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A damned or damn yellow composite (DYC) is any of the numerous species of composite flowers (family Asteraceae) that have yellow flowers and can be difficult to tell apart in the field

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Space colonization? History teaches us that colonial empires were never able to escape their original sin: that it’s bad in general when a person moves from one place to another place, regardless of circumstances. Woe to he who disregards this grim lesson.

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Ooh boy, serial endosymbiosis is really something.

(source: Patrick Keeling, 2004, The Number, Speed, and Impact of Plastid Endosymbioses in Eukaryotic Evolution)

So basically bacteria invented photosynthesis a bunch of times, but oxygenic photosynthesis, the kind that breaks water molecules to make oxygen (which is a lot easier than using e.g. hydrogen sulfide, but also requires a more complex apparatus, it's actually a really interesting adaptation) appeared exactly once, among Cyanobacteria. However, photosynthesis, especially the oxygenic kind, is a really really useful trait. The way most photosynthetic organisms on Earth accomplish it is by swallowing someone else who is already photosynthetic.

Eukaryotes -- i.e. all life on Earth with a nucleus in their cells, or if you will everything living that is not bacteria and such -- got their start in the first place by engulfing smaller oxygen-breathing bacteria that became mitochondria, so they (we) already have some good experience in that. A clade of Eukaryotes called Archaeplastida engulfed Cyanobacteria, turning them into plastids, granting themselves the power of photosynthesis. (This is primary endosymbiosis, as was the earlier origin of mitochondria. Both mitochondria and plastids are surrounded by two membranes -- their own old bacterial membrane, and the internal membrane of the host cell). From the first Archaeplastida grew red algae, green algae, and then the plants with roots and leaves we're familiar with. Some success!

However, the first Archaeplastida made themselves a target, just like Cyanobacteria had done. Not just for grazing, but for endosymbiosis too. At some point, members of several other clades of Eukaryotes -- Haptophyta, Cryptomonadida, and possibly the ancestors of a large and diverse group recorded as SAR -- engulfed unicellular red algae in turn. (This is secondary endosymbiosis. The resulting plastids have four membranes: the original bacterial membrane, the inner & outer membrane of the red alga, and the inner membrane of the new host.)

Other groups -- the flagellate Euglenids and the spiderweb-like Chlorarachniophyta -- did the same by engulfing unicellular green algae instead. (See my Tree of Life series for more info on all these groups.)

The SAR group did well: its photosynthetic lineges include diatoms, giant kelp, and the Dinoflagellates responsible for red tides. Other lineages are not photosynthetic, though, so either they lost their chloroplasts, or those other group did in fact acquire them independently. Ciliates like Paramecium, for example, lost or never had them. (Well, actually some Paramecium incorporate green algae, but not to the point of endosymbiosis.) Inside SAR we also find Apicomplexa like the agents of malaria and toxoplasmosis, which modified their chloroplast into a structure that can't do photosynthesis anymore but helps with other biochemical processes.

it doesn't end here. Dinoflagellates got creative. Some cast aside their red chloroplast and acquired a new one by engulfing a green alga instead. Others, multiple times, independently, engulfed diatoms or haptophytes. Tertiary endosymbiosis! A cyanobacterium inside a red alga inside a diatom inside a dinoflagellate!

... And meanwhile the armored amoeba Paulinella started all over again with primary endosymbiosis by engulfing a different Cyanobacterium, unrelated with all the rest of this story.

And now, just a couple weeks ago, the discovery was announced of the nitroplast, a chloroplast-like organelle that was also the result of endosymbiosis of a Cyanobacterium. This happened in a Haptophyte, and this time the point of the endosymbiosis does not seem to be photosynthesis but nitrogen fixation (i.e., breaking the infamously hardy molecules of nitrogen in the air to incorporate their atoms in a form easier to digest. Legumes can do that too, thanks to symbiont Cyanobacteria in their roots, but not so directly.)

For bonus weirdness points: the Haptophyte carrying the nitroplast has an armored stage of its life cycle that looks like a perfect dodecahedron:

Ah, but of course plenty of animals would find photosynthesis useful as well.

