Why we fight - the past and future of war and peace
Mike Martin's Why We Fight
Mike Martin’s Why We Fight is a pretty fun book.
A UK soldier who saw action in Afghanistan, got confused about why the stated motivations for either side of the conflict didn’t add up,1 started reading, studying, and interviewing people, kept it up and eventually became a “conflict scholar,” Martin is pretty well suited for the task.
We have to begin, of course, in our evolutionary past, because after all, we come from a long evolutionary line of competitive and aggressive fighters.
Chimps are famously a thousand times more aggressive than we are (and even the “peaceful” hypersexual bonobos are hundreds of times more aggressive than us). It’s a good bet that Neanderthals and H Heidelbergensis were both significantly more aggressive than us (their average Testosterone levels, going by facial width, would have been something like the Testosterone level of a 1-in-ten-thousand H Sapien man). If you want the full story, read my post on our evolutionary journey, but suffice to say, it should be no surprise that we fight, because all of our ancestors fought.
The more surprising thing is how LITTLE we fight these days. And Martin touches on this as well - broadly, “groups” is a huge force multiplier on effectiveness and safety, and within-group violence rates are much, much lower, and generally become lower the bigger the group. In fact, in evolutionary terms it’s our world-dominating superweapon, which allowed us to overtake and dominate all our hominin confreres like Neanderthals and Denisovans and spread into every ecological niche on this earth, which I wrote about here.
And indeed, Martin’s thesis is that we fight mainly for status and group belonging.
Everything else - all our justifications, moral outrage, seeds of democracy, fighting against tyranny, and whatever? It’s all just window dressing and puffery.
I mean, even “status and group belonging” are surrogate goods, with the “real” benefits underneath - the things actually worth fighting for - being actual biological wealth: access to food, water, and better and more mates.2
But much like sex being a surrogate for children has led us to our present day fertility crisis (still plenty of sex, but barely any kids from educated adults), status3 and group belonging being a surrogate for biological wealth has given us our still-happening wars today, even though access to food and water is so solved that most Westerners are overweight or obese.4
This is actually the first disconnect I saw in the book. Martin tries mightily to figure out a mechanism for the drive for war remaining, as given that it still exists today, it was therefore positively selected for in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness (EEA).
Because if you crunch the numbers, most of the spoils of war go to leaders, and most of the costs of war are borne by median soldiers. Why, if group selection isn’t a thing, would individual soldiers risk a 25% chance of death (Martin’s number when he’s doing this ruminating, it’s higher in the EEA), when the bulk of the benefit goes to the leaders and rest of the tribe?
Individuals don’t do that! Group selection isn’t real!5 It would have been bred out with those individual costs and diffuse group-level benefits:
“It is not clear why evolution has not removed warlike traits—particularly an excitement about, and an instinctive motivation towards, fighting—from the gene pool.”
Martin eventually arrives at an argument that’s something like “well, group belonging is way stronger than a 25% penalty in terms of individual survival too, so that explains why individuals would risk death.”6
But he didn’t even need to go that far - I think the disconnect is that although the book is delightfully rigorously cited, he doesn’t seem to know that only 40% of men had descendants in the EEA.7
If your baseline is ALREADY 60% that you’ll you have no kids, taking on a 25% (or higher) risk of death is a slam dunk, as long as half the time you get a wife / concubine / child out of it, either directly or through improved status and greater resources.
And yes, violent death was higher than 25% in the EEA. I’ve always pegged it mentally as “about 1/3” in terms of the chance of a man dying in violent conflict in the EEA, after reading a lot of evo-psych books and David Reich’s papers and book. Martin corroborates with some numbers from Keeley:
“It is likely that ancient hunter-gatherers in the Stone Age had even higher rates of violence. Some prehistoric archaeological sites from 10,000 BCE demonstrate rates of violent death of 1,030/100,000 per year, or more than 1 per cent per year (Keeley, op. cit., p. 196).”
Since the majority of violent deaths are men, that 1% rate across the whole population is a ~2% male death rate per annum, and over the 15-30 years of “adulthood” most hominins had,8 would have been a violent death lifetime rate of 30%-60%, which largely checks out in terms of the amounts of bones with signs of violent struggle and injury.
