My point of departure is a story told by the professor Robert Sapolsky, who teaches Biological Sciences and Neuroscience at Stanford University, California.
Since he was a graduate student, Sapolsky spent a few months each year in Kenya, studying the social behavior of a troop of baboons.
A tourist lodge was build next to their territory and the most aggressive Forest troop males went to the garbage pit for food.
In 1983 an outburst of tuberculosis occurred, from infected meat in the dump, 46% of adult males died. Only females (now double the number of males) and less aggressive males had survived.
Ten years after the Forest troop was found out to have a much gentler social system, in spite of the fact that by then even the more docile males died of old age. Other males had transferred to the troop as adolescents, the typical custom of baboons, and had found a tolerant and gregarious social style. Males had high rates of affiliative behaviors, and low-ranking males were subject to low rates of aggressive attack and subordination by high-ranking males, and experienced much less stress.
You can watch the video, where you see Professor Sapolsky telling the story and briefly commenting on it. It lasts just three and a half minutes
The question posed in the video is:
How can we create a better society, that promotes human flourishing?
The final comment of Prof. Sapolsky:
If baboons are able to, in one generation, transform what is supposed to be textbooks social systems, sort of engraved-in-star, we don’t have an excuse when we say there is sort of inevitability about human social systems.
Here below find extracts from Prof Sapolsky’s article on the subject (he is a very captivating writer, so I recommend reading it all) published in Foreign Affairs January-February 2006 (see http://www.truthout.org/article/robert-m-sapolsky-a-natural-history-peace
In the early 1980s, “Forest Troop,” a group of savanna baboons I had been studying – virtually living with – for years, was going about its business in a national park in Kenya when a neighboring baboon group had a stroke of luck: its territory encompassed a tourist lodge that expanded its operations and consequently the amount of food tossed into its garbage dump. Baboons are omnivorous, and “Garbage Dump Troop” was delighted to feast on leftover drumsticks, half-eaten hamburgers, remnants of chocolate cake, and anything else that wound up there. Soon they had shifted to sleeping in the trees immediately above the pit, descending each morning just in time for the day’s dumping of garbage.
[… ]Soon afterward, tuberculosis, a disease that moves with devastating speed and severity in nonhuman primates, broke out in Garbage Dump Troop. Over the next year, most of its members died, as did all of the males from Forest Troop who had foraged at the dump. (Considerable sleuthing ultimately revealed that the disease had come from tainted meat in the garbage dump, which had been sold to the tourist lodge thanks to a corrupt meat inspector).
[…] The results were that Forest Troop was left with males who were less aggressive and more social than average and the troop now had double its previous female-to-male ratio. The social consequences of these changes were dramatic. There remained a hierarchy am
ong the Forest Troop males, but it was far looser than before: compared with other, mor
e typical savanna baboon groups, high-ranking males rarely harassed subordinates and occasionally even relinquished contested resources to them. Aggression was less frequent, particularly against third parties. And rates of affiliative behaviors, such as males and females grooming each other or sitting together, soared. There were even instances, now and then, of adult males grooming each other – a behavior nearly as unprecedented as baboons sprouting wings.
[…] What was key was not just the predominance of females, but the type of male that remained.
[…] But the largest surprise did not come until some years later. Female savanna baboons spend their lives in the troop into which they are born, whereas males leave their birth troop around puberty; a troop’s adult males have thus all grown up elsewhere and immigrated as adolescents. By the early 1990s, none of the original low aggression/high affiliation males of Forest Troop’s tuberculosis period was still alive; all of the group’s adult males had joined after the epidemic. Despite this, the troop’s unique social milieu persisted – as it does to this day, some 20 years after. In other words, adolescent males that enter Forest Troop after having grown up elsewhere wind up adopting the unique behavioral style of the resident males. […]
Is a world of peacefully coexisting human Forest Troops possible? Anyone who says, “No, it is beyond our nature,” knows too little about primates, including ourselves.
Another interesting article, where Professor Sapolsky states:
Some primate species, it turns out, are indeed simply violent or peaceful, with their behavior driven by their social structures and ecological settings. More importantly, however, some primate species can make peace despite violent traits that seem built into their natures. The challenge now is to figure out under what conditions that can happen, and whether humans can manage the trick ourselves.
Article describing the story in academic terms.
