A Rebuttal of Jonathan Leaf's Rebuttal: Combining Phylogenetic and Convergent Evolution Explains Human Nature

Jonathan Leaf loves straw man arguments.  In my review of his book The Primate Myth for Law & Liberty, I criticized him for making a straw man argument.  Now he has written a reply to my criticism by . . . making a straw man argument.

In my review, I pointed out that evolutionary biologists and anthropologists generally agree that to explain the evolution of human nature--or of any animal nature--they need to consider both phylogenetic evolution and convergent evolution.  Phylogenetic evolution explains why human beings are similar to other primates with whom they share common genetic descent.  Convergent evolution explains why human beings are different from other primates and similar to non-primate animals that have evolved adaptations for environments of evolutionary adaptation similar to the human environments of evolutionary adaptation.

Convergent evolution explains why a dolphin looks like a fish: it has evolved to have the fish-like anatomy that allows it to swim smoothly through its aquatic habitat. But phylogenetic evolution explains why a dolphin is not a fish but a mammal: it has all the mammalian traits that it inherited from its mammalian ancestors that were originally adapted for a terrestrial habitat.

Similarly, we need to consider both phylogeny and convergence in explaining the evolution of the human mind.  Leaf correctly argues that the convergent evolution of the earliest human ancestors, as adapted for collaborative hunting, set them apart from other primates, who show very little collaborative hunting.  But we also need to understand the phylogenetic evolution of the human brain.

Leaf criticizes what he calls the Primate Myth--the idea that humans are most like primates and unlike all non-primate animals--because this denies the convergent evolution that makes humans more like herd and pack animals than primates.  But this Primate Myth is a straw man because most evolutionary scientists recognize both the phylogenetic similarities of humans to other primates and the convergent similarities of humans to herd and pack animals.

So, for example, Frans de Waal could see how similar humans are to chimps and bonobos because they share a common phylogenetic ancestry.  But he also could see how similar humans are to some non-primates because of convergent evolution.  For instance, de Waal recognized that while chimps and bonobos were sexually promiscuous, with no enduring pair-bonding of sexual mates, convergent evolution had made humans more like the pair-bonding animals.  He observed: "The intimate male-female relationship, which zoologists have dubbed a 'pair bond,' is bred into our bones.  I believe this is what sets us apart from the apes more than anything else."

Therefore, in attacking the Primate Myth that phylogenetic evolution counts for everything, and convergent evolution counts for nothing, in explaining human nature, Leaf is attacking a straw man.

In his rebuttal, Leaf criticizes me for "asserting that leading primatologists have not said that their study of apes is a means by which we might infer aspects of human nature."  "Actually," he says, "they have been saying this for decades."  Then he quotes from the first page of Chimpanzee Politics de Waal's remark that "apes hold up a mirror to us."

So here we go again with another straw man.  I have not asserted that leading primatologists have never said that the study of apes can illuminate some "aspects of human nature."  What I have asserted is that leading primatologists like de Waal have said that we need to study both phylogenetic evolution and convergent evolution to see how humans can be similar to apes in some ways but similar to non-primate animals in other ways.  

It's the same for explaining the evolved nature of other animals.  Emergent evolution explains why dolphins look similar to fish.  Phylogenetic evolution explains why they are actually mammals and not fish.

Would Leaf have to say that since dolphins are so similar to fish that must mean that they really are fish and not mammals?  Should his next book be all about dolphins with the title The Mammal Myth?

Or are we constructing a straw man here?

Monogamy, Polyamory, and the Primate Myth

That we can understand human nature by comparing ourselves with our closest living primate relatives--chimps and bonobos--has been a recurring theme in my blog posts over the years.  So it might seem that Jonathan Leaf's new book--The Primate Myth--is a powerful critique of my position, because Leaf argues that we cannot learn who we are by studying chimps and bonobos, assuming that the underlying patterns of their behavior are the same as ours, which is what Leaf calls the Primate Myth.  Even if we share some common genetic ancestry with primates--particularly, the great apes--we are radically different from apes, Leaf insists, in our genetic profile, in the configuration of our brains, in our anatomy, and in our social behavior.  To explain those differences, we need to see how our evolutionary adaptations for hunting and language made our earliest human ancestors less like apes and more like dolphins, dogs, rats, and elephants.  

Leaf stresses that human beings are unique in their extreme sociality--their social awareness and their capacity for social collaboration.  While primates are social animals, they are not as highly social as the animals that live in packs or herds.  Humans are more a herd or pack animal than a primate, because our earliest evolutionary ancestors depended on collaborative hunting in packs and herding together to repel predators.

Because of the Primate Myth, humans have been classified as belonging to the Order of Primates and the Family of Hominidae (humans and the other great apes--chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans).  But if we recognized how radically different human beings are from primates, Leaf argues, we would classify humans as belonging to their own order (Homo), or at least in their own family, separated from the great apes (245).

Leaf is certainly right in saying that to understand human evolution, it is not sufficient to look for human similarities to those other primates with whom we share common descent, because we must also see how humans differ radically from those primates.  By convergent evolution our human ancestors evolved adaptations for filling an evolutionary niche--collaborative hunting--that made them more like the herd or pack animals than like the other primates with whom they shared genetic ancestry.

But Leaf is wrong in saying that most evolutionary scientists today deny this because they are so committed to the Primate Myth that humans are most like primates--particularly, chimps and bonobos--in their behavioral and psychological propensities and unlike all non-primate animals.  The Primate Myth is a straw man, because in attacking the Primate Myth, Leaf distorts what most evolutionary scientists say about human evolution to make it easier to refute.

In a few places in his book, Leaf comes close to admitting this.  One example is a passage about Frans de Waal, who is the primary villain in Leaf's book (38-40). Leaf says that many readers of de Waal's first book--Chimpanzee Politics--mistakenly assumed that he was saying "that humans were almost exactly the same as chimps." In fact, Leaf observes, de Waal in that book points to "a number of critical differences" between humans and chimps. And in his later writings, de Waal "emphasized the kinship that humans bear to an array of non-primate animals." "In other words, what de Waal was thought to be arguing in his first and most influential book and what he was actually proposing aren't the same."  But then Leaf devotes most of his book to attacking what he here recognizes to be a mistaken interpretation of de Waal--the belief that humans are almost the same as chimps and other primates.

I can imagine, however, that Leaf could respond by saying no, this is not a straw man, because I point to good examples of people assuming the Primate Myth in explaining human evolution.  The best example might be the argument of Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha in their popular bestseller Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships (2010).  Under the influence of the Primate Myth--"the idea that human behavior is very much like ape behavior"--they say that since chimps and bonobos are sexually promiscuous, with no enduring pair-bonding of sexual mates, that must mean that our earliest human ancestors were just as promiscuous, and therefore monogamous pair-bonding is contrary to our evolved human nature.  Human beings would be happier, Ryan and Jetha insist, if married couples were "polyamorous"--if they felt free to have extramarital sexual affairs without feeling shame or fearing that this must break up their marriage: couples can happily live together and rear their children together but sleep around without harming themselves or their children, because primate promiscuity is natural for human beings.  

