a male might benefit his own genes if he does something detrimental to another male with whom he is competing. The logical policy for a survival machine might therefore seem to be to murder its rivals, and then, preferably, to eat them. Although murder and cannibalism do occur in nature, they are not as common as a naïve interpretation of the selfish gene theory might predict. Indeed Konrad Lorenz, in On Aggression, stresses the restrained and gentlemanly nature of animal fighting. For him the notable thing about animal fights is that they are formal tournaments, played according to rules like
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