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It's not accurate that only a very small minority would participate, the murder rate can go as high as 40-60 percent (e.g Waorani, among others). This is what c

It's not accurate that only a very small minority would participate, the murder rate can go as high as 40-60 percent (e.g Waorani, among others). This is what can happen when there's no Leviathan that disincentives murder and when murder is status conferring instead of status reducing. It's also part of the nature of our close relatives, the chimpanzee. See "lethal raiding".

viraptor 6y ago
> (e.g Waorani, among others) ... when murder is status conferring instead of status reducing. This describes a given culture, including upbringing. It does not describe human nature. (or specifically doesn't prove they are aligned) We've got examples from other extremes too, like pacifism in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  Rape is shockingly common and cultures are human made things, so they express human nature or some variation of it. Picking which cultures you like as examples of "human nature" and excluding others isn't really a sound tactic of argumentation.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    It's not picking cultures I like. It's a counterexample - describing specific culture doing/avoiding X to an extreme level does not prove or disprove X being or not "in human nature".
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      This is from your previous comment: Very small minority would participate in murder, stealing, or rape, even if we created no disincentive for them. I have seen articles that say that if you ask a room full of women if they have been raped, you may get as much as half the hands go up. If you ask them if they ever said "no" to sex and ended up having sex anyway, up to 90 percent of the hands go up. In most countries, the definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent and is presumed to be only something a man can do to a woman (though some laws are being updated). If you accept that forcible sodomy by a man against another man is also rape, prison rapes are quite common. Human trafficking exists and every single instance of sexual intercourse with someone being trafficked against their will is typically referred to in articles on the topic as rape. Then there is statutory rape, where someone is deemed to be too young to reasonably give their consent, so it doesn't count if she said "yes" to it. Then there is date rape, which typically involves alcohol, a culture clash between people with different expectations for what would happen and tragic misunderstanding. Sometimes the guys will tell you that they didn't think they forced her. It's news to them that she felt forced into sex when someone shows up to accuse them of rape and drag them in front of a college review board or charge them with a crime. A lot of people think rape is about physical violence. It's not. Most rapes don't involve beating the hell out of the victim. It's a complicated topic, but rape is far from uncommon. I don't know where you get your ideas about human nature from but they don't seem to fit with anything I know about human nature and I'm some idiot with pie-in-the-sky ideals prone to assuming people are just going to be nice because that's just the right thing to do and that, sadly, is often not the case. At all.
      - da_big_ghey 6y ago
        Do you have citations for these incredibly high numbers? There has been some justified criticism about the way rape stats have been re-designed to elicit higher numbers. https://time.com/3393442/cdc-rape-numbers/ https://time.com/3393442/cdc-rape-numbers/
        DoreenMichele 6y ago
        Do you have citations for these incredibly high numbers? Sorry, no. It was an article I read a long time ago. Rape stats are an inherently difficult thing to measure well. I could, in all earnestness, argue for either much higher or much lower figures than the reported figures. That's a discussion I don't care to try to have on HN at all, much less on two hours sleep.
        watwut 6y ago
        Afaik, highers numbers about rape are somewhat less then 20%. So the 50% or 90% is bonkers and does not represent general population. However, rape (no matter what definition) is not evenly spread, some groups of women are more likely to become victims then others. Perpetrators pick their victims in a sort of rational way - some are more vulnerable. So if you bias the group the right way, you can get large numbers.
        DoreenMichele 6y ago
