>How can this be the leading sentence in a scientific article??
>"Do we gain insight by comparing President Trump to a chimpanzee?"
If you look again at that sentence you quoted, it has a hyperlink to primatologist Jane Goodall comparing Trump to a chimpanzee.[1]
Because Goodall is somewhat of a celebrity on the subject of chimps, and Trump is...obviously Trump, a lot of various media outlets picked up on the combination. E.g. Guardian, FT, Huffington, Fox News, etc.[2]
So it seems like the author is basically responding to all of that.
It's hard to understand what you're objecting to. 1) This is pop sci, not a "scientific article", and 2) the text you quoted links to another article about the most famous primatologist in the world making exactly that comparison.
I think it shows the hypocracy on the left. On the one hand it may be a fair question to ask, scientifically [comparing people to any non human species], but imagine someone on the right used that sentence for someone on the left, even if honestly seeking scientific inquiry. They’d be lambasted for being insentive at the least.
OK, so show us an example. We don't have to "imagine" someone on the right comparing Barack and Michelle Obama to chimps, or apes, or gorillas in a non-scientific inquiry because it was a constant during his presidency.
And we’re saying that that was okay? I don’t think so. So why is it okay in this case? Or are we saying it’s dishonest for a leading expert to engage in this juvenile behavior pretending it’s scientific inquiry?
Imagine a scientist on the right equivocating Hillary with a rat, or something to that effect.
People on the right get compared to Neanderthals as well. My point is no one should honestly be making these comparisons, if they also want to keep the moral high ground.
As mentioned elsewhere, the context is from a comment one person (a celebrity scientist) made.
> the hypocracy on the left
This statement seems designed to drag discourse into the gutter. I do not believe you are here to speak in good faith. There are 1,000 ways I can legitimately criticize Trump without referring to him as a chimp, and frankly it's not something that comes up very often.
Imagine the criticism of Trump and tell me honestly you think him being compared to an animal is anywhere near 1/10th of 1%.
Re: Obamas, it seemed to be one of the go to. You are creating a false equivalency.
Ironically, the article we are discussing is refuting the comparison.
I do not believe you are here to speak in good faith.
Most of the media, which is generally slanted left politically, has generally ceased to speak in good faith with regards to actual societal statistics, social science, biology, and psychology. The right tremendously distorts climate science.
There are 1,000 ways I can legitimately criticize Trump without referring to him as a chimp
Portrayal of George W. Bush as a chimp was tremendously popular in the early 2000's.
> Racism and global climate change are not explained by our shared history with chimpanzees, nor are gender diversity, the #MeToo movement, and the recent rise in nationalism.
No. It can all be compared to how most social mammals operate.
Racism & nationalism have their roots in tribalism, a very useful tool to keep a tribe cohesive and thus competitive against other tribes.
Climate change: Have a look at any invasive species for examples.
Gender diversity & MeToo: Genders in mammals will take on certain specialized roles in order to survive in their environment.
Are they right and ethical? Of course not. Times have changed, and our psyches haven't kept up. But ignoring our evolutionary heritage only results in treating the symptoms rather than the cause. That's not how you correct problems.
> It’s only by delving into humanity’s distinctive evolutionary history, since our split with the other ape lineages, that we are better able to develop a fuller understanding of the human niche, of what makes us specifically human.
Uh, no. It's also important to find out what's baked into our psyche, no matter how ugly or inconvenient, and take steps to compensate for them or maybe even correct them. That's what higher reasoning is for.
I would say that racism is rooted not specifically tribalism but more broadly in inductive reasoning (particular-to-general heuristics) which has been absolutely indispensable to survival and evolution.
It is critical to classify a creature as friend or foe based on what class it belongs to, rather than granting the instance benefit of doubt.
How previously observed members of a group have behaved in the past constitutes rational evidence for estimating the future behavior of a newly observed member of that group.
Trying to understand the thread of reasoning here so correct me if I didn't interpret this correctly.
An individual observing some members of a group with different physical characteristic with a certain behavior, an individual infers all members of that group behave that way.
