Thoughts on human evolution

[aldreas256]

My most recent (serious) books have been Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague and Adrian R. Lewis' The American Culture of War, and they have me thinking. Laurie Garrett's central thesis is the human "intervention" into the natural ecosystem has produced an evolutionary pressure cooker heretofore unknown. Excessive use and misuse of anti-biotics and

Comments

[thecaesar82]

Cool ideas! In one of my anth classes I read about the origins of warfare in the animal kingdom in the book Demonic Males by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson. They use observations of chimpanzees' behavior in contrast to the behavior of more distantly related primates to show that present among Chimpanzees, and absent from the rest of the animal kingdom, is behavior that can be best described as warfare. Groups of chimps will organize violent raids on other groups of chimps for acquisition of land and resources. The book also shows that these traits evolved in chimps in response to very specific environmental pressures created by the conditions of the rainforest north of the Congo River. The chimps who live on the south side of the river (bonobos) didn't have these pressures and and as a result don't engage in warfare. Essentially, their argument is that warfare is a vestigial genetic trait inherited from our chimp ancestors!

Your theory that warfare is a sort of natural selection is interesting. It definitely got me thinking.

[anonymous]

An interesting perspective, and one I had not thought of--war as the catalyst and cause of human development. If this is a constructivist perspective, where did it start? Is there a biological predisposition towards irrational violence, or is this somehow learned behavior?

K