Anthropologist Publishes Research on Warfare Paradox (8/31/2007)

The highly developed human neocortex allows us to envision when killing appears to be in our self-interest and then to overcome our genetic predisposition against such behavior

Some leading scientists who have studied warfare through the ages have long suggested that humans — the males of the species, at least — have little choice when it comes to slaughtering one another in great numbers. Such warlike behavior, the scholars contend, is hardwired into the human brain.

We are, in other words, born to kill our own, an evolutionary trait that sets us apart from nearly all other species on the planet.

Paul "Jim" Roscoe, a University of Maine professor of anthropology and cooperating professor of Quaternary and climate studies, subscribes instead to an equally long-held theory that suggests just the opposite: humans actually have an innate aversion to killing. However, Roscoe believes that this natural aversion can be disabled when warfare is thought to be advantageous to a clan, a tribe or a nation.

"It certainly raises big questions, though," Roscoe says of his theory. "If we do have an aversion to killing, how is it that we manage to kill pretty efficiently? And since we are a species that kills, how could that aversion have evolved and persisted through time?"

Roscoe thinks he may have found the answer to this seeming paradox while conducting an exhaustive study of warfare among tribes in New Guinea, where he lived for a year and a half in the early 1980s and has revisited three times since.

"I argue that the uniquely developed intelligence of humans is the faculty that resolves those questions," says Roscoe, whose article on the subject appears in the September issue of American Anthropologist, considered the country's preeminent journal in the field. "I suspect we have an aversion to killing, but our highly developed intelligence actually finds effective ways to 'disconnect' that disposition from our actions when we think it is to our advantage.

"Given the great advances in warfare technology," he says, "it becomes less and less smart to do what we do. It's really a terrible dilemma that we're locked into."

In his search for the reasons humans wage war on one another and are one of a small minority of species that kill their own, Roscoe has spent the last 14 years conducting research in archives around the world for information about New Guinea warfare. In particular, he has studied the early accounts of German, Dutch and Australian missionaries and administrative officers who once lived among the tribes of the South Pacific island.

Roscoe theorizes that the highly developed human neocortex, the part of the brain responsible for the creativity and intellectual thought that enables us to achieve great things, also allows us to envision when killing appears to be in our self-interest and then to overcome our genetic predisposition against such behavior.

"This ability," he writes in his most recent article, "is self-evident in the material technologies that allow humanity to overcome so many of its physical limitations — for example, projectile weapons and armory designed to circumvent the physical limitations of bare hands and bared teeth for killing and the mortal jeopardy of soft underbellies under fire.

"What is less often recognized, he continues, is how intelligence allows us to overcome our emotional or psychological 'limitations'. Modern weaponry, for example, creates a psychological distance between combatants that allows them to kill without having to look one another in the eyes. Our intelligence also conveniently allows us to dehumanize our enemies and perceive them instead as a lesser, undesirable, threatening species that must be eradicated. Not uncommonly," Roscoe continues, "we find that alcohol or other drugs are used prior to a fight to induce an altered state of consciousness, again making it psychologically easier to kill the enemy."

For many anthropologists, Roscoe says, the most vexing question has been how humans, by their penchant for waging war and killing for revenge, strayed so far off the evolutionary track.

"Most of the other species have a much more logical way of going about it," he says. "They fight, but not in a very dangerous way."

Among other animal species, the outcomes of battle are usually decided not by lethal combat but by ritualistic, threatening displays.

Roscoe admits that his theory regarding humans' intellectual ability to override an innate aversion to killing is speculative and extremely difficult to test. But if it were to be proved sound one day, he says, it could offer valuable insight about the nature of human warfare and why we insist on putting our own species in peril.

"The more humans understand that they have this capacity," he says, "the more cautious they might be about marching to war. The sheer recognition that these are the kinds of creatures we are, and these are the techniques we use to get ourselves to kill, might help us to learn to behave differently."

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by The University of Maine

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