Then with an individual being exposed to a sampling of that groups behavior due to say the news or social media algorithms the individual makes an inference but is unable to account for the bias these sources might have.
Even before social media - we're a social and talkative species. More often than not, we're not observing members of a group directly, but we're receiving an already made generalization from other people - which they as well may have received, not made. In the past, the main source of those received generalizations were people we met. Ever since the printing press, it's mass media instead.
This isn't fair, the OP broke down his arguments for why the author was wrong, and all you do is appeal to the author's authority as a "trained professional". After a certain amount of life experience you realize that "trained professionals" in some (many?) fields of study often have glaring gaps in their knowledge of are purposely ignorant of some set of facts/ideas that do not corroborate their philosophical leanings.
Either way I feel it would have been more productive to rebut the GP on the merits of his arguments. For the record, I agree with him, though I am also not a "trained professional", just an amateur who has spent a lot of time thinking about this subject.
> the OP broke down his arguments for why the author was wrong,
No he didn't. There are no "arguments" presented. There's a vague premise (It can all be compared to how most social mammals operate. <--- not an argument in any sense) then some 1 line ramblings that seem thinly related.
> This isn't fair, the OP broke down his arguments for why the author was wrong
No they haven't. An argument is a persuasive set of evidence and reasoning presented to make a case for a conclusion -- OP merely made a bunch of handwavey, highly debatable statements as if they were fact
Well, Harris has been out-of-date for decades in anthropological circles, I'm afraid. He's a fun read, but I wouldn't take his books too seriously at this point. It's pretty well understood now that a strict economic materialist framework doesn't explain why people do what they do (humans are _not_ rational actors, by any stretch of the imagination), but he was never able to allow himself to think outside his Marxian box.
Granted, I've only had a cursory look at Bennenson, Ryan, and Jetha, but they're a couple of psychologists and a medical doctor, none of whom seem to have a deep background in cultural anthropology. Unsurprisingly, their works appear to fall back on the usual just-so stories taken from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.
TL;DR: I respectfully disagree with the implication that these sources are strong counterarguments to the article's thesis.
I've definitely noticed a tendency in modern times, especially among Americans, towards all-or-nothing-ism. Someone's work is either completely right, or completely worthless. All you have to do is poke a few holes, and then you can dismiss the whole thing as nonsense. Usually, it culminates in an insular attitude of "I don't need to see the evidence to know it's wrong."
Classic HN. Layman comments to tell us why a trained professional knows less than them.
There has been tremendous politicization of science in media in recent years. Basically, if it contradicts a narrative the media is trying to push, actual science is shouted down and castigated. Both the left and the right do this. The right does it with climate science. The left does this with psychology and social sciences.
Basically, this article is nicely full of facts. However, it's presenting them in the classic leftist mode of obscurantism, all to push a politically driven agenda:
These contexts include the history and current reality of specific inequalities that stem from economic, racist, and sexist processes in our society.
As humans are social animals, there is some psychological insight to be gained from studying other social animals, just as there's some physiological insight to be gained by studying the biology of rats and monkeys. Right now, any biological and evolutionary components of human behavior contradict the Marxian, postmodern social constructionist, and far left foundational notion of the human being as blank slate. If any such components are acknowledged, many of their simplistic moralistic calls for reform would have to be questioned. The realistic scientific consensus is a moderate and nuanced one: both nature and nurture matter.
Higher reasoning isn't all that great. E.g., people have constructed consistent systems of reasoning that are entirely misanthropic or, if not actually misanthropic, they conclude that the extinction of the human species is good.
And you're missing the point that the stratification of phenomena into "higher reasoning" <-> "base instinct" is a false hierarchy. Even when you're working within ethics, you eventually have to ground yourself in moral intuitions, which is fundamentally irrational (the underlying mechanism of moral intuition can't be examined through reason).
I think maybe what the author is ultimately saying is that it's not wrong to think about these uniquely human qualities as being just as natural and basic as anything else.
