Humans vs Chimps: Who is more violent? | Richard Wrangham and Lex Fridman
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Published 2021-10-10
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GUEST BIO:
Richard Wrangham is a biological anthropologist at Harvard, specializing in the study of primates and the evolution of violence, sex, cooking, culture, and other aspects of ape and human behavior.
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All Comments (21)
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“Nobody wants to get hurt, what they want to do is hurt others.” Pretty much sums up most violence that takes place from bully’s in the playground to warfare
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I like a guy who can tell a good story without using his hands. 10/10.
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Also, stakes are much higher for animals than humans. Soldiers go to a field hospital when they're injured. We fix a broken leg in a cast and treat cuts with stitches and anti-biotics. Any of those are death sentences for animals. They will be much more cautious than we when dishing out violence for this reason.
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I’d like to think that civilization protects the weak from the bullies.
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I listened to the full conversation at work today. What a wonderful conversation 🇬🇧
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In a way, it is incredible how relatively peaceful large cities are, considering they contain millions of people moving around. You would expect a lot more disturbances than there actually are.
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Let us however remember not just to look at violent urges, but at all those protective loving urges too. I feel like people are going to start painting all animals, and humans, as ferocious monsters. It's just one aspect of the complexity of behaviour.
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Coincidentally I was reading Cormac McCarthy's "All the pretty horses" the same night I listened to this: He writes "...and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold"
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The law of ambush, the first law of coordinated violence, is ancient and crosses primate species. We raised the ante a fair bit.
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I haven’t watched this yet. But I got thinking about the question yesterday about who is really more violent chimpanzees or humans. I got thinking about it yesterday when I learned that some police officers basically amputated a guy’s leg intentionally in Texas. The man wasn’t resisting arrest or anything.
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Great summary of the topic!
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Send this clip to Joe Rogan
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Fascinating topic
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i really whould like of a book recomendation about this conversation.
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Hey 👋 LEX!!! Nice 👍🏼
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Haven't heard the entire episode but humans will enter a one on one life/death situation without feeling safe (to go farther, scared to death). Or Regan's bodyguard stepping in front of a bullet. Does any other animal do that?
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Please can you get Manfred Kets de Vries on an interview!!
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Guerilla warfare badum-tss
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Lex, please have an expert on who can discuss PMDD in women, if there is one... It is the monkey wrench in all reasonable discourse about these type of topics you choose, and you choose a lot of them. It would help so many people. Up to 8% of women have it!
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So he compared chimps to humans in civilian society, I wonder if the comparison would be as drastic if it was chimps to humans in a prison.
