Is War Our Biological Destiny? (Course Readings)

Chapter One

Is War Our Biological Destiny?

By Natalie Angier

In these days of hidebound militarism and round-robin carnage, when even that beloved ambassador of peace, the Dalai Lama, says it may be necessary to counter terrorism with violence, it’s fair to ask: Is humanity doomed? Are we born for the battlefield—congenitally, hormonally incapable of putting war behind us? Is there no alternative to the bullet-ridden trapdoor, short of mass sedation. Or a Marshall Plan for our DNA?

Was Plato right that “Only the dead have seen the end of war”?

In the heartening if admittedly provisional opinion of a number of researchers who study warfare, aggression, and the evolutionary roots of conflict, the great philosopher was, for once, whistling in a save. As they see it, blood lust and the desire to war war are by no means innate. To the contrary, recent studies in the field of game theory show just how readily human beings establish cooperative networks with one another, and how quickly a cooperative strategy reaches a point of so-called fixation. Researchers argue that one need not be a Pollyanna, or even an aging hippie, to imagine a future in which war is rare and universally condemned.

They point out that slavery was long an accepted fact of life; if your side lost the battle, tough break, the wife and kids were shipped as slaves to the victors. Now, when cases of slavery arise in the news, they are considered perverse and unseemly.

The incentive to make war similarly anachronistic is enormous, say the researchers, though they worry that it may take the dropping of another nuclear bomb in the middle of a battlefield before everybody gets the message. “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,” Albert Einstein said, “but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Admittedly, war making will be a hard habit to shake “There have been very few times in the history of civilization when there hasn’t been a war going on somewhere,” said Victor Davis Hanson, a military historian and classicist at California State University in Fresno. He cites a brief period between A.D. 100 and A.D. 200 as perhaps the only time of world peace, the result of the Roman Empire’s having everyone, fleetingly, in its thrall.

Archaeologists and anthropologists have found evidence of militarism in perhaps 95 percent of the cultures they have examined or unearthed. Time and again groups initially lauded as gentle and peaceful--the Mayas, the !Kung of the Kalahari, Margaret Mead’s Samoans—eventually were outed as no less bestial than the rest of us. A few isolated cultures have managed to avoid war for long stretches. The ancient Minoans, for example, who populated Crete and the surrounding Aegean Islands, went 1,500 years battle-free. It didn’t hurt that they had a strong navy to deter would-be conquerors.

Warriors have often been the most esteemed of their group, the most covered mates. And if they weren’t loved for themselves, their spears were good courtship accessories. Geneticists recently found evidence that Genghis Khan, the 13 century Mongol emperor, fathered so many offspring as he slashed through Asia that 16 million men, or a half a percent of the world’s male population, could be his descendants.

Wars are romanticized, subjects of an endless, cross-temporal, transcultural spool of poems, songs, plays, paintings, novels, films. The battlefield is mythologized as the furnace in which character and nobility are forged. And, oh, what a thrill it can be. “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction,” writes Christ Hedges, a reporter for The New York Times who has covered wars, in “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.” Even with its destruction and carnage, he adds, war “can give us what we long for in life….It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.”

Nor are humans the only great apes to indulge in the elixir. Common chimpanzees, which share about 98 percent of their genes with humans, also wage war: gangs of neighboring males meet at the borderline of their territories with the express purpose of exterminating their opponents. So many males are lost to battle that the sex ration among adult chimpanzees is two females for every male.

And yet there are other drugs on the market, other behaviors to sate the savage beast. Dr. Franz de Waal, a primatologist and professor of psychology at Emory University, points out that a different species of chimpanzee, the bonobo, chooses love over war, using a tantric array of sexual acts to resolve any social problems that arise. Serious bonobo combat is rare, and the male-to-female ratio is, accordingly, 1:1. Bonobos are as closely related to humans as are common chimpanzees, so take your pick of which might offer deeper insight into the primal “roots” of human behavior.