Several years ago I attended a distinguished lecture by a researcher with a long history of working with non-human primates. For an entire hour we watched clip after clip of chimps failing at trivially easy human mental tasks mostly involving 2nd order cognition, even after extensive training and guidance by researchers in each task, and videos of research data in which the researcher had anthropomorphized the observed anaimal behavior when the data doesn't actually support it He was trying to undermine the notion that humans are just a better chimpanzee (i.e. quantitative) but are a different order of chimpanzee (i.e. qualitatively different). I was convinced.
I'm still curious how you'd design a task that requires "thinking about thinking" and give it to chimpanzees, given that they don't have language. It's a useful restatement, but do you have an example you could share please?
The headline probably wasn't chosen by the author, and is pretty bad. The minor headline is actually quite good:
> Although there is merit in recognizing how we resemble our primate relatives, sometimes we need to understand what sets our species apart.
That's 100% true. Both sides are right.
But it's not just the headline which is bad. The author goes too far in one direction:
> The argument goes that if warfare, sexual coercion, male aggression, the creation and use of tools, hunting, and other patterns show up in both chimpanzees and humans, then these are evolutionarily old, shared traits. Thus, understanding the reasons behind these behaviors in chimps can offer insight into similar behaviors in humans. This premise is nice, but it is mostly wrong.
No, as the previous sentence says, it can offer insight - not complete answers, but some amount of insight. How much is still very open to debate.
> We have evolved the capacity to be the most compassionate, the cruelest, the most creative, and the most destructive of all life on this planet.
The first two - most compassionate, cruelest - are an overly anthropocentric perspective. It would take extraordinary evidence to claim that humans are more compassionate than all other animals. And that's just not likely to be true - why would it?
> Racism and global climate change are not explained by our shared history with chimpanzees, nor are gender diversity
No, some amount of them probably are explained that way.
It's not a good article, there is hardly any argument there, just the idea that humans are different repeated over and over. The underlying theme is the predictable SJW denial of biology as a determinant force in human affairs.
Well if Chimps can't then Baboons sure as hell can. Have a read of A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky. The vast majority of human social and politic interactions are stereotypical of almost all primates, the only difference is that we have the gall to think that walking erect seems to have freed us from our vicious primate past. Spend some time watching a group of primates or work with a group of them over time as I did a number of years ago, and you will start to see that humans behave in almost the exact same way, our brains lie to us about our motivations so we are obivious to the fact that we are acting from ancient primate social instincts, and worse you get stuff like this piece which pulls on the old great chain of being.
Chips may not have governments, as the author says, but I suggest that he go back an take an introductory course in political science, because our entire understanding of modern political structures is founded on the idea that in some sense all politics are family politics (in group behavior). Macaques, chimps, baboons, and many more have extremely well studied and understood family group politics.
One of the steps on the road to enlightenment is the realization that the monkey on your back is you.
Well if Chimps can't then Baboons sure as hell can. Have a read of A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky. The vast majority of human social and politic interactions are stereotypical of almost all primates, the only difference is that we have the gall to think that walking erect seems to have freed us from our vicious primate past.
I thought the difference is that by dint of our language use and our ability to modify our environment, we have the potential reproduce all the different social behaviors that the various primate species have - as well as social behaviors from even non-primate species.
Sure, it's wrong to image one is entirely outside of a social species, that things like dominance and submission don't play any part. But it seems just as wrong to make a single analogy to a single species and be done. We can be like wolves (predictors), sheep (prey), chimps (violently competitive), Bonabos (nonviolently cooperative), and so-forth but it's the complex structures of human society that are going to determine which of these sorts of animal we wind-up with.
It's important not to let the shock of realization "wow, human are just animals" stand in the way of thinking, "but we can still collectively shape which animals we will resemble".
> I know of no more encouraging fact than the ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so make a few objects beautiful. It is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. This morally we can do.
