Bob Collins
The apes. It always comes back to the apes. Discover Magazine has a story today, based on research involving primates, John Horgan explores this notion that we are somehow hardwired to engage in warfare.
He takes a look, oddly enough, at a group of baboons who fought their version of war from scraps at a garbage dump, until several of them died from tuberculosis.The remaining critters were far more sedate.
Conclusion? Once the cost of war reaches a certain level, it will no longer be waged. Conflict among monkeys eases, it says here, when they are assured of food and when they become interdependent.
Is this a concept that baboons get and humans don’t?
