Warfare, genocide, and ethnic conflict: a Darwinian approach

Abstract

As the 21st century dawns, I reflect on the history of humankind with growing concern about the need to understand the underlying biological and cultural roots of ethnic conflict and warfare. In the many studies of human conflict, innate biological predispositions have been neglected. This article is the third part of a series of seminars for medical residents at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas (see http://adarwinstudygroup.org/). The series starts with in-depth coverage of Darwinian natural and sexual selection, with examples from the domestication of animals and plants and the crisis of antibiotic resistance. The series strives to show how biology has been neglected in the study of the we-they orientation of human behavior, with its devastating consequences. The subject material is profoundly disturbing, as it looks at “human nature” and contrasts the “dark side” of human behavior with the opposite, profoundly caring and loving side.

My overriding premise in this article is that warfare, genocide, and ethnic conflict are not aberrant human nature. They are human nature. The dark side of human nature is fortunately only part of our nature, but it is a terrifying side; it is to be feared as much as the bright side is to be cherished. The dark side has led to heart-rending atrocities over the face of the planet, nonstop, over the course of human history.

Figure 1 shows a cache of unexploded landmines in Iraq, waiting to be exploded as part of the American military's Captured Enemy Ammunition program. The director of the United Nations Demining Program, Patrick Blagden, estimated that upward of 200 million antipersonnel landmines are scattered in 56 countries around the world (1). According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, “Most of the victims are poor farmers, women or often children who are collecting firewood, tending cattle or gathering food in an area that was previously a battleground” (2).

Figure 1.

An Iraqi army explosive ordnance soldier looks at landmines that were placed on top of unexploded ordnance at the Explosive Ordnance Range near Sheibah Log Base, Iraq, on May 6, 2005. Photo by Spc. Kelly Burkhart; reprinted from the US Department of Defense (defenseimagery.mil).

The sobering fact is that violence and warfare are characteristic of virtually all cultures throughout human history. One could even say that they are a trademark of human nature. If this is so, we cannot avoid the frightening question: Does it somehow have an evolutionary logic, that is, could such a tendency actually have been selected for over the course of human evolution?

WE AND THEY

One of the foremost evolutionary biologists of our time, Edward O. Wilson, has argued that a we-they tendency characterizes human nature. In the we-they dichotomy, people are placed inside and outside of an imaginary mental circle. Consider the following examples:

• light skin ↔ dark skin

• men ↔ women

• children: kids like us ↔ kids that are different

• Democrats ↔ Republicans

• heterosexual ↔ homosexual

• street gang #1 ↔ street gang #2

• Christians ↔ Muslims

• pro-choice ↔ pro-life

• rich ↔ poor

Those on the outside are often considered inferior, sometimes even subhuman. The boundary between we and they, however, can shift suddenly under the right circumstances.

George Orwell recounted a remarkable story in his essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (3). He saw a man running for his life half-dressed, holding up his pants with one hand. “I refrained from shooting at him because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’ but a man who is holding up his trousers isn't a ‘Fascist,’ he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to your self.” A mental switch flipped, and the man was instantly reclassified from nonperson to person.

During World War I, German and English troops in December 1914 laid down their arms and celebrated Christmas together. This touching story is told in the movie Joyeux Nöel and in a ballad by John McCutcheon, with the last line: “And on each end of the rifle we're the same” (4) (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Artist Frederice Villiers' imaginative conception of the beginning of the Christmas Truce, from the Illustrated London News of January 9, 1915. Actual photographs of the event show only bewildered soldiers in opposing uniforms.

In Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Jonathan Glover described another equally poignant incident, as told to him by David Spurret, an eyewitness:

In 1985, in the old apartheid South Africa, there was a demonstration in Durban. The police attacked the demonstrators with customary violence. One policeman chased a black woman, intending to beat her with his club. As she ran, her shoe slipped off. The policeman was a well-brought-up young Afrikaner, who knew that when a woman loses her shoe you pick it up for her. Their eyes met as he handed her the shoe. He then left her, as clubbing her was no longer an option (5).