Leaf devotes over eight pages of his book to explaining and refuting their argument (168-177).  He has also taken excerpts from this part of his book for an article on "The Polyamory Delusion" for National Review that will be the cover story for the February 2026 issue.  His preoccupation with Sex at Dawn makes me think that his reading of this book some fifteen years ago was what originally motivated him to write The Primate Myth to counter the harmful consequences of teaching people that imitating the behavior of chimps and bonobos would make them happy.

Leaf is correct in criticizing Ryan and Jetha for their refusing to see that ape sexuality is different from human sexuality, because in contrast to ape promiscuity, the evolutionary function of human sexuality is to strengthen monogamous pair-bonds and the biparental care of children.  He is mistaken, however, in his claim that evolutionary biologists agree with Ryan and Jetha in their primate model of human sexuality as naturally inclined to polyamorous promiscuity.  The Primate Myth embraced by Ryan and Jetha is a fringe position that is outside the mainstream thinking of most evolutionary scientists, and that's why I say the Primate Myth is a straw man.

Previously, I have written about how the evolution of monogamous pair-bonding among our prehistoric foraging ancestors gave birth to the unique structure of human society that sets it apart from the social life of chimps and bonobos as based on sexual promiscuity in mating and reproduction.  Even in cultures that allow polygamy, most people are in monogamous marriages.  And there is plenty of evidence that polygamous marriages tend to be full of conflict: the cowives fight amongst themselves, men fight with one another over access to women, and children often suffer from parental neglect.

It is true, of course, that even in societies where monogamy is the norm, there is sexual promiscuity that can create some uncertainty about paternity.  But remarkably, recent research shows that the rate of "extra pair paternity"--where a woman bears offspring from a man other than her spouse--is usually below 3 percent (Larmuseau et al. 2013, 2019; Zimmer 2016).  By contrast, extra-pair fertilization in socially monogamous bird species can range as high as 20 percent (Brouwer and Griffith 2019; Griffith et al. 2002).

Leaf cites this kind of evidence as showing that while promiscuity is a problem for human beings, it is not as pervasive as it is for primates because human beings have an evolved natural desire for monogamous pair-bonding.  Leaf rightly concludes that this refutes Ryan and Jetha's primate model of human sexuality as naturally inclined to polyamorous promiscuity rather than sexual monogamy.

But Leaf is wrong when he says that evolutionary biologists agree with Ryan and Jetha (Leaf 2025, 171, 173).  In fact, Ryan and Jetha repeatedly insist that they are attacking the "standard narrative of human sexual evolution" that upholds monogamous pair-bonding as crucial for human evolution (Ryan and Jetha 2010, 7-8, 11, 25, 34-35, 38-39, 46-60, 99, 137, 142, 149, 223, 266, 300).  Leaf is silent about this.

For example, Ryan and Jetha criticize Frans de Waal for embracing the "standard narrative."  They quote various remarks by de Waal as illustrating the "standard narrative" of human sexual monogamy that they reject.  De Waal argued that the nuclear family is "intrinsically human," and the pair-bond is "the key to the incredible level of cooperation that marks our species," because "our success as a species is intimately tied to the abandonment of the bonobo lifestyle and to a tighter control over sexual expressions." He observed: "The intimate male-female relationship . . . which zoologists have dubbed a 'pair bond,' is bred into our bones.  I believe this is what sets us apart from the apes more than anything else."   He also said: "Both chimps and bonobos are far more promiscuous than we are. Our testicles reflect this: they are mere peanuts compared to our ape relatives' coconuts" (de Waal 2005, 108, 113, 124-25; Ryan and Jetha 2010, 76, 115, 225).

Leaf does not allow his readers to see this.  Because if his readers saw that the Primate Myth as embraced by Ryan and Jetha is rejected by de Waal and most other evolutionary scientists, they would see that when Leaf attacks the Primate Myth, he is attacking a straw man.

REFERENCES

Brouwer, Lyanne, and Simon Griffith. 2019. "Extra-Pair Paternity in Birds." Molecular Ecology. 28: 4864-4882.

de Waal, Frans. 2005. Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are. New York: Riverhead Books.

Griffith, Simon, Ian Owens, and Katherine Thuman. 2002. "Extra Pair Paternity in Birds: A Review of Interspecific Variation and Adaptive Function. Molecular Ecology 11: 2195-2212.

Larmuseau, M. H. D., et al. 2013. "Low Historical Rates of Cuckoldry in a Western European Human Population Traced by Y-chromosome and Genealogical Data." Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 280:20132400.

Leaf, Jonathan. 2025. The Primate Myth: Why the Latest Science Leads Us to a New Theory of Human Nature. New York: Bombardier Books.

Ryan, Christopher, and Cacilda Jetha. 2010. Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships. New York: Harper.

Zimmer, Carl. 2013. "Monogamy and Human Evolution." New York Times, August 2.

Zimmer, Carl. 2016. "Fathered by the Mailman? It's Mostly an Urban Legend." New York Times, April 8.

The Evolutionary Psychology of Lex Rex

                                    A Contemporary German Print of the Execution of Charles I

The evolutionary psychology of Lex Rex--that the law rules over the king--depends on two points.  First, we need to see how as opposed to regicide by assassination (murder), regicide by legal execution (as in the trial of Charles I) affirms the impersonal rules of law as superior to absolute monarchy's rule by personal threats.  This understanding of law as impersonal or impartial moral rules is unique to human beings because it arises from the natural evolution of the human capacity for the language of rational symbolization.

The second point is that the denial of the sacred authority of the king to rule with impunity was part of the cultural evolution of the rise of theocratic sacred monarchy (beginning in ancient Mesopotamia) and its decline (beginning in 17th century England) culminating in the Lockean liberalism of King Charles III's Christian monarchy.

Two Kinds of Regicide

In the first systematic and quantitative study of regicide in Europe, Manuel Eisner (2011) has collected data on the frequency of violent death and regicide among 1,513 monarchs in Europe between AD 600 and 1800.  He has distinguished four categories of violent death: accident, battle death, murder, and legal execution.  He found that in the seventh century, the frequency of regicide was 2,500 murders per 100,000 years in office.  There was a long decline in regicide.  So that by the eighteenth century, the frequency of regicide was about 200 per 100,000 years in office.  By comparison, the homicide rate in Western Europe today is around 0.6-1.5 per 100,000 person-years.  Clearly, then, European kingship before the Industrial Revolution was one of the most dangerous occupations in the world, comparable to that of soldiers in combat.

Eisner found that for most of this history, regicide by assassination was carried out within the noble elite in the competition for political rule.  But, then, by the seventeenth century, regicide became a matter of legal execution--the execution of Charles I in England in 1649 and the execution of Louis XVI in France in 1793.  In the Glorious Revolution of 1688, James II was deposed and defeated in war without being executed.

The decline in regicide seems to be part of the general historical decline in homicide (Eisner 2003; Pinker 2011).  This general pattern of declining violence seems to be associated with a Hobbesian pacification process, in which the state claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, and with a Lockean liberal culture of bourgeois virtues that arise in modern commercial societies, in which people learn to control their violent impulses for the sake of peaceful economic and social exchange.

