[extropy-chat] Origin of wars (was origin of faith)

[Keith Henson]

At 12:39 PM 11/17/2006 -0500, Robert wrote:

>On 11/17/06, Keith Henson 
><<mailto:hkhenson at rogers.com>hkhenson at rogers.com> wrote:
>>
>>Faith is a manifestation of the psychological mechanism that (in
>>appropriate conditions) leads to wars.  Wars were the evolved hunter
>>gatherer mechanism for keeping the human population in bounds that could 
>>be supported by the ecosystem.
>
>Keith, I think the evidence for prehistoric "population control" were slim 
>to none.  As the dominant and migratory population in ancient times if 
>humans exhausted the local resources they just got up and migrated (which 
>is why we are all over the planet).

That's not exactly about the connection between war mechanisms (for 
whatever reasons wars happen) and faith so I changed the subject 
line.   With regard to migration, I think you are seriously out of date on 
your anthropology.  See below.

>  Wars are more fundamentally about spreading ones genes.  You can cite 
> everything from the current situation in the Sudan where the Arabs are 
> specifically raping the non-Arab women to (a) impregnate them with their 
> genes and (b) make them undesirable to non-Arab men.  Men do not like to 
> dedicate resources to children which are clearly not theirs or at least 
> not closely related to them (children of brothers or sisters).

Correct.

>Another example is the recent evidence that American Indians may have 
>engaged in hunting parties for the purpose of capturing women.  Indeed in 
>war one general outcome for the losers is that the men are killed but the 
>women are broubht back to make *more* babies.  This is entirely a 
>consequence of the fact that men have greater abilities to go out and get 
>resources and making babies is cheap while for women making babies is both 
>resource intensive and tends to diminish their ability to care for 
>children they already do have.

That's not entirely correct.  In *hunter* gatherer bands the men supplied 
critical protein.  How hard that was depended largely on territory and how 
many others were hunting it.

>Wars are due to the desire to get resources to have more sex and produce 
>more children thus spreading ones genes.

I don't think that is exactly the case.  Wars among hunter gatherers are 
mostly when the situation is such that wars are the least awful avenue 
available.  I have read a lot in this area and the most sensible writer I 
know is Azar Gat.  His paper might not even be in Google cashe by now, but 
email me if you want a copy.

Published in Anthropological Quarterly, 73.1 (2000), 20-34.
THE HUMAN MOTIVATIONAL COMPLEX :
EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND THE CAUSES OF
HUNTER-GATHERER FIGHTING
Azar Gat
Part I: Primary Somatic and Reproductive Causes
At the centre of this study is the age-old philosophical and psychological 
inquiry into the
nature of the basic human system of motivation. Numerous lists of basic 
needs and desires
have been put together over the centuries, more or less casually or 
convincingly. The most
recent ones show little if any marked progress over the older, back to 
Thomas Hobbes's
Leviathan, 6 (e.g. Maslow 1970 [1954]; Burton 1990

In the absence of an evolutionary
perspective, these lists have always had something arbitrary and trivial 
about them. They
lacked a unifying regulatory rationale that would suggest why the various 
needs and
desires came to be, or how they related to one another.

Arguing that the human motivational system as a whole should be approached from
the evolutionary perspective, this study focuses on the causes of fighting. 
It examines what
can be meaningfully referred to as the 'human state of nature', the 99.5 
percent of the
genus Homo's evolutionary history in which humans lived as 
hunter-gatherers. In this 'state
of nature' people's behaviour patterns are generally to be considered as 
evolutionarily
adaptive. They form the evolutionary inheritance that we have carried with 
us throughout
later history, when this inheritance has constantly interacted and been 
interwoven with the
human staggering cultural development.

