Those Lovable Chimps And The Art Of War

Written by craig

Never argue with a chimpanzee, especially when he tells you to get out.

This is another one of those, "guess what I ran across the other day" articles. At first it was morbidly amusing but, the more I thought it over, the more questions I had. Some researchers had been observing some communities of chimpanzees over a period of several years. What they found was greed, murder, and war, complete with massive territorial conquests.

The chimps, using quite effective stealth techniques, would send out patrols into a neighboring community to ambush and kill males from that group. Then, significant numbers of the "winning" side would be settled in the new territory. (Some of you history buffs, does this sound at all familiar?) So, did we "teach" them this? 'Apparently not; these chimps had not been acclimated, as it were, to humans. According to the researchers:

Our observations help to resolve long-standing questions about the function of lethal intergroup aggression in chimpanzees. The suggestion that such aggression is an incidental by-product of human intervention is no longer viable [7]. Instead our findings support the hypothesis that killing neighboring conspecifics is adaptive. An unresolved question is whether chimpanzees do so to acquire mates or resources [1].

And now, children, the moral of the story . . . We, as mammals, are hardwired to terrible, unspeakable things. This is the norm, not the exception. Let us hope that the world will wake up soon and accept that merely "teaching" children to be nice and sending "problem kids" to anger management classes will never erase what eons of evolution have put into place.

Eventually we'll adapt. When the external environment was too hostile for a civilized society, we learned to protect ourselves with clothes, and houses, and bug repellents. 'Truth is, the internal environment's been a little too hostile, too. Let's keep teaching kids to be nice, but we have the biological and chemistry knowledge to improve the success rate to remarkable levels.

Now, for those of you who still think that we can get by with thinking the right thoughts and meditating on peace and harmony, I have a proverb:

Those who are determined not to hear, speak, or see evil, will soon wish they'd at least listened when someone said to look out for those chimpanzee patrols.

Peace.