alt Hacker News> Tools predate homo sapiens (which emerged about 300 kYA)
I’m going to use a charged word because Jane Goodall used it.
Goodall asserted that humans and chimpanzees (and wolves) are unique among animals in that we have a genocidal tendency [1]. When a group attacks us (or has “land and resources” we want) we don’t just chase them off. We exterminate them. We expend great resources to track them down to ensure they cannot threaten us.
One reading of pre-history is that we had a number of hominids that were fine sharing the world, and humans, who were not. (I’ve seen the uncanny valley hypothesised as a human response to non-human hominids, as well as other humans carrying transmissible disfiguring diseases.)
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/does-...
Replies
>going to use a charged word
I honestly have no clue what word you used was 'charged'. Considering any of those words charged makes me worry how far political correctness has gone! (I'm assuming, I suppose, politically charged?)
The worst part of reading this thread is I know I won't be able to google image anything interesting related to "non-human hominids" :( Your comment was oddly depressing lol. Real "are we the baddies?" moment this morning.
I think this is part of the reason humans are so stupid during any sort of divisions where "sides" emerge. To be able to do commit this genocide, you need a very ugly "switch" in your head that can make your actions justifiable/right. I think this switch is the same, emotional, unthinking one that makes some people so religion about teams sports, phone OS, political alignment, etc.
Related, I think this is also the mechanism for how religion tends to stabilize societies/give them cohesion. Rather than having an eventual positive feedback loop of division, the division is placed between some type of "good" and "evil" rather than your neighbor. The "us vs them" division that switch craves is put on something more metaphysical (and sometimes a net benefit, like defining evil as behavior destructive to societies).
Army ants do something similar as well.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ants-and-the-art-...
> (and wolves)
And lions. And banded mongooses. And meerkats. And ants. Lots and lots of ant species - they’re actually by far the worst, following colony pheromones to the end of the earth just to get a single ant. Ants that aren’t genocidal to their own species tend to be some of the worst invasive species (like Argentinian ant supercolonies).
I love me some Jane Goodall as much as the next guy but that hypothesis is not taken seriously by primatologists and using the word “genocidal” in this context would get you laughed out of the room. Lethal intergroup aggression, coalitionary killing, and raiding are all different aspects of violent behavior in animals and hominins are far from unique in demonstrating them.
It’s an interesting interpretation, but it’s sounds all very unsubstantiated. Speculation it seems to me.
Given enough time of human survival, the only species left on this planet will be ones that are aesthetically pleasing to us
Everything selectively bred due to environmental or artificial pressures to have big eyes, big heads, high vocal sounds, attributes of human babies
It is very strange and an aberration amongst species, one being tolerating other beings because of their entertainment value and the joy they give from looking at them, but seems to be consistent and validate what's happened over eons of homo sapien propagation
Sometimes when I think about this it makes me wonder if we should take the dark forest hypothesis seriously (re: Fermi paradox).
Not only are we the only species to reach this kind of technology but among humans the first group to reach space was the Nazis. Today the innovation in that area seems driven by militaristic states and by people who seem ideologically adjacent. In other words it’s driven by very aggressive territorial members of one of the most aggressive territorial species.
We can’t generalize from one example of evolution, but if this is indicative of a common pattern then there might be some scary MFs out there. Our radio signals have been spreading for a while, so for all we know something is on its way to cleanse the universe of all forms of life that offend its god (or whatever its genocidal rationalizations is).
If this is true then we die. There is zero chance of resisting something with the technology to travel the stars and perhaps a million years or more head start on us. It’d be like an Apache attack helicopter versus a termite mound.
I had this thought when I saw the ideological turn (or mask removal) of certain people in the space industry. I found it metaphysically disturbing. Again… if there is other advanced life and if this is the pattern of how you evolve to become spacefaring, then we are doomed.
> unique among animals in that we have a genocidal tendency
That's an unsupported generalization.
The article describes "behaviors" that include "perhaps even genocide", and notes that wiping out populations exists in chimps and wolves too.
So not unique, there's a "perhaps", and it's not a tendency. There's no evidence we have a "gene" for it or anything.
In the vast, vast, vast majority of conflicts between two groups, we don't exterminate the "enemy". Otherwise, the human race would have gone extinct a long time ago. Wiping out entire populations is by far the exception, not the rule, of human societies. It happens, but the situations are notable precisely for their extremity, precisely because they're not the norm.