In all three of these examples, a they person moved instantly into the inner circle. We may humanize our pet animals at the same time that we dehumanize other humans!

PREEMPTIVE SELF-PROTECTION

The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world; and long before history began murderous strife was universal and unending. —Winston Churchill (6)

We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount…. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. —General Omar Bradley (7)

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. —Albert Einstein (8)

On the eve of the new millennium, Sir Shridath Ramphal made a chilling prediction at a United Nations conference at Cambridge University: “Humanity remains an endangered species…. On the eve of a new century and a new millennium, we probably have less reason for assurance than our ancestors had in 1900, or even the year 1000, that we are passing on to future generations the right to life” (9).

The Greek writer Thucydides, considered the greatest historian of antiquity, wrote in History of the Peloponnesian War: “What made the war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta” (10).

The only option for self-protection may be to wipe out potentially hostile neighbors first in a preemptive strike. Tragically, you might arrive at these conclusions even if you didn't have an aggressive bone in your body. This Hobbesian trap is one explanation of violent conflict. If neighbors form alliances, they may become entangling, meaning that two parties with no prior animosities can find themselves at war, when the ally of one attacks the ally of the other.

The Roman philosopher Seneca imagined the Earth from space and asked, “Is this that pinpoint which is divided by fire and sword among so many nations? How ridiculous are the boundaries set by mortals” (11). Nearly 20 centuries later the American author Kurt Vonnegut observed that the Earth “looks so clean. You can't see all the hungry, angry earthlings down there—and the smoke and the sewage and trash and sophisticated weaponry” (12) (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Earthrise taken by Apollo 8 astronauts orbiting the Moon in 1968. Photo by NASA.

INGROUP AND OUTGROUP

Charles Darwin's brilliant insight that natural selection explains much of evolution was not well accepted until the early 20th century. We know now that natural selection operates on one or more of several levels, including that of the gene, cell, individual organism, or group of organisms (even an entire species).

Can group selection account for the we-they? Could a warlike predisposition evolve through natural selection? If we discover that it can, we would be one step closer to intervention. As it turns out, a study by Jung-Kyoo Choi and Samuel Bowles, published in the journal Science in 2007, reported the results of a theoretical analysis showing that outgroup hostility and ingroup cohesion can favor the survival of one group of people over another. The abstract of the paper states:

Altruism—benefiting fellow group members at a cost to oneself—and parochialism—hostility toward individuals not of one's own ethnic, racial, or other group—are common human behaviors. The intersection of the two—which we term “parochial altruism”—is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective because altruistic or parochial behavior reduces one's payoffs by comparison to what one would gain by eschewing these behaviors. But parochial altruism could have evolved if parochialism promoted intergroup hostilities and the combination of altruism and parochialism contributed to success in these conflicts. Our game-theoretic analysis and agent-based simulations show that under conditions likely to have been experienced by late Pleistocene and early Holocene humans, neither parochialism nor altruism would have been viable singly, but by promoting group conflict, they could have evolved jointly (13).

This description needs some translation. Figure 4 is an oversimplified drawing I made to explain it. At the top of the drawing, friendly people coexist across boundaries. At the bottom a war-prone group at the left consists of members who are altruistic toward each other and hostile toward outsiders; the analysis showed that under conditions likely to have prevailed in early humans, groups with genes predisposing to this tendency would confer greater reproductive success on their group.

Figure 4.

At top, friendly people coexist across boundaries; at bottom parochial (favoring members of one's own group) groups are more cohesive and xenophobic, and if the other group isn't, the model shows that you spread your genes more effectively into the future. Group selection occurs and is within the explanatory framework of natural selection.

This study throws some desperately needed light on the evolutionary roots of warfare, suggesting that a combination of ingroup cohesion and outgroup hostility can exert a group-selectionist advantage. That is, selection can favor the group, even if it doesn't favor the individual; the warrior who dies in battle testifies to this. Ingroup altruism is shown by the warrior who dies for his countrymen even if he doesn't personally know most of them.