OP kindly mentions corals, many of whom have incorporated red algae in their tissues to provide some extra sugar. Many other low-metabolism animals did the same with green algae or cyaniobacteria. There's even a slug, Elysia chlorotica, that sucks chloroplasts from the algae it grazes, incorporates in its own tissues, and keeps them running long enough to do some photosynthesis on its own -- Elysia's body even looks like a leaf!

Indeed, George McGhee's Convergent Evolution on Earth (which admittedly might err a tad to the side of more convergence) lists 14 events of photosynthetic endosymbiosis among protozoa, and 19 among animals, including sponges, cnidarians such as corals, flatworms, sea squirts, clams, and slugs.

Malaria cells have plastids homologous to chloroplasts

"We now recognize that this large group of parasites had a photosynthetic ancestry and were converted into parasitism early in the evolution of animals."

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EDIT: This goes well with my usual pet peeve of people confusing taxonomic nomenclature with factual descriptions of life. "Birds are dinosaurs", "humans are apes", and "sharks are/aren't fish" are the same sort of statement as "Pluto is a planet"! (Or for that matter, "this piece is real art", "this person is a man/woman", and "a hot dog is a sandwich". The verb "is" and its consequences have been a disaster for humanity)

I've noticed something I find somewhat concerning and it's that for a lot of people, 'pluto is a planet' has fallen into the stock list of examples for what one might call 'science denialism', along with things like antivaxx, denying the existence of feathered (non-avian) dinosaurs, and flat earthers

there's a sentiment that goes like 'well, sure, you learned in school that the solar system has nine planets, but Science Marches On and we now know it has eight' and while certainly people should not take what they learned in school to be immutable law they should also like. have a concept of the rather significant difference between 'we've learned something new about the world' and 'we've decided to slice up the world in categories along different lines'

slicing up the world into categories is one of the basic operations of human thought and if you do not understand it well enough that you think 'people used to think the earth flat -> now we know better' and 'astronomers used to call pluto a planet -> now they don't' are analogous processes then you fucked up somewhere.

and if you don't think they are analogous, if you understand the difference i am pointing out and think it does not matter to the quest of listing stock examples of people disagreeing with things scientists say, well. you fucked up in a different place, probably.

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See, I think the effect actually goes the other way-if you start believing in "harmless nonsense" you'll be more likely to accept and start doing more nonsense, and it's easy to pick up more and more until you're accepting antivax arguments "just in case" and then you're well on your way to the granola-hippie-to-fash pipeline. This all happens through essentially the same methods as that one "girl dinner to fash" TikTok: you uncritically accept some seemingly harmless but false shit, and then you're weakening your defenses against more harmful false shit because you're not in the habit of rejecting things that aren't true.

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Gotta say, I was very confused by this map until I got to the word "butterfly" in the caption

Monarch Butterflies Migration in USA

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-- Denis Mack, Italy and Its Monarchy, 1989, chapter 3.2 ("Foreign policy, 1900-4")

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This book by a South African ecologist makes an elaborate argument that Late Cenozoic Africa really was uniquely suited, for geographical and ecological reasons, for the tool-using-scavenger-then-hunter niche that humans seventually occupied:

(from chapter 19) The uplift of Africa and subsequent rifting and volcanics... produced unusually low rainfall for the tropics coupled with soils that remained comparatively fertile, at least for nourishing large herbivores. Had Africa been mostly low-lying, it would have become largely a degraded semi-desert like most of Australia. Had the uplift taken place in the west, tropical regions of Africa would have been as moist and infertile as South America, thronged with huge mega-grazers rather than a rich assemblage of medium–large ruminants. Tropical Asia is mostly too low and wet for savanna vegetation to be extensive and lacks an abundant grazing fauna.

The crucial feature of Africa’s climates is the wide prevalence of seasonal dryness. This underlies the spatial predominance of savanna vegetation, with grasses coexisting between and beneath trees. Ruminants radiating during the Miocene adapted especially to digest the fibrous C4 grasses during the dry seasons. This capability enabled these grazers to attain vastly greater abundances than browsers... A diet of dry grass made the grazers dependent on access to surface water, concentrating their numbers within reach of perennial water sources during the dry months. This opened opportunities for savanna-dwelling ape-men to incorporate animal flesh into their diet...

