{"id":3158,"date":"2016-09-29T20:31:01","date_gmt":"2016-09-29T20:31:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/What-Meerkat-Murder-Tells-Us-About-Human-Violence"},"modified":"2016-09-29T20:31:01","modified_gmt":"2016-09-29T20:31:01","slug":"what-meerkat-murder-tells-us-about-human-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/2016\/09\/29\/what-meerkat-murder-tells-us-about-human-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"What Meerkat Murder Tells Us About Human Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"        \n<p><strong>Originally shared by David Brin<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>An amazing survey of cause-of-death of members of a wide variety of mammal species finds that a likely <strong>baseline<\/strong> murder rate among humans would be around 2 percent.  The authors used the fact that closely related species usually show similar rates of interpersonal violence to predict a 2 percent rate of lethal violence among humans. That means that 2 out of every 100 human deaths would be a murder taking into account only our place on the evolutionary tree, and nothing about political pressures, technology or social norms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In comparison, among mammals in general just 0.3 percent of deaths are murders. For the common ancestor of primates, the rate is 2.3 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With 2 percent as a human baseline, we come across as both uncommonly peaceful for primates and uncommonly violent for mammals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Rates of homicide in modern societies that have police forces, legal systems, prisons and strong cultural attitudes that reject violence are, at less than 1 in 10,000 deaths (or 0.01%), about 200 times lower than the authors&#8217; predictions for our state of nature.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The champion killers of their own kind?  Meerkats. Hakuna Matata, man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\nhttp:\/\/www.npr.org\/sections\/thetwo-way\/2016\/09\/28\/495798448\/what-meerkat-murder-tells-us-about-human-violence<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n\n      ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>        What Meerkat Murder Tells Us About Human Violence<br \/>\n       <a href=\"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/2016\/09\/29\/what-meerkat-murder-tells-us-about-human-violence\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3158"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}