You’re right and wrong here. Humans are cultural creatures to the point where humans not exposed to some sort of cultural milieu simply don’t develop correctly. Walking erect didn’t free us from our vicious primate past: but culture absolutely can. You’re right in that many of our more basic instincts and psychology are a direct continuation of those evident in our evolutionary relatives, and even many of our cultural structures echo that. But we are no more bound by our instincts to be violent and selfish than we are bound by our physiology to be incapable of flight. Of course, exactly like chimpanzees, we could never fly by flapping our arms, but unlike chimpanzees we can figure out how to build and operate an airplane. Likewise, no matter how saddled we may be with primate psychology, we are capable of structuring our society to overcome that.
It's not walking, it's the realization of why we reproduce and why we die that makes us humans. Most animals are unaware of their own death and will just hunt more for more food in the short term, not knowing they may be killed as they are too tired to return.
I'm pretty sure most animals are aware of death in others, so it would seem likely that they may be aware of self mortality. Our general understanding of other animal behaviours is still quite primitive - generally things considered unique to the human animal are discovered in others after someone bothers to look.
As for reproduction - do humans really know why they reproduce?
> Well if Chimps can't then Baboons sure as hell can. Have a read of A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky. The vast majority of human social and politic interactions are stereotypical of almost all primates
Humans are the only species to show pervasive, non-kin reciprocal altruism. Baboon troops are matrilineal and stable troops have a high-degree of kinship through the females. Males are more likely to move between groups but males will also kill newborns when taking over a troop.
In other words, Baboon society is still completely comprehensible by traditional genetic evolutionary theory. More importantly, Baboon society is quite clearly _circumscribed_ by well-understood genetic theory.
No species comes close to the degree of altruism humans exhibit. I can drop into the middle of nowhere and be greeted with warm relations, free food, and free shelter even when everybody knows I'll never return and thus would never be capable of reciprocating. There are anecdotes of this happening in other species, and even between species, but they're just that--anecdotes. Whenever it seems pervasive, upon investigation it quickly becomes apparent that it's mediated by an underlying intra-kin process.[1] There's a tremendous gulf between humans and every other species, including Baboons, in this regard.
So not only do Baboons fail to reflect human behavior in small groups, it's preposterous to equivocate their behavior with human political behavior at scale. From the vantage point of aliens looking down on earth, large groups of humans, sometimes numbering in the hundreds of millions, behave much like ants or bees. But ants, bees, and all similarly behaving species are siblings! The lone, fascinating exception is humans.
While there are genetic limitations to human altruism, somehow we managed to flip the equation. Individuals are generally altruistic by default unless and until that altruism begins to impose a non-trivial burden, and even then the drop-off is gradual and haphazard. Even the meanest among us exhibit and experience more altruism throughout the day than a Baboon. No existing evolutionary model has clearly shown how humans made this leap. Group selection has never been proven to exist, period. That a behavior improves the survival and reproductive success of a _group_ doesn't explain how it can arise and become prevalent genetically. Group selection, like similar theories, are post hoc rationalizations that fail to explain the full genetic evolutionary process. Likewise, theories about the benefits of tool making, intelligence, language, etc all fail to explain the genetic leap.
It's difficult to exaggerate how significant and profound this difference is. Theories and rationalizations that don't account for this difference are fundamentally crippled. Indeed, theories that fail to fill this gap in our understanding have limited usefulness in terms of either their explanatory or predictive power.
[1] Because animals cannot reliably or consistently know degree of kinship, all cooperative behaviors will naturally rely upon proxy indicators. Thus, if the strategy for cooperation is being nice to people in your troop because statistically you're strongly genetically related to others in your troop, then cooperating with a completely genetically unrelated troop member still conforms to the basic mechanics of selfish gene reproduction. You can see how extraordinary it is that humans regularly cooperate with, let lone behave altruistically toward, random humans. Again, we can rationalize how this behavior persists now that our species has found a new equilibrium, but nobody can explain the leap forward. And finding an answer will be difficult to understand because we're the only ones who have made it. The anthropic principle might partially explain this, but figuring out exactly how it happened would be profoundly useful in terms of understanding our own innate capacities and limitations, as well as in building complex systems.
