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> War may be the exception, not the rule. > Just because we're built for it doesn't mean other species will be. You heard of what chimps get up to? Ants? Micr

> War may be the exception, not the rule. > Just because we're built for it doesn't mean other species will be. You heard of what chimps get up to? Ants? Microbes? They don't just have wars; They have raiding parties, take slaves, serve as battlefield medics, compete in intrafactional and interfactional rivalries that slowly boil over… Hell, even trees actively release toxins to try to kill other nearby plants. On a long enough timescale, war is almost certainly highly (and lethally) maladaptive. But in a non-post-scarcity environment with social contact, creatures whose bodies disagree with entropy tend to learn that violence is an effective tactic for taking others' calories/oil and nutrients/minerals. Maybe there's exceptions. I hope so, anyway.

unsupp0rted 3y ago
All those species evolved on the same planet, with the same constraints. War works well for them, so they evolved to get better and better at it. But war is resource-intensive and costs lives. Lives are easily replaced on Earth. It’s not hard to imagine a planet where going to war would be mutually assured destruction on a species level, even for ants and microbes.
- Jensson 3y ago
  > It’s not hard to imagine a planet where going to war would be mutually assured destruction on a species level, even for ants and microbes. That is very hard to imagine, how do you reckon that would be possible? Does the planet only support a couple of anthills and then all resources are consumed? How would ants even appear on such a planet?
- kolinko 3y ago
  Interesting thought, but how would that work?
  - Intralexical 3y ago
    ....Could be something like extremophilic archaea here on Earth? Not sure how they treat each other, but they're usually quite friendly (beneficial, or harmless— never pathogenic or parasitic) to us mammals– Something about branched separation in biochemistry and highly diverse ecological niches making resource competition less of a thing, I'd guess. But that's not really "mutually assured destruction on a species level", so much as more to gain by working together– Which honestly is better.
  - unsupp0rted 3y ago
    If the environment is so hostile that life keeps appearing, failing to find a foothold, then getting crushed by statistics, then if some resilient life does eventually develop, it might be able to survive in such a hostile environment only through internal/external cooperation or symbiosis. For instance, if two or more extremophiles evolved together but remained separate species. They might even require one another’s contribution to successfully procreate. And successful procreation might be rare. That sort of life, if it evolved to consciousness, would be averse to any form of damaging competition. One poorly timed selfish move and the hostile environment wins: everybody dies. This cooperation imperative would be built into their biochemistry, same as war is built into ours. You’d probably still find insane or outlier members of their society, who are radically uncooperative or individualistic. But they would be rare and containable, otherwise their species couldn’t exist.
    - Intralexical 3y ago
      > For instance, if two or more extremophiles evolved together but remained separate species. They might even require one another’s contribution to successfully procreate. And successful procreation might be rare. > That sort of life, if it evolved to consciousness, would be averse to any form of damaging competition. Uh. That sounds like us. Our dependence on our mitochondria and chloroplasts to survive as microbial life, it turns out, did not translate into an aversion to war after we grew up as macroscopic life and everybody around us had their own endosymbionts too. Honestly I think you're going in the wrong direction with this. A crueler world results in crueler people; scarcity begets conflict. Maybe you could technically create peace by simpy isolating everybody in some kind of desert-like environment, but if you want a Nash equilibrium and selection pressures favouring active prosocial cooperation, then I think what our own history of war, domestication, self-domestication, democratization, etc. shows is that you effectively need (amongst other things) an almost post-scarcity environment, where basic physical resources are no longer a constantly urgent limiting factor on life— A techno-utopia with nuclear weapons and additive manufacturing has both much more to gain from cooperation and much more to lose from war than their less fortunate equivalent struggling just to survive. But then that goes back to my original reply to you: Anybody who evolves through that initial awkward phase of competition in fear of entropy is probably going to have violence as a part of that history, and part of themselves. --- Note that effectively post-scarcity environments do actually appear in nature now and then, and when they do appear, they do sometimes result in apparently utopic, peaceful, and more empathetic societies. E.g. for a particularly stark example, see bonobos versus chimps. But as with many good things, it seems to usually be highly spacially/socially local, and temporally transient.
- rzl1235 3y ago
  [dead]

unsupp0rted 3y ago

All those species evolved on the same planet, with the same constraints. War works well for them, so they evolved to get better and better at it. But war is resource-intensive and costs lives. Lives are easily replaced on Earth. It’s not hard to imagine a planet where going to war would be mutually assured destruction on a species level, even for ants and microbes.

Jensson 3y ago
> It’s not hard to imagine a planet where going to war would be mutually assured destruction on a species level, even for ants and microbes. That is very hard to imagine, how do you reckon that would be possible? Does the planet only support a couple of anthills and then all resources are consumed? How would ants even appear on such a planet?
kolinko 3y ago
Interesting thought, but how would that work?
- Intralexical 3y ago
  ....Could be something like extremophilic archaea here on Earth? Not sure how they treat each other, but they're usually quite friendly (beneficial, or harmless— never pathogenic or parasitic) to us mammals– Something about branched separation in biochemistry and highly diverse ecological niches making resource competition less of a thing, I'd guess. But that's not really "mutually assured destruction on a species level", so much as more to gain by working together– Which honestly is better.
- unsupp0rted 3y ago
  If the environment is so hostile that life keeps appearing, failing to find a foothold, then getting crushed by statistics, then if some resilient life does eventually develop, it might be able to survive in such a hostile environment only through internal/external cooperation or symbiosis. For instance, if two or more extremophiles evolved together but remained separate species. They might even require one another’s contribution to successfully procreate. And successful procreation might be rare. That sort of life, if it evolved to consciousness, would be averse to any form of damaging competition. One poorly timed selfish move and the hostile environment wins: everybody dies. This cooperation imperative would be built into their biochemistry, same as war is built into ours. You’d probably still find insane or outlier members of their society, who are radically uncooperative or individualistic. But they would be rare and containable, otherwise their species couldn’t exist.
  - Intralexical 3y ago
    > For instance, if two or more extremophiles evolved together but remained separate species. They might even require one another’s contribution to successfully procreate. And successful procreation might be rare. > That sort of life, if it evolved to consciousness, would be averse to any form of damaging competition. Uh. That sounds like us. Our dependence on our mitochondria and chloroplasts to survive as microbial life, it turns out, did not translate into an aversion to war after we grew up as macroscopic life and everybody around us had their own endosymbionts too. Honestly I think you're going in the wrong direction with this. A crueler world results in crueler people; scarcity begets conflict. Maybe you could technically create peace by simpy isolating everybody in some kind of desert-like environment, but if you want a Nash equilibrium and selection pressures favouring active prosocial cooperation, then I think what our own history of war, domestication, self-domestication, democratization, etc. shows is that you effectively need (amongst other things) an almost post-scarcity environment, where basic physical resources are no longer a constantly urgent limiting factor on life— A techno-utopia with nuclear weapons and additive manufacturing has both much more to gain from cooperation and much more to lose from war than their less fortunate equivalent struggling just to survive. But then that goes back to my original reply to you: Anybody who evolves through that initial awkward phase of competition in fear of entropy is probably going to have violence as a part of that history, and part of themselves. --- Note that effectively post-scarcity environments do actually appear in nature now and then, and when they do appear, they do sometimes result in apparently utopic, peaceful, and more empathetic societies. E.g. for a particularly stark example, see bonobos versus chimps. But as with many good things, it seems to usually be highly spacially/socially local, and temporally transient.
rzl1235 3y ago
[dead]