Tag:
War
May 7, 2012
Pinker, Politics, and the Decline of Violence: Roundtable on “The Better Angels of Our Nature”
This year's meeting of the International Studies Association featured a panel organized exclusively around Steven Pinker's book. Steven Pinker's book, "The Better Angels of Our Nature," has been getting substantial media attention this year, and it makes what many see as a surprising and counterintuitive claim about the decline of violence in human evolutionary history. Now, the academics weigh in. This year's meeting of the International Studies Association featured a panel organized exclusively around Pinker's book.
Mar 27, 2012
Of Chimps and Men: War In Evolutionary Perspective
Evolutionary theory as a lens with which to investigate the origins and psychological mechanisms of war. Partly stemming from misapplication of metaphors such as "survival of the fittest" and the "struggle for survival," it was assumed that Darwinian processes could only produce selfish individuals that care not for the welfare of others. In the case of coalitional violence, early ethologists argued that chimpanzees and humans naturally strive to dominate each other and that aggression is the inevitable consequence of competitive social environments.