snip

For instance, one critic (McCauley 1990: 3) queried why, if fighting
was beneficial for inclusive fitness, was it not continuous and ubiquitous. 
He failed to
realize that fighting, like any other behaviour, could be only one possible 
tactic for
inclusive fitness, depending for its success, and activation, on the 
presence of specific
conditions. Another cluster of often-voiced criticisms was that it was not 
true that people
were motivated by the desire to maximize the number of their offspring; 
that the
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3
widespread occurrence of infanticide among primitive people was one example 
that belied
this idea; and that women were sought for economic as well as sexual 
purposes, as a
labour force (McCauley 1990; Ferguson 1995: 358-9).
The flaws in these criticisms can be pointed out only briefly here. It is 
not that people
consciously 'want' to maximize the number of their children; although there 
is also some
human desire for children per se and a great attachment to them once they 
exist, it is
mainly the desire for sex - Thomas Malthus's 'passion' - which functions in 
nature as the
powerful biological proximate mechanism for maximizing reproduction; as 
humans, and
other living creatures, normally engage in sex throughout their fertile 
lives, they have a
vast reproductive potential, which, before effective contraception, mainly 
depended for its
realization on environmental conditions. Infanticide typically takes place 
when a new-born
in conditions of resource scarcity threatens the survival chances of his 
elder siblings, as,
for example, of an elder nursing infant; for inclusive fitness is not about 
maximizing
offspring number but about maximizing the number of surviving offspring.

The fact that
women may sometime also be valued for economic, as well as reasons is 
strictly in line
with evolutionary theory; people must feed, find shelter, and protect 
themselves (somatic
activities) in order to reproduce successfully.

snip

In fact, the 'human state of nature' was not that different from the 
general state of
nature. Both somatic and reproductive struggles were an integral part of 
it. Cultural
diversity in human societies is stressed by social scientists and 
historians for excellent
reasons, but all too often to the point of losing sight of our easily 
observed large core of
species specificity.
4
It has long been assumed by many in these disciplines that people
may be moved to action – including fighting – for practically any reason. 
However, as this
study will claim, hunter-gatherers, and other primitive societies, 
manifested a remarkably
similar set of reasons for fighting, regularly observed by anthropologists 
everywhere they
went. As Sumner put it (1965 [1911]: 212; 1906: para 22; Davie, 1929: 65; also
Goldschmidt 1988): the great motives that move people to social activity - 
including
fighting - are hunger, love, vanity, and fear of superior powers. It is the 
intricate
interactions and manifold refraction of these reasons in humans, 
exponentially multiplied
by cultural development, that are responsible for the staggering wealth and 
complexity of
our species' behaviour patterns, including that of fighting. Although I 
shall now go through
the reasons for warfare among hunter-gatherers (as observed by anthropologists)
seemingly one by one, it is not the intention here to provide yet another 
'list' of separate
elements. Instead, I shall seek to show how the various 'reasons' come 
together in an
integrated motivational complex. This complex has been shaped by the logic 
of evolution
and natural selection for billions of years, including the millions-year 
history of our genus
Homo, and the tens of thousands of years of our species, Homo sapiens sapiens.

Subsistence resources:
hunting territories, water, shelter, raw materials

Resource competition is a prime cause of aggression, violence, and deadly 
violence in
nature. The reason for this is that food, water, and, to a lesser degree, 
shelter against the
elements are tremendous selection forces. As Darwin ([1871] 428-30), 
following Malthus,
explained, living organisms, including humans, tended to propagate rapidly. 
Their
numbers are constrained and checked only by the limited resources of their 
particular
ecological habitats and by all sort of competitors, such as cospecifics, 
animals of other
species which have similar consumption patterns, predators, parasites, and 
pathogens.
Some anthropologists have disputed that this rationale applied to humans, 
pointing out
that hunter-gatherers, both recent and during the Pleistocene, exhibited on 
average little if
any demographic growth over long periods of time and constantly regulated 
their numbers
through infanticide. However, as we have already seen, infanticide is 
generally used to
maximize the number of surviving offspring precisely when people push 
against the
resource walls of their particular environment. When these environments 
suddenly expand,
an unusual event in nature, demographic growth is dramatic. One of the best 
known
examples of this is the rapid proliferation of Old World wildlife into new 
territories in the
wake of the European age of discovery. Humans propagated equally 
dramatically in
similar circumstances. More than a million years ago, Homo erectus broke 
out of his
original habitat in Africa and filled up large parts of the Old World. From 
about one
hundred thousand years ago Homo sapiens sapiens repeated that process on an 
even wider
scale. As recently as the last tens of thousands of years, the small groups 
that crossed from
Asia into North America propagated into hundreds of thousands and millions 
of people,
even prior to the introduction of agriculture, filling up the Americas. 
Similarly, the small
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5
‘founder groups’ that arrived in the Pacific islands during the last two 
millennia, in most
cases probably no more than a few tens of people on each island, rapidly 
filled up their
new habitats, increasing in numbers to thousands and tens of thousands.