> Spend some time watching a group of primates or work with a group of them over time as I did a number of years ago, and you will start to see that humans behave in almost the exact same way, our brains lie to us about our motivations so we are obivious to the fact that we are acting from ancient primate social instincts, and worse you get stuff like this piece which pulls on the old great chain of being.
My friend was in the jungles studying primates during his college years. One day we went to a restaurant/bar to eat. A girl was sitting on a bar stool and her boyfriend stood next to her and was rubbing her shoulders. My friend looked at them for a few moments and then said "He's grooming her".
I think there is some political and ideological background to some of those articles which need to be recognised. Many social sciences are under attack that they ignore biology and evolutionary factors when trying to explain human behaviour. The idea that everything is a social construct and the ideology and politics derived from it is under attack lately as people get over their fears of the retribution and doing it anyway, see Google and Damore case as an example. So when such articles come around you always need to ask yourself if we are talking here pure science or politics, I don't want to discredit it, just that we need to read it with those issues in mind.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] thread"Do we gain insight by comparing President Trump to a chimpanzee?"
Edit: this is in response to this idea being floated in the media and this article is responding to it. Thanks child comment for the context.
>"Do we gain insight by comparing President Trump to a chimpanzee?"
If you look again at that sentence you quoted, it has a hyperlink to primatologist Jane Goodall comparing Trump to a chimpanzee.[1]
Because Goodall is somewhat of a celebrity on the subject of chimps, and Trump is...obviously Trump, a lot of various media outlets picked up on the combination. E.g. Guardian, FT, Huffington, Fox News, etc.[2]
So it seems like the author is basically responding to all of that.
[1] http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-aggressive-chimp-and-ma...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=comparing+President+Trump+to...
No, Trump is President Trump.
Get it fucking right, or get the fuck out.
OK, so show us an example. We don't have to "imagine" someone on the right comparing Barack and Michelle Obama to chimps, or apes, or gorillas in a non-scientific inquiry because it was a constant during his presidency.
Imagine a scientist on the right equivocating Hillary with a rat, or something to that effect.
People on the right get compared to Neanderthals as well. My point is no one should honestly be making these comparisons, if they also want to keep the moral high ground.
> the hypocracy on the left
This statement seems designed to drag discourse into the gutter. I do not believe you are here to speak in good faith. There are 1,000 ways I can legitimately criticize Trump without referring to him as a chimp, and frankly it's not something that comes up very often.
Imagine the criticism of Trump and tell me honestly you think him being compared to an animal is anywhere near 1/10th of 1%.
Re: Obamas, it seemed to be one of the go to. You are creating a false equivalency.
Ironically, the article we are discussing is refuting the comparison.
Most of the media, which is generally slanted left politically, has generally ceased to speak in good faith with regards to actual societal statistics, social science, biology, and psychology. The right tremendously distorts climate science.
There are 1,000 ways I can legitimately criticize Trump without referring to him as a chimp
Portrayal of George W. Bush as a chimp was tremendously popular in the early 2000's.
No. It can all be compared to how most social mammals operate.
Racism & nationalism have their roots in tribalism, a very useful tool to keep a tribe cohesive and thus competitive against other tribes.
Climate change: Have a look at any invasive species for examples.
Gender diversity & MeToo: Genders in mammals will take on certain specialized roles in order to survive in their environment.
Are they right and ethical? Of course not. Times have changed, and our psyches haven't kept up. But ignoring our evolutionary heritage only results in treating the symptoms rather than the cause. That's not how you correct problems.
> It’s only by delving into humanity’s distinctive evolutionary history, since our split with the other ape lineages, that we are better able to develop a fuller understanding of the human niche, of what makes us specifically human.
Uh, no. It's also important to find out what's baked into our psyche, no matter how ugly or inconvenient, and take steps to compensate for them or maybe even correct them. That's what higher reasoning is for.
It is critical to classify a creature as friend or foe based on what class it belongs to, rather than granting the instance benefit of doubt.
How previously observed members of a group have behaved in the past constitutes rational evidence for estimating the future behavior of a newly observed member of that group.
An individual observing some members of a group with different physical characteristic with a certain behavior, an individual infers all members of that group behave that way.
