If you imagine an animal that rabidly attacks almost any animal it comes across, including its own kind, or itself if it sees a reflection… and imagine that this animal has the peculiar feature such that each time it attacks anything, it becomes vastly more actively stupid… and thus more rabid and attack-prone…

…you’ve got a pretty close match to the species profile of homo-sapiens-sapiens. Yeah. That’s us. The species that stutters on the word ‘wise’ in our Latin nomens.