War and
Sex, How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path
to a Safer World
by Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden,
BenBella Books, 2008, 383 pages.
The first two thirds of the book describes the history of war beginning
with pre-human ancestors. Jane Goodall was the first to describe team
aggression in young male chimpanzees---we share a common ancestor with
them. Jane Goodall was amazed by how
young male chimpanzees frequently banded together to kill a lone member of a
nearby troop. She never saw females
participating in this. Our authors call
this male coalitional violence and tellingly argue that it is even more obvious
in human history and current events than in chimpanzees.
The universal precursor of male coalitional violence in chimps and
humans is competition between adjacent groups for territory, food, and
mates. Settled agriculture involved
much larger groups and more wealth and was a prerequisite for modern warfare
aggravated by periods of rapid population growth with a higher proportion of
young relatively more testosterone “intoxicated” males less restrained by their
elders. Bonobos, formerly called pigmy
chimps, but recognized as a separate species since 1929, have a matriarchal
social organization---male coalitional violence has never been observed in
bonobos. They evolved from a common
ancestor of ordinary chimpanzees by contriving to cross the two mile wide Congo
River where they avoid their competition.
A truly matriarchal human society has never been described by
historians, anthropologists, or archeologists.
Periods of rapid population growth have preceded, if not caused, most
warfare in humans. For recent examples, consider the time since the invasion of
the new world by Europeans to the very recent Rwandan and Darfur episodes of
genocide. Jared Diamond has emphasized
this in his books Guns, Germs and Steel, and Collapse. In all human cultures men have tried to
control female fertility, probably because males are content with quantity in
reproduction, but females are more concerned with quality. Educated and prosperous women everywhere
usually end up preferring two or three offspring.
What solutions do Potts and Hayden offer in Sex and Warfare? Here are some quotations from the book that
address the question:
…..religions probably arose and persist because they
unite large groups of people, and when it comes to fighting, the larger group
usually wins…….Sam Harris in The End of Faith asks his readers to
“imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over
rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything—anything—be more ridiculous? Yet this would be no more ridiculous than
the world we are living in”…….taking a biological perspective has a much better chance of success. Our survival as a species will not depend on
divine intervention but on understanding our stone age behaviors. Once we do that, controlling them should
become an achievable goal. (page 360-2)
We all
share the desire to live in a world without wars and terrorism. But ignoring reality will get us no closer
to that goal. If we truly want to
attain peace, we first have to make peace with the fact that the behavioral
building blocks of war are indeed to be found in our nature. …practically any young man can be
transformed into a soldier, as the history of conscription and military
training demonstrates….Solzhenitsyn’s insight that “the line dividing good and
evil cuts through the heart of every human being” comes much closer to
capturing human nature than anything {else}….
Raids and wars are not deviant activities; they are the logical
expression of deep-seated behavioral predispositions. The impulses underlying warfare are universal, but happily, they
need not be universally expressed…
…Intellectually tenable and politically realistic
objections to slavery are historically recent, but they have been wonderfully
effective.
Men are
evolved to be territorial and competitive, and to engage in team aggression. Women usually lived in territories men
carved out, and benefited more through in-group cooperation and social
stability than through out-group hostility and aggression. If evolution provides the poison root of
warfare, it has also supplied an important antidote. We overlook women’s powerful evolutionary heritage at our
collective peril. (page 368-70)
In
a generation’s time it is likely Iran will have nuclear weapons, but because
family planning is now available; and women, on average, are having only two
children and are moving toward greater equality, Iran will be much less likely
to use these bombs than Pakistan, where families are twice as large and
unemployment rampant. (page373)
{in
Bangladesh} When asked in surveys how many children they want, most young
couples today say “two.” Crucially,
this includes most young men as well as their wives. What was the reason for this success in Bangladesh? A range of contraceptives has been offered
and in many cases literally carried to women’s doorsteps. (page 375)
Malcolm Potts is an M.D., specialist in human fertility, the first
medical director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (1968), and
professor at the School of Public Health, University of California at
Berkeley. In early 1972 he was invited by the new
government of Bangladesh to help with the plight of women made pregnant by rape
during the war for independence from Pakistan which ended in December 1971. He
deserves a prize for his very successful work there. Thomas Hayden is an
experienced science journalist coauthor of On Call in Hell: A Doctor’s Iraq
War Story in 2007.
John A. Frantz, MD, November 16, 2009