Animals love Machiavelli

Animals : They're Not All Cute And Cuddly

I'm reminded of a recent discussion at lunch in which someone said that aggression is necessary to success. Are there any successful non-aggressive animals ? My response was the limpet. Though they do aggressively cling on to rocks, I suppose...


The dominant monkeys used unpredictable bursts of aggression to rule over subordinates. Alliances were formed and female monkeys looked out for their own daughters by mating with the alpha male – but they also mated with other males behind his back to ensure they would be protected if the alpha male died or was deposed.

In fact, every individual monkey seems to have the capacity for Machiavellian behaviour, says Maestripieri. "It's part of who they are. It's not that there are Machiavellian individuals that do it all the time and others who never do it. Just like humans, it's part of our nature, which doesn't mean we have to do it all the time."

Jane Goodall, meanwhile, studied a mother and daughter pair of chimpanzees – Passion and Pom – who systematically cannibalised eight infants over four years. Goodall called Passion a "cold mother".  But are these apes psychopaths ? They might be.... The chimpanzee pair "cannibalised with such persistence that a human psychiatrist is tempted to render this as antisocial personality 'disorder'", wrote the researchers.

We might associate some of the purest forms of fun with childhood play – and, says Paulhus, perhaps this is one ultimate origin of sadism. "If you look at animals that play with their victims, they don’t kill them, they torture them," he says. "Maybe that's the connection, to learn to be an adult animal you have to play first and somewhere between play and becoming an adult who has to kill, there's a line. That play aspect carries over to some adults, they're actually fixated at the play stage, they never got over it."
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160401-how-did-evil-evolve-and-why-did-it-persist