Evolution and War Workshop
I recently returned from a workshop on “Evolutionary Perspectives on War” at the University of Oregon at Eugene. This was perhaps the first ever meeting to exclusively examine the links between evolution and war. In attendance were researchers from a number of disciplines including archeology, anthropology, primatology, evolutionary psychology, and political science (including, for example, Sam Bowles, Napoleon Chagnon, Steve LeBlanc, Pat Lambert, Rose McDermott, John Orbell, Randy Thornhill, John Tooby, Phil Walker, Frances White, and Richard Wrangham).
The general message of the workshop was clear. There is a plethora of evidence that warfare stretches as far back into human history and prehistory as we can see, and every reason to suspect that warfare exerted a significant selective pressure on the evolution of human psychology and behavior. Humans, particularly men, display a number of adaptations for forming coalitions, aggression, and warfare. Highlights included the ecology of lethal inter-group violence among chimpanzees (Wrangham), the prevalence of warfare as a cause of death in archeological and ethnographic records (Lambert, LeBlanc, Walker), and the role of personality, inter-group threat, and disease in human conflict (McDermott, Thornhill, van Vugt).
My own presentation explored the implications of Lanchester’s Laws of Combat for human evolution. The basic idea is that, where combat is fought as an all-against-all melee, combat power is proportional not to group size but to group size squared (i.e., a force three times larger than its enemy is actually nine times more powerful in combat). This offers a complementary explanation for why coalitions were so important in human evolutionary history, and why groups of men may be particularly prone to aggression-the costs of violence against smaller groups can be very low.
Links:
Eugene’s Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences
Write-up in New Scientist
December 7th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
If Lanchester (and you) are right, then smart soldiers who are fighting more numerous opponents would make sure that they were NOT fighting in an all-out melee. Obvious ways to avoid that would include
!. perfecting stand-off weapons (slings, bows and arrows by skilled archers like medieval English/Welsh, Mongols, and so on, blow-pipes, guns of all sizes);
2. tactics that force an opponent on to a narrow front so that numbers don’t count any more (legend of Horatius and the bridge, English at Agincourt); and
3. developing such superior lethal weaponry that numbers don’t matter (Greek hoplites - unless they were fighting Greek hoplites; Roman legions (ditto); early medieval armored cavalry, unless they met Mongol or English archers; machine guns).
The bottom line is that armed conflict would inevitably and quickly become organized and sophisticated in its own right, not to mention the accessory R & D that would advance military technology and spill over into societal technology and institutions as well.
So is conflict-influenced behavior the driver that has made humans what they are? At the moment I can’t see a way out of it. If it worked by natural selection, the casualties among winners must generally have been less than the casualties among losers, I suppose.