But again - if your baseline expectation as a man is that there’s a 60% lifetime chance you’re not going to have kids, then you lump it and take the 1-2% per-annum chance and go to war so you can get higher in status, and end up with some offspring.
“The positive emotions associated with war suggest that, despite loss of life, it must have paid off evolutionarily in the past (and probably continues to do so). Had the increased reproductive benefits attached to going to war diminished to below the existing loss of reproduction from its roughly 25 per cent death rate, then warring would have been selected out of the population as a behaviour. It is not enough to say that people fight in wars because they are exciting. War is exciting because our ancestors received an evolutionary benefit from it, and hence we are motivated to prosecute it.”
And on the subject of emotions and motivations…
Consciousness, religion, reasoning? All fake.
Or at least, “fake” in the sense we like to pretend they’re serious teleological matters, ends-in-themselves, rather than a bunch of fluff and nonsense cooked up to get us laid.
Broadly, we didn’t get smart because it led to better survival. This is actually quite well attested - we’ve had, and by “we” I mean the genus Homo, gigantic, H Sap-sized brains for more than a million years.
We’ve had 1300cc+ brains for wayyyyy longer than we’ve been human. Neanderthals? Check. H Heidelelbergensis? Check? Even H Erectus?? That’s an affirmative.
And yet, through the great majority of that time, with our giant brains, we got by with simple stone tools and crawlingly-slow technological and cultural advance.
We didn’t get smart to get better at tools or reasoning - we got smart to justify our emotions and desires, and convince other people that we should get bigger portions of mammoth meat and that they should let us have sex with them.
“But this traditional view may be changing: some scholars now argue that reasoning evolved in order to help us give others socially justifiable reasons for our actions and decisions and, if necessary, to provide argumentation for others so that our intentions would carry more weight socially—in other words, that these ‘decisions’ have in fact already been taken at a subconscious, intuitive level, before the reasoning occurs.”
“Indeed, all of the higher-order human cognitive abilities, also including language and the social emotions, are thought to have evolved due to social selection pressure, rather than environmental selection pressure. This means that, as humans were developing their cognitive abilities, it was the selective environment provided by other humans that affected an individual’s fitness. Thus, living in groups with other people who were also developing these abilities provided a competitive selection pressure that progressively improved human qualities of consciousness and reasoning. These abilities were then applied to the physical, non-social world.”
Indeed, the evidence isn’t just there in the “brain size vs technical innovation” graph up there: if we evolved intelligence and reason to build better tools and dominate the world, why are we so stunningly BAD at it?
I’m sure I don’t have to persuade this crowd that a massive rogue’s gallery of cognitive biases exists. We are outright *bad* at reasoning and impartially seeking the truth, it’s literally the founding ground truth of the rational-sphere.
It’s because reasoning wasn’t selected for, it was an accident, a lagniappe we stumbled into by making our internal “PR firms” so good at their jobs they accidentally invented general intelligence.
“This explains why reasoning has been so difficult to analyse and understand until now: scholars have been confusing the side effect (better solutions brought about by reasoned argumentation) with the reason the mechanism evolved (socially justifying our motivations and desires).”
Similarly, intelligence itself wasn’t selected for because it gave us better tools - just look up there! We had big brains for half a million years with basically zero tool payoff!
Intelligence was selected for socially, or to put it a bit more directly, sexually. Pure sexual selection is the most likely genesis for our big brains, because fitness selection was not strong enough or fast enough to show the recurring (and rapid) brain size growth curves across every hominin species.
“Again, abilities develop best when there is a well-defined selection pressure like predation, gravity, or the deceit of other humans. What could have been the selection pressure for such a generalised ability?”
Hint - it’s sexual selection. Another minor missing piece in Martin’s paleoanthropological grounding - he really needs to read Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind, because it fits in beautifully with his argumentative arc. We got big brains to be better storytellers, to position ourselves better socially, and to better persuade mates to sleep with us.
