Chimpanzee vs human fight code#
Did humans evolve this moral code to repress certain behaviors and promote others? After all, the violent behaviors we find so objectionable aren't just genetically ingrained. Just like the behaviors they seek to counteract, these codes have been near universal in human societies since the Code of Hammurabi first put them into stone.
You can see this "moral code" in our formal laws as well as our informal social standards. John Mitani, the head researcher on the chimp study, explained to Time magazine: After all, we have strong moral compunctions against actions such as murder and rape, even if they remain prevalent in human society. But it's worth considering that humanity is ingrained with a genetic inclination that steers us, both as individual actors and as political institutions, toward warfare and worse.īut clearly humans and chimps are different. There are often valid and important reasons to go to war. A primatologist once told me that she refused to study chimpanzees because their remarkable humanness made her too uncomfortable and self-conscious to remain objective. That common biology likely provides the genetic foundation for our shared behavior. What else could fully explain their constant recurrence throughout human history and across vastly different human cultures? After all, we share 97.3 percent of our genes with chimps.
Jared Diamond argues in his 1992 book, The Third Chimpanzee, that these ugly behaviors have stayed with us as our common ancestor divided into chimp and human lineages seven million years ago. Given that humans and chimps are so closely related, and our genocidal records so pronounced, it stands to reason that this common behavior may be more than just coincidental. The idea of chimp genocide may sound strange, but they are one of only three animals that has been observed wiping out entire social groups. In some instances, one group will "invade" and annex the territory of another, killing all but the adult females, who are forced to incorporate into the dominant group. They will often kill any male or young chimpanzees they find, sometimes eating or physically brutalizing their victims in a manner that some researchers liken to torture. The adult males of a social group, which usually number about 30 to 50 in size, daily patrol the edge of their group's territory. The chimp warfare described by this study, and previously by famed primatologist Jane Goodall, includes all the behaviors that we as humans consider to be the very worst: killing, torture, cannibalism, rape, and perhaps even genocide. The propensity for warfare in chimps could help explain the human conceptions of "good" and "evil" that define our laws, our social norms, and our morals. But it may reveal more than just the genetic roots of warfare. The study had led many to conclude that war is an innate behavior with genetic roots extending millions of years. The nature of chimpanzee war, in which males patrol their group's territory and violently annex the territory of other groups in pursuit of land and resources, is startlingly similar to the warfare that has consistently emerged throughout human history. A groundbreaking ten-year study on the behavior of chimpanzees, reported in Current Biology, reveals that humanity's closest living relative expresses a propensity for human-like warfare.
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