance of the actions of a neighbor community, to discover when it becomes possible to use the bulk of their mates against a smaller group of the neighbors that happens to be separated from the others during their foraging activities.

I don't disagree with anything you're saying, mind you! I'm just curious that in the two Chimp cases at the forefront of this conversation, the smaller group started the war. Yes, they of course attacked when they could find isolated targets, but still it seems more "planned" than simply chance and opportunistic attacks (as much as it makes sense to state Chimps planned this, of course).

As a comparison, and changing species, in the also mentioned Mapogo lion coalition (a similar "war" with lots of casualties), the attackers had the numbers, motive and power advantage: six "disenfranchised" male lions, healthy and powerful and experienced with tackling big game such as buffalo, which gave them an advantage when killing other lions (and yet they still chose to isolate victims first, because as you said, animals understand the principle of strength in numbers).

I'm not disagreeing with you on anything, just musing.

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.

“The weirdest people in the world” - has a very good roots cause analysis of all this.

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.

Interesting claim, though not enough detail to disagree with constructively. I'd agree that the Catholic Church had a big influence on our history of course, though among the things you mention I would only count common laws as being intertwined with Church history, everything else pre-dating it or being independent of it in my understanding.

I'll have a look at that book however: what were the other books?

Capital in the 21 century, how to win and influence people, Sidhartha, meditations by Marcus Aurelius, the mars trilogy, the nurture revolution.

These are off the top of my head.

The Catholic Church thing - yea that was quite unexpected for me, and apparently accidental for the church too - the basic premise was - they banned cousin marriage, and heavily enforced it throughout all of society - kings to peasants - this drove people to move around and settle outside of their home towns, driving up individualism and just changing the way our brains work on a neurological level - we have always been a close nit kin social structure animals.

The e book explains it quite well with tons of historical data, neuroscience, comparisons with different countries, continents and social structures.

It got me to “understand” India on a much deeper level since I moved here from Europe, and not get pissed off at people for “not thinking things through”. But also appreciate how small and consistent things can drive profound changes. Also how did china/ussr speed run the Industrial Revolution so quickly - spoiler alert - they copied the same “ban cousin marriage” thing

I will agree with some of those - although i would say Christianity rather than the Catholic Church specifically for most of it.

The Catholic Church did ban marrying first cousins and some other relatives (there is a complicated rule) which broke up clans. It also deserves a lot of credit for the scientific method, although that was not a deliberate strategy - it just emerged from theology and lots of educated people within in.

On laws and nationalism, there were many states and legal systems that predate it. Rome or Athens in Europe, empires, kingdoms, even a republic or two elsewhere. Legal systems go back to Hammurabi. Breaking up clans (requiring better laws) and distinguishing between secular and religious laws are something it deserves credit for.

I am puzzled by what the Church contributed to the Industrial Revolution though.

Yes, good point. But generally, that's not the case. Though what you hint at is a bit more present in all cultures than what we would like to admit.

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.

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.

> 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.

It's just the sin with the greatest consequences since it invokes the wrath of the groups the person being killed belonged to. Unlawful killings challenge the authority of those who determine which killings are lawful and which aren't, therefore destabilizing societies that are more complex than a hunter-gatherer group.

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.

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.

> 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.

Since you're using Biblical language, I just want to point out that you're not Biblically accurate. Murder isn't the original sin.

no for sure its not. its giving birth or rather - conception.

Psalm 51:5 — "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me."

This is a pretty terrible misrepresentation of original sin. I see you managed to copy it straight out of the Wikipedia page and completely ignore the sentence before it:

> In Christian theology, original sin is the condition of sinfulness that all humans share, which they inherit from the the Fall of Adam and Eve. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin

what does it mean a condition of sinfulness, the tendency?

like, if you ask a theosophist, which a I did the other day, he claimed it is not about sexuality or human nature at all. It is the sin of attempting to create a reality without God.

so, go figure.

Kettle? Cattle?

Cattle of course. But not an LLM Text .) which is good

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 are juxtaposing murder with killing. Every culture has a strong taboo against unlawful killing, i.e., murder. What counts as murder has changed, but the taboo against murder itself has not.

But doesn't that distinction kind of prove the point? Essentially killing people is fine when society approves and not fine when society doesn't implies that there is no built in norm against killing, its just society's "rules".