South America’s large grazers were mostly too big to be exploited sustainably for flesh in tropical climates where meat soon rots. Australia and tropical Asia were both deficient in grazers. Nowhere outside of Africa were large herbivores sufficiently abundant to nurture the seasonal dependency of comparatively puny primates on scrounging from carnivore kills or running down their own prey.

The size structure of Africa’s large herbivore fauna was also crucially important. Carcasses of small antelope get consumed completely by their mammalian carnivore killers. Those of megaherbivores that have died remain attended by carnivores until the meat turns putrid... The unique feature of Africa’s large herbivore fauna is the abundance and diversity of medium–large ruminants, weighing 50–500 kg, which was established by 5 Ma... promoted specifically by the prevalence of dry/eutrophic savannas, or ‘sweetveld’... Tools developed by hominins to extract and pulverise tough plants became deployed to break open the bones and scrape flesh off the ungulate carcasses abandoned by the big fierce killers, exploiting a time window when large carnivores were mostly inactive.

Of course there must be a hefty dose of hindsight bias into any consideration of the sort, but it makes sense to me. Admittedly this is mostly about the earlier phase of human evolution, before the first Out of Africa, but the same conditions might still have driven more cognitive and technical development afterward.

Do you think it's possible there's a planet with multiple stable sentient species who interact? Or would such a situation inevitably end up with one getting wiped out or the two hybridizing

Well, they could only hybridize if they were closely related, like humans and Neanderthals. And IIRC there's some evidence that humans and Neanderthals/Denisovans probably weren't all that interfertile to begin with, with most coding Neanderthal alleles getting weeded out of our genome.

I think it would be very difficult for two sentient species that shared overlapping niches to survive. H. sapiens and Neanderthals were both smart, seem to have both had language and culture, and had similar levels of technological sophistication, but the latter had a much lower population and so couldn't really compete when their cousins invaded their territory. And maybe some of this is a function of the wider human clade's tendency to engage in warfare and ecologically disruptive hunting--there's a big wave of megafauna extinction that seems to have followed the expansion of human populations all over the globe--but I'm not sure how many species of big-brained tool-users any niche could support.

But I do think that species with very different niches could coexist peacefully, at least long enough to work out that species in other niches were sentient, and to develop the ethical frameworks necessary for coexistence. If there were superintelligent squid, they wouldn't ever compete directly with humans for habitat (though we might have eaten a fair few by accident). We have also managed (just!) not to render extinct cetaceans, which are fairly intelligent, or our close cousins the chimpanzee. I could also imagine a science fictional scenario where two intelligent species were in some kind of important symbiotic or commensalist relationship that would stabilize their coexistence.

I think the other tricky thing though would be timing. It took a long time for the genus Homo to develop intelligence. AFAICT the australopithecines were closer to chimpanzees in terms of intelligence than they were to us; H. erectus was a lot smarter, but probably didn't have language; it's not until 700,000 to 200,000 years ago you get human species that are more fully developed in terms of their intelligence, and that feels like a super narrow window in terms of evolution for another intelligence species to also emerge. Because once you do get intelligent tool-users who spread over most of the globe, they seem likely to me to start to modify their environment in profound ways, like we have. So if another intelligent species doesn't already exist, the circumstances in which it is likely to arise after one species comes to prominence are going to be very different--more of an uplift scenario, maybe. Like I think if we discovered a group of chimpanzees with rudimentary language tomorrow, we would do our best not to fuck with them, but we would inevitably have some kind of impact on their existence for better or worse, right?

Maybe your best bet for multiple sentient species would be to have a reason that the first species (singular or plural) that arose didn't come to dominate the entire planet--they were aquatic, and so never mastered fire; or they were otherwise highly restricted in the biomes they could inhabit; or they were small in number like the Neanderthals, but could retreat to refugia in mountains and forests rather than be wiped out; or they were a diverse clade like early humans, but they also spread out very rapidly, and were subsequently isolated by climate conditions. Like, imagine Denisovans (who were already in Asia) had crossed the Bering Strait land bridge to the Americas, and then sea levels rose cutting them off until the Age of Discovery. If you had a planet that didn't effectively have a two supercontinents like Earth, you might have many more opportunities for related-but-geographically-divided species to develop (though that doesn't avoid the problem of what happens when they meet each other and start competing then).