Then with an individual being exposed to a sampling of that groups behavior due to say the news or social media algorithms the individual makes an inference but is unable to account for the bias these sources might have.
E.g. "all sharks bite legs off"
This leads to survival: not having your legs bitten off.
Either way I feel it would have been more productive to rebut the GP on the merits of his arguments. For the record, I agree with him, though I am also not a "trained professional", just an amateur who has spent a lot of time thinking about this subject.
Of course it's fair, in a discussion.
> the OP broke down his arguments for why the author was wrong,
No he didn't. There are no "arguments" presented. There's a vague premise (It can all be compared to how most social mammals operate. <--- not an argument in any sense) then some 1 line ramblings that seem thinly related.
No they haven't. An argument is a persuasive set of evidence and reasoning presented to make a case for a conclusion -- OP merely made a bunch of handwavey, highly debatable statements as if they were fact
Warriors and Worriers - Joyce Bennenson
Sex at Dawn - Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá
Granted, I've only had a cursory look at Bennenson, Ryan, and Jetha, but they're a couple of psychologists and a medical doctor, none of whom seem to have a deep background in cultural anthropology. Unsurprisingly, their works appear to fall back on the usual just-so stories taken from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.
TL;DR: I respectfully disagree with the implication that these sources are strong counterarguments to the article's thesis.
There has been tremendous politicization of science in media in recent years. Basically, if it contradicts a narrative the media is trying to push, actual science is shouted down and castigated. Both the left and the right do this. The right does it with climate science. The left does this with psychology and social sciences.
Basically, this article is nicely full of facts. However, it's presenting them in the classic leftist mode of obscurantism, all to push a politically driven agenda:
These contexts include the history and current reality of specific inequalities that stem from economic, racist, and sexist processes in our society.
As humans are social animals, there is some psychological insight to be gained from studying other social animals, just as there's some physiological insight to be gained by studying the biology of rats and monkeys. Right now, any biological and evolutionary components of human behavior contradict the Marxian, postmodern social constructionist, and far left foundational notion of the human being as blank slate. If any such components are acknowledged, many of their simplistic moralistic calls for reform would have to be questioned. The realistic scientific consensus is a moderate and nuanced one: both nature and nurture matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuQHSKLXu2c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKmyO3hbOz8
And you're missing the point that the stratification of phenomena into "higher reasoning" <-> "base instinct" is a false hierarchy. Even when you're working within ethics, you eventually have to ground yourself in moral intuitions, which is fundamentally irrational (the underlying mechanism of moral intuition can't be examined through reason).
I think maybe what the author is ultimately saying is that it's not wrong to think about these uniquely human qualities as being just as natural and basic as anything else.
> Although there is merit in recognizing how we resemble our primate relatives, sometimes we need to understand what sets our species apart.
That's 100% true. Both sides are right.
But it's not just the headline which is bad. The author goes too far in one direction:
> The argument goes that if warfare, sexual coercion, male aggression, the creation and use of tools, hunting, and other patterns show up in both chimpanzees and humans, then these are evolutionarily old, shared traits. Thus, understanding the reasons behind these behaviors in chimps can offer insight into similar behaviors in humans. This premise is nice, but it is mostly wrong.
No, as the previous sentence says, it can offer insight - not complete answers, but some amount of insight. How much is still very open to debate.
> We have evolved the capacity to be the most compassionate, the cruelest, the most creative, and the most destructive of all life on this planet.
The first two - most compassionate, cruelest - are an overly anthropocentric perspective. It would take extraordinary evidence to claim that humans are more compassionate than all other animals. And that's just not likely to be true - why would it?
> Racism and global climate change are not explained by our shared history with chimpanzees, nor are gender diversity
No, some amount of them probably are explained that way.
But the title is arguably baity, so we replaced it with a representative sentence from the text.
Chips may not have governments, as the author says, but I suggest that he go back an take an introductory course in political science, because our entire understanding of modern political structures is founded on the idea that in some sense all politics are family politics (in group behavior). Macaques, chimps, baboons, and many more have extremely well studied and understood family group politics.
