Aggressive Behavior

Okay, I misunderstood the thing about your cat stalking that bird. I thought that the bird was perched on the railing, which would have made it risky for the cat to pounce on it. I suppose that different cats have different levels of hunting instinct programmed into them. For feral cats, or even barn cats, the instinct would be more of a survival advantage than it would be for housecats. When a trait gives little or no survival advantage, it would be more likely to fade out over the generations, unless you deliberately select for it.

That incomplete stalking behavior kind of resembles the way bird dogs go on point. I saw my beagle Splash do that once, and he was neither bred nor trained to point birds. He normally charged after them and would eat them if he could catch them. I once saw him leap four feet into the air and catch a young pheasant in mid flight. This time, though, there were a couple of mourning doves feeding out in the open. Splash went into stalk mode like a cat, but then he just stopped and kind of went on point. I think he was trying to decide if he had a chance of catching them with a quick sprint or if he should try to creep in closer first. Before he could make up his mind, the doves spotted him and flew away. I suppose that real pointer dogs are selectively bred and then trained to hunt that way, and then to wait for the shooter to flush the bird. What the bird dog breeders have done is to select for this incomplete stalking behavior, and then to reinforce it with training. If you don't select for something like that, it will still be rattling around somewhere in the gene pool, and might randomly display itself from time to time.

With social animals, the more aggressive individuals generally become the leaders and the breeders but, if they all were equally aggressive, they would spend all their time fighting, and nothing else would get done. There must be some mechanism that causes varying aggression levels among the individuals, which would bestow a survival advantage on the group as a whole.

It would seem that hunter-gatherers wouldn't need to be as collectively aggressive as farmers or city dwellers. Since they were nomadic anyway, it would be more efficient to avoid conflict by just moving on to undisputed territory. Once you settle down on your own piece of land, you've got a vested interest in defending it. As you start accumulating possessions, you become more of a target of the have-nots, so you would need to learn how to cooperate with your neighbors in your common defense. Then the have-nots are inspired to get more organized themselves, and you have the beginning of the war culture. Marx believed that, if everybody had equal amounts of wealth, there would be nothing to fight about anymore. It was a good idea on paper, but nobody has yet figured out how to get everybody to peacefully accept that condition, so it just gave them one more thing to fight about.

I think World War II was the last time that Americans were in almost total agreement about something important. It would be nice if we could achieve that kind of solidarity without killing millions of people and demolishing a lot of infrastructure in the process. Figure out how to make that happen, and you've got my vote for President of the United States, even if you are a Democrat.