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As I recall it, one important point of the "biomorphs" was that genes do not determine directly the parts of an organism's body as if they were spots on a blueprint or pixels of an image, and if they were, the effects of mutations would be far too chaotic for evolution to be possible -- it would be vanishingly unlikely for a viable body state to change into another viable one. (Not to mention the genome would have to be much larger -- the human body has about 10^13 cells, but the human genome contains only 10^9 base pairs, so obviously our cells can't all be codified independently.)

Genes act indirectly, not determining directly the body structure but rather determining the rules that produce it. At any given moment, only a fraction of the genes of a cell are active, and what most genes do is determining when, where, and how much other genes are turned on. So you have an algorithm to grow a complex body out of a zygote, and mutations change slightly the parameters of this algorithm. Most often this still does nothing or breaks something, but slight improvements are no longer so out of reach.

This is quite important to understand how biological complexity evolves. A New Kind of Science also addresses it, since it's all about the iteration of simple rules producing complex systems, but IMO Wolfram goes way too far by discounting adaptation to environments and describing the form of organism as arising only from production algorithms.

I picked up a copy of The Blind Watchmaker, since it's an interesting view of an era when simple computation was becoming widely accessible. It has a lot in common with A New Kind of Science, actually. Dawkins wrote a program to generate "biomorphs", randomly perturb them, and let the users select and iterate. A simple program so you can see how iterative selection can quickly get you results that would be very unlikely in a single random generation step. A simple point, but you can find creationists calculating the probability of a gene sequence coming from a distribution where each nucleotide is random and saying that this disproves evolution. So apparently not an obvious one. I don't have the blind watchmaker program, but it looks like people have re-implemented it, so maybe I'll try it.

But reading the first chapter, "Explaining the very improbable", I remembered I had another motive for reading The Blind Watchmaker. It helps explain where The God Delusion came from, and how Dawkins became a public atheist. This is the book where Dawkins gets a bit theological. He frames what is to be explained as not just life, but complexity, and argues that the argument from design may explain life, but it doesn't explain complexity, just pushes it onto the creator. Theologians of course do not necessarily agree. Plantinga criticizes the argument in his review of The God Delusion. But the argument was not first made in The God Delusion, I think it comes from The Blind Watchmaker. "Complexity" is vague, so it will be interesting to see how Dawkins defines it, and whether that really supports the idea that a creator would have to be complex, and that Dariwnian evolution does explain how complex things can come from simple things.

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jesus christ

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Naked Mole Rats are rodents that attempted to evolve into bugs

I did once make a specbio future evolution project in which naked mole rats were the only surviving mammal species after a catastrophic solar flare scourged clean Earth's surface and recolonized the world:

And I did have a lineage of them evolve into ant analogues:

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Huh, now that you make me think of it this would be decent evopsych backstory for Gods of Salt.

One of the thoughts I had while writing that post on Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites, anti-predator defense, and the origins of the male gender role is if that model is correct it implies Larry Niven got the relationship between a sapient species's diet and culture/values pegged wrong, at least as far as the Kzin are concerned. Courage is the virtue of a prey species that engages in collective defense; a smart predator attacks the weak, avoids fights against strong opponents, and is quick to retreat from any fight in which it loses the advantage; a sapient species with a long evolutionary history of being big game hunting carnivore apex predators would probably value/honor courage less than we do, so Kzin biology and implied evolutionary history is actually kind of an awkward fit with the kind of assholes the Kzin are. Asshole aliens with a long evolutionary history of being big game hunting carnivore apex predators might be sneaky raiders with an unapologetic "if they outgun us, trade, avoid, or appease, if we outgun them, raid and pillage!" mindset, or something like that; they probably wouldn't have the prideful machismo, hotheaded aggression, and disdain for restraint of the Kzin (you could argue calling it machismo is an anthropomorphism because Kzintosh aren't men but lbr human machismo is very obviously what the Kzin attitude is modeled on).

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's unrealistic for the Kzin to be the way they are, cause Kzin values could plausibly arise from intra-species competition and my rationalization for why the Kzin are as they are is a mix of that and "the Kzin are like that because their right-wing authoritarians won their history and got to shape their culture." But, as I said, I think the kind of assholes the Kzin are wouldn't logically flow directly from their ancestral subsistence strategy/ecological niche.

