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[humanist]

OOOhhhhhh Oracles, that is soooooo nice :) Thanks. As the sun is shimering onto the cool blue sea it blows the love that I share for Thee. Hope you catch it's rays and warm your soul in its delight That's my nice thought for the day.

[Oracle]

OOOhhhhhh Oracles, that is soooooo nice :) Thanks. As the sun is shimering to cool blue sea it blows the love that I share for Thee. Hope you catch it's rays and warm your soul in its delight That's my nice thought for the day.

Ok .... we are both equally warmed by glowing sun and rejuvenated by positive thoughts

..... Gosh you Aussies are ahead of us in so many ways!

[repulsewarrior]

...that's funny...this makes me laugh, thank-you

and good-night...

[humanist]

Elvis has left the building :):):):) this makes me :):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):)

[Oracle]

Wired for war?

Killer chimps fuel debate on how war began

In 1998, researchers in Uganda saw a group of male chimpanzees beating on and swaggering around another male chimp’s freshly killed body. Its windpipe, fingernails and testicles were torn out.

The finding added to a growing number of documented incidents of chimpanzees ganging up on, hunting down and killing each other—activities in which some researchers find eerie parallels to human war. These scientists argue that the killings among chimps, our closest ape relatives, may offer clues to war’s evolutionary origins, lessons that could help us break our own violent habits.

But this claim has stirred a backlash from other scientists, who dispute its apparent implication that we’re biologically wired for war. Some of these critics prefer to blame the mass killing on various aspects of modern civilization—a force, they add, that may also be pushing chimps to violence, by eating into their habitats and food resources.

New findings could fuel the debate.

Two new reports of violence among chimps have appeared, leading their authors to claim that this activity is normal for the animals.

“Lethal coalitionary aggression is part of the natural behavioral repertoire of chimpanzees,” writes David Watts of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in one such report, scheduled to be presented April 9 at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The other appeared in the June, 2004 issue of the International Journal of Primatology. Combined, the reports documented 11 killings and some maimings in two chimp communities totaling over 200 members. Each report covers a period of slightly under a decade.

There is an online movie of a chimpanzee attack, filmed in Tanzania in 1998, which gives an idea what the incidents are like, researchers say. It’s unknown whether this assault actually killed its victim, a young male.

Chimps live in groups called communities. Most reported violence occurs when chimps wander near or into the territory of a neighboring chimp community. If they come across a chimp from that community who is alone, they may attack.

Watts declares the incidents back up a proposal that war is rooted in evolution. This view, called the imbalance of power hypothesis, holds that animals that conduct mutual group violence do so because it helps them win resources and territory. This in turn lets them survive longer and breed more—and all living species, evolutionary theory holds, descend from those that were able best do those things in the past.

The imbalance of power hypothesis states, in other words, that evolution favored humans and chimps who warred when and because they could get away with it. “This makes grisly sense in terms of natural selection,” said Richard Wrangham, a professor of anthropology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., and the author of the hypothesis.

Human and chimp battles differ in major ways, he stressed. Humans seem to be much worse judges of what they can get away with. The result: human wars often drag on year after bloody year, after having been initially sold to those involved as an easy win.

But there are also similarities to chimps, Wrangham added. Fundamentally, “if we as human males feel we are in a position to kill safely, then we’re easily induced to do it.” One example may be genocide, he said. Insurgents in Iraq often attack on one or a few isolated victims, not unlike the chimps, who usually gang up on one, he added. “The old principle of attacking safely is still there.”

The modern phenomenon of long, bloody wars might stem from the fact that leadership decisions have moved away from the battlefield, Wrangham speculated, adding that he’d rather leave this issue for future research to address.

But none of this contradicts his view, he added, that warfare as a whole is rooted in tendencies like those the chimpanzees display. Among hunter-gatherers, “the surprise raid is the typical pattern. The aim is to get together a small group of men who go off, and find a helpless victim, kill them and run away again.”

But some anthropologists question parallels between human and chimp violence.

The frequency of chimp killings “has been exaggerated,” said Brian Ferguson, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J.

The first reports of chimp violence came in the 1970s in Tanzania, he said, when whole chimp communities were supposedly wiped out by others. But “in many cases, all we know for sure is that some chimps disappeared,” he said, adding that some researchers have “a tendency to take a disappeared chimpanzee as a killed chimpanzee.” Some of the animals might have just left, he added.

A possibly darker dimension to the tale is that human interference might have induced the violence, Ferguson added. This might have occurred because human activities put pressure on the chimps’ land and food resources, forcing them to duke it out over the dwindling remains.

The worst of the environmental depradations, such as logging, seems to have ended at the national parks housing the chimps in the studies, Ferguson added; but human pressure continues. For instance, he said, forest cover for chimps has vanished all around Kibale National Park, home of the chimps in Watts’ study, who accounted for eight of the 11 killings mentioned in the two new reports.

“They’re totally hemmed in now,” Ferguson said of the chimps at Kibale. “It’s a very human kind of situation: a population that’s growing, that can’t go anywhere, may be beginning to run down its resources.” The Ngogo chimp community, the one Watts reported on, is gigantic for a chimp community, he added; researchers have estimated its membership at more than 150.

If modern civilization is pushing chimps to battle each other, it wouldn’t be a totally unprecedented finding. It would fit a widely believed theory that war is basically a product of modern civilization. This view, first popularized by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the mid-1700s, got a boost in 2002, when new research suggested Native Americans had been more peaceful before Europeans landed in America than afterward.