Or how about the hamadryas baboons? They’re surly, but not silly. If you throw a peanut in front of a male, Dr. de Waal, said it will pick it up happily and eat it. Throw the same peanut I front of two males baboons, and they’ll ignore it. “They’ll act as if it doesn’t exist,” he said “It’s not worth a fight between two fully grown males.”

Even the ubiquitousness of warfare in human history doesn’t impress researchers. “When you consider it was only about 13,000 years ago that we discovered agriculture, and that most of what we’re calling human history occurred since then,” said Dr. David Sloan Wilson, a biology and anthropology professor at Binghamton University in New York, “you see what a short amount of time we’ve had to work toward global peace.”

In that brief time span, the size of cooperative groups has grown steadily, and by many measures more pacific. Maybe 100 million died in the world wars of the 20th century. Yet Dr. Lawrence H. Keely, a professor of anthropology a the University of Illinois at Chicago, has estimated that if the proportion of casualties in the modern era were to equal that seen in many conflicts among preindustrial groups, then perhaps two billion people would have died.

Indeed, national temperaments seem capable of rapid, radical change. The Vikings slaughtered and plundered. Their descendants in Sweden haven’t fought a war in nearly 200 years, while the Danes reserve their fighting spirit for negotiating better vacation packages. The tribes of highland New Guinea were famous for small-scale warfare, said Dr. Peter J. Richerson, an expert in cultural evolution at the University of California at Davis. “But when, after World War II, the Australian police patrols went around and told people they couldn’t fight anymore, the New Guineans thought that was wonderful,” Dr. Richerson said. “They were glad to have excuse.”

Dr. Wilson cites the results of game theory experiments: participants can adopt a cheating strategy to try to earn more for themselves, but at the risk of everybody’s losing, or a cooperative to try to earn more for themselves, but at the risk of everybody’s losing, or a cooperative strategy with all earning a smaller but more reliable reward. In laboratories around the world, researchers have found that participants implement the mutually beneficial strategy, in which cooperators are rewarded and noncooperators are punished. “It shows in a very simple and powerful way that it’s easy to get cooperation to evolve to fixation, for it to be the successful strategy,” he said. There is not such quantifiable evidence or theoretical underpinning in favor of Man the Warrior, “he added.

As Dr. de Waal and many others see it, the way to foment peace is to encourage interdependency among nations, as in the European Union. “Imagine if France were to invade Germany now,” he said. “That would upset every aspect of their economic orld,” not the least one being France’s reliance on the influx of German tourists. “It’s not as if Europeans all love each other,” Dr. de Waal said. But you’re not promoting love, you’re promoting economic calculations.”

New York Times

November 11, 2003

Peaceable Nature

By Stephen Lackner

The problems of aggression have haunted me since I was an American soldier in World War II, fighting against Germany, my former homeland. I came to regard the large-scale destruction around me as counterproductive. As everybody agrees by now, the senselessness of war is mounting. The Stockholm Peace Institute has established that in World War I, 20 percent of the victims were civilians, in World War II more than half were civilians; and in the Vietnam War 90 percent of those killed were non=military persons. A linear projection of this curve would engulf us all.

The dogma that the aggressive drive is inherited in the genes of every human being is contradicted by many anthropological observations. The example of the pacific Hunza in Asia has become famous. The small Semai tribe in Malaysia, left to its own devices, also knows no aggression. Children there are never chastised bodily, they never witness the use of compulsion, and hence cannot imitate any violent behavior. Murder is unknown among the Semai. True, some of the most peaceful tribes were whipped into a frenzy of bloodthirstiness while menaced by the Japanese “co-prosperity sphere” or, as in Malaya in the 1950s by Communist guerillas. But this proves clear that aggressiveness is an acquired, not an inherited trait.

In one important respect, we should trust nature much more than people have done for the last 130 years. We should acknowledge that the natural order of living things is more peaceable than Charles Darwin and his followers have thought; and we should spread a new conviction that we are behaving naturally when we behave peacefully.