Which makes me wonder: if as a spec-bio exercise I tried to make a species which's biology would predispose them toward becoming approximately the kind of asshole Proud Warrior Race the Kzin are, what traits would they have?

Here's what I came up with:

First obvious thing is to give them a "harem" social system like gorillas, elephant seals, certain ungulates, etc.. This lends itself well to a species with a highly competitive male hierarchy in which male social and reproductive success is contingent on being able to make credible costly signals of being strong and badass.

One major obstacle to a species like that becoming a threat on the interstellar scale is control by a single dominant male is a pretty hard cap on group size. I propose that this species has overcome that by developing a social system with dominant bull coalitions, so instead of being limited to groups of one to three dozen individuals controlled by a single dominant male, they can have e.g. groups of a few thousand individuals controlled by a few hundred dominant bulls and so on; this eventually scaled up to an interstellar empire with billions of subjects and probably at least a few hundred million dominant bulls in loose coalition (that big dominant bull coalition is the empire's warrior-aristocrat class).

Unlike the Kzin, in this species the females will definitely be sapient and have lots of soft power; all the internal male social competition and external war and imperialism is largely about impressing them.

Another major point of difference from the Kzin: this species definitely should not have much evolutionary history of cooperative big game hunting. Pack hunting strongly incentivizes and rewards cooperation and solidarity (I suspect this plus the smaller group sizes of carnivores is why you see "harem" social organization more in herbivores), whereas I think to get aliens that are assholes in approximately the way the Kzin are we want a social system that's highly internally competitive. This probably implies a mostly herbivorous diet, though there might be some supplementation with small game; the important thing is this species has had basically no selection pressure for being effective predators of animals strong enough to require cooperation to take down.

Related and important point: the evolution of sapience in this species was more-or-less entirely driven by social competition and sexual selection, and they got too big to be tempting targets for the predators of their ancestral environment long before they developed sapience. So this is a species with no recent evolutionary history of being a prey species.

I guess we're maybe looking at something like a mix of gorillas and elephants here; maybe ancestrally browsers of the savanna and open woodland (though they'd gradually switch toward eating more richer food such as fruit, tubers, young shoots, meat, etc. as they developed more efficient food production). If we're doing the Mass Effect "more alien-looking than Star Trek forehead aliens but still implausibly humanoid" thing some kind of big beefy horned minotaur-looking humanoids would be a pretty appropriate look for the dominant bulls (with the subordinate males being more slender and the females being more slender and substantially smaller - this would be a species with way more sexual dimorphism than humans), not sure what I'd make them look like if I went the route of making them more realistically alien-looking.

Organized violence (i.e. war) developed in this species partly as a mating ritual. Large-scale battles gave males the same kind of opportunities to demonstrate strength and courage that fitness signalling duels did, but the much more complex tactical environment of a large-scale battle also offered opportunities for males to conspicuously demonstrate intelligence and cooperation. The switch from duels to battles as the primary arena of fitness signalling was a major selection pressure driving the evolution of sapience in this species. Originally the ultimate aim of war in this species was group fusion in which the dominant bull coalition of one group would defeat the dominant bull coalition of another group and the two groups would merge with the victorious dominant bull coalition being the dominant bull coalition of the combined group and the males in the defeated dominant bull coalition being either killed or demoted to subordinate status with their new lower rank being rubbed in by bullying and humiliation rituals. As the species developed bigger and more sedentary social groups this developed into territorial conquest with conquered communities remaining in their old homes under the rule of viceroys. But the thing where wars were partly giant mating rituals meant often neither side was particularly in a hurry to finish off their enemies as no more enemies to fight would mean diminished opportunities for social mobility and impressing females; there tended to be a "we have always been at war with Eurasia/Eastasia" dynamic where the conflict itself was effectively treated as having social value and actively maintained and subject to various forms of ritualization that limited its destructiveness so it could be kept going longer.