Jane Goodall and other primatologists have presented evidence that chimpanzees are similar to human beings in the practice of political assassinations.  There is plenty of evidence of chimpanzees from one community killing individuals from another community, which looks like warfare.  Goodall's observations of chimpanzee intercommunity violence have now been confirmed by similar observations from many chimpanzee communities across Africa.  

What is most surprising about this is that lethal violence within chimpanzee communities is extremely rare (Newton-Fisher and Emery Thompson 2012).  Chimpanzees often become aggressive in conflicts with one another, but they usually resolve their conflicts without physical contact; and even if there is some physical violence, it is almost never lethal, even though chimpanzee canines are powerful weapons for wounding and killing victims.  Most aggression between adult males consists of bluffing attacks without physical contact--threatening gestures and vocalizations and charging displays.  (This is also true for human beings, who often engage in bluffing displays of aggression, but for whom homicide is rare, despite the publicity given to homicidal violence.)

After decades of observations of chimpanzee communities across Africa, there have been only four documented cases of lethal violence between adult males of the same community, in which a coalitional gang of adult males killed a lone victim.  Kaburu et al. (2013) point out that the individuals killed in these cases were either low-ranking males or they were previously deposed alpha males.

In the revised edition of his Chimpanzee Politics, Frans de Waal reported that in the summer of 1980, Luit--the alpha male of the chimpanzee community in the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands--was attacked brutally and killed by Nikkie and Yeroen, who had previously been alpha males (de Waal 1998, 211-214).  De Waal describes the bloody scene: "Apart from biting off fingers and toes and causing deep gashes everywhere, the two aggressors removed Luit's testicles, which were found on the cage floor."  This looks like a political assassination.  But it's hard to know whether this case of lethal violence among captive chimpanzees is an abnormal consequence of their captive conditions.  The killing of Luit occurred at night, when the chimps were confined in their night cages.

Kaburu et al. claim to report the first case of lethal violence among wild chimpanzees in which the victim was the incumbent alpha male.  PM was the alpha male of the M-group of chimpanzees in the Malale Mountains National Park in Tanzania when he was killed on October 2, 2011.  He had been the alpha male since 2007.  After a bloody fight between PM and PR, the beta male, PR left.  A weakened PM  was then attacked brutally by a coalition of four other adult males, including two former alpha males (AL and DE).  AL was the alpha male overthrown by PM in 2007.  After the killing, there was a period of social instability.  AL became the alpha male for a short time.  But by November, PR had become the alpha male and is now the alpha male of the M-group.

Kaburu et al. explain this as an opportunistic attempt by AL (the third ranking of 10 adult males) to seize the alpha position once he saw that PM was weakened by the fight with PR, although AL was unable to hold his alpha position for long against the challenge of PR.

When I asked Michael Wilson (a primatologist at the University of Minnesota) about whether there were any other cases of alpha males being killed, he mentioned two cases at Gombe.  Vincent was the alpha male of the Mitumba community at Gombe.  He fell from a tree and severely injured himself.  He lived for another three months before two adult males attacked and killed him.  Michael says he has not yet written a report of this case.

The second case was that of Goblin, another alpha male at Gombe.  He was severely attacked and would have died if a vet had not treated his wounds.  Kaburu et al. mention this case, but they claim that Goblin had been deposed from his alpha position before the attack.

Even if chimpanzees show a few cases of political assassination of an alpha male, which is comparable to the political assassination of a king among human beings, it is clear that chimps are incapable of the legal execution of a leader, because legal execution implies laws as impartial moral rules, which requires the uniquely human capacity for rational symbolization.

Previously, I have written about Peter DeScioli's argument that laws are moral rules for choosing sides in conflicts by impartial rules of action, which arose first in the human environment of evolutionary adaptation--or in what Locke called the "state of nature."  Laws as impartial rules require moral judgment, which is unique to human beings, because moral judgement depends on the human rational or symbolizing mind that can grasp and share the abstract symbolic values of the good and the just.  

Dominant chimps rule by personal threats: if you challenge my alpha male dominance, I will punish you.  Tyrannical humans sometimes rule by personal threats.  But humans can also formulate impartial laws for judging who has the right to rule:  in America, whoever is elected president by the proper constitutional procedures has the right to rule as president as long as he is constrained by the rule of law.

Charles I claimed to rule by the law of absolute monarchy--that "the king can do no wrong" and is thus above the law--but this was really a personal threat disguised as impartial law.  Because by impartial law, kings must follow the laws like anyone else.  And so, if the king commits murder by initiating a Civil War in which he kills his own people, then he is guilty of murder and should be punished for it as any other murderer would be.  The legal trial and legal execution of Charles I affirmed that principle--that Law is king over the king.

The Cultural Evolution of Sacred Monarchy from Hammurabi to King Charles III

This is a tracing of a rock drawing from a cave at the stone age site of Remigia, Castellon, Spain, dated to sometime before 6500 BCE.  Christopher Boehm used this rock drawing at Remigia to illustrate the importance of capital punishment in the evolution of morality and egalitarian hierarchy.  He observed that on the right we see ten men jubilantly holding their bows over their heads.  On the left, we see a man lying on the ground with exactly ten arrows sticking in his body or on the ground.

It's hard to know for sure what has happened.  The victim could have been a prisoner of war who has been executed.  In fact, other drawings at Remigia show scenes of warfare.  But Boehm suggests that given what we know about hunter-gatherer foragers in the ethnographic record, it's more likely that the victim here was a deviant member of the band who had violated the moral rules of the band--perhaps by murdering someone--and he was becoming a bully who was trying to assert his dominance over the group.   

This also illustrated Boehm's "ambivalence model" of human nature in politics.  Human politics arises from the complex tension between three levels of our evolved political psychology: dominance, deference, and counter-dominance.  Some human beings want to have dominance over others.  Most human beings are inclined to defer to the rule of the dominant ones.  But when that dominance becomes despotic and exploitative, people will resist that dominance and punish the bullies by shunning them, ostracizing them, or--in the most dangerous cases--killing them.  Previously, I have written about this as showing the evolution of equal liberty through capital punishment.

But then about seven thousand years ago, the first agricultural settlements appeared in the ancient Near East.  And about five thousand years ago, the first urban states appeared.  The city of Uruk emerged in ancient Mesopotamia around 3,200 BC.  These states were the first sacred monarchies, in which the king claimed the absolute power to rule by divine right.  This claim to rule by divine authority is evident in the black stone stela that present the Laws of Hammurabi that were compiled toward the end of the reign of Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC), who was the sixth ruler of the First Dynasty of Babylon.

The Louvre stela is almost seven and a half feet tall.  The top one-third of the stela shows the sun-god Shamash, the god of justice, seated on his throne, with King Hammurabi standing before him.  It is not clear whether the god is dictating the laws to Hammurabi, or Hammurabi is presenting the laws to the god, or Hammurabi is accepting the rod and the ring that are the emblems of authority.  In any case, this conveys the clear message to the viewers--even the many illiterate people who cannot read the laws--that Hammurabi's laws are divinely authorized by the god of justice.

