- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- List of Contributors
-
1 War, Peace, and Human Nature -
2 Evolution and Peace -
3 Conflict and Restraint in Animal Species -
4 An Ethological Perspective on War and Peace -
5 Cooperation, Conflict, and Niche Construction in the Genus Homo -
6 Why the Legend of the Killer Ape Never Dies -
7 Pinker’s List -
8 Trends in Cooperation and Conflict in Native Eastern North America -
9 From the Peaceful to the Warlike -
10 The Prehistory of Warfare -
11 The Prehistory of War and Peace in Europe and the Near East -
12 Peaceful Foragers -
13 Social Control and Conflict Management Among Australian Aboriginal Desert People Before and After the Advent of Alcohol -
14 Aggression and Conflict Resolution Among the Nomadic Hadza of Tanzania as Compared with Their Pastoralist Neighbors -
15 South Indian Foragers’ Conflict Management in Comparative Perspective -
16 The Biocultural Evolution of Conflict Resolution Between Groups -
17 The 99 Percent—Development and Socialization Within an Evolutionary Context -
18 Chimpanzees, Warfare, and the Invention of Peace -
19 Evolution of Primate Peace -
20 Conflicts in Cooperative Social Interactions in Nonhuman Primates -
21 Rousseau with a Tail -
22 Conflict Resolution in Nonhuman Primates and Human Children -
23 The Evolution of Agonism -
24 Social Signaling, Conflict Management, and the Construction of Peace -
25 The Challenge of Getting Men to Kill -
26 Man the Singer -
27 Cooperation for Survival - Index
Pinker’s List
Pinker’s List
Exaggerating Prehistoric War Mortality
- Chapter:
- (p.112) 7 Pinker’s List
- Source:
- War, Peace, and Human Nature
- Author(s):
R. Brian Ferguson
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
This chapter challenges the idea that deadly intergroup violence has been common enough in our species evolutionary history to act as a selection force shaping human psychological tendencies, toward either external violence or internal cooperation. Broken down, there are three related propositions: (a) war was ubiquitous throughout our species evolutionary history; (b) war is a natural expression of evolved tendencies toward deadly violence against individuals outside the social group; (c) war casualties were sufficiently high to select for behavioral tendencies conferring reproductive advantage in intergroup competition. For either (b) or (c) to be true, (a) must be true. However, archaeological evidence shows (a) to be false.
Keywords: intergroup violence, evolution, evolutionary history, selection, cooperation, war
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- List of Contributors
-
1 War, Peace, and Human Nature -
2 Evolution and Peace -
3 Conflict and Restraint in Animal Species -
4 An Ethological Perspective on War and Peace -
5 Cooperation, Conflict, and Niche Construction in the Genus Homo -
6 Why the Legend of the Killer Ape Never Dies -
7 Pinker’s List -
8 Trends in Cooperation and Conflict in Native Eastern North America -
9 From the Peaceful to the Warlike -
10 The Prehistory of Warfare -
11 The Prehistory of War and Peace in Europe and the Near East -
12 Peaceful Foragers -
13 Social Control and Conflict Management Among Australian Aboriginal Desert People Before and After the Advent of Alcohol -
14 Aggression and Conflict Resolution Among the Nomadic Hadza of Tanzania as Compared with Their Pastoralist Neighbors -
15 South Indian Foragers’ Conflict Management in Comparative Perspective -
16 The Biocultural Evolution of Conflict Resolution Between Groups -
17 The 99 Percent—Development and Socialization Within an Evolutionary Context -
18 Chimpanzees, Warfare, and the Invention of Peace -
19 Evolution of Primate Peace -
20 Conflicts in Cooperative Social Interactions in Nonhuman Primates -
21 Rousseau with a Tail -
22 Conflict Resolution in Nonhuman Primates and Human Children -
23 The Evolution of Agonism -
24 Social Signaling, Conflict Management, and the Construction of Peace -
25 The Challenge of Getting Men to Kill -
26 Man the Singer -
27 Cooperation for Survival - Index
