[ExI] Wars was defeat physics

[hkhenson]

At 05:23 PM 3/13/2009, spike wrote:
>
> > ...On Behalf Of Jeff Davis
>....
> > ...the last eight years have been hard... Jeff Davis
>
>Jeff, if you think those were hard, wait till you see the next eight.  The
>00s in retrospect will look like a Sunday picnic once several of the middle
>eastern hardliners get nukes.
>
>Keith's model on what causes humans to go to war causes me much distress,
>for even I the unreasonable optimist, see major trouble a-brewing.

It's not foreordained.  The model make the case that when human 
populations grow faster than the economy a behavioral psychological 
switch from the stone age gets flipped that puts a population on the 
road to war.  Originally, when stones were high tech and human 
population group sizes were limited by how far people had to walk in 
a day to find something to eat, this was a decent strategy (from a 
gene's viewpoint).  Nuclear weapons or even machine guns make this a 
sub optimal strategy--especially if you are the technologically weaker group.

Iran has a decent chance of becoming a peaceful country having 
reduced its population growth to under 1% in the past decade.

It is not at all clear how this happened, but it is probably 
culturally dependant.  Iran's culture is Persian, not Arabic.

Iran 1.87 children per woman (2008)

Gaza  5.19 children born/woman (2008 est.)

Of course a sharp economic downturn can switch on war mode, i.e., 
Germany pre WWII.

Keith