Hobbes Leviathan

So okay what I am asking you Anna is (contrary to what Kropotkin thought) genetic behavioural traits that are good for the individual but bad for the species is normal??

What alot of shit, they clearly make alliances as well, what is it that makes them make an alliance with one group but go to war with another, that seems to be environmentally determined.

A most you can say the capacity for 'xenophobia' (and please if you use that term don't then reverse map it back onto humans) and alliances is present in chimps, and that the extent and specific nature of such behaviour is environmentally contingent, there is also the fact that chimps have a culture as such and behaviours can spread by learning.

If there's not such a premium on territory then it makes sense that bonobos would have evolved a different attitude to other troops (and different social structure, sexual behaviour etc) but it doesn't follow that the behaviour is environmentally determined in that if you put common chimps in bonobo habitat and bonobos in common chimp habitat, they wouldn't each display the other species traits. A duck's webbed feet are in the final analysis, caused by its aquatic environment, but you would say that they are determined by genes, not the environment.

As for cannibalism, until very recently it was routinely practised by pretty much all humans. Some 'stone-age' new guinea tribes still practise it. Pretty much all primitive tribes exhibit the extreme xenophobia of chimpanzees, and kill and raid rival tribes. There'll be a shifting pattern of tribal warfare interspersed with uneasy alliances for trade of goods or women. Among 'primitives' the percentage of male deaths caused by homicide is usually somewhere between 20 and 50%.

Stop confusing me even more fucken!!!!

Genetic traits that are good for the individual are normal. Whether they are 'good for the species' or not depends on the specific nature of the particular trait.

Ah amazing the handy equating 'primitive contemporary' tribes with our ancestoral state, you can add euro centric whiggish ideas of 'progress' to your repetoire of heterosexist assumptions.

yes I'm aware that Bonobo's will have evolved much of their sex mad laid back behaviour.

Alliances tend to be within groups. I only know of two long-term studies of chimpanzees and both demonstrate that they will be very aggressive towards other troops. Chimpanzees are xenophobic in that they can recognise that individuals belong to other groups and will treat them very differently to those in their own group. I'd be interested to know what studies you're basing your allegations of 'alliances' on.

Here is a question: do you guys think that Kropotkin deliberately left the rapist monkeys out of his book to make his politics look more appealing? I find it hard to believe that he was just 'too optimistic'.

Hahahaha, fucking hell

But tell me, why should pre-'first contact' tribes (eg those in the Grand Valley in new guinea) differ in lifestyle markedly from the rest of the human race before agriculture?

The studies of chimpanzees revealing this behaviour were done very recently, so I don't think you can blame him for leaving them out of his book, since he can't have known about them.
In any case, only the first two chapters of 'mutual aid' are about animals, the rest are about humans, to whom Kropotkin's thesis is more applicable.

The point being that they make alliances to form such troops and that such troops vary in size, hence the threshold of xenophobia varies, individulas within the troop might rarely meet or interact with each other yet don't attack each other.

Also don't female chimps exchange groups and troops in search of a mate?

because there is great variety in behaviour even amongst hunter/gatherer and nomadic tribes, with many different cultures, rituals and the like, to assume they are somehow unchanging or fossils of our ancestoral past is simple minded nonsense. indeed our tendency to flatten their differences and interpret all their many behaviours and culutres in a reductionist manner is rather akin to an Alien from Mars encountering humans and flattening all our cultures past and present into one universal one.

Um. Hobbes' vision was ordered and cooperative. If you really want do everyone a favour then look after number 1.

Nah, I did read the book. My memory is pretty bad but I remember the first two chapters were pretty cool stuff about crabs helping each other up and eagles letting the old ones eat first and shit like that. but on the other hand there was not much in there about crabs doing "bad" things to each other. I just meant do you think he wrote (maybe even subconsciously) it as more of a propaganda joint, like the prelude to his future stuff, a deliberate move on his part

This is ridiculous. You clearly said that they make alliances between groups, so this is backtracking. And troops, although they vary in size, and alliances shift within the troop, are still pretty small. Individuals would certainly know every chimpanzee within their troop. Xenophobia means that they can recognise outsiders and act more aggressively towards them than they do to members of their troop. This also makes very good evolutionary sense. Why do you have such a problem with this idea, that you resort to clutching at straws like this?

Female chimps will leave the troop and travel to and join neighbouring troops, yes. (Since the violence to other troops is carried out by males, I don't see what relevance this is of.) Other animal species, which have a matriarchal structure (males leave to join another troop, rather than females) tend to be more peacable.

Blah blah blah cultural relativism blah blah blah
Of course there are differences between them, but there are also a whole lot of universals. If you want to see how humans lived as hunter-gatherers before agriculture, then it is instructive to look at how hunter gatherers live today. Or do you think that modern primitives have somehow evolved to be different from how we are back then? If, say, aborigines and europeans, who diverged tens of thousands of years ago, do not differ genetically, then why should humans have evolved in the few thousands years since agriculture? (Besides very small changes like genes for lactose digestion etc).

Seriously, I don't know what your problem is with all this, unless you're trying to cling on to the 'noble savage' myth.