Neither ingroup altruism nor outgroup hostility can provide benefits singly, but together they “share a common fate, with war the elixir of their success.” I found a remarkable observation supporting this conclusion in an article about the Pashtun (Pushtun) people of Afghanistan: “The only time the Pashtun are at peace with themselves is when they are at war” (14).

The Pashtuns (see Figure 5), who live in Afghanistan and Pakistan, have a system of ethics that regards treachery and violence as virtues rather than vices. A man who loses his honor is ostracized, along with his family, and he is obliged to take revenge. He may kill both his daughter's lover and his own daughter.

Figure 5.

Sharbat Gula, a Pashtun young woman featured on the cover of National Geographic in June 1985. Photo by Steve McCurry. Reprinted with permission.

THE ELIXIR OF VIOLENCE

In War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, journalist Chris Hedges argued that war is an elixir that envelops us with a common cause (15). War is a narcotic that can give a social group a common high, a common purpose.

The Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted the Stanford prison experiment in 1971, in which 24 college student volunteers were randomly divided into “guards” and “inmates” and placed in a mock prison environment. Within a week the study was abandoned, as the students were transformed into sadistic guards and emotionally broken prisoners. Zimbardo has compared this to the Abu Ghraib prison event in Iraq (16, 17). In a New York Times interview in 2007, Zimbardo was asked: “So you disagree with Anne Frank, who wrote in her diary, ‘I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart’?” Zimbardo answered yes, he disagreed: “Some people can be made into monsters. And the people who abused, and killed her, were” (18).

“Thrill” attacks on the homeless in US cities took a violent upswing in 2008 and 2009, when the economic recession and rising unemployment caused the ranks of street people to swell. Hate crimes, beatings, rapes, and murders were directed against these vulnerable people. A blurb appeared in an undercover publication announcing an upcoming “hobo convention” and said: “Kill one for fun. We're 87% sure it's legal.” Many homeless people in Las Vegas moved to the flood tunnels beneath the streets, where flash floods occur after heavy rains. Some of these “refugees” stated that they felt safer underground in the dark, even with the risk of floods, because attackers wouldn't seek them out there (19).

Soldiers in battle and rioters in ethnic massacres report that they often kill with gusto, sometimes in a state they describe as “joy” or “ecstasy.” Needless to say, this is frightening. As if to confirm this finding, an interrogator returning from a US prison in Iraq in 2005 stated, “Sadism is always right over the hill. You have to admit it. Don't fool yourself—there is a part of you that will say, ‘This is fun.’” Is this a learned reaction? Or part of our animal nature?

SUICIDE TERRORISM

Suicide attack is an ancient practice, used in early Jewish history and in the Christian Crusades. The Japanese kamikaze of World War II were young, fairly well educated pilots who understood that pursuing conventional warfare would likely end in defeat; when collectively asked to volunteer for special attack transcending life and death, all stepped forward. In the Battle of Okinawa (1945), some 2000 kamikaze rammed fully fueled fighter planes into more than 300 ships, killing 5000 Americans in the most costly naval battle in American history (Figure 6).

Figure 6.

On the morning of May 11, 1945, while supporting the Okinawa invasion, the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill was hit and severely damaged by two kamikazes. The ship suffered the loss of 346 men killed, 43 missing, and 264 wounded. Although badly crippled, Bunker Hill managed to return to Bremerton via Pearl Harbor. Reprinted with permission from the National Archives and Records Administration.

More often than not, suicide terrorists from the Middle East have been shown to have no appreciable psychopathology (mental illness) and are as educated and economically well-off as surrounding populations. Recruiting organizations enlist candidates and provide charismatic trainers who cultivate commitment to die within small cells of three to six members. The 9-11 hijackers, in keeping with these findings, were not children of deprived families, but middle-class citizens of a comparatively wealthy nation (20).

On the other hand, one study has shown a difference between men and women suicide terrorists. Whereas men showed “male-bonded coalitionary violence,” collaborating closely with each other, young women seemed to act on isolated personal motives, often shame from rape or infertility (21).