The evidence collected by anthropological archaeologists--that has been surveyed by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus in The Creation of Inequality--has shown that in the first monarchic states, the power of rulers over their subjects could not be legitimated by reason alone, and rulers had discovered that they needed to pretend that they ruled by divine right--that political rule was sanctified by a religious cosmology.  Originally, the first human beings had no rulers other than the gods, but eventually they were persuaded that some human beings could rule with divine authority.

Every society has some cosmological explanation for how human beings and their world came into existence, and this cosmological creation story provides moral sanction for their social order.  Typically, the world begins as a formless chaos, and then some supernatural spirits create order out of this chaos, including the creation of human beings.  This creation story constitutes the moral charter for a society because it provides a sacred origin for the moral rules of a society. And thus religious belief is an evolutionary adaptation for binding people together into social groups.

Originally, among nomadic hunter-gatherers, the cosmological creation story sanctioned a celestial dominance hierarchy: the invisible supernatural beings were the alphas, the invisible ancestors were the betas, and the living human beings were the gammas.  Therefore, originally, all living human beings were equal in their subordination to the invisible gods and ancestors.  Inequality of social ranking arose when some living human beings successfully claimed that they or their clans were divine or divinely sanctioned for rule over others, and thus there was a cosmological justification for inequality.

Here in ancient Mesopotamia is the first cosmic teleology of human law as rooted in divine law, which is developed in Plato's Timaeus and the Bible, and which becomes the theme of the Divine 
Cosmic Model of the universe that runs through human civilization for four thousand years.  

But even though this mysterious magic of a sacred monarchy could win the deferential submission of people, a tyrannical monarchy often provoked the resistance of the people.  As I have indicated in my posts on Hammurabi's Laws and the Mesopotamian kingships, whenever a king increased his exploitation of his people--through increased confiscation of grain, increased taxation, increased conscription of soldiers and laborers--this provoked flight or rebellion.  The records of the Mesopotamian states are full of evidence of people running away from their states--slaves running away from their enslavement, soldiers running away from their conscripted service in war, taxpayers running away from oppressive taxation, laborers running aways from coerced labor, and people generally running away from cities racked with famine and contagious diseases.  

There is also evidence that over 3,000 years of Mesopotamian life, there were hundreds of rebellions.  Historian of the Ancient Near East Seth Richardson (2010, 2016) has noted that rebels against the state were described by state authorities as "the violators of contracts (mitgurtu, rikistu)."  The Akkadian words mitgurtu and rikistu denote agreement, consent, contract, or treaty.  Richardson has observed:  "These motifs relating to violation-of-contract strike a familiar chord to us moderns, since they suggest the premise of a social contract between ruler and ruled, or at least the existence of legal treaties and loyalty oaths" (2010: 9).

Not only in ancient Mesopotamia, but also throughout the ancient Mediterranean world--the Near East, Greece, and Rome--one sees the same pattern of rebellions against the state in which rebels assert their natural freedom from oppression and thus confirm Locke's understanding of government as dependent on the consent of the governed (Howe and Brice 2016).

But this raises a question:  if there was so much popular resistance to the tyranny of sacred monarchy, then why was it the predominant form of government for five thousand years?  Throughout most of this history, the number of monarchies far exceeded the number of nonmonarchies.  

But then around 1900, the number of nonmonarchies surpassed the number of monarchies.  Today, there are very few monarchies in the world, and most of the most prominent monarchies today--like Great Britain--have a purely ceremonial monarch who has no sovereign power to rule.  This raises a second question:  why has monarchy declined in the last few centuries?

As I have indicated in some previous posts, there are at least two kinds of answers to the question of why monarchy was the prevalent form of government for thousands of years.  The first answer is that historically monarchies have been limited in their exercise of sovereign power over their people, and thus they have been limited in their capacity for the sort of tyrannical exploitation that provokes popular resistance.  For example, the evidence from those first monarchic states in ancient Mesopotamia shows an odd contradiction between their claims of absolute sovereignty and the reality of their severely limited powers.  For example, in their written legal codes, one can see what Seth Richardson has identified as "the curious absence of the state in the text." In the prologue and epilogue to Hammurabi's Code, Hammurabi claims absolute divinely granted authority over Babylonia.  But in the hundreds of laws in his code, there is almost no reference to himself or to the central state as providing judgment or enforcement of the law.  Most of the laws seem to assume private enforcement: when something goes wrong, the wronged party must act on his own with the help of local people to investigate, try, convict, and punish the guilty parties. 

What we see here is what Richardson has called the "presumptive state": the early states in Mesopotamia were presumptive in claiming a sovereignty that they did not in fact possess. Their rhetorical claims for absolute sovereignty have been mistakenly interpreted as evidence for the reality of Oriental Despotism.

Over the past 5,000 years, some states have expanded their power to rule through autocratic bureaucracies--for instance, China under the Song dynasty (960-1279).  But even the most powerful states have had to rely to some degree on law enforcement by private individuals acting through customary laws of vengeance and compensation.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, some states began to extend their law enforcement power by inventing modern professional policing.  Previously, people had policed themselves.  Robert Peel founded the London police in 1829.  The English Reform Act of 1835 extended this system of policing to all municipal boroughs.  Boston established the first American police force in 1838.

As long as monarchic states could not fully enforce their laws directly on their people, and their people were free to police themselves, those monarchic states had little power to tyrannically exploit their people.

The second answer to why monarchic states predominated for thousands of years is that in large societies where people are disconnected, the king provides a readily available focal point for legitimating government.  As I have indicated in a previous post, John Gerring and his colleagues have argued that from the appearance of the first states in the ancient world to the beginning of the modern era about 250 years ago, monarchy was the most common political regime because it was the most efficient solution to the problem of selecting leaders to coordinate social order in large societies where people are isolated from one another.  In the modern era, however, improvements in the technology of communication--for example, the printing press, newspapers, national postal systems, the telegraph, radio, television, and the internet--made it easier for people in large societies to communicate with one another and thus to mobilize a mass public for social coordination, which allowed elites to develop new systems of rule that did not need a central locus of sovereignty in a monarch (Gerring et al. 2021).

But doesn't this beg an obvious question--Why can't kings use modern mass communication to glorify their monarchic rule over their people?

We can answer that question by considering again the causes of the English Civil War, which led to the first trial and execution of a king.  Thomas Hobbes (in Behemoth) indicated that disputes over the interpretation of the Bible were a primary cause of the English Civil War.  The translation of the Bible into English in the sixteenth century and the invention of the printing press made the Bible widely available to common people, who could then interpret the Bible for themselves rather than being dependent on the authority of their priests.  The printing press also facilitated the production of thousands of books and pamphlets debating theological and political questions.  This contributed to the Protestant Reformation in breaking from the authority of the Catholic Church.  As a consequence, all the parties in the English political controversies of the time found their ideas in the Bible (Hill 1993).  People like John Cooke could publish books arguing that the Bible did not support absolute monarchy.  And when the Stuart monarchy was restored in 1660, Charles II had to order the burning of such books as the greatest threat to the monarchy.

