Genetic Seeds of Warfare

Evolution, Nationalism, and Patriotism

R. Paul Shaw, Yuwa Wong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000258950
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For millennia humanity has simultaneously deplored and waged war. With each conflict the stakes have risen, and we now face global annihilation for the sake of a practice all the world claims to condemn. Is there some seemingly irresistible force that impels us toward our own destruction?

To explain this central paradox of human behaviour, Genetic Seeds of Warfare, originally published in 1989, advances a startling new theory. It traces the origins of warfare back to early groups of Homo sapiens in competition for scarce resources, showing that warfare evolved as these groups evolved: kin-group against kin-group; tribe against tribe; nation against nation. Rather than being tied to a specific gene, warfare emerged as one of many behavioural strategies for maximising genetic survival. As social groups became more complex, motivations for warfare developed from simple protection of blood relations to political appeals to shared ethnicity, religion, and national identity. But the ultimate cause of warfare is rooted in the most basic of human drives: the need to ensure that one's genes will survive and reproduce.

The authors challenge many assumptions about human behaviour in general, and warfare in particular. They convincingly present the case for an evolutionary understanding of the propensity for warfare, supporting their argument with data from a vast array of social and natural science research. In doing so, they reveal why previous attempts at ending war have failed, and make proactive suggestions toward the development of a new agenda for world peace.

CHAPTER 1
Why This Study Matters

The most persistent sound which
reverberates through humanity’s
history is the beating of
war drums.
[Author Koestler 1978]

Introduction

At an invited lecture at the University of British Columbia a concerned student asked: “Do you think nuclear war is inevitable?” A hushed audience awaited an answer from a scientist who had conducted one of the largest empirical studies on war. David Singer, director of the “Correlates of War Project, ” replied, “I don’t think we will see a worldwide nuclear holocaust in the next ten years, but if things continue as they are now, I can’t foresee escaping limited nuclear war.”¹

In the nuclear age, an informed, rational response to curtailing propensities for warfare is one of extreme pessimism. Humans, with their unique capacity for reflection, perceive the strong possibility of their own annihilation. Such perceptions are based not only on media images of pending doom, mass destruction, and personal pain; they are motivated by acknowledged failures to reduce nuclear stockpiles; the coexistence of deterrence policy with ever-accelerating arms races, and by worries that technical malfunctions or random errors will somehow do us in (that is, Murphy’s Law). In the space of a few decades, nuclear technology has eliminated tolerable margins of error. One mistake could prove fatal.

Perhaps most alarming is that experts best prepared to disavow doomsday scenarios are, themselves, casting gloomy forecasts. Carl-Freidrick von Weizsacker, director of the Max-Planck Institute in the Federal Republic of Germany, echoes Singer’s foreboding assessment. On dismissing faith in the doctrine of deterrence, mutual assured destruction, detente, and disarmament through arms control, he comments:

People think that I can propose something. My answer is that I propose to stop and think for a while. The question, “What do you propose?” is still the sort that suppresses the truth that there may be no real means of preventing a nuclear war or an aggressive foreign policy carried out by our enemy by threatening limited war. [1980b, p. 201]

Professor Fred Knelman, author of Reagan and the Bomb (1986), says of our current predicament: ‘There is little doubt we are all travelling on the Titanic.”

This prospectus provokes the most perplexing question facing modern civilization. How can we perceive the possibility of self-annihilation without serious efforts to abolish the threat? Einstein raised this question more than 40 years ago: “Why has the unleashed power of the atom changed everything except our thinking about war?” Boulding (1962), White (1984), and countless others query why peace research has been accorded such low priority in government funding. Compared with minuscule amounts for “peace” research, the world spends nearly $2 million per minute on armaments (1987 figures). And, how is it the vast majority of people in the world sincerely professes their desire for peace while war rages in every corner of the earth?

Such a paradox has caused confusion and disillusionment to the extent that humanity’s propensity for warfare has been called an irreversible animal instinct, necrophilia, a pathological degeneration of basic human impulses, a spin-off of original sin, or a cancer in the vast body politic (Alcock 1972; Jolly 1978). As one journalist observes: “We don’t know why we have got into this situation, we don’t know how to get out of it, and we have not found the humility to fully admit we don’t know. In desperation, we simply try to manage our enmity from day to day” (Powers 1984, 55).