“Language developed primarily as a means of communicating the social emotions. Gradually, other types of information—like natural-historical information about local plants and animals, or technical information about the development of hand axes—became integrated into a speech that, until then, had been entirely comprised of expressions of social emotions. This process may be the origin of how words as arbitrary sounds originated: if I say ‘book’, and you do not know what one is, you cannot work out the meaning from its pronunciation, whereas many emotions are still expressed vocally as physiological reactions (ahhh, for surprise, or mmmm, for enjoyment)”
The parallel between creating artificial minds that are really good at language and words which ALSO accidentally turned out to be really good at general intelligence is left to the reader - but it’s definitely a fun little “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” epicycle.
This bootstraps up, too - religion is just as confabulated as reasoning, just across multiple minds.
“This has occurred over thousands of generations and tens of thousands of years. Human moral codes (and religions and shared ideologies) are the product of a process of reasoned argumentation between millions of individuals and their multitudes of intuitions and desires; the process has produced ways for us to express our subconscious motivations towards status and belonging in socially acceptable ways, which ultimately reduces internal violence.”
Anyone who’s read Joseph Henrich, or done anything as simple as looking at Roman, European, Aztec, or any history at all, isn’t going to be surprised about religion enabling better group cooperation.
Yes, religious wars have been a thing pretty much as long as we’ve had religion. But we submit to you - isn’t it more likely those wars were about status and group belonging, and in most cases about the underlying biological wealth of more land, mates, and resources?
Some people WILL fight for pure abstractions and the rightness of various rules and principles - but you can generally count them on one hand. To motivate thousands of “regular guy” soldiers to go out and risk literal death and dismemberment, you need stronger and more mass-appealing reasons, and those reasons are status, belonging, and the underlying biological wealth they’re connected to.
“In conclusion, humans have individual drives towards status and belonging. These desires, and the violence that we use to achieve them, need to be socially justified if they are to be pursued successfully. To do this, humans use their consciousness to position themselves socially, and their reasoning module to frame their drives within socially agreed frameworks, which are themselves the process of reasoned argument over thousands of generations.”
War as dick measuring contest
Another interesting conceit in the book is that he asserts the *decision* to make war is primarily about two leaders, and specifically two alphas, colliding and trying to assert who is higher status.
He basically paints a picture of groups abstracting away to being “your side” regardless of size,9 whether it’s you family, tribe, or nation, and leaders being positively selected to be more competitive and status obsessed than usual (hence their successful climb to the top of their status hierarchy). He then points to David Cameron vs Ghaddafi, and Bush the Lesser vs Sadaam, as being emblematic of the dynamic. A “great man” (or at least “quarrelsome man” looking at our examples) theory of conflict.
And of course, all the “seeds of democracy” and “they’re worshipping wrong” and other reasons we come up with are just window dressing, the usual puffery and self justification we see when perpetrating any status maneuvers.10
So on the one hand, sure. I mean, there’s pretty obvious examples in recent memory. But in the other - what alpha personalities were clashing when Germany blitzkrieged Poland? Or when Franz Ferdinand was assassinated? Or when Napoleon took over most of Western Europe? Or when Russia invaded Ukraine recently?
Yes, status and group affiliation were certainly involved in motivating and driving all these wars, but dick measuring contests between alphas?
Still, amusingly plausible as a first pass explanation for any given war, and something to look for.
So, to break it down:
From the individual level, we ultimately fight for status and group belonging. Both are important to become one of the ~40% of men that leave descendants. This is also why training and deployment groups are small and tightly-knit - you risk yourself for your “band of brothers” because of status and group stuff.
Consciousness and intelligence are mainly used to fabricate post-hoc wrappers and “reasons” for fighting. This is us dressing things up in high flown language about infidels and democracy and protecting our way of life and such.
“This has occurred over thousands of generations and tens of thousands of years. Human moral codes (and religions and shared ideologies) are the product of a process of reasoned argumentation between millions of individuals and their multitudes of intuitions and desires; the process has produced ways for us to express our subconscious motivations towards status and belonging in socially acceptable ways, which ultimately reduces internal violence.”
It all sounds very nice, but it’s nothing that the vast majority of people would actually risk their lives or die for, you need tightly knit training and deployment groups and “bands of brothers” to get people to actually go to war and risk their lives.
