I look towards our closest relatives, Chimpanzees, at least one subspecies of which carries out organized troupe-based raids that echo much of what we see in human warfare. Troupes of young males patrol the perimeter of a territory by night, and periodically raid neighboring groups, killing adult males, seizing females, killing male offspring, and conquering their territory.
I have a hard time believing that warfare is a pure invention, given its (near) universality across space, time, and our most closely related genetic relatives.
Humans are also literally the apex hunter on the planet. We can successfully hunt and eat any other predator if we choose to. Even nearly perfectly evolved hunters like sharks, lions and tigers are merely food and decorative pelts to us. A right of passage for some human children to be considered adults is to track, hunt and kill other apex predators.
Humans have no natural predators. Zero. Think about that. Anything that may have once threatened us, we've out organized, out planned, and out thought on the way towards global dominance. Even superficially similar co-inhabitant species like Neanderthal could not survive in a world with Humans. Today, only microscopic creatures threaten us, and we once again organize, plan and think about ways to defeat these creatures.
Even with stone-aged levels of technology we spread to every corner of the world, in every known climate and ecology, in large numbers, and thrived. The only thing that is dangerous to humans is other humans. And we've even arrived at the point that, with no considerable effort at all, we're capable of wiping out every living thing that inhabits the surface of a world.
Despite having poor biting power, diminished canines, running (poorly) on our heels, lower than average strength and no claws. We are the the most dangerous creature in the known universe.
My professor once told us that we were thinking of Australopithecines, a recent hominid, all wrong.
While we thought of early human ancestors as less intelligent versions of ourselves, the correct analogy was to a modern Velociraptor: fast to the point of running animals to death, fiercely intelligent, and with unparalleled group coordination.
Arguably the last of the giant dinosaurs was the Moa, a bird with claws that could eviscerate a human with a single swipe, and our species wiped them out as a prey animal.
The combination of unusual tricep structure (also found in cats and the extinct great sloth), remarkably mobile shoulder structure (inherited from our primate ancestors) and grippy hands (thumbs!) gives us remarkable downward thrusting power useful for smashing, grabbing and throwing.
One of the earliest inventions, the spear-thrower, enhanced that ability even more, giving us the ability to kill big game from a distance with near impunity. (It works by increasing the lever arm. Think of a lacrosse stick.)
I agree with pretty much anything you said, but I disagree on humans being poor runners. We are amongst (if not THE) most endurant runners on the planet. Humans have been known to defeat horses in long races [1]. As for running on the heel, this is more of a modern shod runner curse than a natural instinct or predisposition.
Paradoxically, this skill only becomes really apparent when humans act in the role of hunters. As prey, it's more likely a sneaky tiger will spring forth from the jungle and run us down for dinner.
But yep, we can actually run other animals to death.
As a group yes. As individuals - no. Go in alone somewhere where other big predators like wolves, bears or whatnot and hold your ground for a few weeks. I bet that unless you build some kind of fortress for yourself to sleep at night, not even firearms will help you in the long run.
"Even with stone-aged levels of technology we spread to every corner of the world, in every known climate and ecology, in large numbers, and thrived."
Actually, we've managed to thrive only in the places where there was enough air (no underwater humans), water (not many thriving communities in the deserts), food (which was a hard limit for the level of development, famine was a regular regressing factor), warmth (no people in Antarctica), and other such useful things. In this regard we are no different than other animals.
I think you might need to look into what the Russian and USA nuclear arsenal might do if used evenly across the world. If this does not convince you let me introduce you to the cobalt bomb [1].
I laugh I your General direction: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbear note there is a lot of surface area on the planet. A 1MT nuke per sqare mile would come fairly close but not quite get to where you suggest and we don't have close to that many nukes.
I have to say I love Tardigrades, but without a food source they are not going to survive. Nuclear winter is not too conducive for moss growth.
More seriously I suspect that short of a massive high altitude cobalt bomb detonation that some small life will survive on the surface even if all the current nuclear weapon were used.
Well they can go without food for 9+ years so that's more of a long term problem. As to nuclear winter they already live in Antarctica so there food source can also survive fairly harsh conditions, and it only takes one (or 2 depending on species).
Not that we have a lot of spare planets lying around but IMO it would be an interesting experement. Also, there is a fairly interesting ecosystem living inside the chernobil building which just goes to show how hardy some things are. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus Gama radiation as food... Yea that's a thing.
Excluding caves. Also, rain drastically reduces how long radiation stays in an area. And again cobalt produces Gama radiation which some things use as food.
Even if we take 1985 levels of nuclear warheads - the maximum, I believe USSR had 40 000 back then, and fuck it, lets say for even numbers, 100 000 nuclear warheads.