TORTURE

Concerning Man … he is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. —Mark Twain (22)

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. —Aleksandr Solzhenistyn (23)

Torture may be worse now in Iraq than under Saddam Hussein…. Torture is at appalling levels in Iraq. Everyone, it seems, from the Iraqi forces to the militias to the anti-US insurgents, now routinely use torture on the people they kill. —Manfred Nowak (24)

How can humans torture and kill fellow humans? Ingrid Betancourt, the Columbian-French activist who was rescued in 2008 after 6 years of captivity, said: “I think we have that animal inside of us, all of us…. We can be so horrible to the others. For me it was like understanding what I couldn't understand before, how, for example, the Nazis, how this could happen.”

In the Gulag Archipelago (23), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn chronicled over four decades of Soviet arrest and torture of over 10 million people (Figure 7). Ordinary citizens were arrested, often in the middle of the night, and deported to one of over 475 forced labor camps. There they were repeatedly interrogated and tortured and were permitted no contact with their families. They were often executed if their interrogation was considered unsatisfactory.

Figure 7.

Map showing sites of the Gulags in Russia. Reprinted with permission from the International Historical-Enlightenment Human Rights and Humanitarian Society.

The unprecedented scale of human torture in the Russian Gulags forces a brute confrontation of human nature. What would you think of another planetary intelligence that perpetrated these cruelties on their own kind? How do we explain this to children?

Following is a partial list of the truly horrific torture methods used in the Soviet Gulags:

• Sleep deprivation

• Confinement in upright coffin-sized cell

• Packing in tiny cell with other prisoners so that few prisoners' feet touched the floor

• Starvation

• Humiliation

• Living cloak of blood-feeding bedbugs in a coffin-sized cell

• Standing on testicles with booted foot

• Worst of all: threats to prisoner's family

Humans have justified torture in a variety of ways:

• Claiming moral authority (dehumanization): They are degenerates, infidels, cockroaches.

• Displacing responsibility: We are just carrying out orders.

• Diffusing responsibility: Everybody does it.

• Blaming the victims: They deserved it; they asked for it; they had it coming.

• Renaming torture: We use aggressive interrogation. Does this sound familiar?

Physicians participated to an extraordinary extent in the Nazi exterminations of the 1930s and 1940s. Some 50% of German physicians collaborated in the sterilizing of Jews, infants born with deformities, gays, and patients at mental institutions, all of whom were compared to infectious disease organisms seen through the microscope. Tens of thousands of prisoners lost their lives in medical experiments performed on them, such as freezing with attempts to revive them with warming, hyperbaric compression, wound creation, infectious disease experiments with malaria and typhus, and poisonous chemical warfare experiments. How does one explain the approval and collaboration of so many physicians, who used their skills to torture, kill, and perform inhumane experiments on the prisoners?

I can find no evidence of similar physician participation in the atrocities of the Gulag, perhaps because the Gulag was intended to exterminate political enemies, in contrast to the Nazi extermination of “inferior” humans.

War seems to be open season for rape, often mass rape of thousands. This is not an exaggeration. Read about almost any war, any genocide, and you will gasp at the victimization of women and children. It becomes obvious that this is less about sex than about power, humiliation, and conquest, using sex as a weapon. Men seem to feel a kind of narcotic power in war, at a time when women have lost their male partners. In the ethnic conflict of the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2008, rape was described as the norm by a refugee survivor. Women were raped, brutalized, and murdered. Survivors were abducted by the invaders. This is not just one more form of torture and murder. It is also a reflection of an asymmetry in the way the sexes have treated each other across cultures and through human history. The difference in strength between a man and a woman cannot be the only explanation. There is an underlying evolutionary dynamic that reflects a fundamental difference in gender identity and aggression, encoded in behavioral predispositions.

RELIGION AND SPORTS

Militant Islamist extremism emerged in the 18th century and has gained strength ever since. Christianity has a worse record than Islam; from the Crusades to the Inquisition to the bloody religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, Europe saw even more blood spilled in religious conflicts. Yet if religious differences have catalyzed conflicts, religion cannot be blamed as the cause; human nature must ultimately shoulder the blame. This is far from a trivial distinction. Identity can be a bloody business.

