Bidiversity

A new book investigates how biology intersects with war. Here are some excerpts from Wired Magazine’s interview with the authors

UC Berkeley obstetrician, Malcolm Potts and science writer Thomas Hayden take a wide-ranging look at the many places that biology intersects with war. But the most fascinating parts of the book look at how modern technology has interacted with our Stone Age brains’ risk calculators to produce the brutality and aggression of the world today.

Wired.com: Why did you write this book? Why sex and war as topics?
Sex and War co-author Thomas Hayden: Let me tell you the why from two different perspectives. For me personally, the why goes back to the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003. I was a correspondent at a national news magazine (U.S. News & World Report) at the time and the war was the big story. As a science reporter, I was trying to understand the big story of the day through the lens of science.

I was struck by how big a factor the desire for revenge for 9/11 seemed to be. I was struck by the momentum, the emotional momentum, in the rush to war. It seemed once we’d been talking about war for a while, it almost became inevitable, despite lots of logical arguments against going to war. I wanted to understand why that was.

In the evolutionary psychology literature, you see that those are evolved predispositions. Those are behaviors that we see not just in our own times and in hunter-gatherer people, but, in fact, there are direct correlates we see in chimpanzees.

Wired.com: You both talked about how men are really the drivers of war. Why is that?

Potts: Because of the asymmetry in the investment [men and women] make in the next generation, beginning with eggs being bigger than sperm. When you’re a mammal, women can only have a limited number of children. Their sexual agenda is to be as selective and to get support from that mate. Whereas the males amongst chimpanzees and to some extent among human beings, the more sexual partners they can get, the more likely they pass their genes to next generation. So the males are competing.

Most peoples, not the number of people, but the number of cultures, are monogamous. Men are intrinsically risk-taking and are less selective in their sexual partners and once you get this team aggression in a primate, a new set of things kick in. You add all those things together and you’ve got a pretty fearsome male animal. That’s why I call testosterone the perfect weapon of mass destruction.

Wired.com: Could you point to any other specific technological leaps that really changed the nature of warfare?

Hayden: Here’s a really important one, maybe the most important one today. And that is the way in which technology enables terrorism. I want to say this carefully and this is a really important point any time you are talking about the evolution of human behavior. It’s very clear that we are evolved animals and there are behavioral dispositions. But to say that something has evolved doesn’t put a value statement to it. It doesn’t say it’s a good or bad or necessary behavior. We’re very complex animals, so there are predispositions that tilt us towards distrust or hatred of outsiders, love and compassion for members of our in-group.

The balance of those different traits is such that perhaps all men have the ability to be warriors. We have the evolved traits necessary to turn off that empathy. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t any free choice and there is a lot of environmental circumstance. Nature provides the possibilities and nurture helps shape what actually happens.

So, when it comes to terrorism, it only works because of technology, because a small number of people, almost always men, can use technology for leverage. Nineteen terrorists armed with sticks and stones could do very little to affect the United States of America. But 19 terrorists armed with jet fuel-laden aircraft … The technology pushed their destructive capability way beyond where it would have been. Nineteen men against 300 million people. We would have never known they existed if they hadn’t leveraged technology.

Technology has done many wonderful things for humankind through the years, but it also has been a central part of war. The technology of a time really defines the warfare of a time.

Wired.com: Does the study of the bonobos, another close primate relative of humans who are noted for their peaceful behavior, add anything to the discussion of sex and war?

Hayden: I think it does. Chimpanzees and bonobos are sort of a Rorschach test for humanity. Do you see us as warring, meat eaters or vegetarian peace lovers who apparently solve all their problems by having sex?

My very loving view of the human condition has room for the chimpanzees and the bonobos. Thank goodness we have both species … If we just had chimpanzees, we might not be quite as hopeful. With the bonobos, we find a great deal of diversity of behavior. I think humans have the capacity for love and peaceful coexistence.

The really hopeful thing of looking at war from the perspective of evolution is recognizing that war is built up from a set of evolved predispositions, but that doesn’t make war inevitable. Yes, it is inherent, but it’s not necessary and we can start looking at things that we can do in social policy that make war less likely and less brutal.

You can look at it as trying to figure out what we can do and how we can shape our world so that our bonobo comes out more than our chimpanzee nature. And when you get right down to it, who wouldn’t rather be a bonobo?