Adam,

I doubt your base claims are true in non-human species. Is it true that non-human species procreate "until there are more mouths to feed than resources"? I don't think so. Breeding patterns seem to be related to the availability of resources in the sense that breeding patterns respond to resource availability and not the other way round.

welcome, adam! very happy to have you here. i hope you mind find the discussions fruitful. we have professional ecologists, philosophers, psychologists, and others here and the conversations are ordinarily quite robust.


"Ultimately there is going to be severe competition for these resources. If gene pool A is peaceful, and gene pool B is warlike, then the next generation is going to see far more of gene pool B, and individuals with aggressive, warlike behavior are going to be selected for in both gene pools"

we must ask, when does reciprocal altruism occur? how are humans relevantly different from other species? how do the mechanisms of war affect the discussion?

cooperation evolves when you're going to see the same beings again and have to live with the consequences of your last round of behavior, in addition to the stakes being such that risking a bad reputation or someone retaliating isn't worth competition or violence. cooperation provides insurance.

whatever you think of the "near inevitability" of non-zero sum cultural evolution a la robert wright's work, it is demonstrably the case that humans have become less and less violent to each other as we have evolved to become more interdependent. i personally don't have the "faith" that wright seems to have, though i do see how different organizational clusters of cooperative entities evolve again and again, and humans are becoming more networked and hiveish with time.

those who can fund what we would call war must have a lot of capital behind them. we're not talking about skirmishes, guerrila war, terrorism, but WAR. what i see is a diminishment of the nation-state as a pivot point for such activity. regionalism is diminishing with the advent of a global information economy. what will become the greatest threat to this - other than corporate hegemony, which is major - is the disenfranchised subordinate males who may not have a shot at getting a mate or status.

does anyone here know about ants? can someone point me to a good resources about ants and war? i know they have specialized classes of soldiers, and even <gasp> sterile suicide bomber ants that blow up their abdomens filled with goo on their enemies. i need to know more!

"I already have far to much to read without wondering what the writer's sources are"

ask for a source if you want. we've provided citations just fine many times.

hmmm... something about this explanation doesn't quite make sense to me.

we didn't evolve in a situation like this for one. we were mobile, and not particularly numerous. anthropological studies of modern hunter-gatherer societies indicates that in general food would have been quite abundant for this type of society, and as groups were mobile a local overuse of resources leading to competition doesn't really make sense.

nevertheless, it seems to me that there would have been pressure to create in-group out-group identifying and reacting mental configurations. as a member of a mobile hunting-gathering unit it would be vital for you to identify those in your group. and the behavior of those out of your group, of your species and otherwise, would be unpredictable and most likely dangerous, so there would have been pressure for an aversion reaction.

fitting into this from a cultural angle, resource competition does not seem to explain most wars. it seems to have more to do with ideology, and the ability of a relatively small group to convince the public of some inimical diffference between "us" and "them" and the necessity to hurt/weaken/destroy "them" in order to ensure "our" safety. and even if it were to, definitions of in-group/out-group that could thus "compete" as a group would be central, and in a sense arbitrary when separated and generalized from the ancestral kin-group.

so, basically, i think that we've evolved a capacity and a tendency to define and recognize in-group/out-groups, that we have an innate aversion instinct for those defined as out-group, and that this capacity has been built upon and complicated by the imaginative and ideational capacities of human consciousness into complex structures of ideological in-group/out-group defintion, propaganda, and cultural constructions of the "other" that drive most modern wars.


"Species, including ours, make war to compete for resources and therefore breeding potential. Should it be an option? We have no choice. Say gene pool A and gene pool B are the only humans on the planet. They are going to procreate until there are more mouths to feed than there are resources. Ultimately there is going to be severe competition for these resources. If gene pool A is peaceful, and gene pool B is warlike, then the next generation is going to see far more of gene pool B, and individuals with aggressive, warlike behavior are going to be selected for in both gene pools. Ideal..."

I see a place where my logic may have been awry:
"Say gene pool A and gene pool B are the only humans on the planet. They are going to procreate until there are more mouths to feed than there are resources. Ultimately there is going to be severe competition for these resources. If gene pool A is peaceful, and gene pool B is warlike, then the next generation is going to see far more of gene pool B, and individuals with aggressive, warlike behavior are going to be selected for in both gene pools."
In many cases we seem to be breeding the aggression out of populations. Good examples are the Native Americans, the Germans, and if this patterns proves true, the Iraqis. If, in war, we kill everyone that fights against us, and the only people that are left are those that will fall in line, then we are breeding aggression out of these populations. I lived in Germany for two years, and it was well understood amongst us American soldiers that the German locals would never want to fight, and were far more likely to try to placate you. We've killed over 600,000 Iraqis so far, and it could be reasoned that the aggressive ones have been far more likely to die than the ones that avoided combat. In this way we have drastically altered their gene pool by selecting against aggressive behavior.