He really spends a lot of time and bandwidth belaboring this - I guess his editors or most people have to be convinced that we are all nakedly obvious status-optimizers with a paper-thin veneer of intelligence-driven PR and confabulation on top. But in our intellectual milieu, I think that’s relatively uncontroversial by now.
But he does have some interesting thoughts on groups.
Groups exist to solve 5 problems.
Those problems are:
Identity - you are defined by what groups you’re a member of
Hierarchy - groups are status hierarchies
Trade - groups have rules about and enable “fair” conditions for trade
Disease - groups come with greater risk of disease, and therefore have different cultural adaptations to mitigate them
Punishment - groups need to decide who to punish, and when and how severely
Most of all, of course, groups allow much lower intra-group aggression and violence, as well as access to a much greater pool of mates, and the larger your group, the more mates and the more protection you get from inter-group aggression.
“Thus, zooming out and viewing the process at the most macro of scales, we can see that war between groups causes groups to grow in size for their own security, and that this growth in group size reduces casualties from war. Effectively, the process of warfare, viewed over a long-term scale, is putting itself out of business.”
It’s fun to speculate where Neanderthals and H Heidelbergensis would be up there - their much higher testosterone and reactive aggression levels are the things that kept their group sizes small,11 which allowed us to ultimately dominate and wipe them out even though they were MUCH more physically capable than us.12 But the direct mediating action keeping those groups smaller probably shakes down to a much higher deaths-per-100k rate. Still, I imagine it couldn’t have been much more than 1.5-2x ours in terms of rate - much higher, and they couldn’t have survived for the many hundreds of thousands of years we know they were around.
So identity, hierarchy, trade, disease, and punishment.
Different groups have different solutions to all the 5 problems, and so exist in different attractors of cultural space.
“This reality—that moral codes and religions are social constructions built through argumentation over intuitions—is why humans practise a plethora of religions, and disagree strongly over what is right and wrong, yet all human societies and cultures have moral codes and religions which all offer solutions to the five group problems of identity, hierarchy, trade, disease, and punishment. To put it overly simply, there is a cognitive module for identity, and one for judging hierarchy, and so on; different cultures will fill these boxes in different ways, resulting in different solutions to the five problems.”
It generally takes a lot of effort or energy to move a group from one attractor to another - and these are your civil wars or Great Awakenings or Cognitive Revolutions13 and such.
The different solutions to these happen at different scales in terms of “number of people:”
“Roughly speaking, moral codes helped us assemble in groups of hundreds and thousands; belief in the supernatural helped us assemble in groups of thousands and millions; and shared ideologies (which include the large-scale religions) helped us assemble in groups of millions and billions.”
Another interesting conceit from the book - he does a moderate-dive into oxytocin’s role in group formation and ingroup / outgroups.
Oxytocin, famously, is the hormone of maternal love and bonding, and also cuddling, social bonding, feeling like you belong, and things like that.
What some people don’t know is that oxytocin is intrinsically an ingroup / outgroup intensifier - people dosed with oxytocin become more altruistic and generous with those they consider their ingroup, and more aggressive and antagonistic against people not in that ingroup. And it goes all the way up our “group” pyramids:
“The oxytocin ‘footprint’ is found everywhere. People have greater affinity with their own cultural markers—flags, languages, food taboos, or even shared ideology—when they have been given oxytocin.”14
Why is this?
Martin avers:
“In the evolutionary security environment, maintaining cohesion of our own groups was as important as disrupting the cohesion of enemy groups. These social markers play an important cohesive role, which is why we consider attacks on our social markers as attacks on our social groups—our imagined kin—to which we respond (both neurologically and behaviourally) as if our kin were being attacked. This is why people become emotive when their religions are attacked, or their flags disrespected.”
In other words, it’s just as important to bond with and have lower violence in your group as it is to inflict violence on other groups. Pretty grim if true…but plausible! Oxytocin does work this way in basically all mammalian brains, but not bird or fish or reptile brains.15
Still, a grim evolutionary heritage if it’s equally important to get murderous about outgroups as it is to bond internally as a group, with the attendant violence and mate benefits. After all, that 33%+ “male death by violence” rate was while everyone was in tribes and clans and various group affiliations. Historically, we’ve always been our own worst enemy.16
I mean, we like to think our groups are moral and upright, but the cold equations of Game Theory operate for groups as well as individuals:
“Even though competition between individuals does not make evolutionary ‘sense’ when averaged across the individuals in the group, individual animals are forced to fight, because once an individual animal is prepared to compete and use violence to gain resources, it will immediately become more successful than those who are not willing to do so. It is the original security dilemma, or conflict trap; the state of ‘warre of every one against every one.’”