        So the 50% or 90% is bonkers and does not represent general population. No, it's actually commentary on the fact that women themselves often cannot clearly state "I was raped." The article in question was trying to show that lots more women have been raped than will admit to it or claim it. But you can also read it the other way: It casts light on how difficult it is to define rape. Rape hinges on the detail of consent. Even women who have been fed alcohol until they were incapacitated and then taken to someone's room will go online and say things like "I had sex with a friend last night. I'm in a relationship. I know I need to drink less..." and get a chorus of people saying "Honey, that was rape." People imagine rape to be some clear cut crime. In reality women are often very unclear in their own minds whether or not they were raped. If the crime hinges on the detail of consent and the woman in question can't state clearly whether or not she wanted it, much less whether or not she consented, then you have bigger problems in determining data than in how surveyors ask their questions.
- hntrader 6y ago
  The clear trend from hunter gatherer to modern society is a dramatically declining murder rate. The murder rate has declined by about 50x thanks to modern society. This is what I mean when I say that these actions are human nature. Only because of the state Leviathan and modern cultural zeitgeist have we been able to change this behavior from very common (in some cases more likely than not) to rare. What's the murder rate of the Moriori? Is it less than 5 per 100k per year? If modern society were to disintegrate, the murder rate should increase by 50x roughly as we trend back to our raw nature without these artificial attenuating forces.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    > The murder rate has declined by about 50x thanks to modern society. > This is what I mean when I say that these actions are human nature. That carries an assumption that modern society restricted that side of human nature. An alternative: modern society enables us to act according to human nature and not resort to actions necessary for survival in previous societies. If modern society disintegrated, there wouldn't be a lack of society influence. It would be a different society. That's why we have the whole nature-vs-nurture debate which is not trivial. That's why I objected to the original claim. (Although as Doreen mentions, some behaviours are much more common than others)
    - hntrader 6y ago
      I get where you're coming from, but modern society is clearly pushing us away from our own nature in this instance, not towards it. To establish this, we just need to ask the question of what would happen if the explicit state punishments for murder, rape, etc were removed. The rates would increase significantly, implying that the existence of these measures is attenuating behaviour that's otherwise rather natural. If chimps received an electric shock each time they tried to murder another chimp, would they murder less often? Yes, because that shock is attenuating their true nature. Admittedly, "human nature" is a rather fuzzy concept and isn't a scientifically precise term.
    - sjg007 6y ago
      Historians and scientists have studied this and basically the rise of government has reduced the murder rate. There's a great PBS episode on it.
Sharlin 6y ago
However, it's very much not a part of the nature of our other close relatives, the bonobos, whose conflict resolution mechanisms can be literally described as "make love, not war". The difference seems to be more about their respective environments' relative abundance/scarcity than any innate "nature".
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  Indeed, humans clearly have both tendencies in our evolutionary lineage. But I think the point is that humans build societies which enforce behavioral norms independently of what would emerge based on the “natural” environment. Both bonobos and chimpanzees are locked in their strategies for conflict resolution, which may not always be appropriate for the prevailing environmental conditions.
- hntrader 6y ago
