What is truly shocking about human warfare is that large numbers of reproductively capable, unrelated, and unfamiliar individuals die in combat for benefits that are widely shared:
From our closest living relative in the animal kingdom, to the highly cooperative eusocial insects—no animal cooperates in war in this manner.
Chimps raid neighboring communities, but in the several decades of observing them, no chimp in the attacking party has been killed. They only attack when they outnumber the opponent sufficiently so that the attackers are unscathed. And the chimps that gang up for a raid know each other well, as they hail from the same community.
Ants readily sacrifice their lives in inter-colony battles, but the ants that do so are sterile individuals. They are giving up their lives to increase the fitness of the reproductively capable queen they are genetically related to.
Reciprocity and relatedness suffice to explain chimp and ant wars. Human warfare calls for a novel explanation.
Sarah Mathew has studied the pastoral Turkana of East Africa and how such egalitarian herders fight:
They make a living in the semi-arid savanna of northwest Kenya by keeping cattle, camel, goat, and sheep, and seasonally moving to find pastures and water. Periodically they mobilize and raid other settlements to acquire cattle and pastures, and to take revenge for previous attacks.
These attacks give the impression that human warfare does indeed require a novel explanation. Turkana warriors are not coerced by any authority. Yet in some areas of the Turkana one out of five males die in warfare. Of the males who survive to adulthood, one out of two die in warfare.
You may be tempted to think that in an egalitarian small-scale society everyone is either a friend or relative, and so this is simply cooperation with one’s kith and kin. But this is not the case. The Turkana number a million people, and are divided into about two-dozen different sub-territories. On Turkana raids hundreds of men from different territories come together. For a typical warrior most of his fellow combatants are neither kin nor close associates. Many are strangers.
So, really, why do these men go on raids, trusting that the strangers they are fighting with will do their part?
Some may say it is obvious why these men participate in warfare. After all, cattle are food, wealth, and the path to marriage. And cattle have feet—drive them away and you can make a fortune overnight. Not only so, without a fight they would lose their territory, and what is life for a herder without good pastures? And lets not forget, it is reproductive-aged men wielding AK-47s who go on these raids. The mix of youth, testosterone, and firearms—how can war not transpire?
Yet, acknowledging these motives—cows, pastures, and firearms—gets us only so far. AK-47-wielding, young, unmarried men have plenty of reasons to have a dustup with other men of their community. They share pastures and water, and vie for the same women. Yet, in quarrels with each other, they put aside their AK-47s, and hash out disputes with their herding sticks and wrist blades.
If you think it is the desire for cows, then consider that there are cows everywhere. The neighboring family has cows, the settlement across the river has cows, and herders in distant Turkana settlements have cows. Yet, Turkana men pass up on these hundreds of thousands of cows, and instead will travel large distances until they reach the settlement of people who do not consider themselves Turkana, before they raid cattle.
And yes, territory is precious. But, remarkably, Turkana from one territory typically allow Turkana from other territories to graze in their pastures, and such sharing is especially common in the dry season when grass and water are scarce. Yet, if the Toposa encroach, the Turkana of the area will mobilize a retaliatory raid.
Earlier in this post I noted that warfare is where moral depravity seems to abound. But perhaps the question to ask is why we have moral concerns at all, and why they extend to an arbitrary set of people who are neither relatives nor friends. Why does a Turkana herder pass up on the cows of some distant stranger, to go and raid the cows of some other distant stranger? Why use sticks to fight with some people, and AK-47s to fight with others? Why let some strangers graze in your scarce pastures and kill others for venturing too close? And is that set of people we have moral concerns towards just arbitrary, or is there some logic to our moral inclusivity?
“And lets not forget, it is reproductive-aged men wielding AK-47s who go on these raids. The mix of youth, testosterone, and firearms—how can war not transpire?”
The reason is they have no one to reproduce with because of polygamy, so they fight and die.
In hunter-gatherer societies men participate more in child rearing and family, have less time or need to fight, and they’re testosterone decreases. In pastoral societies men are less needed to invest in child rearing because of the climate and environment, and they have more requirements for roaming. Polygamy, higher testosterone, and fighting results.
I believe the technical term for that phenomenon is “tribalism”; Sarah should look it up! And maybe in a follow-up article, she can wonder why we prefer helping out family members over strangers; is there some weird paradox logic to our moral inclusivity of relatives as well?
Can I be the only one who sometimes feels like Social Science is just trolling me?
Slovenian Guest, the problem is that we are not closely related to other members of races, nations or large tribes. The kin selection argument doesn’t work because relatedness drops off exponentially. You share half your genes with your brothers, a quarter with your grandchildren but only an eighth with your cousins, etc. Greg Cochran: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/02/28/brotherhood-of-warmblood/
So the question remains: why are people tribal? Why would someone sacrifice themselves for the race, nation or tribe?
Perhaps it is similar to religion. People sacrifice themselves for ideas, religions and ideologies. The nation is an idea like these.
There are hypotheses that religion is beneficial to fitness, but dying for it seems to be an aberration. In that case it seems to be a mind-virus, a morbid meme.
I expect the true explanations for the mysteries of group selection, altruism and mass warfare, will turn out to be linked.
“I expect the true explanations for the mysteries of group selection, altruism and mass warfare, will turn out to be linked.”
Given that they most famously turn up in social insects (where the genetics are all bent out of shape in just the simple obvious way to solve the instability problem) and in the one species with an enormous Dunbar number, the enormous-Dunbar-number case is probably not simple. (Game theory of limited information, intentional deception, strategic thinking, intentional signaling, bounded rationality, etc. is not, among most people who have thought seriously about it, considered to be easy. I like David Friedman’s take on it: “Problems that stumped John von Neumann go at the bottom of my pile.”)
Graham, social science is often trolling you or just sneeringly speaking power to truth. But this is a real puzzle, not just a propagandist coyly refusing to use the word “tribalism”. It is not a puzzle like black body radiation or the Michelson-Morley experiment ca. 1900 indicating a problem with our fundamental laws of the universe, but it is a puzzle like turbulence or protein folding or the relativistic many-body quantum mechanics of high temperature superconductors or nitrogenase where the known fundamental laws of the universe explode into an incredibly nasty problem of analysis if you try to understand the problem at a useful level of accuracy.
In many other circumstances social scientists merrily speak power to truth by e.g. refusing to consider obviously relevant fundamental rules of the universe like DNA heritability in screamingly obvious situations like kids turning out like their parents. In this case, though, the one who seems to be trolling you is Grurray, writing as though using a name like ‘tribalism’ or ‘turbulence’ or ‘catalysis’ is an explanation in a context where people are in fact trying to understand the phenomenon of turbulence or catalysis or (stably naturally selected) tribalism.
People who were just one generation ago in the bows and arrows and spears era of development now have the AK and an abundance of ammo available. Thank you Mikhail.