When it was way back when

There's a general tendency to believe in a better time far ago.  This tendency is common in humans.  Howard Bloom gives the example of a psychologist who wrote down various events in a journal, and then looked at them a year later.  She forgot about painful break-ups, about past problems, etc.  In sociobiology, this tendency is an adaptive trait designed to help us cope with life in general, and to help us make small gains.  For example, if we unconsciously forget to pay someone back a small amount of money, we gain that money.  Most people find this problem in swapping movies with other people or whenever they swap books or other low-value items. 

A rececent book which discusses this trend is The Way We Never were, by Stephanie Coontz.  Americans idealize a family system that never existed.  Likewise, in Greek mythology, and a whole slew of others such as Dogon mythology, Vedic Mythology (1), Hebrew mythology, and so forth, man starts off in this land of the Golden Age. Mankind doesn't know disease and suffering, and all is swell. Unfortunately, in every version of this story, all the descendants of Golden Men die off. We then keep going towards an age of destruction, which is generally assumed to be what we are in right now. This thinking is now shrugged off as primitive mythology.

However, romanticizing about time periods and people we were never a part of is still rampant. For example, Native Americans were pushed out by settlers from England, through violence. To be more precise, our germs killed the Native Americans, roughly 66 to 75% died from our bacteria. Can we blame people for what their bacteria does? In which case, we can start blaming the Native Americans for a couple of our STDs that we now have, now imagine asking for retribution from the Native Americans for the people who have died from the indigenous STDs.

Let's look at the actual killings instead. Did the Europeans introduce violence for the first time to the Native American world? African-American scholar Orlando Patterson, studying various tribes around the World and their life-long servitude into slavery, makes the grim conclusion that "There was no word for 'freedom' in most non-Western languages before contact with Western peoples." Dinesh D'Souza, in speaking of the Native Americans, writes: "Native American Indians practiced slavery on each other, long before Europeans arrived to practice it on them. For several tribes in the American Northwest, slaves constituted between 10 and 15 percent of the population. The Cherokee employed "slave catchers" to retrieve wounded combatants from other tribes, although the Cherokee preferred to kill enemies rather than take them captive. In some Indian tribes, slaveowners routinely killed large numbers of slaves in potlatch ceremonies to prove how wealthy they were."

n cases of subjugation under imperialism, the countries usually gain. While things such as slavery, brutality, murder, ethnocide and genocide do occur, the majority of the benefits measured over the long run are good. This theory of analysis is what caused Marx to believe in the overall “goodness” of many things, measuring things as a whole of events growing rather than what is caused at any given frame shot. Whenever the Romans initially conquered Briton, their harsh treatment lead a group of 80,000 Briton soldiers against an army less than 20,000. Yet, the four to one odds were no match against the superior weaponry, discipline, and tactics of the Roman army.

After this, the Britons lived better than ever before, adopting many Roman traits. They had better towns, arcades, baths, banquets, had better ploughs, and finally had peace unthinkable just years earlier when 30 barbaric tribes were contending for power, (sharing one wife among many men.)

Whenever the Romans left Briton, things progressively became worse, leading up to the Norman Conquest of 1066. This lead up to the state of affairs described in the “Civil War” section.In Africa, the marauding tribes such as the Bemba of Zambia and the Zulus of South Africa were constantly brutalizing their fellow natives. The Ibos of Nigeria engaged in the slave trade, along with the Ashanti on the Gold Coast, Ghana. As Sowell puts it, “In general, African slaves were captured by other Africans and sold to Europeans who shipped them overseas.” (p.228, The Economics and Politics of Race)

There's an old saying that people often parrot that history is written by the conquerors. If you apply that all the way through, the history of the losers is written by the conquerors of other losers. When you go through all the rubble, you'll find there's always somebody getting beaten by somebody else whenever the opportunity to do so is presented. None of our ancestories are blameless, and there was no primitive land of contentment from which to return. What's sickening about the approach is that it's a form of moral patronization.  "Our primitive ancestors may have been like this, but I'm so much better than them."  Without understanding how these problems evolve, or how they originate within the human system, it's hard to change them for the better. 