These dramatic cases only demonstrate that as a rule, and contrary to the
Rousseauite belief, our Palaeolithic ancestors had no empty spaces to move to.

Normally, species quickly fill up their particular habitat and soon push 
against its
boundaries. As some scholars have pointed out, even low population 
densities and
relative mobility over low-yield terrain do not necessarily mean lack of 
competition and
territoriality. Low-yield environment simply requires larger territories 
for subsistence.
Many animal species that also require very large territories for 
subsistence and are
therefore widely spaced out - such as, for example, lion prides - hotly 
defend their
territories against intruders who try to improve their lot. The same 
applies to humans.
Hunter-gatherers’ mobility and nomadism were practised within a circumscribed
territory. Contrary to a lingering popular impression from the 1960s, 
evidence of
territoriality exists for most hunter-gatherer societies examined. Indeed, 
some territories
are better, have richer wildlife, than other, and are, therefore, much 
coveted (Bigelow
1975: 247-8; Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1979: 129; E. Wilson 1978: 107-9; Anders 1994: 
230-2).

Anthropological thinking on hunter-gatherers was dominated for some time by the
study of the Kalahari Bushmen in the 1950s and ‘60s (Wilmsen and 
Denbow1990). But
during the Pleistocene, hunter-gatherers inhabited not only isolated arid 
areas but also,
indeed mainly, the world's most fertile environmental niches, which had 
much denser
populations. This resulted in much greater contact and much more 
competition with
other groups.

