Thursday, October 23, 2025

new Farside Comic questions Jane Goodall's Ngogo natural war chimp primate instinct a la R. Brian Ferguson

 https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/363/club-gombe

 I was watching the Netflix "chimp empire" doc and they focus on the "warring chimps" of Ngogo. This got me curious - I had not really dug into the details of R. Brian Ferguson's tome, "War, Chimpanzees and History" - sure enough Ngogo is the central focus of the book. AI summary:

 R. Brian Ferguson is a cultural anthropologist at Rutgers University who has written extensively on human warfare and has also analyzed chimpanzee violence, particularly at the Ngogo research site in Kibale National Park. His work on Ngogo chimpanzees, detailed in his book Chimpanzees, War, and History, argues that the extreme levels of violence are not natural but are instead a result of human-induced habitat loss and resource scarcity, a perspective that challenges common theories about inherent aggression in chimpanzees.

https://academic.oup.com/book/46479/chapter-abstract/407799218?redirectedFrom=fulltext 

So he quotes Goodall and kind of critiques her....

https://academic.oup.com/book/46479/chapter-abstract/407799412?redirectedFrom=fulltext 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropology/comments/1dhu98f/an_anthropological_approach_to_chimpanzee_warfare/ 

Glad to see his work being discussed online.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/1d5wn45/book_that_mentions_how_european_imperialists/ 

 when you go into culture you are ignoring that music and dancing as spiritual healing is the focus of our original human culture. Goto the "radical anthropology" vimeo lectures for details - Professors Chris Knight and Camilla Powers and Jerome Lewis out of UC-London and Ian Watts and Megan Biesele and Dr. Elizabeth Marshall-Thomas. I recommend her book "The Harmless People" that got ignored by the male anthropologists. 

So as Professor Michael Corballis emphasizes - as primates we used hands for language for gesturing but as tool use increased this meant the right hand could no longer gesture as communication since it was using a tool. So left-brain dominant language developed. But music as frequency is right brain dominant based on left-hand dominance of the hand. So as Michael Corballis points out when you make rhythm with your hands the left hand keeps a steady beat - why? Because timing is based on the corpus callosum - not the prefrontal cortex. 

So Dr. Daniel Levitin has emphasized how the corpus callosum is not just for timing but also emotional processing of our subconscious. What the spiritual healing training does - as detailed in the ancient science of yoga and meditation - is consciously control what is otherwise subconscious, thereby making a direct access to our spiritual or biophoton "body" as it were. Quantum biology is just now starting to study this interaction. So ancient DNA science has now proven the San Bushmen and "pygmies" split over 225,000 years ago - and so they maintained the same focus of singing and dancing as spiritual healing in both cultures - the radical anthropology group studies this but only Professor Brad Keeney trained in this from the inside. 

So Keeney started out studying shamanism worldwide as a systems theory psychology professsor but then he focused on the San Bushmen as the original human origin of this spiritual healing culture. So Keeney is the only outsider accepted as a spiritual healer in the San Bushmen culture - he goes there every year to hang out. His YT channel "Keeney Center" has interviews with the older female spiritual healers of the San Bushmen culture. So when you go into "ecosystem engineering" and use the beaver as an analogy - the problem is that modern humans with farming created abrupt global warming - this was detailed in William Ruddiman's book "Plows, Plagues and Petroleum." 

So the irony of your focus on evolution is that we currently face "biological annihilation" through accelerating destruction of ecology. I got a certificate in conservation biology and sustainable development in 1992 in Costa Rica, from a semester at the School for Field Studies. It's one thing to study evolution but it's entirely different to change policies of our petro-dollar imperial destruction of ecology from "free trade zones" etc. In fact actually doing sustainable policy work is a quick route to civil disobedience and begging for donations door to door or on the phone while not making enough money to pay rent, etc. 

I did get a few policy changes in my time but I also saw people get fired, etc. And thus the norm now is for academics to chase after research funding by ignoring the details of our "biological annihilation" - for example the research group of Natalia Shakhova gets ignored even though she got published in Nature and top science journals - there is a 1200 gigaton pressurized methane subsea permafrost "abrupt eruption" that has the taliks melted down already to release 50 gigatons (triggered already) in the next ten years. This will soon double atmospheric temps yet this "tipping point" is ignored by mainstream science - unless you go to oceanographer Jim Massa's yt channel (he worked with Shakhova at UA-Fairbanks).

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