St. Darwin Speaks

It has historically been assumed that humans intergroup violence is some new and rare ordeal in the evolutionary spectrum. More or less, it has been assumed that our mammal ancestors were peaceful and coexisting animals who would only harm animals outside of their own species. Francis Fukuyama is worth quoting at this point, (2):

"Jane Goodall became famous studying a group of about 30 chimps at the Gombe National Park in Tanzania in the 1960s, a group she found on the whole to be peaceful. In the 1970s, this group broke up into what could only be described as two rival gangs in the northern and southern parts of the range. The biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham with Dale Peterson in their 1996 book Demonic Males describes what happened next. Parties of four or five males from the northern group would go out, not simply defending their range, but often penetrating into the rival group's territory to pick off individuals caught alone or unprepared. The murders were often grisly, and they were celebrated by the attackers with hooting and feverish excitement. All the males and several of the females in the southern group were eventually killed, and the remaining females forced to join the northern group. The northern Gombe chimps had done, in effect, what Rome did to Carthage in 146 B.C.: extinguished its rival without a trace."

Francis Fukuyama posits this as a unique experience in human and our hominoid to chimpanzee ancestors. Yet it's not. Violence among interspecies is quite well documented in recent times (3). Certainly it wasn't an unusual idea to Charles Darwin, he believed that it was only natural for interspecies violence to occur. After all, members of your same species pose the greatest threat to you, because they are biologically the closest, eating the same food, living in the same space, and competing for sex against you. Unfortunately, as Stephen Jones, the modern interpretator of Charles Darwin notes, most people have never actually read Charles Darwin, and the numerous repeated errors in basic biology made by numerous people shows that.

Until fairly recently, gaining momentum in the early 80's and gaining exceptional popularity through the 90's and into 2000, the view that categorized the idea of evolution was one of a Marxist/socialistic critique, one best categorized by Emile Durkheim, that all social changes were the results of prior social changes, not biology. In other words, if boys watch more violent films, reinact more violent scenes, and behave more violently, it has nothing to do with biology. Rather, it has to do with sociology, boys are conditioned to be that way. This is known as social-constructionist viewpoint.

There are a number of reasons why this viewpoint gained considerable favor. In the late portion of the 19th century and the early portion of the 20th century, biological concepts were seen as being used for racist reasons. It's somewhat debatable if these people were actually racist in and of themselves, (some blatantly were, I would recommend Mortin Hunt's "Story of Psychology" for a little information on that), they seemed to have viewed themselves as scientists doing their job, but the fact remains that their work was seen as being used for racist reasons, most notably, the legitimization of the Holocaust. (4)

If this itself would have made a difference is not known. Many people were siding with socialism, and Marxism itself was appealing to a wide audience. This was mainly through the portrayal of Communism in Russia being a national superpower, and the appeal of Marxism is immense. Marxism is essentially a religion, or what psychologist Albert Ellis called a "secular religion", though Marx himself was a God-fearing man. (5) The continued existence of religions in spite of evidence to the contrary of any of them leads one to believe that on some fundamental psychological or biological level, religion is needed, even for the secular.

The theories of Marx and other social theories like it are ones that have managed to become ingrained tightly in our cultural psyche. The theories of Marx were popular in feminist circles, who reinterpretated Marxism to a matriarchal versus patriarchal class struggle. (6) While most would probably faint if you called them a Marxist, they are nonetheless dependant upon Marxist theories, but find it intellectually unfashionable to be lumped together with Karl Marx. Since these theories are more dependant upon their trendiness rather than their confirmation by empirical evidence, there are endless strains of them, but they all share the same general erroneous assumptions. The leader of the Italian Neo-Fascists, Gianfranco Fini, refused to condemn Mussolini, and 90 percent of his political party are from the old Fascist party. Yet he didn't want to be called a Fascist, saying that Italy had changed because "Italy has gone from an era in which nothing was known of politicians to one where they get photographed naked, as if they were actors."

