Random Musings

I am quite surprised at the number of mails I received criticizing my position vis-a-vis warfare as an adaptive trait. They point me to the World Wars, where millions of soldiers pointlessly died for the sake of their nation states, or even the recent spate of suicide bombers, where overeager young men who turn themselves into live bombs to further their religious cause, all of whom have failed to leave any progeny, which translated to the language of Evolution means that they were miserable failures.

But they are missing the bigger picture. They are taking the last 100 years as representative of the entire human history. Human history is nothing but a drawn out homage to marauding armies. We evolved from a past, where every dispute was ultimately settled by war. But more than that, the societal structure was based on feudalism, which was a iniquitous system which was arbitered via pure brutal aggression. Whether it was a peasant revolt, or the rebellion against an occupying state, or even the failure to pay taxes, the outcome was the same: the common people were mercilessly and brutally massacred. It was a society where the elite few–who were distinguished from the rest by their bravery–physically owned the bodies and minds the rest of the population, and the arbiter for hierarchy was brute force, backed by large armies.

The written history, with its attention solely focused on the ruling class, gives us a very skewed view point of the past. It appears to be an orderly society where each individual contentedly occupied his position in the society, but it was nothing of that sort. The nobility ultimately were the descendants of a marauding gang of thieves, who simply staked the ownership of a particular area. They invented the rules that cemented their own positions–including a religion that endorsed the divine right of kings–, and the common man had little choice in any of these matters. The rules were invented by the nobility, for the nobility, and any transgressions by the rest of the population were punished via brutal massacres.

People who claim that warfare is maladaptive clearly haven’t read about the empire building wars. Before the dawn of industrial era, war was the sole means of furthering one’s wealth. The only way you can improve your status was by murder and pillage, and when it was done on an organized scale, they automatically became acceptable and was deemed to be patriotic duty of every citizen. But the purpose of wars were purely materialistic–to steal the wealth and women of the conquered population. Whether it be Roman or the Ottoman Empires, the wealth of the empire came from people who were brutally massacred and their material goods confiscated from them, or were physically enslaved to work for their conquerers.

Who were the elite of this society? The aggressive, intelligent men. Ultimately the job of the nobility was not even governance, but war. In such a society, we should note that men who were merely intelligent and lacked the aggression would fare worse than violent men, even if the latter lacked any semblance of intelligence. This is one of the reasons why women still prefer aggression to intelligence as the appealing trait in men. It is no wonder that almost all our movies–or any of the other articles of pop culture–revolves around men whose distinguishing trait is not keen intelligence, but rather his ability and willingness to take physical risks.

In the past where wealth acquisition was only possible via plunder–which automatically became justified when given the name of ‘conquest’–the only people who had any hopes for advancing in the society were men who were ready to take physical risks. The relic of this violent past is still with us in the form of pop culture, which are to the most part, nothing but a paean to the brave and the reckless.

“But how can something that leads to death be adaptive”? Skeptics will still ask. So let us provide mathematical model which can show how warfare is adaptive. War will ultimately make sense only if it leads to the capture of females, and also if the conquering society is based on polygamy, that is where one male monopolizes the reproductive potential of many females, and the fact is, 98% of the cultures on this planet practice some form of polygamy. Anyway, let us we consider a population of 10 men and 10 women. If the men do not go to war, they can have, say, 2 children each in the 10 women, making the total population to 40. Now, let us assume that the 10 men go to war, 3 die, but they manage to capture 3 females. The population is now skewed, with 13 females and 7 males. The important thing we need to understand here is that when it comes to children, the limiting factor is the number of females. The number of males is completely irrelevant. Even if there is only male left, he can easily inseminate the 13 females and have the same number of children that would be possible if there were 13 males. So now, the number of children possible would be 26 in 13 females, sired by the 7 men. The total population has gone up to 43, or an increase of 3, even though 3 men have died.

When we consider the gene for making war, what the above shows is that even though some of the men who carries this gene will die, when considered as a group, more of its copies will survive. This is what we mean when we say that warfare is adaptive.

If you are still harboring doubts about the adaptive nature of war, consider these facts:

The man who managed to sire the most number of children in history is Mulay Islmail the blood thirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, with 888 children in more than 500 concubines.

More than 3 million Irish Men can trace their lineage to a _single_ powerful fifth century warlord named Niall of Nine Hostages. Tracing lineage becomes feasible because the y chromosome is passed from the father to son unchanged, and thus by comparing the y chromosome of the current population of men, you can determine their common paternal ancestry.

The most prolific male–as far as the number of descendants are concerned–is Genghis Khan, to whom 1 in 12 men across Asia can trace their descent to.

But the story doesn’t end there though. Modern society with its extremely potent weaponry has finally made this battle instinct maladaptive. When the most potent weapon in the hands of the soldiers was the sword, the blind rush of a few reckless men could actually lead to winning the entire war. These men also always formed the elite warriors around whom the battle plans were formed, and occupied a privileged position, which in turn translated to more wealth and females. This strategy will not clearly work if you are trying to root a Nazi machine gun nest as WWII clearly showed.

So, yes, we have finally reached a stage where the instinct to go to warfare is extremely maladaptive. Not only do soldiers do not enjoy special privileges–in the past this meant the ability to rape/pillage the conquered population with impunity–in the age of technical proficiency, imprudent, reckless bravery has become secondary aspect in winning a war.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 7:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.