Sporting events provide another instructive example of conflict, even if they are usually friendly confrontations. Norman Mailer has written that war and sports are too close for comfort (25). The stadium and the game have become a theatre where two opposing groups, who at other moments mingle normally, can enjoy the thrills of tribal warfare. Intense emotions are generated in the opposing teams and their supporters, and fights often ensue. Yet sports may offer us a priceless alternative to fighting, as a safe way of venting animosities; they may be an exercise of sorts in recognizing equality in the face of competition. Certainly this is true of the Olympic games and other events, such as musical competitions, in spite of great disappointment on the part of losers. Even if losing seems unfair, which it often is (even a head cold can seriously impair performance), competitions provide an opportunity to compete (i.e., fight) and still treat competitors as equals. Many are good friends, even though they compete against each other. Competition replaces fighting, and the we-they division often dissolves afterward.

MOBS AND MILITIAS

We need look no further than to pre–civil rights America for some of the most dramatic examples of dehumanization, when blacks were hanged and burned publicly in savage rituals. Photographs of the “barbeques,” as they were called, with children looking on, were sent to relatives on postcards.

In some ethnic conflicts, which may or may not be labeled genocide, children have been conscripted into the killing armies. Ishmael Beah, a child ex-soldier himself, chronicled his story, which was published in 2007. He grew up in Sierra Leone, West Africa, and had a nonviolent childhood until age 12, when his world fell apart. His family was murdered in front of his eyes, and he was conscripted into a militant army for 2 years. During this time he learned to murder with impunity and enjoyed torturing his captives before killing them, having learned that he should view them as the ones who killed his family.

Here is a painful example of E. O. Wilson's we-they. Ishmael described burying captives alive after forcing them to dig their own graves. In the course of his rehabilitation at age 15 he lived through flashbacks of the torture he once enjoyed imposing on his victims.

The idea of death didn't cross my mind at all and killing had become as easy as drinking water. My mind had not only snapped during the first killing, it had also stopped making remorseful records, or so it seemed. I joined the army really because of the loss of my family and starvation. I wanted to avenge the deaths of my family. I also had to get some food to survive, and the only way to do that was to be part of the army. It was not easy being a soldier, but we just had to do it…. I am not a soldier any more…. What I have learned is that revenge is not good…. If I take revenge, I will kill another person whose family will want revenge; then revenge and revenge and revenge will never come to an end (26).

Ishmael described his own deviant and disturbed behavior. How do we view such behavior on the scale of an entire culture engaged in genocide or warfare? Where do we draw a line between human nature and deviant individual behavior? No one knows how to draw such a line, but the question must be addressed, because we must try to understand where cultural group behavior ends and sick, disturbed individual behavior begins, even if we can't draw a fine line. Human nature is part of this equation, and we must understand how it has evolved if we ever expect to do anything about it. Otherwise the cycle will go on and on, as Ishmael Beah warned.

GENOCIDE AND ETHNIC CONFLICT

Genocide is the deliberate and often systematic destruction of an ethnic, religious, or racial group. As in warfare, one side often dehumanizes the other side, but unlike warfare, genocide is often waged by one group against another and not the other way around. Some consider the Holocaust the mother of all genocides (Figure 8). A close second was the Gulag, involving systematic capture, punishment, and often execution of millions of supposed political opponents.

Figure 8.

Prisoners in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, Germany. Reprinted with permission from the National Archives and Records Administration.

A survivor of Auschwitz wrote poignantly in 2010:

The fury of the Haitian earthquake, which has taken more than 200,000 lives, teaches us how cruel nature can be to man. The Holocaust, which destroyed a people, teaches us that nature, even in its cruelest moments, is benign in comparison with man when he loses his moral compass and his reason (27).

The Holocaust and Gulag each claimed over 10 million lives, the equivalent of 100 Haitian earthquakes.