Read carefully. Neither me nor bluegatty claimed humans were inherently biased against killing. We claimed that humans were inherently biased against murder - and the universal taboo proves our point.

So your claim is that there is a universal taboo against things that there is a universal taboo against? If your definition of murder is taboo killing, it is very curcular to claim there is a universal taboo against it since by definition it is only murder if there is a taboo. Thus the claim kind of proves the opposite - if you have to limit it to murder then it shows there is no built in bias, as the definition of murder varies from society to society and essentially means killing in a way the society doesn't approve off. There is no possible way for there not to be a bias against murder since if a society is ok with it is ceases to be murder.

> Read carefully

I did, perhaps read my post carefully.

To be fair, it doesn't really seem worth mentioning to say humans are inherently biased against murder, which we then agree is a killing against that society's norms. Because the definitions of "murder" vary so hugely, you're essentially just saying "there is a taboo against breaking the arbitrary rules of your social group."

No. What we are saying is that murder is a universal taboo. That the "arbitrary rules" of every social group on earth regulate killing demonstrates exactly that. It is precisely these rules that demonstrate universality. Some societies regulate what you can eat - halal/kosher. Most don't. Thus, there is no universal taboo against "unlawful eating".

> Thus, there is no universal taboo against "unlawful eating".

That's probably a poor choice of example given cannabilism is pretty uniformly condemned.

Even ignoring that, pretty much every society regulates food. The health inspector shutting down resturants is just as much of a regulation as religious rules like kosher & halal (and there is some reason to suspect that the original goal of those rules were at least partially health related and made a lot more practical sense with the technology available 2000 years ago)

Nonetheless, ignoring all that, i still think any self-referential taboo applies in all circumstances, and thus is kind of pointless to discuss.

E.g.

All societies regulate unlawful insider trading. Societies where all insider trading is lawful are still vaccously regulating unlawful insider trading.

I think you are being deliberately obtuse here. Or maybe you are just dumb? Most societies have no concept of trading based on private knowledge and certainly no taboo against that activity. Hence, there is no universality. Your poor attempts at coming up with counterexamples proves my point.

> Most societies have no concept of trading based on private knowledge and certainly no taboo against that activity

Yes, obviously. That is my point.

But if you insert the word "unlawful" the statement becomes true, vaccously (in the formal meaning of that word) most of the time.

I struggle to think of a society that didn't have some regulation on what you can eat. They almost all have taboos against various meats especially. Can you give me some examples?

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.

This is one theory for crime. You could think of crime as a high variance high risk strategy to improve mating status. You might then expect most criminals to be young men, and for the straight crime rate to be higher than the gay crime rate. And indeed both of these are true.

Well now you are talking about humans and human females don't actually only mate with a small minority of high status males.

Technically you're right, because of your use of "only", but it is a fact that a minority of males reproduced, vs a majority of females, with historic ratios of 2:1 to 4:1.

The skew is weaker nowadays, but still more men are childless than women, and it is correlated with wealth to some extent.

I think that’s too narrow. You can also advance your genes by helping your sisters or other close relatives have offspring.

Sure but you can advance your genes even more by taking a woman for yourself. And if there are already enough other males to ensure the survival of the females and children then it might be worth some of the males going to war to get some females.

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.

> Lions murdering prey to eat is a stable equilibrium.

Lions kill and dont eat children of other lion aliances.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

Lookup the definition of murder because its subtly different from the definition of the word kill. You keep substituting those two words as if they are synonyms and they are not.

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.

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.

Plenty of people know who Hannibal Barca was. But sure, they probably don't know anything else about Carthage.

Fun fact, the main lesson from that war on the Carthaginian side was that you never let the merchants control the state in a time of war. There was a point where Hannibal was one siege away from erasing Rome from the history books and the leaders in Carthage called him back because sieges are expensive. This decision cost those leaders everything. Most of western history ever since swung on this lone bad decision. Its one of the few true inflection points in history.

I think most people associate the name Hannibal with Silence of the Lambs, maybe 10-15 per cent will know that it was some ancient warrior, perhaps 5 per cent know that it was a Carthaginian general and 2 per cent will know that his surname was Barca. Let's not kid ourselves about actual knowledge of history...