When Darwin’s bellicose philosophy led him to certain predictions, history had already proven him wrong. In 1871 he prophesied: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” What a strange concept of being civilized! Yet it seemed so “natural” at the time that it spread through the entire spectrum of intellectual activities. The beneficence of warfare enthralled imperialists as well as communists. Karl Marx, the apostle of class warfare, wanted to dedicate “Das Kapital” to Darwin. In 1860 he wrote to Engels: “Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basic in natural science for the class struggle in history.”

Luckily, the past two decades have initiated a change of approach among life-scientists. Fritjof Capra writes in his thought-provoking boo “The Turning Point”: “Detailed study of ecosystems over the past decades has shown quite clearly that most of the relationships between living organisms are essentially cooperative ones, characterized by coexistence and interdependence, and symbiotic in various degrees….This insight is in sharp contrast to the views of the Social Darwinists, who saw life exclusively in terms of competition, struggle and destruction.”

John A, Wiens, a meticulous observer of small animals, comes to a similar conclusion: “The birds of grassland and shrubsteppe seems to be telling us that Darwin’s ‘great battle of life’ may be fought in skirmishes that are interspersed with periods of relative peace.”

And yet, this friendly view of nature has a hard time penetrating into the general thinking of ethologists. Even a gentle, humanistic biologists like Rene Dubos writes: “Since most animals live by feeding on other creatures, killing is a biological necessity.” Hold it! Most animals feed on other creatures? The ancient dog-eats-dog dogmas must indeed have nefarious power if an “objective” scientist can pronounce such a topsy-turvy statement!

By far the most numerous groups of mammals, such as rodents and hoofed animals, never touch meat. Carnivores like canines a d felines comprise less than one percent of the mammalian population of any given habitat. Birds are a mixed crowd, some eat seeds and fruit, some insects; true birds of prey are a tiny minority. Among the reptiles, lizards and snakes are carnivorous, land turtles vegetarians. Fish: probably half and half. Among the anthopods, spiders, dragonflies and wasps require other animals for their diets; bees, moths, and butterflies like only honey. It is perfectly obvious that very few animals live by feeding on other animals, and that combat, killing and cruelty are rare phenomena. Just open your eyes on your next nature walk: how much killing do you see going on in forests and meadows? Do you see “unending struggle?” Or peace and beauty?

….On the whole, nature behaves in a surprisingly non-Darwinian, peaceable way.

In order to continue living with a certain degree of optimism we must pin our hopes on

Eros, the power to which Sigmund Freud assigned the task of counteracting the aggressive drive. Luckily, we are warm-blooded organisms. Not too cold, not too hot, we possess a warm heart. Warm-blooded creature know forms of “togetherness” unknown in earlier geologic al periods. Nonerotic fondling occurs only birds and mammals. Finches sit tightly cuddled on a twig in the wintry air, monkeys love close contact. And this closeness is also natural to brothers, sisters, and friends, not only to lovers.

If we thus accept love as one of the strongest motive powers of evolution, the question arises: where will this development lead life? If left to its own devises, natural evolution will to increased peaceful cooperation. When principle proves as useful as love since time immemorial, nature would be quite perverse to negate this force instead of enhancing it. This entails a rather surprising discover: such modern trends as pacifism, vegetarianism, economic cooperation and overall planning, courts of international justice and the United Nations point in the direction of the general biological progress.

We should recognize that this supra-ordinated natural development gives us certain duties and rights. The dogmas “Life is war against all” made pacifists feel that their endeavors were anti-natural. “Life is also cooperation”: This sentence can give the peacemakers a very good conscience indeed.

Many compulsive action patterns that have hindered true progress are already dissolving. For instance: No world leader today declares an aim to acquire martial glory. In olden times, a leader who did not at least once ride into battle could not get a place in the history books. This craze has passed. The writers and the makers of history have changed their tastes.

