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No, the fact that the chimps don't do it isn't the reason for my distinction. I make the distinction between simple and complex tools because complex tools present a bootstrap problem.

Suppose you take a troop of chimps, take their tools away and displace them to an unknown area. They will be able to recreate their entire stock of tools in more or less the same state within a very short span of time. They have all the knowledge required, all the raw materials at hand, and all the cultural structure they need.

Now suppose you do the same with one of the early Sumerian city-states. They still have all the raw materials readily at hand. They have all the culturally embedded knowledge. They have all the craftsmen and laborers they had in their city-state. But they would not be able to bootstrap a Sumerian civilization before they starved and died. Because they would not have the tools they would need to build the tools with which they were familiar. They would not have the irrigation systems that their forefathers built up over generations. They would not have the granaries to stockpile food, or the roads to transport it in from the farms. Or even the strains of food crops carefully cultivated and domesticated.

I argue that this, more than anything else, is what distinguishes chimpanzee and human politics. Because the rest is a lot more similar than most people give the chimps credit for.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Thu Nov 21st, 2013 at 11:03:10 AM EST
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ok, you mean that our societies are a bit more complex than chimp's societies? ;-)

But maybe the human society may "downgrade" and, whith some losses in lives, develop a new technical environnment.

Anyway, I think we are quite far away the initial posts, and I personnally have a bit lost my thread here. But it was interesting to discuss things with everybody here, as I had never really took the time to write things down. Food for though anyway.

by Xavier in Paris on Thu Nov 21st, 2013 at 11:22:48 AM EST
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Humans, like cockroaches, are exceedingly easy to kill but very difficult to completely exterminate.

Then again, our technological civilization could be argued to be a part of our extended phenotype - just as one might regard an anthill as a part of the ant colony, rather than a part of the ground. If one takes that view, then to extinguish a culture is tantamount to an extinction event.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Thu Nov 21st, 2013 at 11:30:12 AM EST
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I'm not optimistic. I think our culture and accumulated knowledge are unique, and uniquely endangered.

Without that culture humans are just animals with unusually developed language skills. Humans as a species can survive without that culture.

But I think in Darwinian terms the persistence and mechanical amplification of knowledge are a new symbiotic genus in their own right, and wholesale extinction would just as catastrophic as any other kind of extinction.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Thu Nov 21st, 2013 at 11:35:24 AM EST
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Give it fifteen thousand years and the survivors of the nuclear Armageddon will have developed a new technological civilization. Humans are tenacious bastards like that.

But it will bear so little resemblance to the one we currently live in that one might as well argue that mainline humans went extinct and a sub-species evolved to fill in the abandoned niche.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Thu Nov 21st, 2013 at 11:53:24 AM EST
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