> Well if Chimps can't then Baboons sure as hell can. Have a read of A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky. The vast majority of human social and politic interactions are stereotypical of almost all primates

Humans are the only species to show pervasive, non-kin reciprocal altruism. Baboon troops are matrilineal and stable troops have a high-degree of kinship through the females. Males are more likely to move between groups but males will also kill newborns when taking over a troop.

In other words, Baboon society is still completely comprehensible by traditional genetic evolutionary theory. More importantly, Baboon society is quite clearly _circumscribed_ by well-understood genetic theory.

No species comes close to the degree of altruism humans exhibit. I can drop into the middle of nowhere and be greeted with warm relations, free food, and free shelter even when everybody knows I'll never return and thus would never be capable of reciprocating. There are anecdotes of this happening in other species, and even between species, but they're just that--anecdotes. Whenever it seems pervasive, upon investigation it quickly becomes apparent that it's mediated by an underlying intra-kin process.[1] There's a tremendous gulf between humans and every other species, including Baboons, in this regard.

So not only do Baboons fail to reflect human behavior in small groups, it's preposterous to equivocate their behavior with human political behavior at scale. From the vantage point of aliens looking down on earth, large groups of humans, sometimes numbering in the hundreds of millions, behave much like ants or bees. But ants, bees, and all similarly behaving species are siblings! The lone, fascinating exception is humans.

While there are genetic limitations to human altruism, somehow we managed to flip the equation. Individuals are generally altruistic by default unless and until that altruism begins to impose a non-trivial burden, and even then the drop-off is gradual and haphazard. Even the meanest among us exhibit and experience more altruism throughout the day than a Baboon. No existing evolutionary model has clearly shown how humans made this leap. Group selection has never been proven to exist, period. That a behavior improves the survival and reproductive success of a _group_ doesn't explain how it can arise and become prevalent genetically. Group selection, like similar theories, are post hoc rationalizations that fail to explain the full genetic evolutionary process. Likewise, theories about the benefits of tool making, intelligence, language, etc all fail to explain the genetic leap.

It's difficult to exaggerate how significant and profound this difference is. Theories and rationalizations that don't account for this difference are fundamentally crippled. Indeed, theories that fail to fill this gap in our understanding have limited usefulness in terms of either their explanatory or predictive power.

[1] Because animals cannot reliably or consistently know degree of kinship, all cooperative behaviors will naturally rely upon proxy indicators. Thus, if the strategy for cooperation is being nice to people in your troop because statistically you're strongly genetically related to others in your troop, then cooperating with a completely genetically unrelated troop member still conforms to the basic mechanics of selfish gene reproduction. You can see how extraordinary it is that humans regularly cooperate with, let lone behave altruistically toward, random humans. Again, we can rationalize how this behavior persists now that our species has found a new equilibrium, but nobody can explain the leap forward. And finding an answer will be difficult to understand because we're the only ones who have made it. The anthropic principle might partially explain this, but figuring out exactly how it happened would be profoundly useful in terms of understanding our own innate capacities and limitations, as well as in building complex systems.