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Comment by jojobas | Hacker News Reader

Can't express how relieved I am that I am tentatively not inferior to a chimpanzee.

In one-on-one hand-to-hand combat, an adult male chimp can savagely defeat a baseline human.

It might be more because of what the baseline (both physical and mental) has become, though.

But humans would not get involved in one on one hand to hand combat with a chimp. We would avoid combat, or use tools (likely a gun)

Having volunteered at an ape rescue centre, I've heard some horrific stories about what happens when a chimp fights a person. Example scenarios include people who keep chimps as pets and zoo keepers who don't close a door correctly. Example injuries to the humans include fingers and other parts being bitten off, or being blinded. A worst case scenario for a zoo involves a group of chimps getting out and then getting frightened, and fighting.

Of course a gun will solve this problem, hence my comment about 'baseline'. Perhaps I should have said 'unaugmented'.

They are pretty horrible to each other at times too. More or less illustrates the somewhat Hobbesian idea of continual reduction of violence since probably the last common ancestor to today.

Right-wingers compare human nature to chimps; left-wingers to bonobos.

What does that tell us about humans? Nothing.

What I find fascinating is the bifurcation of R-rated behaviors between chimps (violence) and bonobos (sex). I read somewhere about a similar bifurcation in species of dolphins or porpoises where there were was one species which would exhibit high levels of violence and another which was all about the sexy fun time, but that was 30 years ago or so I read it and I have little hope of ever recovering that information (assuming it’s even true, which is not guaranteed for popular science reporting).

This is a myth. Bonobos are at times more than happy to bash each other's heads in, and chimps shag a lot.

Gombe Chimpanzee War.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

Monkey bite your face off.

Part of that is most humans' ingrained resistance against being murderously vicious. It's easy to gouge eyes out, but it's hard for most people to actually do it.

A chimp pulled someone's foot off in one incident - they are brutally strong.

Yes but in one-on-one hand-to-hand tango, I think there'd be an even match

Well I mean at least intellectually.

Would it really have been so bad to be inferior at such a specific task?

Great apes are hard for humans to match in e.g. upper body strength, so we are not strictly superior anyway...

I strongly believe that human intellectual superiority will come to an end within a lifetime, will be quite interesting to see how our species deals with it (to be clear: talking about AI there, not apes :P).

You mean how AI will deal with it. We might not have much say against something significantly smarter than us.

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