Ausis our largest, continent-size, ‘pure’ laboratory of simple 
hunter-gatherers, which
before Western arrival was totally unaffected by contact with farmers or 
herders. The
focus on the Kalahari Bushmen has resulted in a relative neglect of this 
methodologically
and empirically far superior ‘laboratory’ in recent anthropological 
literature. In Australia,
even in the desert areas of the central regions, where population densities 
were often as
low as one person per 20 square miles, or less, let alone in the 
resource-rich and more
densely populated areas, group territories existed and their boundaries 
were well defined
and kept on penalty of death. These boundaries cris-crossed the continent 
and by and large
were apparently very old. There was no 'vast common land'. Rather than 
free-rangers, the
Aborigines (like the Greenland Eskimo, another good, isolated 'laboratory' 
of simple
hunter-gatherers) were in fact 'restricted nomads', or 'centrally based 
wanderers', confined
for life to their ancestral home territories.
5
The human - like animal - tendency for maximizing reproduction was constantly
checked by resource scarcity and competition, largely by cospecifics. This 
competition
was partly about nourishment, the basic and most critical somatic activity 
of all living
creatures, which often causes dramatic fluctuations in their numbers. Resource
competition, and conflict, is not, however, a given quantity but a highly 
modulated
variable. They change over time and place in relation to the varying nature 
of the resources
available and of human population patterns in diverse ecological habitats 
(Durham 1976;
Dyson-Hudson and Smith 1978; Dawson 1996: 25). The basic question, then, is 
what the
factors that act as the main brakes on human populations in any particular 
habitat are; what
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6
the main scarcities, stresses, and hence objects of human competition, are. 
Again, the
answer to this question is not fixed but varies considerably in relation to 
the conditions.
In extreme cases like the mid-Canadian arctic, where resources are highly 
diffused
and human population density is very low, resource competition and resource 
conflict may
barely exist. In arid and semi-arid environments, like those of Central 
Australia, where
human population density was also very low, water holes were often the main 
cause of
resource competition and conflict. They were obviously critical in times of 
drought, when
whole groups of Aborigines are recorded to have perished. For this reason, 
however, there
was a tendency to control them even when stress was less pressing. For 
example, as
Meggitt recorded (1962: 42), between the Walbiri and Waringari 
hunter-gatherers of the
mid-Australian Desert, whose population density was as low as one person 
per 35 square
mile, relatively large-scale fighting, to the order of ‘pitched battles’ 
with a ‘score or more
dead’, took place, among other reasons, in order to 'occupy' and monopolize 
wells.
In well-watered environments, food often became the chief cause of resource
competition and conflict, especially at times of stress, but also in 
expectation of and
preparation for stress.
6
As Lourandos, for example, has written with respect to the
Australian Aborigines (1997: 33): ‘In southwestern Victoria, competition 
between groups
involved a wide range of natural resources, including territory
. 
competition between
groups is expressed in the elaborate material culture of weaponry (shields, 
clubs and the
like) used for display and combat.’ Resources meant mainly food. The nature 
of the food
in question obviously varied with the environment. Still, it seems safe to 
conclude that it
was predominantly meat of all sorts that was hotly contested among 
hunter-gatherers. This
fact, which is simply a consequence of nutritional value, is discernible 
throughout nature.
Herbivores rarely fight over food, for the nutritious value of grass is too 
low for effective
monopolization. To put it in terms of the model (Dyson-Hudson and Smith 
1978) that
relates defended territoriality and violent competition to resource 
density: grass' nutrition is
simply too 'defused' to make the effort to monopolize it cost-effective. 
Fruit, roots, seeds,
and some plants are considerably more nutritious than grass and are often 
the object of
competition and fighting, both among animals and humans. Meat, however, 
represents the
most concentrated nutritional value in nature and is the object of the most 
intense
competition. Animals may defend territories to monopolize mates or food, or 
both. The
higher the nutritional value of their food, the more the food element of 
territorial behaviour
would be present in addition to the reproductive element. At the top of the 
food chain,
meat eaters would not only defend their hunting territories against 
cospecifics; whenever
they had the opportunity, they would act against predators from other 
species to weed out
competitors. Lions, for example, would kill leopard and hyena cubs whenever 
they can
find them. Game resources are the principal factor determining predators' 
spacing out in
nature.
Indeed, before and during the 'protein controversy', game resources have been
consistently shown in a series of studies to play a similar role across a 
whole range of
primitive human societies examined. Chagnon was right that there were 
other, and perhaps
even more important, (reproductive) reasons for Yanomamo warfare, but he 
was wrong in
claiming that game competition was not a reason at all. As his protagonists 
reminded him,
he himself had noted that 'game animals are not abundant, and an area is 
rapidly hunted
out'. His protagonists accepted that the Yanomamo suffered from no 'protein 
deficiency'.
But they pointed out that the minimum levels of consumption achieved were 
only secured
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7
by a static population level, kept static inter alia by the high mortality 
rates in fighting
recorded among the Yanomamo, as well as among other primitive peoples. A 
rise in
human population level would easily be translated into game depletion.
7
snip

In conclusion, let us understand more closely the evolutionary calculus 
that can make
the highly dangerous activity of fighting over resources worthwhile. In our 
societies of
plenty, it might be difficult to comprehend how precarious people's 
subsistence in pre-
modern societies was (and still is). The spectre of hunger and starvation 
always loomed
over their heads. Effecting both mortality and reproduction (the latter 
through human
sexual appetite and women's fertility), it constantly, in varying degrees, 
trimmed down
their numbers, acting in combination with disease. Thus, struggle over 
resources was very
often evolutionarily cost-effective. The benefits of fighting must also be 
matched against
possible alternatives (other than starvation). One of them was to break 
contact and move
elsewhere. This, of course, often happened, especially if one's enemy was 
much stronger,
but this strategy had clear limitations. As we have already noted, by and 
large, there were
no 'empty spaces' for people to move to. In the first place, space is not 
even, and the best,
most productive habitats were normally already taken.

snip

******
Evolutionary psychology and its applications is, IMNSHO, utterly critical 
for any group such as Extropians who want to know *why* things happen 
(perhaps in the hope we can guide them or at least stay out of the jaws of 
death).

My article EP memes and war is based on this kind of background.  I highly 
recommend reading Gat's paper.

Keith Henson