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The realm of aggression, back every single one of those like
Mutual Of Omaha specials at the end there will always be the deep voice saying
"We are the only key species that kills", and that turns out to be wrong.
Lots of other species kill, they kill members of their own species
they kill them in anger, they kill them in cold blood premaditation
they cold kill them strategically in ways that would make Machiavelli proud,
they do it to each others infants, they do it competetively, advantageously
we're not the only species that kills.
Just to give one example of this, this was a male who joined one of my
troops of baboons a few weeks earlier and the only way to describe this guy
is he had horrible political skills.
And he was hassling all sorts of high-ranking guys he should not have been messing with
and one morning this is what was left of him.
And in the 30 years i've studied male baboons, the leading cause of death among male baboons
are male baboons. We're not the only species that kills.
In addition, we're not the only species that kills in an organised manner.
This is what's called a border patrol, a group of chimps that have gotten together
and they are patrolling the edge of their territory and if they encounter a male from another group
they will attack and kill him.
And it's documented by Goodall and all this one circumstance, things like this
a group organised enough to do this systematically and kill all the members of a neighboring troop.
So we're not just the only one that kills, not the only one that kills in an organised way
but this is some proto version of genocide, we're not the only ones who do this either.
So what about us then and our aggression? What you see is some of the time
we can just hit somebody over the head like any good old primate
but some of the time we are doing stuff that's unrecognizable.
We could do nothing more physically challenging in our aggression, than pulling the trigger
or dropping a bomb from 30,000 feet or looking the other way. We can be passive aggressive
we can damn with faint praise, we can do all sorts of subtle things.
Let me give you an extraordinary example on the way in which humans can damage each other for which
the world has never seen the likes of before. Everyday outside of Las Vegas
there are people who get up in the morning and they are rushing off to work
and their spouse reminds them to pick up the dry cleaning on the way home and they say goodbye to their kids
and they rush out and they get caught in traffic, and they're all anxious they're gonna be late at work
and they will look out and get a good parking spot, and get to work and sit down in a flight simulator
and what they spend their day doing is operating a drone bomber in Iraq that drops bombs and kills people.
This is at Nellis air force base, people sitting there spending their work days operating drone bombers
at the other side of the world. And at the end of the day, having finished your day
doing that, you get up and you rush off because you want to be there on time
for your daughter's ballet performance and you hug her afterwards and you can't believe it's possible
to love someone that much, and the next day, you sit in this dark room and kill people
on the other side of the planet.
And there's nothing out there in the animal world that has a precedent for that,
and not surprisingly, apparently the rate of psychiatric problems among people
who spend their days doing this, is also unprecedented.
So in some ways there is no precedent in that realm of us.