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War-Dependent Evolution
What if we need war to develop as a species? What happens in a post-War-and-Peace world culture?
What if humanity’s advancement over time has been significantly dependent on violent conflict? At some point, it may be that our relationship with war itself finally drives us to sustainable peace — or whatever we’d call it in a post-war-and-peace world. There’s an excellent chance, if we start in our day, that within one to two hundred years we can arrive at a reasonable society.
Projects such as the Sustaining Peace Project, launched in 2014 at the Columbia University’s Earth Institute, suggest that complexity science can help us define the dyamics of a sustainably peaceful society.
Selfish Genes
Many things human beings do, we are born with — both present in our incredibly intricate and poorly understood genome, and coded in the many ways society and culture shapes human development through social learning. The capacity for aggression appears to be intrinsic — one of the response to threat is to fight, along with flight, freezing and some say, fawning (trying to placate the threatening other).
Threat can be from non-human sources, including animals and the natural world, and threat can have human origins. Sometimes, as in natural…