In 1994, extremist Hutus in Rwanda slaughtered 8000 Tutsies a day for 100 days, calling the Tutsies “myenzi” (cockroaches). The violence became so maniacal that neighbors and even relatives slaughtered each other. The nightmare is described in lurid detail by Paul Rusesabagina in his excellent documentary, An Ordinary Man, written in 2006 (28).

In an equally gripping book, a near-victim of the Rwandan genocide, Immaculée Ilibagaza, told her story. She was hidden in a bathroom for months, along with a few friends, and given food and water. Hundreds of people surrounded the house, many of whom were dressed like devils, wearing skirts of tree bark, and some had goat horns strapped onto their heads. Their faces were easily recognizable, and “there was murder in their eyes.” They jumped about, waving spears, machetes, and knives in the air. They chanted a chilling song: “Kill them, kill them all, kill the old and the young…. A baby snake is still a snake, kill it, too, let none escape, kill them, kill them all!” Immaculée Ilibagiza commented:

It wasn't the soldiers who were chanting, nor was it the trained militiamen who had been tormenting us for days. No, these were my neighbors, people I'd known since childhood. He was a high school dropout my dad had tried to help straighten out. I saw Philip, a young man who'd been too shy to look anyone in the eye, but who now seemed completely at home in this group of killers. At the front of the pack I could make out two local schoolteachers who were friends of Damascene. I recognized dozens of Mataba's most prominent citizens in the mob, all of whom were in a killing frenzy, ranting and screaming for Tutsi blood. The killers leading the group pushed their way into the pastor's house, and suddenly the chanting was coming from all directions (29).

If you don't think genocide will go on and on, consider Jared Diamond's list of genocides (30):

• Tens of millions of American Indians killed by Spanish and English colonists of North, Central, and South America from the 15th through the 19th centuries

• Over 1 million Armenians killed by Turks in 1915

• Over 10 million Jews killed by Nazis in Occupied Europe between 1939 and 1945

• 8000 Tutsies killed per day for 100 days by extremist Hutus in Rwanda in 1994

• Hundreds of thousands of Darfurians killed since 2003

The New England Journal of Medicine called Darfur the “first genocide of the 21st century” (31). The killing in Sudan became so chaotic in 2007 that Arab tribes began fighting other Arab tribes and rebels began fighting rebels. Armed men who seemed to have no allegiances were attacking anyone who crossed their path. It appeared that in places the we-they becomes so arbitrary that almost anyone else could be considered they.

HUMAN NATURE VERSUS INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

Teenagers in Los Angeles flaunt their gang sign and play with loaded guns. There is a subculture of violence in the toughest neighborhoods, in which gangs are like rival armies. A Jesuit priest in Los Angeles said, “I've buried kids I loved who were killed by kids I love” (32).

If we consider that violence is inherent in human nature, how do we distinguish between normal violent behavior and pathological (sick) violent behavior? Consider these categories: soldiers in war, genocide, violent ethnic conflict, street gangs, terrorist activity, and torture.

Where do we draw the line between normal and abnormal forms of abuse and violence? Unfortunately, this is an unanswered question and a painful confrontation. Many violent individuals are clearly mentally ill. These are singled out and treated, and often incarcerated. Yet many persons who commit violent acts, such as soldiers in warfare, are not considered emotionally ill and may be rewarded for their courage in killing. This is true in ethnic conflicts as well.

A person with no history of violence can be trained to be violent and abusive, if this is systematically carried out in a social setting where it is encouraged and rewarded. The Stanford experiment by Philip Zimbardo showed this, as did the prison experience at Abu Ghraib. Such training can also be effective even if it is abrupt and highly traumatic, as in the case of Ishmael Beah, who became a shadow of his former self, finding it exciting and fun to torture and kill. There are examples of men who have tortured prisoners during their daily jobs and returned in the evening to their families, living as good family men and neighbors (personal communication, Ryan F. Estévez, MD, PhD, MPH). Suicide bombers are often remembered as well respected and well adjusted.