  The difference is definitely not known to be due to current environments' relative abundance. Maybe you got that from the Wiki article on bonobos which includes a deceptive quote of a 2014 Nature article. What the article actually says is that bonobos have a genetic adaptation due to historic evolution in environments with abundance which either allows for phenotypic variation in response to current environment, or which has resulted in biological evolution to less violence as a general policy (which would indeed be "nature"). Personally I'm strongly inclined towards the latter hypothesis because it's the most parsimonious and fits observation better, ie the number of observed bonobo murders is near zero despite varying environments. If we find modern bonobos living in some scarcity who take up murder as a result, then I'll change my mind. Chimps on the other hand are believed to be violent because it confers genetic fitness (as per that same Nature article), and things such as the age and sex of their victims is predictive suggesting they murder in order to eliminate competition. This is their nature in the sense that this behavior is significantly impacted by their genes.
  - Sharlin 6y ago
kiliantics 6y ago
Your understanding of society is behind by about two or three centuries at least... It's supremely unscientific to use chimpanzee social dynamics to understand human ones. And the standard view among anthropologists about prevalence of violence in a given community, is that it arises out of certain conditions (e.g. famine or other loss of resources, usually man-made by outsiders or despotic rulers), not because we are innately prone to just killing each other if there is no "leviathan" to stop us. Past research suggesting this kind of thing -- like the single study of a single tribe that you are giving us with your argument -- has been debunked by more nuanced, modern (and less colonial/racist) research. There are far more peaceful societies known to us than violent ones, though unfortunately we are mostly forced to participate in one of the latter.
- hntrader 6y ago
  It has zero to do with racist research (the same findings apply to historical Europe) and your assertions here are just factually wrong. Here's a study on middle ages Croatia where 20 percent of skeletons showed cranial fractures (which doesn't even include murder by flesh wounds): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.22083 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.22083 Here's a study on London cemetaries which found a 7 percent rate (again this excludes murder by other methods): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23288 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23288 "e.g. famine or other loss of resources, usually man-made by outsiders or despotic rulers" Demonstrably wrong in the case of the Waorani. It was a blood feud going back generations, long before any contact with other societies. So yes, a Leviathan would've stopped it. https://www.nature.com/news/2009/090511/full/news.2009.463.html https://www.nature.com/news/2009/090511/full/news.2009.463.h...
  - fuzzfactor 6y ago
    >It was a blood feud going back generations, long before any contact with other societies. So culturally preserved hatred (which became an outlier over a period of time where other cultures preserved less hatred), not much different than the Hatfields & McCoys.
lukeschlather 6y ago
This is a little like saying that starvation is human nature. Our entire society is organized around minimizing various aspects of human nature, starting with starvation and moving on up to murder, and at some point in the list of things we try to avoid, perhaps because they are part of our nature, is bullying.
watwut 6y ago
One culture with unusually high murder rate does not prove murder is "in human nature". You are literally picking outlier to make general claim.
- hntrader 6y ago
  No, I didn't bring up that one example to support the general claim that murder is part of human nature. I brought it up to debunk the notion that only a very small proportion would necessarily engage in these activities in the absence of a state. For that purpose, all I needed was a single counter-example. If instead you want evidence for the more general claim, you can look at some of the studies I've referred to in this thread (e.g. the one about London or Croatia), or just look up anthropological surveys of hunter gatherer societies that show murder rates 50x higher on average.
  - watwut 6y ago
    > I brought it up to debunk the notion that only a very small proportion would necessarily engage in these activities in the absence of a state. But, what you brought up is a very small part of world. And that small part of world has own governance structure too. They dont have social "state", but they do have some kind of social structures, culture, hierarchy, traditions and unwritten laws. Also, how do you know those are murders and not wars or executions? Murder is specific thing, killing members of other tribe over resource is not going to be considered murder. Raising child to adult is expensive on food among other things, you do that to other people and you do that less to own.