The primitive idea that a man had to prove his masculinity by putting a dozen children into the world or by venting his frustrations in the local inn by knifing some other young man, has become out-of-date, on the village level as well as on the highest political stage. Those two proofs of manliness—nameless, to be fruitful and frightful—made some sense through thousands of years insofar as they cancelled each other out, thus providing two crude kinds of amusement. They chased away the boredom of our ancestors. Today we must renounce both the overproduction of babies and of corpses, because the equilibrium is no longer attained automatically. Both pastimes have become too dangerous.

Once we admit that nature is not--repeat, not—“red in tooth and claw” and that a generally cooperative equilibrium is indeed the overriding purpose of nature, we can strive for naturally peaceful developments. In this we can be helped by integrating biology and philosophy into biosophical thinking

We can dislocate our truly “offensive” drives and redirect out energy toward new aims. Aggressive initiative is perfectly fine if it is targeted against the foes of humankind, against, sickness, hunger and neglect--for life’s sake.

It would be nice if we could rely on natural selection to ride us of our superfluous warriors instincts. If the warriors among us would kill each other, thereby demonstrating their “unfitness” for higher forms of life, everything would be all right. Unfortunately, the fighters have a tendency to destroy more peaceable women and children than aggressive males. Thus the inheritable genes won’t become more pacifistic.

The overriding urgency of a pacification program for humankind is felt by many. Suggestions are being made as to how to warrior-like nature of man can be changed. Some reformers even want to add female hormones to our drinking water into order to make males less aggressive.

All this is certainly not necessary. The intelligence we have already developed, coupled with our capacity for learning, should easily master the task of avoiding catastrophic quarrels. Home sapiens now has sufficient reserves of cooperative spirit, enough capacity for selflessness and even for self-sacrifice to prevent future bloodletting, and to guide incipient brawls into formalized channels. It must be possible that we remain proud, active people, directing our aggression against hunger and sickness and corruption in the world.

Not very long ago, people felt pleasure in watching killings. They came from far and wide to thrill at executions on gallows and guillotine. We have changed. We don’t like live brutality any more. We prefer it in the movies, where blood isn’t wet. It’s a question of improved taste. Aesthetic endeavors, once considered sissifying, become essential for our survival. It is not a wonderful coincidence that these trends agree exactly with the most general biological development? Life has an immanent vector toward aesthetic improvement.

Only human beings have not yet become full-fledged members of the natural improvement society. We put smoke-belching factories and slums into the landscape, we damage the biosphere with garbage, strip mining and war. Did we receive the most developed brains for this purpose? Many warm-heated and farseeing men and women combat this devaluation.

The Case Against Competition

By Alfie Kohn

A tour of the literature through many disciplines makes it clear that the great majority of theorists and researchers who have investigated competition have concluded that the competitive orientation is indeed learned. Theoretically, and practically, too, what is learned can be unlearned.

The first comprehensive investigation of the topic was the 1937 study sponsored by the Social Science Resaearch Council. Mark A. May abd LKeonard Doob reported 24 specific findings based on “the existing knowledge represented by the survey of the literature of the field,” the first of which was: “Human beings by original nature strive for goals, but striving with others (cooperation) or against others (competition” are learned forms of behavior. Neither of these two, they continued, “can be said to be the more genetically , basic, fundamental or primordial.”

This conclusion has withstood half a century of study across several fields. The father of modern research on competition in social psychology, Morton Deutsch of Columbia University, wrote in 1973 that “it would be unreasonable to assume there is an innately determined human tendency for everyone to want to be ‘top dog.’ Sports psychologist Thomas Tutko and Williams Bruns agreed, basing their opinion on considerable experience with athletes of all ages: “Competition is a learned phenomenon. People are not born with a motivation to win or to be competitive. We inherit a potential for a degree of activity, and we all have the instinct to survive. But the will to win comes through training and the influences of one’s family and environment. As the song in “South Pacific” says, “you’ve got to be carefully taught.”

