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THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON WAR, CONQUEST, AND ALIEN RULE

by Satoshi Kanazawa

Abstract.

The evolutionary psychological perspective implies that women should be far less resistant to alien rule than men, because they have the option of marrying into the conquering group; however, this sex difference should disappear when women are no longer reproductive.

1.2. Ultimate Causes of War from the Evolutionary Psychological Perspective

Chagnon (1997, p. 190) notes that "the Yanomamö themselves regard fights over women as the primary causes of the killings that lead to their wars." Buss (1994, pp. 219-220) summarizes: "Among the Yanomamö, there are two key motives that spur men to declare war on another tribe -- a desire to capture the wives of other men or a desire to recapture wives that were lost in previous raids.... It seemed silly to them to risk one's life for anything other than capturing women." This ultimate reproductive motive behind wars can explain why it is so common for invading soldiers to rape women of the conquered group (Shields and Shields 1983). From this perspective, rape is not an unfortunate byproduct of war; it is its original purpose.

[…] Apart from exogenous shocks like imbalanced sex ratios (potentially caused by, among other things, earlier history of warfare), one social factor which artificially decreases the availability of reproductive women in a group is polygyny. By allowing some men to monopolize many or most reproductive women, polygyny reduces the number of women left available for the rest of the men, even when the sex ratio is roughly 50:50. Earlier studies show that the degree of polygyny increases men's tendency toward violence (Daly and Wilson 1988; Kanazawa and Still 2000); the more polygynous the society, the greater the incidence of violent crimes. Similarly, the degree of polygyny may increase men's desire to raid another group in order to gain access to reproductive women. Now does this mean that EP would predict that polygynous societies engage in a greater number of interstate wars than monogamous societies? No. Modern interstate wars are initiated, declared, orchestrated, conducted, and fought by modern, bureaucratic states, not by men or even groups of men. [...] Polygyny, even in modern society, creates a shortage of reproductive women, and this in turn makes young men more violent and desirous of abducting and capturing women. (It is almost always the young resourceless men of low status who are left without mates in polygynous societies.)

[...] So polygyny would not increase the incidence of modern interstate wars. However, it should increase any other instance of intergroup conflict, initiated and fought by groups of men, at a lower level of aggregation, in a form that existed in the EEA. One such instance of intergroup conflict within a society is civil wars.

2. Implications for Foreign Conquest and Alien Rule

[...] the perspective simultaneously implies that women will not be killed by the conquering soldiers, because they are too valuable, while all men will be killed.

[...] "the response of adult males to a "stranger" female -- that is, a female unknown to the human observers and presumed to be from a neighboring community -- depends to a large extent on her age and reproductive state" (Goodall 1986, p. 493) The stated object of a raid is to kill one or possibly two men and escape. If the raiders can do so without risking losses, however, they may abduct a woman from the enemy village. The abducted woman will be raped by all the raiders, taken to their village, raped by the remaining men in the village, and then given as a wife to one man. She can expect to spend the rest of her life with her new companions (Wrangham and Peterson 1996, p. 67).

Strictly from the genetic perspective, it does not matter for the female with whom she mates and reproduces, because the resulting offspring will always have half her genes, regardless of whether the other half comes from the males of her native (now conquered) group or the foreign (conquering) group. In some sense, females should prefer to mate with the conquering males, because they have proven themselves to be superior on average to the native males (most of whom are now dead). As generations of German, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese women in the 20th century can attest, human females may sometimes prefer to mate with the conquering males under alien rule.

This reasoning leads me to suggest that women have less to fear from foreign conquest and alien rule than men do. Of course, it is terrible to face the risk of being raped repeatedly by the conquering soldiers, but it could not be worse than the certainty of death, especially since, if they survive, the women from the conquered group have the option of marrying into the conquering group and reproducing with the conquerors, who might possess superior genes. And the conquering soldiers are much less likely to kill the (potential or actual) mothers of their offspring. However, this option is open only to reproductive females.

2.1.2. Results

[… ]that, among the Eurobarometer respondents under 50, there is a large and statistically significant sex differences in the three measures of xenophobia. Men under 50 are significantly more likely to say that they find disturbing people of another nationality (p < .001), race (p < .01), and religion (p < .01) than women under 50, even after controlling for their education. The sex differences are substantively, as well as statistically, significant. Controlling for education, income and marital status, men under 50 have 23-28% greater odds of responding affirmatively to these questions than women under 50. In sharp contrast, the sex differences disappear entirely among respondents who are 50 years old or older It means that, at least for nationality and race, women do not gradually and linearly become more xenophobic over the life course. They suddenly become qualitatively more xenophobic sometime between the ages of 40 and 50.

3. Discussion

The evolutionary psychological perspective on wars suggests that the root cause of all intergroup conflict is the lack of reproductive opportunities for young men, and polygyny,

In their study of the surplus male population (called "bare branches" in Chinese) in China and India, Hudson and den Boer (2004, p. 202) note: Two observations would seem to follow from the analysis thus far. First, high-sex-ratio societies are governable only by authoritarian regimes capable of suppressing violence at home and exporting it abroad through colonization or war. Second, high-sex-ratio societies that are ethnically heterogeneous are likely to experience civil strife directed against minority ethnic groups, which the government (if it represents the majority ethnic group) may seek to encourage. In our view, the first observation holds for China, and the second, for India.

[...] For foreign conquest and alien rule, the evolutionary psychological perspective suggests that women should fear alien rule much less than men, but only so long as they are reproductive, because they then have a good chance of being spared by the conquerors and have the option of marrying into them. Accordingly, the analyses of the Eurobarometer data show that young women are much less xenophobic than young men, but the sex differences disappear around age 50. In his 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman predicted that the first major war in the 21st century, after the end of the Cold War, would not be fought between nations. It will instead be declared by what Friedman called "Super-Empowered Angry Men," such as, among others, (the then little-known) Osama bin Laden, who would use the power of modern technology, like the internet, email, and cell phones, to mount a successful war against modern states, possibly even a superpower like the United States

[...] From my perspective, there are two points to note in Friedman's predictions. First, the World War III is not an interstate war between nations; it is instead the first global civil war in human history. Bin Laden and other "Super-Empowered Angry Men" do not represent any nation or state, and they need not express their anger through the channels of modern bureaucratic states. Western allies, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, are fighting groups of angry, frustrated men, not other states. Second, the one factor which unites all of our otherwise diverse enemies, from al Qaeda in the Middle East, to Jemaah Islamiyah in the South East Asia, to the Chechen rebels in Russia, is the Muslim religion, and Muslims, unlike members of other major religions in the world, are polygynous. From the evolutionary psychological perspective, it is no coincidence that the first major global civil war is declared, initiated and fought by a polygynous group. Many young resourceless Muslim men of low status are left mateless because young reproductive women are monopolized by wealthy polygynous men of high status.

[...] There is one ethnic group in the world which is significantly more polygynous than Muslims, however, and that is the tribal societies in the sub-Saharan Africa. Accordingly, sub-Saharan Africa has the world's highest levels of violence, measured by interpersonal crimes such as murder and rape (Kanazawa and Still 2000), and the region suffers from a long history of interminable civil wars.

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Source: https://faculty.washington.edu/hechter/KanazawaPaper.pdf THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON WAR, CONQUEST, AND ALIEN RULE by SATOSHI KANAZAWA *Direct all correspondence to: Satoshi Kanazawa, Interdisciplinary Institute of Management, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom. Email: [email protected].