Random musings: Does war act as an evolutionary pressure against violence?
In the Ringworld series, there is a race of predatory, sentient cat people called the Kzin. When they get space travel, they reach out and destroy whomever they can fight. This includes several wars with humanity.
And here's the spoiler: The humans and Kzin are kept at the appropriate technological level by a hyper intelligent race of cowards to ensure that neither one wins outright.
Why? To breed aggression out of the Kzin, and various other things to humanity. The Kzin that are on the front-lines die, and its the ones that stayed home that produce children. Continue this for a couple of thousand years, and you wind up with a species that can be reasoned with.
I wonder -- here's the musing -- have our wars done the same? Are we, as a species, simply less warloving than we were in 1066?
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which evidence? Don't we have lower rates of violent crime? I think it was freakonomics showed the murder rate for centuries, and it was dropping nearly consistently.
ReplyDeleteSo -- let me know. I don't know.
Interest. And, certainly, teenagers can be violent and stupid and unthinking. Its a good counter argument, and I'll have to actually give it some thought. :-)
ReplyDeleteI am skeptical of the claim that anyone has centuries of accurate murder rate data.
ReplyDeleteBut the more important issue for this hypothesis is that lots of civilians die in wars. The lowest estimates are about a 1:1 ratio between civilian and combatant deaths. They range as high as 9:1. Wars aren't fought in space, and being a civilian in the area of operations is at least comparably dangerous to bring a combatant in the front lines. Even if aggression is decreasing, it can't be because wars selectively kill combatants.
Murder rates, America: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/06/long-term-trend-in-homicide-rates.html
ReplyDeleteWestern Europe has pretty decent records, so did Rome.
Anyway, yes. While we may have selective force against those that choose to go to war, civilian casualties are a thing. Just not nearly as much in the US.