Will humans follow?
“Hey, hey, we’re the monkees, and we’re” [NOT] just playing around. Scientific American on April 9 broke the internet with its story about lethal conflict erupting among the world’s largest known group of chimpanzees, the Ngogo:
It’s an exceedingly rare event: scientists estimate that chimpanzee communities split, on average, every 500 years…. Ngogo is the first time that you could say definitively that the civil war is actually happening.
Primatologists now want to know whether the breakdown of social bonds among the chimps could drive similar conflicts with their “closest living relatives” — i.e., humans.
Our March 2026 issue of The Socionomist delves into this very topic, examining how “collective increase in discord” led to the exceedingly rare event of the first and only Civil War in the United States — and whether those same conditions could be underway now.
Read that report today, along with the complete March 2026 Socionomist — for just $30.