viraptor 6y ago

> (e.g Waorani, among others) ... when murder is status conferring instead of status reducing. This describes a given culture, including upbringing. It does not describe human nature. (or specifically doesn't prove they are aligned) We've got examples from other extremes too, like pacifism in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori

DoreenMichele 6y ago
Rape is shockingly common and cultures are human made things, so they express human nature or some variation of it. Picking which cultures you like as examples of "human nature" and excluding others isn't really a sound tactic of argumentation.
- viraptor 6y ago
  It's not picking cultures I like. It's a counterexample - describing specific culture doing/avoiding X to an extreme level does not prove or disprove X being or not "in human nature".
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    This is from your previous comment: Very small minority would participate in murder, stealing, or rape, even if we created no disincentive for them. I have seen articles that say that if you ask a room full of women if they have been raped, you may get as much as half the hands go up. If you ask them if they ever said "no" to sex and ended up having sex anyway, up to 90 percent of the hands go up. In most countries, the definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent and is presumed to be only something a man can do to a woman (though some laws are being updated). If you accept that forcible sodomy by a man against another man is also rape, prison rapes are quite common. Human trafficking exists and every single instance of sexual intercourse with someone being trafficked against their will is typically referred to in articles on the topic as rape. Then there is statutory rape, where someone is deemed to be too young to reasonably give their consent, so it doesn't count if she said "yes" to it. Then there is date rape, which typically involves alcohol, a culture clash between people with different expectations for what would happen and tragic misunderstanding. Sometimes the guys will tell you that they didn't think they forced her. It's news to them that she felt forced into sex when someone shows up to accuse them of rape and drag them in front of a college review board or charge them with a crime. A lot of people think rape is about physical violence. It's not. Most rapes don't involve beating the hell out of the victim. It's a complicated topic, but rape is far from uncommon. I don't know where you get your ideas about human nature from but they don't seem to fit with anything I know about human nature and I'm some idiot with pie-in-the-sky ideals prone to assuming people are just going to be nice because that's just the right thing to do and that, sadly, is often not the case. At all.
    - da_big_ghey 6y ago
      Do you have citations for these incredibly high numbers? There has been some justified criticism about the way rape stats have been re-designed to elicit higher numbers. https://time.com/3393442/cdc-rape-numbers/ https://time.com/3393442/cdc-rape-numbers/
      - DoreenMichele 6y ago
        Do you have citations for these incredibly high numbers? Sorry, no. It was an article I read a long time ago. Rape stats are an inherently difficult thing to measure well. I could, in all earnestness, argue for either much higher or much lower figures than the reported figures. That's a discussion I don't care to try to have on HN at all, much less on two hours sleep.
      - watwut 6y ago
        Afaik, highers numbers about rape are somewhat less then 20%. So the 50% or 90% is bonkers and does not represent general population. However, rape (no matter what definition) is not evenly spread, some groups of women are more likely to become victims then others. Perpetrators pick their victims in a sort of rational way - some are more vulnerable. So if you bias the group the right way, you can get large numbers.
        DoreenMichele 6y ago
        So the 50% or 90% is bonkers and does not represent general population. No, it's actually commentary on the fact that women themselves often cannot clearly state "I was raped." The article in question was trying to show that lots more women have been raped than will admit to it or claim it. But you can also read it the other way: It casts light on how difficult it is to define rape. Rape hinges on the detail of consent. Even women who have been fed alcohol until they were incapacitated and then taken to someone's room will go online and say things like "I had sex with a friend last night. I'm in a relationship. I know I need to drink less..." and get a chorus of people saying "Honey, that was rape." People imagine rape to be some clear cut crime. In reality women are often very unclear in their own minds whether or not they were raped. If the crime hinges on the detail of consent and the woman in question can't state clearly whether or not she wanted it, much less whether or not she consented, then you have bigger problems in determining data than in how surveyors ask their questions.
hntrader 6y ago
The clear trend from hunter gatherer to modern society is a dramatically declining murder rate. The murder rate has declined by about 50x thanks to modern society. This is what I mean when I say that these actions are human nature. Only because of the state Leviathan and modern cultural zeitgeist have we been able to change this behavior from very common (in some cases more likely than not) to rare. What's the murder rate of the Moriori? Is it less than 5 per 100k per year? If modern society were to disintegrate, the murder rate should increase by 50x roughly as we trend back to our raw nature without these artificial attenuating forces.
- viraptor 6y ago
  > The murder rate has declined by about 50x thanks to modern society. > This is what I mean when I say that these actions are human nature. That carries an assumption that modern society restricted that side of human nature. An alternative: modern society enables us to act according to human nature and not resort to actions necessary for survival in previous societies. If modern society disintegrated, there wouldn't be a lack of society influence. It would be a different society. That's why we have the whole nature-vs-nurture debate which is not trivial. That's why I objected to the original claim. (Although as Doreen mentions, some behaviours are much more common than others)
  - hntrader 6y ago
    I get where you're coming from, but modern society is clearly pushing us away from our own nature in this instance, not towards it. To establish this, we just need to ask the question of what would happen if the explicit state punishments for murder, rape, etc were removed. The rates would increase significantly, implying that the existence of these measures is attenuating behaviour that's otherwise rather natural. If chimps received an electric shock each time they tried to murder another chimp, would they murder less often? Yes, because that shock is attenuating their true nature. Admittedly, "human nature" is a rather fuzzy concept and isn't a scientifically precise term.
  - sjg007 6y ago
    Historians and scientists have studied this and basically the rise of government has reduced the murder rate. There's a great PBS episode on it.

Sharlin 6y ago

However, it's very much not a part of the nature of our other close relatives, the bonobos, whose conflict resolution mechanisms can be literally described as "make love, not war". The difference seems to be more about their respective environments' relative abundance/scarcity than any innate "nature".

