There’s a new paper in Nature about the level of intraspecific violence in humans and other species, written by José Maria Gómez et al. (free reference and download below). The question is how often members of single species kill each other in the wild, and whether humans are outliers. It’s already gotten a lot of attention in the press, including an Atlantic summary by Ed Yong, but I’ve avoided reading the journalism until I read the original paper. Now that I have, I’ll summarize the Nature paper briefly for those who haven’t seen other pieces about it.
First, the authors used data from the literature to estimate the level of lethal violence in 1024 species of mammals from 137 families. The question was this: what percentage of individuals who die within a species do so after interacting with members of their own species? That’s the measure the authors take as the degree of “lethal violence” within species…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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