Re: Birdbrain: "Damned dirty apes"

On 2 Lug, 09:24, richardalanforr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Jul 1, 11:18 pm, Vend <ven...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 1 Lug, 21:09, Jason Spaceman <notrea...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

And remember, if you disagree with Birdnow and reply to him, it means your
obsessed with him. . .

From the article:
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So, we are now just one ape among many. Does it surprise us that our young
people act like animals, when we are telling them that they are just one of
many beasts?

Non-human apes are less intraspecies aggressive than humans.

What nonsense! Humans are far less aggressive towards other members of
their own species than any other ape. That's one of the reasons why we
can live in enormous conurbations, and why it is possible for me to
walk down a street in Beijing or New York without much risk of being
attacked. The image we get from the popular media is very distorted,
and most of us do not live our lives in constant risk of violence.

Perhaps not most of us, but many do.

How many non-human apes live in a constant risk of lethal violence by
members of their species?

A chimp which moves into the territory of another group of chimps runs
a very high risk of savage attack.

Like an human who moves into the private property of another human.

Male orangs are fiercely
territorial, and if they encounter another male in their territory
will quite literally fight to the death to defend it.

I don't know about orangs, but if I remember correctly, gorillas and
chimps rarely kill individuals of their respective species.

Anyway, these are examples of territorial defence, where the
aggression occours in response to a perceived misbehavior of an
individual.

Humans, in addition to that, also relatively often actively initiate
aggression towards individuals who weren't misbehaving. I don't think
this happens frequently in other apes.

Paradoxically, it's the fact that we are not aggressive towards other
members of our own species that allows us to build huge populations
capable of warfare. Even so, for most of human history warfare was a
ritualized activity involving a small proportion of the population.

I don't think this is completely accurate.
For some part of human history, battles were ritualized and limited to
well-defined armed forces, and they still are to some extent. However,
war is not and was never just a series of ritualized battles. Armed
forces usually exploit, harass and sometimes massacre civilians.

.

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