The behavior of other animals is reminiscent of our own. Aggression against a perceived enemy, whether of the same or another species, has evolved in the interest of personal and in-group survival.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), now recognized as a common and tragic result of the emotional trauma of war, is not a human exclusive. It has also been documented in elephants, with symptoms typical of human PTSD: abnormal startle response, apparent depression, unpredictable asocial behavior, and hyperaggression. They were studied by veteran researchers Cynthia Moss and Joyce Poole, among others, who described their startling behavior:

The air explodes with the sound of high-powered rifles, and the startled infant watches his family fall to the ground, the image seared into his memory. He and other orphans are then transported to distant locales to start new lives. Ten years later, the teenaged orphans begin a killing rampage. A scene describing post-traumatic stress disorder in Kosovo or Rwanda? The similarities are striking—but here, the teenagers are young elephants and the victims, rhinoceroses…. Now, studies of human PTSD can be instructive in understanding how violence also affects elephant culture (33).

A raging elephant matriarch can be a frightening sight. Figure 9 shows a matriarch running at full speed after my son, David, our guide, and me, when we were in an open vehicle in Botswana. Her bond group of young and old followed closely behind her. The image was taken with a video camera by David as we struggled to hang onto our seats. The matriarch would have almost certainly overturned the vehicle and tried to kill us had we not outdistanced her. We had startled her and her bond group the day before, when they suddenly discovered us parked in the forest close beside the river they were playing in, and they didn't forget who we were.

Figure 9.

A charging elephant. Photo courtesy of David G. Dimijian.

PREVENTING WAR AND GENOCIDE

The psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan has spent much of his professional life studying ethnic and political strife in the Middle East. He has taught arbitration and conflict resolution to cultural and political leaders, using his skills as a psychoanalyst in a group setting. In Killing in the Name of Identity he wrote:

Despite some pessimism about human nature, especially as it is manifested in large groups, I believed that we could be successful in certain areas of international conflict if we were to spend extended periods of time—as a psychoanalyst spends years in treating an analysand—opening dialogues between enemies and providing actual examples of peaceful coexistence…. I knew we could not change human nature in general, but perhaps we could manage to tame massive aggression in certain locations (34).

In an earlier book, Blood Lines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism, Volkan wrote that most Jewish people share a legacy “to never forget,” and he asked the poignant question: “How do members of a group adaptively mourn past losses … so that they do not induce feelings of anger, humiliation, and the desire for revenge?” (35).

Although Volkan's studies and teaching reflect a state-of-the-art understanding of warfare and ethnic conflict, not once in his books have I found a discussion of evolutionary aspects of human behavior. He covers cultural, developmental, and psychoanalytic aspects of the we-they tendency inherent in human nature, but fails to address the critical need of understanding human nature in a fundamentally biological light.

How did a we-they tendency evolve and become so powerful? Has it had Darwinian adaptive value over the course of our evolution? If so, at what level(s) of selection did it evolve—gene, individual, and/or group?

Much has been written about how to intervene in ethnic conflicts—how to stop genocide from escalating and “spilling out of control”—but the challenge is like sweeping back the ocean with a broom. If we wait until feelings are at the breaking point we may have lost the chance to intervene by arbitration. Instead, I would argue that we are “missing the boat” in the search for a solution to genocide.

TEACHING CHILDREN

The ready availability of lethal weapons has not made violent behavior any easier to manage. An AK-47 is easy to learn to use; in half an hour a 10-year-old can learn the basics and have as much firepower as a Civil War regiment.

In a 2007 article, Hamza Hendawi described Iraqi children playing make-believe war games inspired by the Shiite-Sunni conflict in Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City, Iraq (Figure 10). He wrote:

“Playing such games is normal,” said a schoolteacher in Baghdad. Violence has become part of children's lives. A toy store owner said that most of the children who visit his store are looking for the “biggest and most harmful toy guns. Ninety-five percent of the toys I sell are guns.” A policeman said he tries to discourage his two sons from playing, and talks to them about Shiites and Sunnis living in peace, but “they keep going back to the same game” (36).

Figure 10.

Children play a war game in central Baghdad's Karradah neighborhood. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of the nation's children have been killed or wounded in the over 7 years of war and sectarian strife. Photo by Associated Press/Samir Mizban; reprinted with permission.