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jkhdigital 6y ago
Indeed, humans clearly have both tendencies in our evolutionary lineage. But I think the point is that humans build societies which enforce behavioral norms independently of what would emerge based on the “natural” environment. Both bonobos and chimpanzees are locked in their strategies for conflict resolution, which may not always be appropriate for the prevailing environmental conditions.
hntrader 6y ago
The difference is definitely not known to be due to current environments' relative abundance. Maybe you got that from the Wiki article on bonobos which includes a deceptive quote of a 2014 Nature article. What the article actually says is that bonobos have a genetic adaptation due to historic evolution in environments with abundance which either allows for phenotypic variation in response to current environment, or which has resulted in biological evolution to less violence as a general policy (which would indeed be "nature"). Personally I'm strongly inclined towards the latter hypothesis because it's the most parsimonious and fits observation better, ie the number of observed bonobo murders is near zero despite varying environments. If we find modern bonobos living in some scarcity who take up murder as a result, then I'll change my mind. Chimps on the other hand are believed to be violent because it confers genetic fitness (as per that same Nature article), and things such as the age and sex of their victims is predictive suggesting they murder in order to eliminate competition. This is their nature in the sense that this behavior is significantly impacted by their genes.
- Sharlin 6y ago

kiliantics 6y ago

Your understanding of society is behind by about two or three centuries at least... It's supremely unscientific to use chimpanzee social dynamics to understand human ones. And the standard view among anthropologists about prevalence of violence in a given community, is that it arises out of certain conditions (e.g. famine or other loss of resources, usually man-made by outsiders or despotic rulers), not because we are innately prone to just killing each other if there is no "leviathan" to stop us. Past research suggesting this kind of thing -- like the single study of a single tribe that you are giving us with your argument -- has been debunked by more nuanced, modern (and less colonial/racist) research. There are far more peaceful societies known to us than violent ones, though unfortunately we are mostly forced to participate in one of the latter.

hntrader 6y ago
It has zero to do with racist research (the same findings apply to historical Europe) and your assertions here are just factually wrong. Here's a study on middle ages Croatia where 20 percent of skeletons showed cranial fractures (which doesn't even include murder by flesh wounds): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.22083 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.22083 Here's a study on London cemetaries which found a 7 percent rate (again this excludes murder by other methods): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23288 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23288 "e.g. famine or other loss of resources, usually man-made by outsiders or despotic rulers" Demonstrably wrong in the case of the Waorani. It was a blood feud going back generations, long before any contact with other societies. So yes, a Leviathan would've stopped it. https://www.nature.com/news/2009/090511/full/news.2009.463.html https://www.nature.com/news/2009/090511/full/news.2009.463.h...
- fuzzfactor 6y ago
  >It was a blood feud going back generations, long before any contact with other societies. So culturally preserved hatred (which became an outlier over a period of time where other cultures preserved less hatred), not much different than the Hatfields & McCoys.

lukeschlather 6y ago

This is a little like saying that starvation is human nature. Our entire society is organized around minimizing various aspects of human nature, starting with starvation and moving on up to murder, and at some point in the list of things we try to avoid, perhaps because they are part of our nature, is bullying.

watwut 6y ago

One culture with unusually high murder rate does not prove murder is "in human nature". You are literally picking outlier to make general claim.

hntrader 6y ago
No, I didn't bring up that one example to support the general claim that murder is part of human nature. I brought it up to debunk the notion that only a very small proportion would necessarily engage in these activities in the absence of a state. For that purpose, all I needed was a single counter-example. If instead you want evidence for the more general claim, you can look at some of the studies I've referred to in this thread (e.g. the one about London or Croatia), or just look up anthropological surveys of hunter gatherer societies that show murder rates 50x higher on average.
- watwut 6y ago
  > I brought it up to debunk the notion that only a very small proportion would necessarily engage in these activities in the absence of a state. But, what you brought up is a very small part of world. And that small part of world has own governance structure too. They dont have social "state", but they do have some kind of social structures, culture, hierarchy, traditions and unwritten laws. Also, how do you know those are murders and not wars or executions? Murder is specific thing, killing members of other tribe over resource is not going to be considered murder. Raising child to adult is expensive on food among other things, you do that to other people and you do that less to own.