So, this is a species that's gotten lots of selection pressure from intra-species competition and violence, but has no recent evolutionary history as cooperative predators of animals with comparable size and strength to themselves and has no recent evolutionary history as a prey species. This species will have instincts and intuitions about violence totally optimized for intra-species violence that's mostly a mix of coalition politics propaganda of the deed and male fitness signalling rituals (and, of course, their culture will build on those instincts and intuitions and the dynamics that selected for them). I think this would lead plausibly to people who share one of the defining traits of the Kzin: being aggressive imperialist warmongering swaggering bullies who endlessly congratulate themselves on their ferocious warrior spirit and supposed mighty warrior prowess and supposed right to rule derived from that but are not actually all that good at war compared to a species like us that has been shaped by hunting and being hunted.

The thing about intra-species violence that's mostly a mix of coalition politics propaganda of the deed and male fitness signalling is it simultaneously incentivizes restraint more than inter-species predator/prey violence and incentivizes aggression more consistently than inter-species predator/prey violence.

On the restraint side, intra-species violence means potentially violence against relatives or potential mates, and in a social species violence against potential helpers. This obviously creates an incentive for restraint. Violent intra-species competition is where you get natural weapons and combat set up to probably not do too much damage (bighorn sheep knocking each other on their hard blunt horns instead of stabbing each other in the fleshy flank or face with sharp horns), notions of fair and honorable fights, "why don't you pick on someone your own size?," chivalry, rules of war, boxing gloves and rules against hitting below the belt, etc.. This post touches on some of the dynamics I'm talking about here.

I think plausible cultural development of this species might enhance this. A highly competitive "harem" social system means at least the males of this species are likely to be less cooperative than humans, and a less cooperative species will have a harder time forming effective equalizing coalitions. This species never got our probable evolutionarily significant period of living in mostly relatively egalitarian societies; compared to us their males at least are likely to be less wired for cooperative coalition-building and more wired for trying to individualistically climb their way up viciously competitive hierarchies; again, it seems likely this would make the formation of effective equalizing coalitions harder. The females are a bit of a wild card here, not sure what'd be going on with them, but considering they find aggressive, violent, domineering males sexy, I can see them not having instincts terribly promising for forming effective society-wide equalizing coalitions either. A species that's not very good at forming effective equalizing coalitions is likely to be not very good at coming up with ideologies of equality; equivalents of liberalism, democracy, socialism, anarchism, etc. may not exist at all in their philosophical tradition, or if they exist are likely to be obscure and marginal. The implication may be the political landscape of this species was a pretty dismal picture of oppressive oligarchies everywhere for pretty much the entire existence of their species. Like I said, I expect this species would develop a lot of practices to limit the destructiveness of war and focus its destructiveness on direct combatants. Defeat of a community in war would likely mean little change in the social or material conditions of most of the community's members; one oligarchic dominant bull coalition would replace another, and the only real change for most people would be a change in the names and faces (or scents or whatever they primarily recognize each other by) of their masters. Plausibly, the females of a conquered community would even approve of the change, seeing their community's new ruling dominant bull coalition as having proven themselves more desirable breeding material by winning. All of this would tend to encourage a sensibility that wars are basically social games between males and the only thing important at stake in them is the personal social and reproductive success of the direct combatants.

On the aggression side... Violent coalition politics involves lots of costly signalling, bluff, and martyrdom. The kind of violence a species like the one I'm describing here engages in is probably going to include a lot of violence that's basically an implicit statement of "I am exceptionally strong and brave and badass and would be an exceptionally good subordinate or ally, please give me a promotion!" And when it comes to male violence done as male fitness signalling to females, well, sperm is cheap and ova and wombs are expensive; in a "harem" social system demonstrating your mere viability will probably not be enough to impress females into mating with you, they are likely to require a costly signal of exceptional excellence before perceiving you as a desirable breeding partner, and if you die trying to make that costly signal, well, rolling the dice on a 65% chance of getting killed while young and a 35% chance of getting to breed might easily be selected for over contenting oneself with dying childless at a ripe old age.

Basically, I think you might plausibly end up with a species with bone-deep intuitions that:

- Violence is a performance, it is primarily communicative, using it to send a message to your opponent and/or to witnesses is at least an important secondary consideration and may even be more important than the actual concrete outcome of the fight. It is not enough to simply defeat your enemy, you must do so in a way that effectively communicates what you want to communicate.

- The most consistent purposes of violence are to show off your own strength, bravery, and fighting prowess and to terrorize and humiliate your opponent into submission.

