Humans warlike, shock

Terence Kealey writing in the Times brings us the insites gained from Jane Goodall’s seminal study of the battles of the Kasakela chimpanzees of the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. A group of Chimpanzes split into two seperate groupings (did one group have a religious revalation?) after which things started to go wrong. To begin with:

the groups shared the rain forest peaceably, and when their members met they were pleasant. They were old friends.

But after about a year, once the new collective loyalties had firmed up, the two groups grew mutually hostile, and they fell into war. Bands of males from one would descend on bands of the other, killing the males and abducting the females (perhaps chimps, too, dream of 72 virgins). Eventually, after appalling scenes of multiple mutilation and murder, the Kasakelas drove the Kahamas to extinction

which just goes to show how much we share in common with the other primates. She then goes on to human sociology studies that extend this finding into us humans.

The psychologist Judith Rich, in her book The Nurture Assumption, explained how separate group identities are maintained when different cultures share the same urban space. It is a matter of critical mass. When a single Muslim family, say, inhabits a northern town, it acclimatises to northern culture, chip butties and all. But once a school contains sufficient numbers of Muslim children, they forge their own separate, potentially paranoid, identity.

The lesson of science is that a heterogeneous society aspiring to internal peace must follow the melting pot and induct all children into a common culture. That may involve flag worship and other embarrassing ceremonies, but the celebration of diversity may be, biologically, a mistake.

The problem is not the particular differenciator, as the chimp studies showed, but that societies can only assimilate slowly and if the pace is forced then ghetos start to form as people cling to what they know with potentially bad results.