<i>> If chimpanzees - one of the species closest to humans genetically - could do so without human constructs of religion, ethnicity and political beliefs, then "relational dynamics may play a larger causal role in human conflict than often assumed", they added.</i><p>That's a weird thing to say. Studies of primitive tribes showed decades ago that they only seem to fight each other for a handful of reasons. Religion, ethnicity and political beliefs aren't among them. Fighting over resources, women and blood feuds are.<p>Supposedly academic anthropology had difficulties accepting these findings, especially the Yamomamö studies by Chagnon where he documented them going to war to steal each other's women, as it contradicted the popular idea of the noble savage.

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).<p>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.

If anyone is interested in going more in-depth on this, there's a four episode documentary series on Netflix called <i>Chimp Empire</i> [1]. I just saw it last week and it's fascinating stuff. You get to know the individual chimps in-depth (they all have names) and get to see conflicts in this "civil war" unfold. Plus I learned a lot about social and "political" dynamics among chimps.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.netflix.com/title/81311783" rel="nofollow">https://www.netflix.com/title/81311783</a>

Damn, they've been polarized by social media too? Zuckerberg's greed knows no limits.

The book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan is a revelation in how close human behaviour is to those of chimps.<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61662.Shadows_of_Forgotten_Ancestors" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61662.Shadows_of_Forgott...</a>

Here is the paper: <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4944" rel="nofollow">https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4944</a> - it's interesting.<p>I noticed there was a respiratory epidemic that killed 25 chimps naturally quickly, one would imagine that would have quite a societal destabilizing impact?

I hope nobody decides to violate the prime directive and take sides in the chimp war.<p>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.

we can send them some of that vim donation money

That's absolutely bananas!

So which side is fighting for our values?

I always wondered when Planet of the Apes would begin. We can see it now:<p>a) Chimpanzees going to war. b) Humans ending humans.<p>Both is presently in the making, if one looks at the geopolitical scale and looks at damage caused by drones; a) is probably not yet full scale. Chimpanzees may be better diplomats than humans.

They've been watching us and what we do to each other.