My point wasn't about Hannibal, though. Carthage died in a very different way from Rome: none of its institutions or cultural developments survived, while we still encounter plenty of obviously Roman things in everyday life, starting with the letters we use and names of the months and ending with Latin names for diseases and animals. Pretty much the only thing that survives from Carthage is the faint memory of Hannibal and, for military history buffs, Cannae. Otherwise, the culture has been erased from this world.

The story of the callback is interesting and reminds me of the Mongols suddenly withdrawing from Europe in order to elect the new Khan.

> 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.

> Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures.

Numbers 31.17-18

But we don't generally define war as murder.

War is termed throughout the bile as being just and necessary.

Philosophically speaking, we define murder as being done for personal selfish reasons; i.e greed, jealously, hatred/anger

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

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Evidence doesn't support your conclusion. Try reading something from Steven Pinker on this topic. Your chance of dying violently in such tribal societies is easily 10x (or more) higher than in modern society.

The psycholinguist? He's written about it? I mean ok I'll go check it out. In return I recommend some David Graeber.

I was thinking about your last point about why we honor veterans. In the US it’s not really the case that without them we’d be captured or killed. All our conflicts in the last several generations have been us invading or fighting in foreign lands against forces that were not attacking us. All our modern military personnel are willfully employed and well compensated and given lifetime benefits for that.

The US engages in preventive wars, generally. For example, the wars in Korea and Vietnam were ultimately fought to prevent the USSR from becoming more dominant than the USA and ultimately to prevent it from becoming so strong that in an eventual direct confrontation they would be able to cause a lot of destruction in the US. Iran is similar: they seem to want to prevent Iran from getting nukes which could then be used to destroy Israel, which the US considers its protectorate. But this is a super slippery slope. It’s essentially the same excuse Russia used in Georgia and now Ukraine: they are near neighbors geographically and culturally that must be stopped from joining the enemy alliance in order to prevent the enemy from attacking Russia in turn, which would be much easier should those countries be part of NATO. But where do you stop? Should Cuba be allowed to join Russia military alliance? Should Mexico be allowed to join BRICS? According to US foreign policy, the answer is always no, because of “national security”.

Well, it's much better to be on the invading side though. I've been to a coutry that was on invaded side (Ukraine), and, trust me, you'd always want to be on the invading side. And sometimes all it takes is just one invasion.

But when I said "we honor our veterans" I did not speak of USA, I spoke of any country veterans.

Normally there are more than 2 actors, which changes the reward structure.

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.

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.

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.

These are distribution problems. Usually intentional.

There is enough food to feed everybody.

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

Yes and? They are not about natural resources.

Literally about land, oil, rare earth minerals…

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.

Weord position to defend. So: modern wars are not about resources because there's enough food to feed everybody, those wars that are widely understood to be about resources (oil, land) are "distribution problems" and not about resources, and the only way to prove that they are is to show a country-wide economic benefit to the victor directly related to the war...

Confidently dismissing others based on your own weird definitions and shifting goalposts does not make you seem as knowledgeable as you think.

> those wars that are widely understood to be about resources (oil, land)

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.

Ok, so what do you think these wars are about?

Ukraine: Personal Grandeur by Mr Putin.

Iran: Security, hate, personal Grandeur

There's a simple energy argument for both predation and war. It is energetically cheaper to take than to build. If you can take with low risk, there is no (energetic) reason to not do so.

Collaboration is the exception. That collaboration is everywhere in many forms is a testament to the power of natural selection.

> 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.

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.

orangutans deal with similar and are notorious for being peaceful

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

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.

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

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.

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.

What is a "Tja, IMANAH"?

My guess:

Tja - German for "well".

IMANAH - I am not a historian.

Yeah, you got it! After 30 years on the internet I should know by now whats understandable for others and what's not (I honestly just realized that English speakers don't say 'tja'), but alas.

We have a sound we usually spell “yeah”, which can also be an informal “yes” but can also server roughly the role of a “Well, “. The same spelling is sometimes employed for a cheer that might otherwise be spelled “yay” and sounds very different, though.

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.

Going from "I'm not a historian" to "it might even be the norm historically" made me chuckle.

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.

> primatologist

sometimes I feel like that at work

> an evolved trait

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".

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.)

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.

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.

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/

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?"

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

> 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.

I mean, kill everyone else and you can be sure your genes are the only one propagating. Makes sense to me.

However there must have been some opposite instinct that prevented monkeys from just wiping themselves out. I hope so, for our sake.

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