[ExI] Origin of War was Rick Warren on religion

[Keith Henson]

Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:

> Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:

>  Humans detect a resource crisis and undergo a behavioral switch.

### If true, I wonder what is the genetic make up of the switch. Is it
something about starvation itself or rather a more abstract way of
detecting resource limits?

I have been reading Robert Sapolsky _Behave: The Biology of Humans at
Our Best and Worst_ recently.  I think a more interesting question
than genetics might be where in the brain this feature resides.  How
to find it will take some thought, direct experiment seems unlikely to
get by the ethics committee.  You might have a point on genetics
because whatever it is, it does not seem likely we share it with our
sister species.  I think it was one of the more abstract things early
humans did detecting looming resource limits.  It makes sense to
attack *before* you are weak from hunger.

> Fat people don't go to war, or do they? Is there
an inherited neural system that analyzes power interactions at the social
level and ratchets up individual pro-social behaviors and out-group
aggression in some contexts? I think it does exist but it's not the most
important factor that leads to war.

According to EP "Our minds were designed by natural and sexual
selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer
ancestors."  https://slideplayer.com/slide/796009/  Near as we can see
from the archeological record war has been with us more or less the
whole time.  It's a consequence of overpopulation, i.e., population in
excess of the capacity of the environment to feed them.  Since humans
are top predators, nothing except other humans will put an upper limit
on population.  If humans don't limit population with war they have to
do it some other way, Tibet, nuns, monks and polyandry comes to mind.

> For a different perspective, take the Yanomami. The bands are in a near
constant state of war, even though there is no shortage of food and space.

That's not actually the case.  The forest is very short on protean.
They, like all humans originally did, live at the ecological limit for
their environment.  It is a stable environment so unlike places with
famines, so they fight each other all the time (or did).

> Yanomami go to war for women, either to steal or extort from weaker
neighbors, or to resist attacks. They don't seem to have a behavioral
switch.

Their population has been seriously reduced by diseases from the
outside.  I don't have the numbers, but I would bet long odds the
warfare between villages has gone down in places with big population
reductions.

>  Or take the civilizations of ancient Middle East.

In spite of the problems of living in high density, the effect of
agriculture was to about double the number of children per woman and
fast population growth.  This resulted in frequent wars between groups
over agricultural land to the point we can see it today as the Y
chromosome bottleneck.

The history of our species is not a happy one, though there surely
were some good times as well as bad.

Keith