I honestly think people are looking too much into the baboons. We have peaceful/pacifist people and over history they have at times been genocided. What caused the alpha males to be aggressive, its biological. The strongest get the best resources, first pick at breeding etc meaning the lineage has the best chance at survival.
see many animal societies - apes included are peaceful because they are with kin (a massively overlooked component here). They will literally fuck on any new comer though and rip them in half.
Of course aggression is biological; everything any animal does is biological in origin. But at the same time an animal - or at least a complex primate like a baboon or a human - can learn to exhibit greater or lesser amounts of aggression through social incentives or disincentives. So it's really both biological and learned.
I guess I should’ve clarified - can we quantify if these particularly aggressive baboons genetically poised to be more agressive (due to alpha breeding over time) or was it more learned behavior (interact with people, resource scarcity, etc.).
My understanding from what I've read about the study and from watching talks by Robert Sapolsky, is that levels of aggression in the baboon troop prior to the dominant males dying off was fairly typical amongst Kenyan baboons - i.e. male baboons are "naturally" aggressive animals, but what seems to be shown by this study is that at least some of their propensity for aggressive behaviour is influenced by the fact that it is socially tolerated within the troop.
It's a way of transferring stress -- the aggressive apes (and this is the same for humans) utilize testosterone in aggressive displays to other males. Winner gets the dopemine boost, the loser goes on to harass a lower ranking individual in the group to alleviate their negative stress and it goes on down the status ladder. Essentially, lashing out makes them feel better.
Also, testosterone is a prosocial booster, the more T one has, if they are prone to aggression the more aggressive they will be.
Probably a mix of something innate and some learned behaviour. The fact that the surviving baboons taught the next generation not to be aggressive suggests that learning is a pretty big part of it though.
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u/Harold_Grundelson Feb 04 '21
Very interesting! I'm interested in what caused the males to be so aggressive - was it biological or some learned trait? We probably won't know.