Evolving an answer for war… slowly

Scientific American publishes a puff piece on human warfare in the article Taming Humanity’s Urge to War. On one hand SA seems to take a biological approach, but then muddies the water with the question: “Must lethal conflict be an inevitable part of human culture?”

Is war biological or cultural? No answer is given in the SA article which features a wide range of “causes of warfare” as given by researchers from the University of Utah conference The Evolution of Human Aggression: Lessons for Today’s Conflicts. For those that have studied political science and warfare, this article is simply a roundup of undergrad level polisci issues: Power Disparity, Polarity, Economic Interdependence, Prospect Theory and Resource Warfare (both due to population booms and climate change). Though the article fails to impress, it is nice to see the psychologists, biologists and anthropologists address issues usually relegated to the Humanities Department.