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War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views 1st Edition

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Douglas P. Fry (Editor)
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4.5 out of 5 stars 8 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-0199858996
ISBN-10: 0199858993
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 582 pages
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (April 12, 2013)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0199858993
  • ISBN-13: 978-0199858996
  • Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 1.9 x 6.6 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,997,843 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 starsGreat collection on conflict
By E. N. Anderson VINE VOICE on February 5, 2015
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
Douglas Fry’s edited volume is by far the most comprehensive and wide-ranging single work on the anthropology of war and peace. It takes us from monkeys to apes, from apes to the full range of human societies. It dives into archaeology, ethnography, history, and military studies. The 32 authors range from those who emphasize war in human and ape nature to those who see largely peace.
The data are slowly coming together, however, making many earlier views obsolete. It is clear that humans are not, and never were, even remotely like Thomas Hobbes’ isolated “savages” in a state of “constant warre,” whose lives were “poore, solitary, nasty, brutish and short” (from Leviathan). Actually, nothing is less like the state of “warre of each against all” than an actual war, when people die without a second thought for their comrades.
Stephen Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), greatly overestimated the extent of violence in traditional small-scale societies, and probably underestimated the extent of violence in modern ones. His point that violence has diminished in recent centuries still apppears accurate, but the extreme difference he alleges does not stand up under scrutiny.
Many authors have recourse to evidence from our closest living relatives, the chimpanzee and the bonobo. This is equivocal at best: chimps are among the most savage, brutal and murderous of animals, bonobos among the most peaceful. So those who see humans as innately warlike see us as only-slightly-transformed chimps, conveniently forgetting about bonobos. Those who see peace remember the bonobos. The primate record shows that we primates are a variable lot: individually, troop-to-troop, and species to species. Not much help there on decoding basic human nature.Read more ›
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5.0 out of 5 starsOutstanding Book
By Riane Eisler on January 8, 2014
Format: Hardcover
War, Peace, and Human Nature is an exceptionally important contribution to the debate about whether or not warfare is just human nature. Starting with Frans de Waal's rousing introduction, it is also a breath of fresh air in the often stuffy corridors of academic writing: fascinating, highly accessible, and occasionally humorous.

For decades, the common wisdom has been that war goes back to the dawn of our species, and even before that, to our primate ancestors. In this veritable encyclopedia of information, Douglas P.Fry brings together evidence examining this assumption in the light of evolutionary biology, animal ethology, anthropology, sociology, and psychology. The result is a compelling work that shows that, far from being "wired" into our genes, warfare is a recent social invention. The section on gathering-hunting groups (of particular relevance since over millennia our ancestors foraged for food) likewise shows that the notion that warfare is ancient and universal is not supported by the evidence.

War, Peace, and Human Nature also looks at violence within groups, and of particular interest, though this is only addressed in passing, is how gender roles and relations are structured. For example, among our closest primate relatives, in sharp contrast to the male-dominated chimpanzees, alliances of females lie behind the lack of lethal violence among bonobos. Several studies report that women are often peacemakers in potentially lethal quarrels between males in contemporary foraging societies. And in societies with very low rates of violence, such as the Malaysian Batek, women are not subordinate to men. In sum, this fascinating book is a treasure trove of information for everyone interested in what makes for more peaceful ways of living in our past, present, and potential future.
Riane Eisler
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3.0 out of 5 starsInteresting anthropology, but asks the wrong questions
By Herbert Gintis on January 7, 2016
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
Douglas Fry's message in this edited volume is that "warfare is not ancient,,, arising within the timeframe of the agricultural revolution" (pp. 4,6).Therefore making war is not part of human nature and hence can be avoided. How? "In this interdependent world of the twenty-first century we need to 'Expand the US to include the Them." (p. 546).

I think the basic conclusion, that war is not ancient, is most probably wrong, as I have written recently in Current Anthropology (with Carel P. van Schaik and Christopher Boehm, "Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems", Current Anthropology 56,3 (2015):327-353), and more extensively in my book with Samuel Bowles (A Cooperative Species, Princeton University Press, 2011). Humans are the only mammals who make war, by which I mean organized combat involving the coordinated action of many combatants facing a well-organized opposition of considerable size. Most nonhuman primate species have great trouble in acting collectively in conflict with neighboring groups. Chimpanzees are a major exception: they engage in war-like raids where larger parties cooperate closely to target and destroy much smaller ones. But Chimpanzees engage in raids and fight only when they encounter single individuals from another group. There is no organized combat between groups of comparable size and strength.. War among human hunter-gatherers likewise largely consists of such a raiding strategy, suggesting a shared predisposition to engage in this type of warfare. Obviously, the dramatic changes in human social organization accompanying the origin of defensible wealth produced major changes in the nature of warfare.Read more ›
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