One of the steps on the road to enlightenment is the realization that the monkey on your back is you.
I thought the difference is that by dint of our language use and our ability to modify our environment, we have the potential reproduce all the different social behaviors that the various primate species have - as well as social behaviors from even non-primate species.
Sure, it's wrong to image one is entirely outside of a social species, that things like dominance and submission don't play any part. But it seems just as wrong to make a single analogy to a single species and be done. We can be like wolves (predictors), sheep (prey), chimps (violently competitive), Bonabos (nonviolently cooperative), and so-forth but it's the complex structures of human society that are going to determine which of these sorts of animal we wind-up with.
It's important not to let the shock of realization "wow, human are just animals" stand in the way of thinking, "but we can still collectively shape which animals we will resemble".
-- Henry David Thoreau
As for reproduction - do humans really know why they reproduce?
Humans are the only species to show pervasive, non-kin reciprocal altruism. Baboon troops are matrilineal and stable troops have a high-degree of kinship through the females. Males are more likely to move between groups but males will also kill newborns when taking over a troop.
In other words, Baboon society is still completely comprehensible by traditional genetic evolutionary theory. More importantly, Baboon society is quite clearly _circumscribed_ by well-understood genetic theory.
No species comes close to the degree of altruism humans exhibit. I can drop into the middle of nowhere and be greeted with warm relations, free food, and free shelter even when everybody knows I'll never return and thus would never be capable of reciprocating. There are anecdotes of this happening in other species, and even between species, but they're just that--anecdotes. Whenever it seems pervasive, upon investigation it quickly becomes apparent that it's mediated by an underlying intra-kin process.[1] There's a tremendous gulf between humans and every other species, including Baboons, in this regard.
So not only do Baboons fail to reflect human behavior in small groups, it's preposterous to equivocate their behavior with human political behavior at scale. From the vantage point of aliens looking down on earth, large groups of humans, sometimes numbering in the hundreds of millions, behave much like ants or bees. But ants, bees, and all similarly behaving species are siblings! The lone, fascinating exception is humans.
While there are genetic limitations to human altruism, somehow we managed to flip the equation. Individuals are generally altruistic by default unless and until that altruism begins to impose a non-trivial burden, and even then the drop-off is gradual and haphazard. Even the meanest among us exhibit and experience more altruism throughout the day than a Baboon. No existing evolutionary model has clearly shown how humans made this leap. Group selection has never been proven to exist, period. That a behavior improves the survival and reproductive success of a _group_ doesn't explain how it can arise and become prevalent genetically. Group selection, like similar theories, are post hoc rationalizations that fail to explain the full genetic evolutionary process. Likewise, theories about the benefits of tool making, intelligence, language, etc all fail to explain the genetic leap.
It's difficult to exaggerate how significant and profound this difference is. Theories and rationalizations that don't account for this difference are fundamentally crippled. Indeed, theories that fail to fill this gap in our understanding have limited usefulness in terms of either their explanatory or predictive power.
[1] Because animals cannot reliably or consistently know degree of kinship, all cooperative behaviors will naturally rely upon proxy indicators. Thus, if the strategy for cooperation is being nice to people in your troop because statistically you're strongly genetically related to others in your troop, then cooperating with a completely genetically unrelated troop member still conforms to the basic mechanics of selfish gene reproduction. You can see how extraordinary it is that humans regularly cooperate with, let lone behave altruistically toward, random humans. Again, we can rationalize how this behavior persists now that our species has found a new equilibrium, but nobody can explain the leap forward. And finding an answer will be difficult to understand because we're the only ones who have made it. The anthropic principle might partially explain this, but figuring out exactly how it happened would be profoundly useful in terms of understanding our own innate capacities and limitations, as well as in building complex systems.
My friend was in the jungles studying primates during his college years. One day we went to a restaurant/bar to eat. A girl was sitting on a bar stool and her boyfriend stood next to her and was rubbing her shoulders. My friend looked at them for a few moments and then said "He's grooming her".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War