[ExI] Rick Warren on religion

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2018 at 2:42 AM 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? 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.

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.
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.

Or take the civilizations of ancient Middle East. Over thousands of years,
from about 9000 BC to about 500 BC, there was a slow transition from small
scale societies, similar to Yanomami, to stable agrarian states. The main
reasons for war and collapse were attacks from outside and epidemics inside
the farming societies. Nomadic barbarians were always only a few tens to
hundreds of miles away, ready for pillage and rapine. Density of humans,
their animals, and a multitude of parasites living among them was always
creating new contagions, spreading among people suffering from diverse
forms of malnutrition brought about by their staple-based diets, much
different from the diverse diet of the ancestral hunter-gatherers. Again,
no behavioral switch, but rather lack of immune and psychological
adaptations to living among crowds fed on millet.

I think your hypothesis has some merit but its reach may not be as
extensive as you posit.
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