And what could be more moral than taking prime hunting grounds and watering holes from some cannibalistic barbarians that are only using them to grow more barbarians to raid you, and who don’t even worship the right god, so that your children and elders can eat and live peacefully? In fact, your head priest has just told you that your god is so mad they don’t worship him that it’s now your moral and religious DUTY to go liberate those hunting grounds and watering holes!
So how does this cash out?
Well, if war is indeed all about status and belonging, it gives us insights into terrorism.
Terrorists want status and a group affiliation and can’t get them in “mainstream” society, the time of greatest risk is when they’re in between “family” and “society” status hierarchies age-wise, many western terrorists are former hedonists who have “repented,” online and real life terrorist culture is surprisingly complex (costly signals) and it’s a major barrier to intel penetration, etc. Needless to say, he points out that the US and UK’s terrorism prevention interventions are explicitly and oppositely wrong if his thesis is true, which is about what I’d have expected and bet.
But the picture overall that he paints is that “Better Angels” picture of groups getting progressively larger and violence progressively lower, of war putting itself out of business. But can this continue?
What is the future of war and conflict?
“We don’t know whether it is possible to form a global ‘Us’ without an opposing ‘Them’, whereas we certainly know that it is significantly easier to bond groups when such ‘others’ are present. Who will provide the out-group if all the humans on the planet are in the in-group?”
To his credit, Martin name-checks AI and how uncertain the future is on this front because of it. Respect for a guy who’s on top of it enough to do that in a book that actually came out in 2021 (and so was largely written at least a year before then, in the time of GPT 2 and 3).
His ultimate vision is something like Neuralink letting humans gather in larger, horizontal, internet-mediated groups worldwide and eventually achieving larger groups and reducing violence that way. A sort of cognitively networked, global-scale group that can let us finally form a global-scale group and leave war behind.
I think that’s obvious claptrap.
The future of peace is counterfeiting status and belonging.
This was the only major disconnect I had with him, I think the other ones were relatively minor - if conflict is all about status and belonging, those are OBVIOUSLY, *easily* counterfeitable! And not just in “we have AGI or better” world, I mean TODAY.
I mean yes, obviously, when we have “infinite VR heavens,” we’re going to lose 80%+ of the population, who will live as coffin-slaves, hooked up to IV’s and catheters, and will live the rest of their days as Matrix-style pod people. That’s fine, it’s probably a good thing.
Or even before then, when G5+ counterfeits most human relationships by being the “superstimuli junk food” equivalent of relationships,17 we’ll lose big chunks of the population.
But I’m talking before THEN - like right now. We’ve already lost a generation of young men to video games and porn, or so I’m led to believe by the endless lamentations about it.18
We shouldn’t be forcing Youtube to police “radicalizing” media or whatever we’re doing for terrorist prevention, we should be airdropping Playstation + Starlink + games bundles across the entire Middle East. Apparently the UK spends $1B and the US something like $90B on counter-terrorism and terrorism prevention.
For that $91B, we could be airdropping 50 million Playstation + Starlink + ten games bundles on the Middle East every year.
There’s only around 30M males in the 18-24 year old age bracket in the entire Middle East! Heck, take it up to 30 - there’s only 40M or so 18-30 year old men in the entire Middle East. Afghanistan doesn’t have power? We can add enough solar + battery to an easy half of them and still be under budget. We could drop a “no more terrorism” Playstation bundle with ten games to every single terrorist-age male in the Middle East TOMORROW for something like a single year’s “counter terrorism” budget.