The success of modern mass communication in popularizing ideas of religious and political liberty has made it ever harder to defend absolute monarchy with the coercive enforcement of one national church.  This was dramatically manifested in the coronation of King Charles III on May 6, 2023, which was broadcast around the globe.  In the Coronation Liturgy--as designed by Charles himself--we saw a subtle interweaving of Old Testament and New Testament traditions that reconciled the conflicts between them by favoring the liberal interpretation of the New Testament advanced by Roger Williams and John Locke.

Since Henry VIII, the English King has been "Defender of the Faith"--first the Catholic Church and then the Anglican Church, which meant that the King would enforce a theocracy.  But King Charles III has identified himself as the "Defender of Faith"--that is, all religious faiths.  And indeed the coronation procession into Westminster Abbey included "faith leaders" from a dozen or more religious traditions.  Moreover, the Coronation Oath included a pledge "to foster an environment in which people of all faiths and beliefs may live freely."  Notice that "beliefs"--as distinguished from "faiths"--suggest that even atheists "may live freely" under the rule of Charles III.

The coronation of Charles indicated how his kingship will follow the model of Christ's persuasive kingship rather than the theocratic kingship of ancient Israel.  At the beginning of the coronation, Charles was greeted by a Chapel Royal chorister: "Your Majesty, as children of the Kingdom of God, we welcome you in the name of the King of Kings."  Charles responded: "In his name, and after his example, I come not to be served but to serve."

Here Charles echoed the words of Jesus when he warned his followers not to strive for authoritative rule over others:  "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them.  Not so with you.  Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave--just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Matt. 20:25-28).

Charles thus intimated here that he is a king who has no coercive authority over his people, particularly in matters of religious belief.  At most, he can only exercise the sort of persuasive authority that comes through Christian preaching.

Unlike the Stuart dynasty, the King of the House of Windsor rules over Great Britain as a purely ceremonial head of state that exercises no sovereign power in what is really a liberal Parliamentary democracy where Law is King.

REFERENCES

Boehm, Christopher.  2017.  "Prehistoric Capital Punishment and Parallel Evolutionary Effects."  Center for Humans and Nature, June 12.

Cooke, John.  1649.  King Charles, His Case, or An Appeal to All Rational Men Concerning His Trial at the High Court of Justice.  London: Peter Cole.

DeScioli, Peter.  2023.  "On the Origin of Laws by Natural Selection."  Evolution and Human Behavior 44: 195-209.

Eisner,  Manuel. 2003.  "Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime."  Crime and Justice 30: 83-142.

Eisner,  Manuel.  2011.  "Killing Kings: Patterns of Regicide in Europe, AD 600-1800."  British Journal of Criminology 51: 556-577.

Filmer, Robert.  1991.  Patriarcha and Other Writings.  Ed. Johann P. Sommerville.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Flannery, Kent and Joyce Marcus.  2014.  The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.   

Gardiner, Samuel Rawson.  1906.  The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625-1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gerring, John, et al.  2021.  "Why Monarchy? The Rise and Demise of a Regime Type." Comparative Political Studies 54: 585-622.

Hill, Christopher.  1993.  The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. London: Penguin Books.

Howe, Timothy, and Lee Brice, eds.  2016.  Brill's Companion to Insurgency and Terrorism in the Ancient Mediterranean.  Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.

Kaburu, Stefano S. K., Sana Inoue, and Nicholas E. Newton-Fisher. 2013. "Death of the Alpha: Within-Community Lethal Violence Among Chimpanzees of the Mahale Mountains National Park." American Journal of Primatology 75:789-797.

Locke, John.  1988.  Two Treatises of Government.  Ed. Peter Laslett.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Newton-Fisher, Nicholas E. and Melissa Emery Thompson. 2012. "Comparative Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence." In The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence, Homicide, and War, 41-60. Eds.Todd K. Shackelford and Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pinker, Steven. 2011.  The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.  New York: Viking.

Richardson, Seth.  2010.  "Writing Rebellion Back Into the Record: A Methodologies Toolkit."  In Seth Richardson, ed., Rebellions and Peripheries in the Cuneiform World, 1-27.  New Haven, CN: American Oriental Society.

Richardson, Seth.  2016.  "Insurgency and Terror in Mesopotamia."  In Howe and Brice 2016, 31-61.

Robertson, Geoffrey.  2005.  The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold.  New York: Pantheon Books.

de Waal, Frans. 1998. Chimpanzee Politics. Revised edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

"No Kings!" Is the Waa-Bark of America's Chimpanzee Politics of Resistance to Trump

Last Saturday, we saw a massive display of chimpanzee political rhetoric.  Subordinate chimpanzees utter pant-grunts to signal their fear and submission before a dominant chimp.  But subordinates can also utter waa-barks to signal their defiance of a dominant chimp.  If enough subordinates scream their waa-barks, and if the dominant chimp does not have a sufficiently strong coalition of supporters, he can be overthrown.  The five million people in the "No Kings" protests against Trump were shouting their waa-barks.  The people at Trump's military parade celebrating his birthday were pant-grunting their submission to Trump.  But reporters noticed that the number of spectators at the parade was small, and many of them were looking at their phones to see images of the massive crowds at the "No Kings" protests.  The waa-barks were louder than the pant-grunts.

Although chimpanzees do not have language, they do communicate with one another through sounds, postures, and facial expressions that convey information.  Often that information is about social rank.  An alpha male might engage in a loud display of intimidation that asserts his dominance over the group.  Other chimps might respond to this by signaling their submission to him.  Or they might respond with signs of resistance and defiance.  And some might even signal that they want to overthrow him.  Thus chimps engage in political rhetoric, because they try to persuade one another as to how their social order should be organized.  

We could also identify this chimpanzee political rhetoric as Lockean insofar as subordinate chimpanzees can protest against despotic dominance by the alpha male and thus limit his power, which moves towards the egalitarian social arrangement seen in human hunter-gatherer bands with an egalitarian style of hierarchy in which the leader is only primus inter pares ("first among equals").  This is what Locke saw in the state of nature in which all men are by nature equally free.  Not that all are absolutely equal, because some will have higher status than others, and some will become leaders of their social groups.  But that all adults have the natural right to be free from being unduly subordinated to anyone else without their consent, and that they have the natural right to punish those who threaten their life, liberty, or property (Second Treatise, pars. 4-10, 54, 94, 105).  

To explain the Darwinian evolution of this human state of nature, we should expect to find precursors of this human egalitarianism in our pre-human primate ancestors.  And if we assume that the common ancestor of humans and the African great apes was similar to a chimpanzee, then we might expect to see evolutionary preadaptations for an egalitarian style of dominance in chimpanzee groups.  In fact, as Christopher Boehm has argued, we can see in chimpanzees similarities to the ambivalent political nature of human hunter-gatherers that shows a tense balance between dominance, deference, and counter-dominance (Boehm 1993, 1999).  