In the United States we are carefully taught, and the result is that, excepting the kind of invisible cooperation that is required for any society to run, Americans appear to be uniquely uncooperative as a people. David Riesman, the sociologist, found an interesting irony in “the paradoxical belief of Americans that competition is natural--but only if it is constantly recreated by artificial systems of social roles that direct energies into it.” First we systematically socialized to compete, and want to compete, and then the results are cited as evidence of competition’s inevitably.

Consider the dimensions of that socialization. Psychologist Elliot Aronson writes: “For two centuries our education system has been based upon competitiveness. If you are a student who knows the correct answer and the teachers calls on one of the other kids, it is likely that you will sit there hoping and praying the kid will come up with the wrong answer so that you will have the chance to show the teachers how smart you are. Indeed, children’s peers are their enemies--to be beaten.”

The message that competition is appropriate, desirable, required and even unavoidable is drummed into us from nursery school to graduate school. It is the subtext of every lesson.

In a hypercompetitive society, it is never too early to begin such training. Most recently, “readiness programs” have appeared to prepare infants for the feverish competition at the better nursery schools. By the time of elementary school, the pressure to be number one is noting new, but it has just begun to be codified and quantified. A first grader may be crushing, for instance, if her homework assignment is stamped with a smile face white others receive a smile face and a “VERY GOOD.” Eventually this ranking takes the forms of grades. “Educational achievement,” writes Morton Deutsch, “is measured so as to conform to an assumed underlying distribution. The social context of more education measurement is that of a contest in which students are measured primarily in comparison with one another rather than in terms of objective criteria of accomplishment.”

When class is over, the lesson continues. Children are taught that all games must have a winner and a loser. As Peter and Brigitte Berger have written, “It is only very young children who sometimes wish, wistfully, that ‘everyone should win.’ They soon learn that this is ‘impossible.’ In American society, that is, for there are other society in which children actually plays games in which ‘everyone wins.’” The idea that everyone can win evokes condescending smiles, and it doesn’t take long before these children come to accept the naturalness of competition. Here is Jean Piaget, in his classic work “The Moral Judgment of the Children, questioning six-year-old Mark. “’Who has won?’ ‘We’ve both won.’ But who has won the most?’” Piaget is not only learning his young informant, but also teaching him.

The inculcation of competition in the classroom and on the playing field is a source of unending frustration to some parents. Father and mothers who would prefer that their children learn to work with rather than against others can do only so much to foster this value since they do not raise their children in a vacuum. Even determinedly liberated parents must contend with an elaborate competitive structure outside the home that will frustrate their best efforts at education. “Out there,” doing one’s best means triumphing over others. This is the same struggle that defines parents’ attempts to steer their children away from sexism or violence or mindless obedience or unhealthful foods, or any number of other things sanctioned by our society.

Such a class between the parents and the rest of the culture is exceptional, however. The family generally is an efficient vehicle by which societal norms are transmitted, not as a holdout against these norms. Most parents raise children according to the values by which they were raised, and this process perpetuates the larger culture in which it occurs. From our very earliest days, we are busily absorbing an uncritical acceptance of competition. We are being primed for the classroom and the workplace.

When we think about cooperation at all, we tend to associate the concept with fuzzy-minded idealism or, at best, to see it as workable only in a very small number of situations. This may result from confusing cooperation with altruism. It is not at all true that competition is more successful because it relies on the tendency to “look out for number one” while cooperation assumes that we primarily want to help each other. Structural cooperation defines the usual egoism/altruism dichotomy. It sets things up so that by helping you I am helping myself at the same time. Even if my motive initially may have been selfish, our fates now are linked. We sink to swim together. Cooperation is a shrewd and highly successful strategy--a pragmatic choice that gets things done at work and at school even more effectively than competition does. And can serve as a basic for creating challenging and enjoyable games that do not require us to compete against one another. There is also good evidence that cooperation is more conducive to psychological health and to liking one another.