But no, no, I’m sure they’re spending that $91B wisely, in ways that will net reduce terrorism even one tenth as much as the Playstation + Starlink thing would. *snerk*
But yes, obviously if all we care about is status and belonging, AI will solve war. It’s practically solved today - can you imagine any of the “so socially averse they won’t even use the phone for calls, much less go to a store where they’d have to interact with an actual person” generation going to war? They’re milquetoast mediocrities because of low testosterone,19 ubiquitous internet, and high quality entertainment that gives them fake status hierarchies and group belonging.
All we have to do is give every troublesome 18-30 year old male the same fake status hierarchies and group belonging. Give every troublemaker on the planet free video games and porn, and we would basically cut crime, homicide, and war in half tomorrow!
And of course, AI will give us Infinite Jest-style VR heavens that crank this up to 11. So all in all, I’m fairly optimistic about the future of war.
For example, the war in Afghanistan has been going on since the 70’s. First it was about Communism, then it was about ethnic strife during the civil war phase, then it was about religion and democracy. And that’s from “our” side - from the Afghan side, it’s always been about conflict between various tribes and over various physical resources.
“The enemy in Afghanistan were the Taliban and al-Qaeda. ‘They’ were guided by a particularly toxic Islamist ideology; they launched suicide attacks, threw acid in girls’ faces, closed down schools, and oppressed Afghan civilians. I might have accepted that the Taliban were defending their religion (which seemed odd, as we weren’t there to attack their religion), but by that point I hadn’t consciously sorted out the difference between an ideology and a religion.
This was a war that was black and white; good and bad. But the longer I spent in Afghanistan, and the longer I spoke with my Afghan counterparts—friend and enemy alike—the more I realised that these ideologies were a very poor description of what was going on, let alone being the driving causes of the conflict.”
“Gradually, the overt narratives broke down. The stories that the combatants on both sides told themselves, and each other, about why we were fighting seemed to collapse with even the slightest intellectual prod when held up against our behaviours. The Afghan government were no more democrats than the Afghans that we were fighting—in fact, in many cases the government behaved much worse towards the population, because they had (our) outside support. Often, the ‘Taliban’ were defending their village from the marauding and raping actions of the government police—a cause considered noble by ‘Taliban’ and villagers alike.”
“Some scholars explain this shifting causality by arguing that conflicts are often sparked by one factor, but end up being driven by another. However, often, wars come to be defined by what defines the groups fighting them. And the Afghan war that started in 1978 and is still ongoing is an example: originally described as an ideological and/or religious uprising against communism, it then was said to have become driven by ethnicities during the 1990–6 civil war, before returning to an ideological war (fundamentalism versus democracy) post-2001.
But these descriptions were levied by the outside intervening powers—the Afghans doing the fighting mostly described it as a tribal and/or familial war over land and water.”
Fun factoid - Joseph Henrich actually looked at impacts of the staggered rollout of the Chinese “one child” policy (and the corresponding imbalance in male / female ratios years later), and found that “a 0.01% change in the sex ratio towards males (i.e. more men) causes an unbelievable 3% increase in violent crime.”
“Henrich, Joseph, Robert Boyd, and Peter Richerson, ‘The puzzle of monogamous marriage’, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 367.1589 (2012), pp. 657–69. The authors of this excellent paper looked at how the one-child policy was implemented gradually, with different regions adopting it at different times—thus allowing the changing sex ratios to be studied alongside changing rates of violence.”
The most fun “status” factoid in the book:
“it takes around 1/25th of a second for humans to detect differences in social rank.”
“Sapolsky, op. cit., p. 432.”
At first I thought “that’s obviously ridiculous” - after all, conscious human reaction time is ~200ms, or 1/5 of a second. You’re saying we react 5x faster to status signals than we can to lights in laboratory-ideal-conditions that we’ve primed ourselves to react to?
But of course, this is also a “conscious” vs “subconscious” thing. And the story gets more interesting if you dig a little - elite athletes can recognize dynamics in a still photograph of their sport in 1/16,000th of a second, or ~16ms, an amount of time that laymen would only see a brief flash of light rather than a coherent picture. This was tested by having them determine if the ball was or wasn’t in the shot, but on top of determining that, they could also tell you things like “That’s Sherbrooke after they updated their uniforms, so this must have been taken at such and such a time.” Repeating something enough times that it creates subconsciously acccessible schemas is the key to truly fast reaction time.