Anthropologists at the University of California at Santa Barbara and Ohio State University examined more than 5,000 Native American skeletons and found that those from after Christopher Columbus landed in the New World showed a rate of traumatic injuries more than 50 percent higher than those from before. Some researchers speculated that the increased violence evident in the bones might have stemmed from such factors as disputes over access to Western goods and weapons, and White people’s expansion forcing once-separate groups of natives together.

Regardless of these findings, chimpanzee researchers dispute the claim that modern man’s intrusions are the main culprits in chimp infighting.

The Kibale park covers more than 700 square kilometers, and the chimps in it multiply as rapidly or slightly more than average, suggesting resources are ample, Wrangham argued. “They actually seem to be very well off in terms of their food supply.”

He also dismissed Ferguson’s idea that researchers are counting too many unconfirmed disappearances as killings. Two-thirds of the 49 killings documented to date were either directly seen, he said, or inferred from clear evidence such as chimps prancing around a brutalized corpse. Only the remaining 16 are classified as suspicious disappearances.

Some researchers have also disputed the balance-of-power hypothesis on grounds that mutual killing among animals besides chimps and humans is rare. None has been found among bonobos, apes more closely related to chimps than humans are.

Wrangham argues that this may be because only particular social structures, such as a combination of social communities with small and frequently changing subgroups, make slaying an easy option. “It is a finely tuned strategy,” he said, “used, on occasion, when killers are able to kill at very low risk to themselves.”

.... so many parallels to our behaviour!

[shahmaran]

So it is only natural for animals to try and guarantee territorial advantage for the benefit of the future generations....

[Oracle]

So it is only natural for animals to try and guarantee territorial advantage for the benefit of the future generations....

Only if we follow the law of the jungle and do not integrate or ameliorate our instinctive primeval behaviour ...

Remember we are one species ... TC and GC ... whereas Chimps and Bonobos are separate species.

The most heartening fact is that the most aggressive Great Ape can be made to behave more sociably when certain factors are removed ....

We can do it too ....

[shahmaran]

So it is only natural for animals to try and guarantee territorial advantage for the benefit of the future generations....

Only if we follow the law of the jungle and do not integrate or ameliorate our instinctive primeval behaviour ...

Remember we are one species ... TC and GC ... whereas Chimps and Bonobos are separate species.

The most heartening fact is that the most aggressive Great Ape can be made to behave more sociably when certain factors are removed ....

We can do it too ....

What we call the "law of the Jungle" is nothing but the result of the conflict between billions of different genetic interests, one must be very naive to deny that, we as humans, have managed to evolve beyond this, we are far from it.

The "law" is still very much alive, just in various other forms.

[repulsewarrior]

...indeed, studies with rats and cockroaches, both, as social as apes and men demonstrate stress as a motivating factor for the same type of violence. "lawlessness" occurs and so does homosexuality and prostitution when conditions become overcrowded, and where these animals commit these acts for their own survival, profiting as best they can from submission. great acts of compassion are also demonstrated, sacrifice by the elder for the young. and by dividing these communities into social groups, one finds the alphas having a demographic of 'good' and 'bad' individuals, those who do not mind the betas who follow them and others who hide their acts so that the reward from their superiority is kept to themselves. what makes us different to all living forms is our need to reason, animals may reason, but they are not engrossed in there ability to make change, nature in its perfect form allows for this, no doubt our plundering affects these living creatures worse, but we are only beginning to reach the environmental limits that affects us all.

So it is only natural for animals to try and guarantee territorial advantage for the benefit of the future generations....

it is not as simple because animals do not possess the territory, there is no Heritance, and there remain no relics, what is important to them is its immediate use.

...this is not exactly true either, but generally heiarchies are naturally selected over time, the land defines its effecient use equally to all growing things, which includes its systems, (wind, weather, river, mountain, flora, etc.(all grow)). certain settings will be returned to because the geography suits a territorial advantage, it would be possible that one community or the other will 'possess' a site simply because they got there first, but for the specie, many more will exist which for survival are available for this use. "warring" is doubtful, unless this negative pattern exists over many seasons by the same parties, where this resource is scarce enough to really have a primal importance. it's hardship to one or the other provides the challenge, and its solution although quite natural, is confronting an unnatural condition in nature.

'overcrowding', or the artificial isolation which in its exclusivity does not allow for free movement is at issue.

...and I cannot stress the importance of looking at the island as a single system, where we are dwellers, preparing for the growth in our own population, and which will affect the other dwellers as well (animal, plant and geographic systems) which will occur because of our commitment to our European partners, and our proximity to an immensely larger population over three continents who are mobile, and who will wish to benefit from these prospects as well. animals don't engineer as we do, and my manifesto is, i think, a very good example of social engineering toward this effort, which as a scientist, and a political-economist, is based on about 350 years of practice. Thus, I suggest to you that this Manifesto represents the most Socialised governance in the world because it makes Bicommunal and Bizonal useful toward our betterement as Humans who seek to act in exchange while we possess as persons our own identities. (Internally we should (and can) sustain the two societies which represent its living Patrimony, but these cannot survive the demands we face for our representation as Stewards of this land) ... and a Unitary State must exist which goes beyond these identities to consider the island's interest first, and above all.

the changes we find are in ourselves. by overcoming our own fears we embrace the future, and the change takes place. animals react to the forces that they face without this sense of time.

[Oracle]

I still think preservation of the individual and his rights, is more important than the group /community rights. But the community has to provide the requirements to sustain the individual.

Or as Plato put it:

"Man is a tame or civilised animal; nevertheless, he requires proper instruction and a fortunate nature, and then of all the animals he becomes the most divine and most civilised; but if he be insufficiently or ill-educated he is the most savage of earthly creatures"