Science (2/24/06), which just arrived today, notes:
Watch the 6 o'clock news or stroll through a natural history museum of spear-wielding cavemen, and you might think humans have been killers since the dawn of time.
A great deal of recent evolutionary psychology has painted a picture of a highly fierce and competitive early life for human beings. Others have expressed concern about decoding our psychology from the just-so stories that are told about our prehistory. Those who are politically aware often enough recognize that these stories may reflect our contemporary conceptions about ourselves, rather than anything that should be called the product of scientific enquiry.
Science reports a presentation at the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting that presents some possibly solidly based challenges to the idea that we are warriors in our bones and genes.
As they report, Robert Sussman of Washing University in St. Louis argues that fossil evidence indicates that
Australopithecus afarensis, a hominid that many think evolved into
Homo Sapiens had NO stone tools or weapons, no fire to cook meat, and no sharp teeth to eat it. Rather, it looks as though they were a prey species, stalked by numerous predators. Sussman suggests that what these pre-humans first did was to gather into protective groups. So we started out with protective bonding, not war.
Of course, this is all controversial. But the article quotes Frans de Waal of Emory University as saying, "We are also a species marked by high levels of cooperation [and] conflict resolution, ... and it is time science started paying more attention."
The articles says Sussman "details his theory in the recent book Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators, and Human Evolution. I went to look it up on Amazon.com. You might find the publishers' notes interesting.
(At least as interesting is that the book is actually written by two people, Donna Hart and Robert W. Sussman. She is not mentioned in the article. Could it be that once again a woman's contribution is written out of the story of science? Who would have thought?)
What's the bottom line? Well, what do you think? Here's one possibility: Making war is NOT doing what comes naturally so much as failing to live up to even our early potential. War is failure.
Except, of course, that we do not really know what was going on in our prehistory.
UPDATE: sorry to say, it's probably impossible to show that war is in our genes. So what is so compelling about the thought that it is? What makes that an attractive thought?