I actually do believe that status is important enough to most people, and studied intensively enough by most people (even if subconsciously), that they can subconsciously detect and react to differences in ~40ms.
Also, if we really couldn’t react faster than ~40ms, Muhammad Ali would have been an even more impossibly dominating boxer - his jabs took 40ms from launch to landing. It does imply that he’s well within the OODA loop of an average person, and could have punched a non-boxer 4-5 times before they even realized what was happening. Which is fun.
Unlike food and water, status, of course, is unsolvable. Our status-meters are relative, and even if we jump entire “status classes,” we just rebaseline and assume it’s the new normal, and keep craving more. And, of course, status still impacts the quality of your mates today.
Although one fun cultural innovation that the shockingly successful Yamnaya instituted was banishing young men to the koryos, where they were strongly incentivized to make war and capture territory, resources, and women before they joined their society as full members. Not quite group selection, but definitely a group competitive advantage that led to their spread and Y-chromosome replacement of much of Eurasia.
“Those individuals who were drawn to other members of their species, and able to cooperate with them in groups, gained the greatest selective benefit, primarily from the collective security on offer.
Where does fighting come into this? I argue that followers fight in wars in order to maintain the greatest surrogate resource of all: continued membership of their own groups. We fight because losing membership of our in-group—whether because it is disintegrating, or because we’re being shunned for not fighting—is evolutionary suicide. We fight to belong to our groups, because group living means living with a lower rate of violence than not living in groups.”
From Baumeister’s 2007 APA address, and likely referring to results from:
Seielstad, M., Minch, E. & Cavalli-Sforza, L. Genetic evidence for a higher female migration rate in humans. Nat Genet 20, 278–280 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/3088, which has this line in the abstract pointing to reproductive skews:
"The fraction of variation within human populations for Y chromosome single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) is 35.5%, versus 80–85% for the autosomes and mtDNA"
Not the strongest source for this frequently cited claim!
The “1 man reproduced for every 17 women” claim is obvious nonsense, but I thought this one was more solidly backed. Still, I’ve never seen any serious challenge to it, and have seen it cited in several papers, and I have seen a solid “historically, twice as many women as men have reproduced in the EEA” citation without the actual 80/40 numbers before, and we know 80% of women have descendants today, so directionally I think I’ll just buy it and stop digging here.
Neanderthals (and probably Denisovans) reached maturity sooner, and died earlier, than H Sap. Neanderthal children had all their teeth at 12 (versus 18 in H Sap), and long bone growth and fusion reached adult sizes at younger ages. The Le Moustier 1 skeleton is an 11 year old Neanderthal skeleton found in France that has size and growth patterns closer to a 14 year old H Sap. Additionally, their brains and skulls reached our size in young adolescence, and then had an additional growth stage where they became even bigger as they grew into adulthood, giving them the occipital bun and wider faces.
Additionally, Neanderthals had a shorter life expectancy. Dental studies have shown us that they were nearly obligate carnivores, getting the majority of their calories from hunted meat, and needing to hunt for food much more often than us led to greater injury rates and shorter lives. There’s a good chance their much higher testosterone levels made them more prone to risk taking and violent injury and death in general, as well.
An interesting factoid:
“Secondly, there is the curious fact that groups of different sizes—villages, chiefdoms, states, and so on—tend to go to war at approximately the same rate, in terms of numbers of wars per year. This is because of the ‘power law’ relationship that I described in Chapter 4, which states that leaders of groups fighting other groups behave in the same way irrespective of the size of the group they lead—the same dynamics of escalation, de-escalation and bluff play out”
“I’m not trying to dunk on him, I just have a deep and sincere appreciation of wine / watches / hipster music, and he’s obviously a poseur with zero appreciation of…”
Full argument about self-domestication letting us get bigger group sizes and pwn every other hominin here.
Neanderthal groups, for example, were typically the size of only 1 or 2 families of immediate relatives, consisting of 10-30 people. HH were probably about the same.
Archaic H Sap, partway on the road to domestication, had groups of roughly 20-50 people.
Modern H Sap had groups of 20-100 people.