Needless to say, if humanity’s propensity for warfare is an aberration in human evolution, we would inevitably face extinction. There would be little prospect for understanding how or why it came about, or how it might be curtailed. Contentious, but far more reasonable, is the premise that humanity’s propensity for warfare serves discernible functions. This implies human beings are responsible for the path they have selected. It also places the onus on science to understand the reasons for this path. WTiy was humanity’s propensity for attack and defense adopted in the first place? Why has it been retained and reinforced in the process of human evolution? How does it express itself in contemporary situations, particularly in terms of nationalism and patriotism? Why do we find it so difficult to abandon this propensity when it threatens the existence of the human race?

The most important, yet unresolved question, then, becomes why warfare exists at all. Specific differences in warfare, its forms and the historical conditions surrounding the outbreak of war, are of secondary importance. To answer this fundamental question a truly interdisciplinary approach must be engaged, and age-old premises, usually taken for granted in the social sciences, must be reevaluated. By developing a general paradigm (or line of reasoning) that subsumes and orders existing analytical approaches, new theory, new insights, and new policy implications can be generated.

This chapter sets the stage for our theory by condensing research on war proneness and aggression. Such information has been widely used by social scientists to imply that humanity does, indeed, have a propensity for warfare. However, such information only scratches the surface. This will become apparent when attention is drawn to differences between ultimate versus proximate or situational causes in warfaring propensities and to the role of evolutionary theory in deciphering these propensities.

War Proneness

What kinds of evidence convey war proneness? Some social scientists view the frequency of warfare among “primitive” tribes and “modern” nations as the most persuasive data. Montagu (1976) cites evidence of some 14, 500 wars during the last 5, 600 years of recorded history, or 2.6 wars per year. From his tally, only 10 of 185 generations have known uninterrupted peace. Burke (1975) makes a similar point; there have been only 268 years of peace during the last 3, 400 years of history. Peace thus comprises only 8% of the entire history of recorded civilization.

More recently, the Correlates of War Project at the University of Michigan shows there is virtually no evidence of a secular trend up or down in the incidence of warfare between 1816 and 1977 (Singer and Small 1972; Singer 1981). This suggests that war proneness is a “constant” in modern history. Since World War II, Valzelli (1981) notes there have been more than 150 wars, scrimmages, coups d’état, and revolutions. During this period of “deceitful peace, ” he reports an average of 12 acts of war occurring simultaneously per year, with only 26 days of actual peace. Some 25 million humans were killed during the last 35 years, more than the total number of soldiers killed during the two world wars.

For other social scientists, the absence of truly peaceful cultures represents the strongest evidence of war proneness. The search for such cultures was fueled by the assumption that Homo sapiens were peaceful creatures during their hunting-and-gathering days and that strife over matters of possession grew out of developing horticulture and agriculture. Cultural anthropologists were particularly interested in this issue. If lethal conflict between individuals of the same species was unique to humans (as maintained by Lorenz 1966) and if it existed in some cultures but not in others, then the propensity for organized killing among humans could be attributed to cultural differences alone.

Evolutionary biologists helped resolve the debate by reexamining hunter-gatherer contexts to provide several new insights. First, there are strong indications that many of the injuries apparent in remains of Australopithecus, Homo erectus, and Homo sapiens of the European fourth and pre-fourth glacial periods resulted from combat (Roper 1969). Second, available anthropological data on more than 90 hunter-gatherer bands belonging to over 30 different cultures reveal that the only bands that can be classified as peaceful are the Eskimos of the Yukon, the Siriono of Bolivia, and the Semai of Malaya. Third, among hunter-gatherer bands not engaging in warfare, aggression and conflict within bands still commonly occurs over other resources that are worth defending and in short supply (Barash 1979). Fourth, hunter-gatherer bands enjoying relatively long periods of peace share one characteristic — they live in relative isolation or under nomadic conditions where territorial conflict tends to be ruled out (Ottenberg 1978). Finally, closer examination of most “peaceful” hunter-gatherer bands, (for example, Eskimos) often uncovers a history punctuated by instances of territoriality, organized killing, or warfare (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1979). In short, while the organization of lethal conflict may well hinge on cultural evolution, the propensity for lethal conflict among humans appears to have coevolved with their capacity for culture.

Still other social scientists see aggression and warfare most visible in ethnically inspired conflicts. Greeley (1974), for example, estimates that as many as 20 million people have died in ethnic conflicts since World War I. During the same period, Connor (1972, 1983) estimates that nearly half of the world’s states experienced varying...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Why This Study Matters
• Part I Ultimate Evolutionary Strategies: An Overview
• Part II Emergent Psychological Strategies: An Overview
• Part III Reinterpreting the Empirical Record: An Overview
• Part IV Mobilizing for Action: An Overview
• Appendix I A Cost-Benefit Framework Applicable to Ethnic Conflict
• Appendix II Incest Avoidance and Early Warfare
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index