Dominance is the natural propensity of individuals to seek the power over others that comes from superior rank in a group.  The political life of primates is organized around dominance hierarchies in which the old tend to have dominance over the young and males tend to have dominance over females, although females can also have a dominance hierarchy, and sometimes coalitions of females can resist male dominance.  This is a political universal for chimpanzees, both in the wild and in captivity; and for human beings throughout history.  Winning or losing dominance is determined by patterns of coalition formation that depend on shifting circumstances and individual decisions.

Deference is the natural propensity of individuals to submit to those who are dominant.  As political universals, deference is the correlative of dominance.  Among the various species of political primates, there are distinctive behavioral cues, both verbal and nonverbal, by which subordinates defer to dominants.

Counter-dominance is the natural propensity of individuals to resist being dominated.  Among some primates, subordinate individuals can resist excessive dominance and thus limit the power of dominant individuals.  Subordinate individuals can form large coalitions to challenge those at the top of the hierarchy.

The variation in this behavior creates differences in dominance style across species.  As Frans de Waal has observed, rhesus monkeys show a "despotic dominance style" in which subordinates cannot challenge dominants; but chimpanzees show an "egalitarian dominance style" in which subordinates can restrain dominants (de Waal 1996).  Dominant chimpanzees are expected to mediate conflicts within the group and to lead the group in conflicts with other groups.  Dominant chimpanzees can be challenged or even deposed if they do not properly carry out their conflict-mediation role.

Like chimpanzee politics, human politics shows a dominance hierarchy that can be egalitarian in style, based on the principle that leaders are only first among equals.  This egalitarianism is most evident among human hunter-gatherers who use various kinds of sanctions (from ridicule and disobedience to ostracism and execution) to punish leaders who become too despotic in their dominance.  This resistance to dominance was probably a crucial part of human evolutionary history in the Paleolithic era (from about two million years ago to 10,000 years ago).  But with the establishment of large bureaucratic states based on agricultural production, which began more than 5,000 years ago, many states have been more despotic than egalitarian.  The emergence and spread of Lockean liberal democracies over the past three centuries is in some ways a return to the egalitarian dominance of the foraging way of life in which subordinates limit the power of dominants.

To the old question in political philosophy as to whether human beings are naturally hierarchical or naturally egalitarian, the answer from biopolitical science is that human beings are both.  Niccolo Machiavelli was right to see that human political nature is torn by the tension between the propensity of the few to dominance and the propensity of the many to submit to dominance while also resisting oppressive dominance.  The history of political practice and political thought turns on this natural ambivalence interacting over time with particular political circumstances and decisions.

As an illustration of this political ambivalence among chimpanzees, here is Jane Goodall's description of an incident she observed in July of 1964 in Gombe:

"Mike, the new alpha, rests in the shade of a tree.  A sudden crashing in the undergrowth heralds the arrival of Goliath, recently deposed from the top position.  Mike does not move as Goliath charges flat out toward him, dragging a huge branch.  At the last moment Goliath turns aside, swings into a nearby tree, and sits motionless.  Only now does Mike begin to display, swaying the vegetation, hurling a few rocks, then climbing into Goliath's tree and swaying branches there.  When he stops, Goliath displays again, leaping ever closer to his adversary until Mike responds.  For a few moments both are wildly swaying foliage within 2 meters of each other; but there is no fight.  They swing to the ground and charge off through the undergrowth, running parallel, then sit staring at each other.  Goliath stands upright and rocks a sapling; Mike hurtles past, throwing a large rock.  For the next twenty-three minutes the performance continues, and during the whole episode the only physical contact between them is when one is hit by the end of a bough swayed by the other.  Finally, after a three-minute pause, Goliath moves rapidly toward Mike, crouches beside him with loud, submissive pant-grunts, and begins to groom him vigorously.  For half a minute, Mike ignores him, then turns and grooms his vanquished rival with equal intensity.  For more than an hour, they groom until both are relaxed and peaceful" (Goodall 1986, 409).

Notice the ambivalent political rhetoric in this incident.  The male dominance hierarchy is determined by the directionality of displays and pant-grunting among the adult males.  Goodall has kept a quantitative record of this for many years so that she can track the ever-changing history of the dominance hierarchy. If an alpha male is secure in his dominance, he displays towards the others in the group, and he receives pant-grunts from the others; but he never pant-grunts toward any of them.  When Goliath displays towards Mike, Goliath is challenging him, attempting to take the alpha position.  Both are feeling aggressive and fearful at the same time.  Each is trying to bluff down the other.  But while Goliath wants dominance, his fear of Mike finally drives him to signal his submission through pant-grunting; and Mike accepts his submission by reconciling with him.

Displays are more common than physical attacks, because chimps would rather avoid the danger of serious physical injuries that come from attacks.  Charging displays are threats that serve to maintain or challenge the existing order of dominance.  But reversals in rank among the males are usually the result of physical fights.  And while size and strength are important for success in displays and fights, psychological traits--such as intelligence, ingenuity, boldness, persistence, and shrewdness in forming coalitions--are crucial for success.  Mike was actually one of the smaller adult males when he overthrew Goliath, but he figured out how to use empty kerosene cans in his noisy charging displays to shock the other males and throw them into confusion until they submitted to him.  As I indicated in a previous post, Boehm and Goodall have compared Donald Trump's bombastic rhetoric to Mike's displays.

The vocal rhetoric of chimpanzees is complex.  Goodall and other primatologists have identified at least 32 distinct calls that convey particular emotions or feelings (Goodall 1986, 127; Arcadi 2018, 116-23).  One of them is the pant-grunt that Goliath uttered to signal a feeling of social apprehension and submission.  Another is the waa-bark that signals anger and defiance.  Dominant individuals can use waas as a warning to subordinates.  But from his careful study of chimp videotaped vocalizations, Boehm has concluded that most waas are used by subordinates to express their defiance of dominants (Boehm 1999, 164-69).

Boehm has seen this illustrated by what de Waal reports in his studies of the chimps in the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Georgia.  When new adult males were introduced into the community, the Yerkes females acted as a power coalition that rejected males seeking the alpha male position.  Finally, they accepted Jimoh as the alpha male.  But when he acted as a bully, the females punished him.  

For example, one day Jimoh saw that Socko, an adolescent male, was mating with one of Jomoh's favorite females.  Jimoh chased Socko around the enclosure and refused to stop.  Socko was screaming and defecating in fear.

Several females nearby began to waa bark.  They looked around to see the reaction of others.  When others began to join in the waa barking, the intensity of their protests became deafening.  Finally, Jimoh got the message.  He broke off his attack to avoid any further attacks from the females.  It was as though the chimps were taking a vote, and Jimoh had lost the vote.  If Jimoh had not stopped his attack, he might have been overthrown and even killed.

Here are the evolved primate roots of Lockean political rhetoric, in which we see the political ambivalence in the tense balance between dominance, deference, and counter-dominance.

Last Saturday, we saw a great debate between the deference to Trump at his military parade and the counter-dominance of resistance to Trump at the "No Kings" protests.

Steven Cheung, the communications director for Trump, has said: "The so-called No Kings protests have been a complete and utter failure with minuscule attendance."  Of course, that is what he has to say--he has to tell those of us who attended one of the protests that we must not believe what we saw with our own eyes.