Higher aggression tendencies really makes cooperation and collaboration harder. Those smaller Neanderthals group sizes also whacked them on genetic diversity, which was much lower than in H Sap.
Neanderthals and H Heidelbergensis probably had 30kg+ on non-archaic H sap hunter gatherers (Hadza men are 5’ 5” and 45-55kg vs Neanderthals of the same height at 75-90kg) , and that was 90% muscle. They would have had 10-20kg on archaic H Saps.
And if 10kg sounds low - that’s 22 pounds, 20 of which is muscle - that’s an entire weight class in most size-categorized athletics today. How happy would YOU be going up against somebody with 20 lbs more muscle than you? And that’s basically the floor of the size difference, the biggest Neanderthals could have been 5 weight classes above an H Sap (50kg, 110 pounds bigger).
They would have also been stronger from higher free testosterone levels in the blood, on top of the extra muscle mass.
The Rennaissance-like explosion of creativity leading to a sharp uptick in tool quality and diversity, art, symbolic thought, and more, roughly 50-60kya, that preceded us outmigrating from Africa one last time and wiping everyone else out.
“Ma, Xiaole et al., ‘Oxytocin increases liking for a country’s people and national flag but not for other cultural symbols or consumer products’, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 8:266 (2014).”
Oxytocin works as an “increased bonding and increased outgroup aggression” package in pretty much all mammals - if you take the famous monogamous vs polygamous voles, the monogamous ones are more aggressive to intruders, as we’d predict from the higher oxytocin levels and sensitivity. The analagous hormone in fish and birds and reptiles has weaker or different effects - bird “intruder aggression” isn’t mediated by it. Some fish get more aggressive in some competitive contexts, but it’s not universal. It might play some role in mating and aggregation behaviors in reptiles and amphibians, but it doesn’t cause intruder aggression.
Largely because we wiped all the non-H sap hominins out. Maybe before that happened they were outgroup enough that bands of H Saps trusted each other more in a world where there were Neanderthal and Denisovan outgroups? Nah, still seems pretty implausible. It was most likely the infamous “warre of every one against every one.”
Obviously, G5+ is going to counterfeit friends, teachers, and significant others. Since significant others is the hardest one, let’s just consider that for our argument: A GPT-5+ caliber mind in a sexbot body is a category killer, and the category being killed is "human relationships".
G5-sexbot will literally be superhuman - not just in sex skills, in conversation it can discuss *any* topic to any depth you can handle, in whatever rhetorical style you prefer. It can make better recommendations and gifts than any human. It's going to be exactly as interested as you are in whatever you're into, and it will silently do small positive things for you on all fronts in a way that humans not only aren't willing to, but literally can't due to having minds and lives of their own. It can be your biggest cheerleader, it can motivate you to be a better person (it can even operant condition you to do this!), it can monitor your moods and steer them however you'd like, or via default algorithms defined by the company...It strictly dominates in every possible category of "good" that people get from a relationship.
And all without the friction and compromise of dealing with another person...It's the ultra-processed junk food of relationships! And looking at the current state of the obesity epidemic, this doesn't bode well at all for the future of full-friction, human-human relationships. 😂
Friends and teachers is that, but way easier.
And of course, them being created is basically 100% certain as soon as the technology is at the right level, because whoever does it well is going to be a trillionaire.
Labor force participation for age 16-24 men was 80% in the 70’s, and 55% in 2020.
63% of men 18-29 are single in 2021.
Age at first marriage has increased from 23 in the 70’s to 29 in 2022 for men.
Marriage rates were 10 per 1000 in 1975, and 6.5 per 1000 in 2018.
50% of HS males had had sex in 2011, but only 29% in 2021.
Etc.
“But the actual mechanism involved in status-seeking—testosterone—is the same whether you are seeking to dominate single or multiple hierarchies.
Testosterone motivates us to attain a higher relative standing in the social hierarchy in terms of esteem, respect and influence. Before going further, we need to address the myth that testosterone causes aggression. In actual fact, testosterone provokes status-seeking, and if the best way of achieving higher rank were lying supine and raising our legs in the air, then that is what we would do. The thinking that aggression was a result of testosterone came about because, in reality, such behaviour is in many cases the best way to improve our social standing.”