- War is basically a game played among males. It's not a trivial game, it's literally deadly serious for the males involved in it and your society is largely organized around it, but it's fundamentally a game; the only people who have really big stakes in it are the direct combatants, and having fun and displaying good sportsmanship and putting on a cool performance are important secondary considerations and may even be more important than the actual concrete outcome. If you've ever read Ian Banks's Player Of Games, Azad (the game and the institutions and culture around it) in that book is the best analogy I can think of for what war would be to these people.

- Your enemies will be basically following the same rule book you have.

When these people develop interstellar travel and meet other sapient species, they'll apply the instincts and cultural institutions they developed for intra-species competition to those other sapients. I.e. they'll turn into nasty imperialists. Conquered aliens would get incorporated into their society in about the same social position as weak males. In their society weak males with little hope of rising to dominant bull status are kept around for labor and to assist with the care and education of the offspring of their female relatives and have a social status roughly equivalent to serfs; this would be the obvious niche to put conquered aliens in, with some modifications, e.g. conquered aliens would be expected to keep reproducing with each other.

Combine what I said in the previous paragraph with how much these people's social instincts would revolve around volatile male hierarchies reinforced by bullying and humiliation rituals, and I expect being a conquered subject of them would tend to be unpleasant to horrific. Being a primarily herbivorous species, these people wouldn't occasionally eat their slaves like the Kzin, but I could totally see the dominant bulls occasionally casually caving some poor slave's skull in out of a combination of some petty irritation and wanting to remind everyone who's boss.

Let's say we want these people to get approximately the same nasty surprise when they attack humans that the Kzin did. Model favorable to that:

In this setting, the most common pathway to sapience is through social and sexual selection. Sapient species usually evolve in environments without big predators, e.g. isolated islands, because serious predation pressure tends to prevent the very strong commitment to a long-lived slow-breeding very K-selected life strategy that leads to sapience. Sapient species usually do not have recent evolutionary history as big game hunters (the typical sapient is a physically not very strong omnivore, often primarily an eater of fruit, tubers, seeds, insects, and small animals, though also a lot of sapient species started with an ecological niche roughly equivalent of fish-eating birds that nest in large rookeries). Species that evolve sapience through this pathway usually have strong social and artistic intelligence, but lack instincts and institutions of organized violence (they aren't always peaceful, but if they do have significant intra-species violence it's murder, done by individuals or very small groups, not war).

When the warmonger aliens I've spent most of this post describing meet species like this it usually goes similarly to what happened when the Maori met the Moriori, or at least like that event as described in a book I read once. The warmonger aliens will roll up and be like "Yo, what's up, losers! You are now our slaves! We're awfully fond of presents called 'tribute' which you'll be giving us regularly from now on, and you'll be obeying our orders from now on! You can start by performing these humiliating submission rituals to acknowledge our superiority!" and this will be kind of an OCP to their victims, who will usually either basically surrender immediately or try to resist but fold pretty quickly cause they aren't well-equipped for war psychologically, culturally, institutionally, or materially. The warmonger dominant bulls honestly find it kind of boring, to the point that they fight a lot of highly ritualized flower war style conflicts among themselves as a mix of oligarch class dispute resolution, bloody enrichment, and live fire training to keep their warrior skills sharp.

Basically, the galaxy is full of weedy theater kid nerds, and these warmonger aliens are the meathead jock bullies of the galaxy going around shoving those nerds into lockers and stealing their lunch money.

The exceptions to this pattern the warmonger aliens met before us were a mix of 1) other species like themselves, 2) sapient species with a long evolutionary history of being big game hunting carnivore more-or-less apex predators (who are basically sneaky raiders). The warmonger alien dominant bulls tend to hate the latter and bitch endlessly about how they "have no honor," but savor tangling with the former in a "finally, worthy opponents!" way.

Then they met humans.

Humans have a long enough evolutionary history of big game hunting that this may have subjected us to significant selection pressure for increased cooperativeness that the warmonger aliens didn't get. But that isn't special in this context, the warmonger aliens have tangled with sapients descended from big game hunting carnivores before.

The thing that makes humans relevantly special is our relatively recent evolutionary history of being a prey species that engaged in collective defense, and the instincts we have that formed in that context but can be activated in other kinds of conflict.