Like I say, that's chimpanzee politics.

(Some of the material in this post comes from a previous post.)

REFERENCES

Arcadi, Adam. 2018. Wild Chimpanzees: Social Behavior of an Endangered Species. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Boehm, Christopher. 1993. "Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy." Current Anthropology 34:227-254.

Boehm, Christopher. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Goodall, Jane. 1986. The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

de Waal, Frans. 1996. Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

The Chimpanzee Politics of Joe Biden's Betrayal of America

Like many people I have been trying to understand why and how the Democratic Party threw the presidential election of 2024 to Donald Trump.  I now think the answer to that question will come from reading two books--Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, It's Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again and Frans de Waal's Chimpanzee Politics.  

When Joe Biden announced in 2023 that he would run for a second term, most American voters thought he was too old to serve out a second term.  He was already the oldest man to be President of the United States, and by the end of a second term, he would have been 86 years old.  Moreover, throughout 2023 and 2024, the voters saw his drastic physical and cognitive decline.  At the same time, after inflation peaked at 9.1% in the summer of 2022, the highest in 40 years, many voters thought Biden's economic policies had failed, and they continued to believe that even when inflation rates came down slightly by 2024.  Consequently, by early 2024, the polls indicated that Biden was going to lose to Trump.  But it was also clear, that most voters were unhappy with the choice between Trump and Biden, and that if the Democrats had nominated a moderate Democrat not identified with Biden and his economic policies, the Democrats would have won because Trump was not the first choice for the majority of voters.

So why did the Democrats allow Biden to run for a second term?  Why did they not organize an open presidential primary to identify a good alternative to both Biden and Trump?  Why did they wait until the end of July in 2024 to force Biden to withdraw from the race?  And why did they then allow Kamala Harris to become the nominee, even though she was even more unpopular than Biden, and she ran as a proponent of "Bidenomics" despite the unpopularity of Biden's inflation?

The answer is that it was all chimpanzee politics.  Once Joe Biden and Jill Biden had won political dominance as the alpha male and alpha female ("First Lady"), they didn't want to give it up, even though they had lost their minimum winning coalition by 2024.  Other Democrat politicians who could have defeated Trump refused to enter the race because they thought they could not risk being disloyal to the Bidens.  Even after Harris replaced Biden as the nominee, she refused to show disloyalty by renouncing Biden's unpopular policies (particularly on inflation).  This allowed Trump to win even though he was not the first choice of the voters.  Now he's the dominant chimp, who proudly announces his dictatorial rule: "I run the country and the world."

I have written many posts about the chimpanzee politics of dominance hierarchies.  People often assume that among animals the dominance hierarchy must be determined by fighting in which the biggest and strongest animal wins and becomes the alpha.  But primatologists like de Waal and Jane Goodall have shown that this is false.  Among chimpanzees and other animals, physical strength is only one of many traits required for becoming the dominant alpha leader.  To become the alpha, one needs supporters.  One must form coalitions with partners, and to win the support of the females and the children, one needs to act as a mediator in intervening in disputes to enforce peace and unity either through impartial intervention or by supporting the weaker party against the stronger.  One must know how to reconcile after disputes.  And one must know how to achieve mutual cooperation through reciprocity by returning favors and by punishing those who are not cooperative.

Males tend to reach their peak in the hierarchy between age twenty and twenty-six years.  Goodall explains: "Factors other than age, which determine the position of a male in the dominance hierarchy include physical fitness, aggressiveness, skill at fighting, ability to form coalitions, intelligence, and a number of personality factors such as boldness and determination. . . . At Gombe some males strive with much energy to better their social status over a period of years; others work hard for a short while, but give up if they encounter a serious setback; a few seem remarkably unconcerned about their social rank."

Chimp male canine teeth are powerful weapons for killing.  But remarkably, chimp fighting almost never leads to killing, except when male chimps are attacking chimps outside their community.  Fighting for dominance within a community is carried out through the bluffing of spectacular, charging displays of intimidation.

Goodall and De Waal have seen among chimpanzees what some political scientists have called government by the "minimal winning coalition."  No one individual can rule without supporters, and so there must always be a ruling coalition supporting the leader, who must satisfy his supporters.  A dictatorship is rule by a small coalition.  Democracy is rule by a large coalition.  The leader must serve the interests of his coalition, and so the larger the coalition, the closer this approximates to serving the common interests of society.

One can also see among chimpanzees confirmation for Machiavelli's political psychology of the one, the few, and the many.  In every society, there are a few people who are ambitious to rule over others, and out of these ambitious few, one individual will emerge as the dominant ruler over all.  Most people do not want to rule, and they will defer to the rule of the few, but the many do not want to be exploited by those ruling few.  To avoid an exploitative despotic rule, there needs to be a balance between the one, the few, and the many.  The hope of the American founders--perhaps most clearly expressed by John Adams--was that American government would separate and balance these three powers: 

Adams believed that human nature is such that every human society must decide the question, Who is the first man?  "It is a question that must be decided, in every species of gregarious animals, as well as men."  Even in the most civilized societies, "the same nature remains," and the contest for first rank must be decided, whether by peaceful or by violent rivalry.  The balance of powers answers this question by providing for a supreme executive office to be filled by one person with sufficient ambition to strive for it, while still checking the power of this executive officer with the powers of other offices--the legislative and judicial offices--filled by the ambitious few, with the ultimate check on power coming from the great multitude of people who defer to their rulers while also resisting exploitative dominance by their rulers.

Consider how this explains the history of American presidential politics over the past two years.  Joe Biden has been driven by a life-long ambition to be President of the United States.  In 1972, he was elected Senator from Delaware at age 30, which is the minimum age for a Senator set by the Constitution.  He failed in his first two runs for the presidency in 1988 and 2008.  But he did become Vice-President in 2008 after being selected by Barack Obama as his running mate.  In 2016, Biden wanted to run again for the presidency, but Obama supported Hillary Clinton, which created a deep resentment in Biden.  He ran again in 2020--without Obama's support in the primaries--and this time he finally won in defeating Trump.

Since his inauguration as President in 2021--the oldest president at 79--fulfilled a lifetime of striving to be Number One, it is not surprising that in the summer of 2023, he announced he would run for reelection, despite the fact that most Americans saw the physical and mental decline that came with his advanced age.  It is hard for a man like Biden to give up the power and fame of being President of the United States.  As Tapper and Thompson report, four-time California Governor Jerry Brown understood why Biden stubbornly refused to drop out of the race for a second term: "Politics is addictive.  It's exciting.  It's kind of psychic cocaine.  People just don't want to just go back to their former boring lives" (50).

But then why didn't Biden follow the example of Lyndon Johnson in 1968?  Johnson was elected to his first full term in a landslide victory in 1964, after becoming president in the wake of JFK's assassination.  In 1968, Johnson chose to run for reelection even though he was very unpopular because of his prosecution of the Vietnam War.  It was widely assumed that a sitting president could not be denied renomination by his party for a second term if he ran.  But after running in some early primaries, and being challenged by the candidacies of Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy--part of a "Dump Johnson" movement--Johnson announced on March 31, 1968, that he would no longer run for the nomination.  This allowed his Vice President--Hubert Humphrey--to run as the Democrat candidate, although he was defeated by Richard Nixon in the election.

