Male-Coalitional Reproductive Strategy
I found this an interesting read, The Origin of War: The Evolution of a Male-Coalitional Reproductive Strategy (by Johan M.G. van der Dennen; 1995) (over 850 pp. with a huge bib).
Good short review by George Modelski (BLUF):
Quote:
What this particular IR scholar appreciates in particular in this analysis is its facultative aspect. It is good to be shown convincingly that humans are neither inherently bellicose nor innately peaceable. Though it might at time have been opportune, war was not preordained in the long distant past, and it is not preordained in the future. On the other hand, it ought to be pointed out that the male-coalitional strategy has been key not only in war but in all the myriad other cooperative enterprises: business, political, religious, associational and sports, that have marked the evolution of the human race and of the world system. Nor does "reproductive strategy" appear sufficiently convincing as the ultimate cause of modern warfare. Territory remains an important bone of contention but hardly an all-encompassing imperative.
What appears to be missing from this account is sensitivity to evolutionary changes in such a basic political institution as war. Are we to understand that in its basic makeup warfare has remained unchanged for several million years? Or that its basic structure was laid down in the dawn of prehistory, and that all that followed, in the past five thousand years of civilization and of "history", has been nothing but "a nightmare" (p.593)? Has nothing changed in world politics even in the past one thousand years? Arguably, the biological (reproductive) component of the war syndrome is less powerful to-day, and the social (coalitional) more important, and working through social evolutionary mechanisms such as e.g. elections, or innovations, that are analogous to natural selection and genetic variation. That much might indeed be implicit in this account but it could be spelled out more fully if the author looked carefully at modern history as the record of world political evolution.
Regards
Mike