aegipan-omnicorn:

jacquez45:

fluffmugger:

geoclaire:

theclassykindoftrasy:

sparrf:

i keep thinking about that tribe of baboons where all the alpha males died from eating poison garbage and then the baby boy monkeys were taken care of by the lady monkeys and never got socialized to be aggressive so they all just live peacefully and groom eachother instead of fighting and killing eachother and its been generations of that, it only took 1 wipeout of the aggressive males to change the whole social order of the species i am crying they must be so much happier

……….I have an idea.

don’t we all

You’re missing half the story.

When adolescent males from other groups came to join, they learned very rapidly that being an arsehole baboon was not fucking tolerated, and completely stopped the behaviour and integrated with the group.

Arseholes only thrive when you let them. 

Only the aggressive males died; the non-aggressive ones didn’t go on garbage dump raids and so they survived just fine. This was about half the adult males in the troop. The suddenly-without-mean-competition males didn’t get aggressive and take over and start being giant jerks; they stayed the same pleasant baboons they had always been.

The researcher studying this troop was asked what he had learned about stopping violence in society and he said “Kill all the aggressive young males” and I think about that a lot.

He (Dr. Robert Sapolsky) said, in a 2008 documentary (YouTube clip) that featured his research:

“…if they are able, in one generation, to transform what are supposed to be textbook social systems, sort of engraved in stone, we don’t have an excuse when we say there are certain inevitabilities about human social systems.”

(via miraculous-hearts)