Well guys, 200,000 years on the planet and the best we've done is sliced bread. *slow clap*
Nevertheless, on a more serious note..
Actually, I do believe it may be a natural instinct to be "as annoying and destructive as possible." Now while I don't promote or advocate the blatant behavior you two have talked about and described, I think this rhetorical question you asked (Captain) may not be so rhetorical after all. It may very well be perverseness. What is perverse you ask? Well, according to
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/perverseness, it is:
"willfully determined or disposed to go counter to what is expected or desired; contrary."
So essentially doing something
just because you know you should not. I believe Edgar Allan Poe described it best in his 1843 short story 'The Black Cat'. In the story, he quotes:
"And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law , merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself - to offer violence to its own nature - to do wrong for the wrong's sake only - that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute. One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; - hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; - hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence; - hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin - a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it - if such a thing wore possible - even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God."
Aside from being one of my favorite quotes from the author, I think it describes this process beautifully.