Going back to that "real fights" thing earlier:

"but how often are you ever going to be in a fight where you’re willing to rip the other guy’s cheek out, gouge out his eyes and so forth?"

A fight against a predator that wants to eat your child looks like that.

If you're fighting a member of your own species, the entity you're fighting might be a relative, potential mate, or potential helper, so there's an incentive for restraint.

If you're a predator hunting, well, a carnivore species needs their prey species, that's their food source; smart lions wouldn't want to wipe out their prey species, they need their prey species, they would prefer their prey species thrive and be abundant and healthy; again there is an incentive for restraint; very plausibly one of the first lessons a sapient carnivore species would have to collectively learn after becoming sapient is restraint, learning that it would be all too easy to use their new, better weapons to kill too many of their prey and that they need to consciously avoid doing that.

Prey defending themselves from predators are the ones who'd have more-or-less zero incentive for restraint. If you can hurt or kill the lioness that's trying to eat your child, there is basically no reason to not go for it except self-preservation. Predators need their prey, but that's not symmetrical; prey don't need their predators, and sapient prey smart enough to do birth control and cull any dumber competitor species would probably be unambiguously much better off if all their predators dropped dead (Pleistocene humans could have done semi-reliable birth control by abstinence, outercourse, and lactational amenorrhea).

Humans are a slow-breeding species. A pride of lions could easily gradually eat a small early human band into extinction, and would have little incentive to avoid doing so cause humans aren't even their primary prey so when they ran out of humans they could just eat more of the antelope and so on that are already most of what they're eating anyway. The warmonger aliens have no evolutionary history of conflicts so existential.

The warmonger aliens have an idea of self-sacrificial heroism, but their version is entirely oriented (in an "adaptation executor, not fitness maximizer" way) toward burnishing the reputation of surviving close male relatives by association and thus increasing their reproductive success. They would have nothing in their recent evolutionary history like the experience of standing between a child and a hungry lioness. They would not grok "get away from her you bitch!" (that essay talks about the role of males in anti-predator defense but, yeah, women would have this too, who do you think would be the last line of defense for the children if a predator got past the male defensive ring?).

(The warmonger aliens definitely think it's a bit weird that we have mixed gender armies, not so much in a conventionally sexist way - they're inclined to see the size and strength differences between human men and women as obviously trivial compared to the much bigger sexual dimorphism of their species - but in that the idea of females caring enough about the outcome of a war to fight in it is alien to them. It's not that weird to them though, the big game hunter ancestry carnivore sapients they've encountered have mixed-sex armies and unwarlike sapients that try to resist conquest usually form them when they scramble to put a military together so it's got precedent in their experience.)

Like, yeah, the warmonger aliens are exactly the kind of people where some human commander would draw some of them into a clever trap they wouldn't anticipate cause prioritizing actually winning over looking heroic is alien behavior to them and then the comrades of the ones who died getting punked would bitch about how "dishonorable" it was of us to fight to win instead of obediently lining up to get slaughtered like cattle in some set-piece battle because that'd be the "honorable" thing by their definitions.

But also, something a lot like Londo Mollari's little speech about how brave the humans were in the Earth-Minbari war but it's some warmonger alien dominant bull describing the resistance we're putting up against his people and instead of admiration it's spoken with a tone of queasy puzzlement tinged with fear, irritation with our "irrational" resistance mixed with fear of the possible implications for what might happen if we start winning, it's alien behavior to him and he's admitting that it scares him.

Also, turns out species that have been strongly selected for solidarity (that's us!) are good at building equalizing coalitions and creating memes to coordinate them around, so not only are human ideologies of equality such as liberalism and communism effective at supercharging our resistance against imperialist conquest in a way that's an OCP to the warmonger aliens, they also turn out to be really disruptive to the warmonger aliens' shitty empire when some human chaos agents have fun spreading them around in it.

[o-craven-canto]

Wild World: a world map of nature with 1,642 animals.

by u/AntonThomas

[o-craven-canto]

Room for his shadow on the grass – let it pass! To left and right-stand clear! This is the Buyer of the Blade – be afraid! This is the great god Tyr!

-- Rudyard Kipling, The Knife and the Naked Chalk (Song of the Men’s Side), 1910

more stuff about becoming a god being inherently dehumanizing pls