Cooperation for Survival: Creating a Global Peace System (original) (raw)

Th e radio talk show host begins with a grand tour question. Interviewer: What is the main conclusion to draw from War, Peace, and Human Nature ? Fry: Well, there are several main conclusions and they interconnect with each other. If we consider war fi rst, there is ample and defi nitive evidence that war is not ancient. First, archaeology shows this. Second, by analogy from existing nomadic forager societies, the ancestral type of nomadic band social organization simply is not conducive to warfare for a number of reasons. Th ird, and I must start with the caveat that data on humans is more relevant to understanding humans than are data from bonobos and chimpanzees, but, that said, clearly among our closest living primate relatives, we can see that one cousin, the chimpanzee, sometimes "wars" and that the other cousin, the bonobo, does not, preferring instead to eat, groom, and have sex. So the primate analogs in-and-of themselves simply cannot logically be used to peddle a view of human nature as either warlike of nonwarring. Humans are not bonobos and we are not chimps either. It is interesting that among three diff erent closely related species of apes-if we count humans as honorary apes-that we see this variation in agonistic behavior. Finally, regarding warfare, this book goes back to the basics, back to "Evolutionary Principles 101" so to speak, by exploring the widespread restraint against killing that exists both in humans and other mammals: ethology, game theory, and cost/benefi t analyses of fi tness show the triumph of restraint as an overall biological principle in contrast to an oft en-heard assertion that humans have evolved a predisposition for killing. Th e grand conclusion, therefore, from archaeology, nomadic forager studies, primatology, and evolutionary theory, as applied afresh to aggression, is that in humans, war is recent, not ancient, and war is a capacity, not an evolved adaptation. In short, war was rare to nonexistent under the conditions in which our species evolved but obviously prevalent in more recent times that are dramatically diff erent ecological and cultural circumstances.