We have neglected to teach the evolution of human nature to children—very young children—when they are forming their fundamental ideas about human behavior. We now know that the we-they dichotomy is a feature of human nature in all cultures and across history, and we are beginning to see how it may have evolved through group selection. If we teach children that outgroup hostility is a product of evolutionary logic, there is hope that they will see it as a deep-rooted behavioral predisposition to be always aware of.

The golden opportunity to teach children about the dangers of we-they comes in their school years when they see examples all around. In schools one sees arbitrary social divisions created by the children themselves, based on clothing styles, ethnic identity, academic standing, skin color, sports team, fraternities, sororities, even the kind of car an older child drives.

Is Figure 11 simply a page from a child's coloring book? Take another look. The Nazis used their educational system to demean, even to dehumanize, Jews, by incorporating their xenophobia into the everyday life of their children.

Figure 11.

One page of an antisemitic coloring book widely distributed to children with a portrait of a Jew drawn by the German caricaturist known as Fips. In the upper left hand corner is the Der Stürmer logo featuring a Star of David superimposed over a caricature of a Jewish face. The caption under the star reads: “Without a solution to the Jewish question, there will be no salvation for mankind.” Reprinted with permission from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The views or opinions expressed in this article, and the context in which the images are used, do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of, nor imply approval or endorsement by, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“Look around you,” we can tell them. These are the seeds of dangerous adult conflicts which cross every conceivable boundary. Very graphic examples are in the news every day and in the personal family histories of many. The teaching must be sensitively planned and pursued year after year.

This is no easy task if a child goes home and reports that he is being taught to respect and appreciate all other people, even if a clear distinction is made between respecting another person but not respecting their behavior. What if his family harbors a deep bitterness toward another ethnic or political group? Is he supposed to defy his own family's values? Family intervention may become a necessary part of the educational challenge.

It may take generations before the reality sinks in that the dark side of human nature is to be feared and taken seriously—in everyone, including you and me. Our large brains are unique in nature in being endowed with the ability to understand what's wrong with them and to work to overcome destructive behaviors that have been chiseled into them by natural selection. “Nature, Mr. Allnutt, is what we were put in this world to rise above.”

Our very nature embodies our hope.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

In The Youngest Science, Lewis Thomas argued that civilization would be much improved if men retired for 100 years and allowed women to run everything.

I am, in short, swept off my feet by women, and I do not think they have yet been assigned the place in the world's affairs that they are biologically made for. Somewhere in that other X chromosome are coils of nucleic acid containing information for a qualitatively different sort of behavior from the instructions in the average Y chromosome. The difference is there, I think, for the long-term needs of the species, and it has something to do with spotting things of great importance (37).

I would like to see Thomas's wish come true. There is a caveat, however. If violent traits are more characteristic of men than of women, and if they are represented in genetic predispositions toward violence, how did those traits evolve? If they evolved by female choice (intersexual selection), then women have played a role. Could women have consciously or unconsciously (or both) favored mating with men who were strong and more aggressive, thus contributing to the spread of such predisposing genes, especially in their sons?

Or instead, did male-male competition (intrasexual selection) favor violence in men? Could men who were more inclined to be violent have more reproductive success than other men? Could both inter- and intrasexual selection have worked together to predispose men to violence? In addition, there is still the possibility of group selection, as discussed above, contributing to 1) ingroup cohesion and altruism and 2) outgroup hostility, in both men and women.

Powerful reasons exist, then, to consider evolutionary predispositions to warfare, genocide, ethnic conflict, and any other kind of we-they segregation. If these innate predispositions exist, we must acknowledge and understand them to combat their devastating consequences. We have come full circle to the three-tiered bridge of biology, culture, and development. We disregard any of these levels at our peril.

Humans bond, love, spend a lifetime giving to others, yet can also be cruel and commit atrocities on a vast scale. The paradox of a bright side and a dark side coexisting in human nature is deeply buried in ignorance, ignorance born of turning our head the other way when there are rich opportunities to understand the evolutionary origins of the paradox.