Land-surace is about 150 square million km. Take 1.2Mt the biggest yield in US arsenal currently. That would require around 270 000 nuclear warheads to cover every square km. We dont have that many and never had.
Also that wouldnt even scratch the oceans.
And the cobalt bomb, it hasnt been built, and anyway wouldnt work its not a doomsday device.
There are also way too many caves and cave systems with ecology in them which would be largely unaffected by civilized weapons.
Sure, the earth wouldnt look like it does today, but life would still prevail - and civilization isnt really that powerful to exterminate all life.
"...to cover every square km. We dont have that many..."
One does not have to rake every piece of soil in order to wipe out the entire life. The oceans would get the radioactive lavement of the soil and cycle that back on the land over and over though radioactive rains. This affects especially the bottom layer of the food chain, which cause chain's partial (if not total) collapse. In the end there is the possible nuclear winter that may render almost the entire planet inhabitable for all life forms. (Spores, bacteria, algae or other microscopic life forms may resist in hibernation to thrive again someday, but that is not called "living" through the event.) The reality is that there wasn't in our planet history any extinction event that involved nuclear contamination of every available living habitat (among other hostile-to-life effects), and speculating about it and about if it would or not be destructive enough, feels to me a little bit like playing with madness here.
We sure are. We can blacken the sun, wipe away the ozone layer, irradiate and poison the earth, freeze the oceans, we can drill down to nearly the mantle, introduce plagues that can ravage continents and over time, we can fracture the earth's ecosystems so badly that a meteor strike will look like a pebble drop.
Every living thing on the planet will die as a result.
Any human trait observed across cultures, time and languages must be considered a universal human trait in the same way all make dogs lift their legs to pee on things.
The writings of Shakespeare are relevant today as the day they were written. That's because they cover the human traits of love, jealousy, war, gossip, pride and others.
The reasons humans go to war is plainly evolutionary. Those ancestors that raided other tribes and stole their resources (and women) left successors who also had those traits. The peacenik human ancestors are all in the earth, never to be heard of again.
That's not to say its hopeless - human traits can be tempered through society - such as limiting murder to that explicitly sanctioned, and introducing laws and concepts around monogamous marriage to prevent single ruling families introducing polygamy and dominating the genetic results. Those things promote peace and harmony but war will always be with us.
I used to be a lot more starry eyed about this but I've come to realise how temporary and fleeting peace really is.
The only societies that have really prospered are those that have established walls and dedicated resources to making sure they are effective. And I don't mean actual city walls - I mean barriers to conquest.
Murder is not (supposed to be) explicitly sanctioned, only killing is. Murder as a word is supposed to designate specifically unsanctioned, immoral killing. We don't need another word for kill, we already have that word.
Bonobos are about as close and they are hedonistic little buggers. Judging by the internet, I have a hard time believing that sex is a pure invention, given its universality across space, time, and our most closely related genetic relatives.
Human war is not some local territory thing though is it? It's far more complex, as are human social interactions.
People love to make the war-chimp-humans-shrug connection, but aren't willing to make the sex-bonobo-human-wink connection??
There is a form of hipster-like love for the "authenticity" of humans as they were tens of thousands to millions of years ago. Just because we want to believe something is baked into our DNA doesn't mean that those tens of thousands to millions of years can be waved off so easily.
Chimps have evolved over the same time as humans. That we don't party like chimps implies that this line of reasoning with zero "war-DNA" evidence is bogus. Show us the genes. Which part of the tiny % difference btw bonobos, humans, and chimps explains all of this?
I can't speak to the DNA, as I don't believe that's established scientific knowledge yet, but there are a few details worth noting.
Bonobos' reputation as make-love-not-war pacifists is quickly becoming undermined by recent research. They hunt for meat, go months without sex, and engage in (albeit more limited) intergroup conflict.
Examining Pan paniscus and Pan troglodytes are like looking at exaggerated aspects of our own nature. But in looking at the behavior of humans, organized group warfare appears to be the norm, rather than the exception.
Organized group warfare? Do you mean bar fights or nation-states and insurgents? What proportion of humans take part in acts of organized group warfare? Saying war is natural to humans is to selectively ignore that the vast majority seem to prefer peace and/or don't have time for the war games.
The decisions and designs of organized group warfare are in the hands of an extremely small few and they are constantly trying to balance the application of their wealth between keeping domestic subversion at bay while clumsily dumping bombs and bodies around the world to "preserve peace."
War is not an undeniable urge, it's a choice. It's proven morally corrupt in most recent applications and this searching for some innate reasoning is an attempt to give hawks a way out of their cognitive dissonance. It's killing for duty, profit, and fun. You always have a choice.