Mussolini himself was photographed as an actor, and prided himself on his trendiness, from wearing the latest clothes to dancing to the latest tunes, just like Gianfranco. In summarizing this, John Ralston Saul writes, "they wish to be, and not be." (7) This approach would well summarize our neo-Marxists, dressed in the latest fashions but still the same ideology underneath the rhetoric. As the French novelist Romain Gary said, "Le besoin d'affabulation, c'est toujours un enfant qui refuse de grandir." (The need to fabulate is just a child who refuses to grow up.)

As St. Richard Dawkins has shown, (8) some ideas behave like viruses. (9) The body, once exposed to a virus, becomes resistent against that strain. However, viruses mutate and come back, hence, we catch the flu dozens of times during flu season because even when we've developed an immunity to one form of it, another one comes and catches us off guard. Likewise, these new variations of old ideas are like the new viruses that have come to infect us yet again. These new variations are simply the old themes remade.

To put things in perspective, I'm going to put the ideas of feminist/hunter-gatherer romanticizers in a list of breakdowns:

1.) There was once a primitive land of matriarchy.

2.) There were little to no problems in this primitive land of matriarchy.

3.) Patriarchal usupers destroyed this utopia.

4.) Our current system is a patriarchal usurption which needs to go back to them good-old days

Matriarchy or Exaggerated Mythopoesis?

In Will Durant's epic book, Our Oriental Heritage, he looked for evidence of a matriarchal system in current day usage. What he found wasn't particularly flattering. (10) The term matriarchy itself has considerable problems with the usage. According to The Hutchinson Encyclopedia 2000, on the part about matriarchy:

"Matriarchy and patriarchy are oversimplifications of the distribution of familial and political power between the sexes. The concept persists largely through a confusion with matrilineal descent, where kinship is reckoned through females, and with matrilocal residence, where men reside in their wives' homes or villages after marriage. Matrilineal societies with matrilocal residence do exist, for example the Minangkabau of Indonesia.

In the late 19th century many anthropologists (such as Johann Bachofen (1815-87), John F. McLennan (1827-81), Lewis H. Morgan (1818-1881), and Friedrich Engels) believed matriarchy to be the earliest stage in the evolution of society. Others (including Henry Maine (1822-88) and Edward Westermarck (1853-1936) maintained that patriarchy was the earliest stage. The theory was abandoned early in the 20th century when fieldwork failed to discover any matriarchal societies."

Note that our friend Mr. Engles has showed himself up again. On the question of how many societies were women are allowed to be in control, if they do, we find Steven Goldberg, National Review, 11/11/96, Vol. 48 Issue 21, p. 32:

'Scandinavian nations, which have long had government agencies devoted to equalizing women's position, are often cited by social scientists as demonstrating modernization's ability to override patriarchy. In fact, however, Norway has 454 municipal councils; 443 are chaired by men. On the Supreme Court, city courts, appellate courts, and in Parliament, there are between five and nine times as many men as there are women. In Sweden, according to government documents, men dominate ``senior positions in employer and employee organizations as well as in political and other associations'' and only 5 of 82 directors of government agencies, 9 of 83 chairpersons of agency boards, and 9 per cent of judges are women.

One may, of course, hope that all this changes, but one cannot invoke any evidence implying that it will.

Of course, there are those who simply try to assert away the evidence. Lewontin et al. write, ``Cross cultural universals appear to lie more in the eye of the beholder than in the social reality that is being observed.'' In fact, with reference to the universalities mentioned above, they do not. If these universals were merely ``in the eye of the beholder,'' the authors would merely have to specify a society in which there was a hierarchy in which males did not predominate and the case would be closed.'

(See also The Inevitability of Patriarchy by Steven Goldberg). The American anthropologist Joan Banberger thinks that the myth about matriarchy in the feminist movement fulfills a regressive and clearly undesirable function. The myth was invented to explain how things got to be how they were, and the inescapable conclusion from each of the matriarchal societies pre-existing the patriarchal ones was that the matriarchal one failed. That's what the matriarchy myth highlights, that women failed in some respect or another. Mythologists take to the interpretation that the 'former matriarchy' myth was invented by patriarchal societies to give legitimization to their descent of ruling.