LBJ was similar to Biden in many ways.  Like Biden, LBJ had a life-long ambition to achieve political dominance.  In 1937, at age 29, he was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives.  In 1948, was elected to the U.S. Senate.  In 1954, he became Senate Majority Leader.  In 1960, he ran for President.  But when Kennedy won the party's nomination, he selected Johnson as his Vice-President.  Becoming President fulfilled his driving ambition for power.  And so he did not want to give up that power in 1968, even though he was unpopular.  But unlike Biden, he ended his campaign early--almost four months earlier than did Biden.  What explains this difference?

One difference is that Biden was surrounded by a small inner circle of advisors that controlled the information he received and that insulated him from public view.  The most important member of this inner circle was Jill Biden who protected Biden from bad news (such as unfavorable polls) and thus protected her own power as First Lady.  The rest of the inner circle was known in the White House as "the Politburo": long-time Biden aides Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Ron Klain, and Bruce Reed.  These five people supported Biden's run for reelection because their powerful prominence in government depended on extending Biden's presidency.  David Axelrod saw "that Donilon was so blinded by his emotional attachment to Joe Biden--his fate and life inextricably bound up with the president's--that he just couldn't let go" (207).  As Democrat congressman Peter Aguilar observed, "folks like Ricchetti and Donilon--they're living the first line of their obituaries right now.  People don't give that up" (253).

Another difference from Johnson is that Biden did not face anything like the "Dump Johnson" movement--popular candidates challenging him in the presidential primaries.  Beginning as early as 2022, Congressman Dean Phillips, a member of the House Democratic leadership team, began warning that Biden's evident cognitive decline would make it impossible for him to communicate clearly to voters, and so the party would need to find someone else to run for president in 2024.  He suggested that the best candidates would be one of the Democrat governors in the Midwest--such as Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.  Phillips had tried to speak directly with Pritzker and Whitmer, but they refused to even take his calls.  Although he admitted that he was not the best candidate, Phillips announced his presidential campaign on October 27, 2023.  He said his aim was to force Biden into a debate, in which Biden would show that he lacked the cognitive ability to win another presidential campaign.  The Democratic Party obstructed Phillips' efforts.  He suspended his campaign after a bad showing on Super Tuesday (March 6, 2024), and he endorsed Joe Biden.

So, for two years, from the summer of 2022 to the summer of 2024, the elite politicians of the Democratic Party refused to challenge Biden's decision to run for a second term because having loyally supported him in 2020, they were afraid to show disloyalty to Biden as their party leader.  Thus, they lacked the political shrewdness of chimpanzees who understand that politics is all about shifting coalitions, so that the loyal supporters of the dominant chimp will withdraw their support as soon as he manifests any signs of weakness, and then a new coalition forms to support a new alpha male.

For example, when de Waal began studying the chimpanzees at the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands in 1975, he saw that Yeroen was dominant over the group, with the support of Luit and Nikkie.  The political hierarchy among chimps is indicated by a special form of greeting.  Chimpanzees show a submissive greeting that is a sequence of short panting grunts by the subordinate individual as he looks up at the superior individual, which is usually accompanied by a series of deep bobbing bows by the subordinate.  Sometimes the subordinate will stretch out a hand to the superior or kiss the superior's feet, neck, or chest.  The superior reacts to this by rising up and making his hair stand on end, so that he looks very large in contrast to the groveling subordinate.  The alpha male is the male who is "greeted" by the other males.  Generally, the alpha male is also "greeted" by the females and the children in a group.

The male on the left is dominant.  The male on the right is subordinate.  Although they are actually the same size, the dominant male makes himself look bigger.

In 1976, de Waal saw the first of two power take-overs, which he understood with the help of Machiavelli, and this is what became the central focus of his book Chimpanzee Politics.  In the spring of 1976, Luit stopped "greeting" Yeroen, which initiated months of tense conflict between them as they fought over which would be dominant.  Luit formed a coalition with Nikkie, so that Nikkie would help Luit against Yeroen. On June 21st, Yeroen bared his teeth for the first time, which is a sign of fear in chimps.  On September 1, Yeroen "greeted" Luit for the first time.  Luit began to take on the control role of the alpha male in mediating fights to restore peace in the group.  On October 31, Yeroen "greeted" Nikkie for the first time.  So, now, Luit was the alpha male, Nikkie was second in command, and Yeroen was ranked third.  But then, in the spring of 1977, Nikkie formed a coalition with Yeroen to challenge Luit, and by December of 1977, Luit was "greeting" Nikkie as his superior. Nikkie had become the alpha male, with Yeroen second in command. 

Congressman Phillips saw that there was a similar opportunity for a power take-over among Democratic politicians once Biden showed his vulnerability in 2023 and 2024. But it's hard to understand why ambitious Democratic politicians like Whitmer, Pritzker, Shapiro, and Newsom did not see that this was the time to betray their party leader and put together a new coalition to support a new person in the position of dominance.

It was not until Biden's disastrous debate with Trump on June 27, 2024, that everyone saw what Phillips and a few others had seen much earlier--that Biden's cognitive decline would make it impossible for him to be a competent campaigner for reelection.  Even then, however, it took three weeks for party leaders to persuade Biden to withdraw.  When that finally happened, they then allowed Kamala Harris to lock up her nomination in only two days of phone calls (July 21-22).  They refused to take seriously the suggestion of Obama and others that there should be a short "mini-primary" or an open convention that would allow a few candidates to compete for the nomination.

Strangely, as Harris campaigned she refused the advice of her campaign people to separate herself from Biden and the unpopular policies of the Biden administration (particularly in connection with inflation).  Tapper and Thompson report that in one meeting with her campaign staff, Harris asked: "If I were to really distinguish myself, how would that make me look?"  She then answered her own question: "Disloyal."

On October 8, Harris went on The View.  At one point in the interview, Sunny Hostin asked: "Well, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?"  Harris answered: "There is not a thing that comes to mind."  The Trump campaign people were happy to use this footage in a new Trump TV ad (298).

Because of her fear of being disloyal to Biden, she did not say what she should have said to distance herself from Biden and his unpopular policies: As a Vice-President, I have had to defend my boss.  But now I am running my own campaign for president, and I can say that Biden has made many mistakes--such as economic policies that promoted high inflation--and I pledge to avoid those mistakes.

Although Trump won the popular vote by over 2 million.  The election was actually very close.  If Harris had beat the margins of 1.44 percent in Michigan, 1.73 percent in Pennsylvania, and 0.87 percent in Wisconsin, she would have been elected president.  She could have done that by radically separating herself from Biden's policies.

Alternatively, since Harris began the campaign as even less popular than Biden, the Democratic Party could have won the presidential election by a large margin by selecting a moderate Democratic candidate--perhaps one of those Midwestern governors.

That did not happen because the Democratic leaders did not understand how to play the game of chimpanzee politics.