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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 acqu

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..

mothballed 7mo ago
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.
- actionfromafar 7mo ago
  I think that’s too narrow. You can also advance your genes by helping your sisters or other close relatives have offspring.
  - mothballed 7mo ago
    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.
- missedthecue 7mo ago
  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.
  - deleted 7mo ago
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  - michaelmrose 7mo ago
    Well now you are talking about humans and human females don't actually only mate with a small minority of high status males.
    - constantius 7mo ago
      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.
dml2135 7mo ago
> 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.
- deleted 7mo ago
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- hunterpayne 7mo ago
  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.
lo_zamoyski 7mo ago
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.
- EA-3167 7mo ago
  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.
  - card_zero 7mo ago
    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?
    - EA-3167 7mo ago
      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."
EA-3167 7mo ago
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.
krapp 7mo ago
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- adsweedler 7mo ago
  Murder is a synonym for kill but you can differentiate between them to make a point that one particular instance of such a caused-death is worse. Is more reprehensible. The semantics of the word are as fluid as the opinions of those who you are trying to explain the situation to, using such distinctions. If you think the death was wrong, it is a murder. If you think the death was right, it was a murder, killing, assassination, or any such word. Language is obviously not as black and white as the example I gave, but the point stands. I agree with your definition but think it’s too narrow, and thus missing the point of the original argument. I don’t agree with lo_zamoysk‘s original point. I think lions CAN murder. I think when they commit cannibalism it’s only when they murder other lions. All other deaths lions cause, lion or other animal, are killings (maybe murder maybe not). But when Lion A kills and eats Lion B, Lion A would have much preferred to get food another way. It’s a lot more likely Lion A is motivated by something other than hunger, like so many of Lion A’s - or even any Lion’s - kills are. Motivations are required for murder. The word “murder” ascribes motivation to a killing.
  - hunterpayne 7mo ago
    Murder is a hyponym of kill, not a synonym. The inverse is that kill is a hypernym of murder. PS I think I got that right, it could be the reverse.
- hunterpayne 7mo ago
  "I mean, the United States practically murdered an entire continent of civilizations and cultures" You realize that this is largely propaganda and doesn't honestly or accurately describe the actual history right? If a history teacher taught you this, you deserve to get a refund. The actual history is a lot more complex, subtle, nuanced, and driven by biology and trade more than warfare. Most of the deaths were caused by disease and trade drove the warfare in most cases. Also, the warfare was rarely strictly along ethic lines but it was at times. Perhaps you are thinking of the Spanish or something...
deepsun 7mo ago
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.
- icameron 7mo ago
  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.
  - brabel 7mo ago
    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”.
forshaper 7mo ago
In addition to the standard cross-cultural sample, I find the Seshat database useful for checking universals. https://seshat-db.com/sc/scvars/ https://seshat-db.com/sc/scvars/
TheOtherHobbes 7mo ago
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.
- bjourne 7mo ago
  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.
  - bawolff 7mo ago
    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".
    - bjourne 7mo ago
      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.
      - Amezarak 7mo ago
        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."
hellojimbo 7mo ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapogo_lion_coalition
- adsweedler 7mo ago
  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
- bluegatty 7mo ago
  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.
kevin_thibedeau 7mo ago
Sanctioned killing to defend or strengthen the tribe is generally not equated with murder.
seizethecheese 7mo ago
> 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.
- samus 7mo ago
  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.
bawolff 7mo ago
> Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures. Yeah, but almost all cultures consider killing people in war not to be "murder".
heavyset_go 7mo ago
> 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
- bluegatty 7mo ago
  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)
eastbound 7mo ago
> 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.
larodi 7mo ago
> 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.
- mariodiana 7mo ago
  Since you're using Biblical language, I just want to point out that you're not Biblically accurate. Murder isn't the original sin.
  - larodi 7mo ago
    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."
    - jbboehr 7mo ago
      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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin
      - larodi 7mo ago
        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.
- ownlife 7mo ago
  Kettle? Cattle?
toivo 7mo ago
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.
- seer 7mo ago
  “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.
  - constantius 7mo ago
    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?
    - seer 7mo ago
      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
never_inline 7mo ago
> Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures. Numbers 31.17-18
frakrx 7mo ago
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.
- bluegatty 7mo ago
  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
  - energy123 7mo ago
    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.
  - hunterpayne 7mo ago
    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.
adrian_b 7mo ago
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.
- the_af 7mo ago
  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.
  - adrian_b 7mo ago
    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.
energy123 7mo ago
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.
Telemakhos 7mo ago
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.
- redsocksfan45 7mo ago
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watwut 7mo ago
> Lions murdering prey to eat is a stable equilibrium. Lions kill and dont eat children of other lion aliances.
Amezarak 7mo ago
> 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.
inglor_cz 7mo ago
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.
- hunterpayne 7mo ago
  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.
  - inglor_cz 7mo ago
    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.
themaninthedark 7mo ago
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

mothballed 7mo ago

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.