Anna you haven't made any point here, clearly we haven't 'evolved', but our social life has changed dramatically, and such differences in human socieities doesn't require any genetic difference, the Spartan, Aztec, Aborigine and modern American all share the same genes by and large yet the cultures are extremely different, likewise 'primitive tribes' have histories, they change, they pass on myths, develop religions, customs and the like, to think they just sat around having the exact same existance for thousands and thousands of years until some white folk showed up is frankly fucking racist. Ironically the 'noble savage' is as much part of that, afterall the 'noble savage' is a myth that such people represent our 'natural state', as if they are innocent children uncorrupted by culture.

Oh, I'm 'racist' now, I'll add that to the list. What were the others? 'blinkered bigot', 'heterosexist', 'euro-centric whig'...

They did have pretty much the same existence for thousands of years, just as all of us had pretty much the same existence for tens of thousands of years before the rise of agriculture and the domestication of horses. How is this racist?
Of course humans have culture, they have had for at least 40,000 years, but the point is that for most of that 40,000 years the culture has been broadly the same, tools have been broadly the same, technology has been broadly the same. Although cultures vary between tribes (of course I am not denying this), the point is that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle (and the customs and all the rest that go along with it, which do not vary that much) is the type of existence that we are adapted to, since we have lived that way for most of our evolutionary history as homo sapiens.

Also, all the evidence from the archaeological record suggests a way of life thousands of years ago very similar to that of the tribes of new guinea, for example. If you want to offer some evidence in favour of it differing wildly, I'm all ears, but as yet you haven't provided any evidence to back up any of your ridiculous claims.

Genius-level heckle.

juozokas, I just saw your tagline. Did you know that female hyenas have penises? They have to give birth through them and all.

No I didn't know that but that is very interesting, here is my tagline:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=tnCk0uGwFZI

The classic analysis of Hobbes as a political philosopher is "The Theory of Possessive Individualism" by C. B. Macpherson in which he identifies Hobbes's views as an ideology reflecting the rise of the market economy where we are all constrained to behave as "possessive individuals".
I don't know whether Hobbes really believed that things in a "state of nature" were like he said or whether he just assumed this as part of his argument in favour of the State and government. Even in his day people knew that the members of primitive tribes were not engaged in a war of everyone against everyone else. In any event, anthropologists have long refuted this ideological view (a reflection of what capitalist market society would be like without a State to keep order). For instance, Marshall Sahlins in his book "Stone Age Economics", especially the well-known first chapter on "The Original Affluent Society" (http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm).

A fat load of good all that 'affluence' does you when us men are incredibly likely to die of head trauma from some other man's rock/stick/rock on a stick.

I don't buy the 'Hobbes as a prophet of capitalism' thing either. It isn't like the psychology of the ruling class under capitalism just popped out fully formed before the factory system was well established and had produced technologies, psychologies and cultures that nobody could have forseen.

I see you've been watching too many Flinstone cartoons.

Yeah as I mentioned before, the level of male death by homicide in primitive tribes is 20-50%. As for the archaeological record, plenty of skulls have been found with pointy rocks stuck in them, and also ones that have been cracked to get the brains out - murder and cannibalism right there.

As for the Sahlins article, while broadly correct it has its deficiencies (based on limited studies of little reliability), and it doesn't factor in the 'work' done aside from hunting/foraging. While it is laudable to correct some of the misunderstandings of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle (and also to point out that early agriculture had a lot of bad effects and was more labour intensive) to swing too far to the opposite extreme and paint the hunter-gatherers as noble savages is madness. For one thing, setting aside their extreme xenophobia and genocidal tendencies, the nomadic lifestyle necessitates infanticide to be strictly enforced.

Anna different groups in Papua and such places actually have quite different individual cultures and societies - isolation does that.

"most of that 40,000 years the culture has been broadly the same"

sorry you have no way of knowing that, "the archaeological record" tells us very very little, and indeed if you wanted to draw a parallel with modern day hunter gatherers to say what way people in Europe were like before agriculture you would have to conclude they had lots of different cultures. Culture meaning more than just material culture.

Or maybe he's read some better anthropology. Lee's study which Sahlin based his theory on was very flawed. In actuality, the hunter-gatherers Lee studied had a working week of at least 40 hours.

A couple of papers have criticised Sahlins conclusions, but I don't know how to get free versions of them:

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0091-7710(200023)56%3A3%3C301%3ATDSOT%22%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=A98DC5E2B7928EB14F6A19F99FB2E49F.tomcat1?fromPage=online&aid=121765

I know they had cultural differences, I've not said they didn't. But if you look at the cultural variation among a bunch of different hunter-gatherer tribes, there are plenty of universals. As for 'material culture' - the technological basis of a society places a lot of constraints on that society.
Actually, you mention isolation of tribes - surely this in itself tells us a fair amount about them?

Some universals

You'll be telling us next that when a caveman wanted a wife all he did was chose someone he fancied, knock her on the head and then drag her back to his cave by her hair.

Don't be ridiculous. Sahlins' conclusions are flawed and idealised. Pointing this out can only lead to a more accurate appraisal of hunter-gatherer life.