WAR MAY NOT BE IN OUR NATURE AFTER ALL WHY WE FIGHT

DO PEOPLE, OR PERHAPS JUST MALES, HAVE AN EVOLVED PREDISPOSITION to kill members of other groups? Not just a capacity to kill but an innate propensity to take up arms, tilting us toward collective violence? The word "collective" is key. People fight and kill for personal reasons, but homicide is not war. War is social, with groups organized to kill people from other groups. Today controversy over the historical roots of warfare revolves around two polar positions. In one, war is an evolved propensity to eliminate any potential competitors. In this scenario, humans all the way back to our common ancestors with chimp-anzees have always made war. The other position holds that armed conflict has only emerged over recent millennia, as changing social conditions provided the motivation and organization to collectively kill. The two sides separate into what the late anthropologist Keith Otterbein called hawks and doves. (This debate also ties into the question of whether instinctive, warlike tendencies can be detected in chimpanzees [see box on page 80].)