actionfromafar 7mo ago
I think that’s too narrow. You can also advance your genes by helping your sisters or other close relatives have offspring.
- mothballed 7mo ago
  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.
missedthecue 7mo ago
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.
- deleted 7mo ago
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- michaelmrose 7mo ago
  Well now you are talking about humans and human females don't actually only mate with a small minority of high status males.
  - constantius 7mo ago
    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.

dml2135 7mo ago

> 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.

deleted 7mo ago
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hunterpayne 7mo ago
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.

lo_zamoyski 7mo ago

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.

EA-3167 7mo ago
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.
- card_zero 7mo ago
  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?
  - EA-3167 7mo ago
    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."

EA-3167 7mo ago

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.

krapp 7mo ago

[flagged]

adsweedler 7mo ago
Murder is a synonym for kill but you can differentiate between them to make a point that one particular instance of such a caused-death is worse. Is more reprehensible. The semantics of the word are as fluid as the opinions of those who you are trying to explain the situation to, using such distinctions. If you think the death was wrong, it is a murder. If you think the death was right, it was a murder, killing, assassination, or any such word. Language is obviously not as black and white as the example I gave, but the point stands. I agree with your definition but think it’s too narrow, and thus missing the point of the original argument. I don’t agree with lo_zamoysk‘s original point. I think lions CAN murder. I think when they commit cannibalism it’s only when they murder other lions. All other deaths lions cause, lion or other animal, are killings (maybe murder maybe not). But when Lion A kills and eats Lion B, Lion A would have much preferred to get food another way. It’s a lot more likely Lion A is motivated by something other than hunger, like so many of Lion A’s - or even any Lion’s - kills are. Motivations are required for murder. The word “murder” ascribes motivation to a killing.
- hunterpayne 7mo ago
  Murder is a hyponym of kill, not a synonym. The inverse is that kill is a hypernym of murder. PS I think I got that right, it could be the reverse.
hunterpayne 7mo ago
"I mean, the United States practically murdered an entire continent of civilizations and cultures" You realize that this is largely propaganda and doesn't honestly or accurately describe the actual history right? If a history teacher taught you this, you deserve to get a refund. The actual history is a lot more complex, subtle, nuanced, and driven by biology and trade more than warfare. Most of the deaths were caused by disease and trade drove the warfare in most cases. Also, the warfare was rarely strictly along ethic lines but it was at times. Perhaps you are thinking of the Spanish or something...

deepsun 7mo ago

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.

icameron 7mo ago
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.
- brabel 7mo ago
  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”.

forshaper 7mo ago

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

TheOtherHobbes 7mo ago

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.

bjourne 7mo ago
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.
- bawolff 7mo ago
  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".
  - bjourne 7mo ago
    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.
    - Amezarak 7mo ago
      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."

hellojimbo 7mo ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapogo_lion_coalition

adsweedler 7mo ago
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
bluegatty 7mo ago
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.

kevin_thibedeau 7mo ago

Sanctioned killing to defend or strengthen the tribe is generally not equated with murder.

seizethecheese 7mo ago

> 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.

samus 7mo ago
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.

bawolff 7mo ago

> Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures. Yeah, but almost all cultures consider killing people in war not to be "murder".

heavyset_go 7mo ago

> 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

bluegatty 7mo ago
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)

eastbound 7mo ago

> 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.

larodi 7mo ago

> 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.

mariodiana 7mo ago
Since you're using Biblical language, I just want to point out that you're not Biblically accurate. Murder isn't the original sin.
- larodi 7mo ago
  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."
  - jbboehr 7mo ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin
    - larodi 7mo ago
      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.
ownlife 7mo ago
Kettle? Cattle?

toivo 7mo ago

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.

seer 7mo ago
“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.
- constantius 7mo ago
  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?
  - seer 7mo ago
    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

never_inline 7mo ago

> Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures. Numbers 31.17-18

frakrx 7mo ago

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.

bluegatty 7mo ago
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
- energy123 7mo ago
  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.
- hunterpayne 7mo ago
  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.

adrian_b 7mo ago

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.

the_af 7mo ago
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.
- adrian_b 7mo ago
  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.

energy123 7mo ago

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.

Telemakhos 7mo ago

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.

redsocksfan45 7mo ago
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watwut 7mo ago

> Lions murdering prey to eat is a stable equilibrium. Lions kill and dont eat children of other lion aliances.

Amezarak 7mo ago

> 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.

inglor_cz 7mo ago

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.

hunterpayne 7mo ago
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.
- inglor_cz 7mo ago
  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.

themaninthedark 7mo ago

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