War is a completely predictable consequence of (a) our intelligence, which recognizes (b) the existence of scarce resources and (c) the fact that violence is sometimes an effective strategy for obtaining them. Organizing into groups to do so is just matter of thinking about tactics for a second, especially since we're already pretty group-oriented. There's no reason that war shouldn't be constantly, independently re-invented.
Ants have also practiced warfare against one another, for perhaps a longer time than any other species:
http://www.wired.com/2010/08/gallery-ant-warfare/ (Sorry for the wired link, I couldn't find the original primary source I read concerning the subject)
On a side note: I feel like the title crosses "not too or interesting", goes past "interesting or revolutionary!", and somehow winds up in "just plain wrong/easily dismissible". His subtitle makes it even worse: "Many evolutionists believe that humans have a drive for waging war. But they are wrong and the idea is dangerous."
Less an attempt to persuade, and more like preaching to the choir, who ever that maybe.
The reason chimpanzees are indicative of an inherent propensity towards warfare rather than it being a learned culture trait is that chimps do not have an observed unified learned culture. Their habitat ranges from Guinea on the west coast to Uganda, and the bahavior is observed in chimp communities that have no contact with each other.
Alliance, treaty, federation, united, concordate, joint, organization... And that's just the large scale things that get names. There's also friendships, marriages, corporations, cooperation's, and more. There are at least as many words for peace as for war.
Sorry, pedantic nitpick anytime someone brings out the old "there are a hundred words for X but only one for X^-1"
That's a fair point on the use of that literary cliche. Yet, the main thrust of the idea is valid. Peace is a relief against from which special events (wars) are defined. Whether it's valid AND important to his thesis is doubtful.
I argue that we don't have a war gene, but we do have genes that are related to our experience of fears, aggression, etc. and the power of these are more easily manipulated to create societies prone to war than to peace. Despite large groups of peace-loving people in most societies, violent subgroups will wage wars and turn fear into profit. You don't see the peace-lovers standing up against the war-mongers in a way which would stop the bloodshed.
False binary coming... Would you spend a trillion dollars on raising the most helpless and hopeless up on a ladder of living standards or spend that same trillion stamping out shadows and bogeymen amongst the same people?
… I was not making fun of you personally; I was heaping scorn on an inexcusably silly idea — a practice I shall always follow. Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never settles anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms."
He sighed. "Another year, another class — and for me another failure. One can lead a child to knowledge but one cannot make him think.
I personally am with Kissinger and Metternich on that subject - wars are unavoidable, so it is better to have a system that limits their scope and regularity.
> It is said that the Bedouin have nearly 100 different words for camels
So the myth of Eskimos having 100 words for snow is now Bedouins and camels....
I'd argue sport is just war but with a lot less people being killed. Or war is just sport with a lot more people being killed. We love going to battle against 'others'
> Many evolutionists believe that humans have a drive for waging war. But they are wrong and the idea is dangerous
To make statements like this, they really need a much better argument.
Thanks, that was an interesting article. Yet, in the light of the OP, it also seems to be tied to specific American culture. It seems that there are societies (like in Europe) where going to war doesn't have so much that connotation of "being a man". Maybe they just do the ritual differently, for example, in Nordic countries, by trekking and hill-climbing.
Now that I think about it, I am not sure this article is in disagreement with OP. The OP argues that war is a capacity, not some given natural trait. This article claims that people have need for "the ritual of manhood", whatever that is, but doesn't claim it has to be "going to a war". So even Junger may consider the war to be a capacity.
Specific quote that highly relates to the OP:
"He tells me about a primatologist friend of his who studies chimpanzees. He began to study how chimpanzees wage war. “He was literally told by a fellow academic, ‘You’re undermining the cause of peace,’” Junger recounts."
I'm rather surprised that he has made no mention of Marvin Harris, who has studied culture and war extensively, including the case of the Yanomamo.
Their way is warlike because they have their roots as "foot" indians, and over-hunted animals in the forest, and their farming practices are primitive and very deficient in protein. The resulting collapse of animal protein sources created a longstanding ecological pressure leading to the cycle of high female infanticide and war. And since they've already passed beyond the point of ecological replenishment, they can't break out of it.
They actually have two words for hunger: One denotes an empty stomach, and the other a full stomach that craves meat.
I don't think there is a war instinct directly. But when you mesh self preservation with social status you get weird interactions where you end up being compelled to attack so as to not lose face with your in group.
Damn it, the cold war almost went hot as much because neither side wanted to be the "weak man" and bend as it was because of a overt threat.
It's odd that the page title is 'Human beings do not have an instinct for war', while the article title itself seems to be the far more representative 'Is there a war instinct?'
The author is only arguing that we don't know if human beings are instinctually predisposed to war - as a counter to other writers who've been assuming that we are.
I have a hard time believing that warfare is a pure invention, given its (near) universality across space, time, and our most closely related genetic relatives.