The evidence rests on three interpretations of available data. Those being ones where the women make major contributions to the wealth and agriculture of the society, (see footnote 11), societies in which desent is traced through women, and myths of ancient rulership by women. While women may indeed have greater pull in matrilineal societies, it doesn't imply a matriarchy. For example, Iroquois women could nominate and depose members of their ruling council, but the members were male and enjoyed a veto over women. The Crow women could take ritual offices, but their power was severely limited by menstrual taboos.

Nigerian sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi pointed out in his 1992 book that the majority of women in any society could have been powerless. That is, your average man had more power than your average woman. Yet, royal and aristocratic women in this same position could enjoy political authority, social status, and substantial power within the family structure. Using this structure, it's very easy to overinflate the role of women in general because of a few exceptions who are within a power structure. One very popular and often regurgitated piece of misinformation is that "patriarchal rulers from the North came into Arabia and destroyed the Goddess culture." I've seen that on so many websites I could choke on it. Yet exactly, "who" these people were, where they came from, what portion of history this was, and how we can assume the cross-cultural links between them which established a new patriarchal order of society is never explained or even attempted to be explained. (12)

A book which feminists should read to see a perspective on this from a feminists position are The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won't Give Women a Future, by Cynthia Eller. In response to this, I was asked about the Musuo, an interesting tribe of people in China. Here's the problem with the Musuo, which will again be elaborated later on when I start talking about hunter-gatherer societies.

Where does our information on these people come from? From Marxism and from a 1997 book mostly, in addition to the Cultural Revolution of China changing things. Marxists in China were fond of the Musuo, it validated Marx's opinions of the original formation of the World. In more addition, the increased tourism has also changed the Musou, so how much we *really* know of these people, now given a highly privileged position that they used to not have, is debatable.

http://www.time.com/time/asia/features/china_cul_rev/minorities.html

Who ate who?

This is the crux of the argument. Even if the research quoted above and in the corresponding footnotes is wrong, that somehow, defying the odds, there was this great pre-historical feministic matriarchy, what would we find there? The answer would surely disappoint us.

To start off with some of the more famous ones, Napoleon A. Chagnon, one of the best-known students of the Yanomamo, had a theory about their internal conflicts. In inter-village warfare women were regularly raped, or kidnapped for marriage, or both. Village headmen and distinguished warriors had many wives and children, many times more than ordinary people did. Violent feuds within the village were chiefly caused by adultery.

In competiting for resources, there are two primary biological constitutes, one being sex, and the other being an ecology that allows for the sustainment of procreation. It's not really that people *want* to have babies either, not consciously at least, but they want to have sex. The widespread use of infantcide assures us that many times, the children were not planned. (13) Babies are strange little creatures because many women aren't too as bonded to them as they feel they should be when they are born. The longer a baby stays around, the more attached women get to them. (14)  One Babylonian omen text says, "If the wife of that man, pregnant by another man, will consantly pray to the goddess Ishtar and say to her while thinking of her husband:  "May my child resemble my husband!" (A. Toetze, Old Babylonian Omen Texts, chap. 8, n. 13).  We can probably infer what the husband would do to the baby if it did not look like him.

Whether you term this the "Lucifer Principle" or the selfishness of genes, our genetic material wants to spread, whether or not we consciously want it to. If you ask a biologist which comes first, the bacteria or the soil, the answer is always the soil. No organism can survive in an environment which is not conducive to its life. Hunter-Gatherers weren't aimless wanderers, they moved with a certain amount of territory, somewhat similiar to how wolves and lions do, and fiercely defended that territory against outside intruders. Territories possessing better food and denser wildlife were coveted and fought over frequently. (15)

Even groups traditionally assumed to be purely nomadic are not so. Both the Aborigines and Greenland Eskimo were restricted nomads, who wouldn't go more than twenty miles from their homeland. The reason we don't know this is because the Aborigines once inhabited the lusher lands of the Australian continent, but were pushed out by settlers, as Jared Diamond shows in "Guns, Germs, and Steel".

To give a shortened account of Jared Diamond and Robert Wright's work, the ability to have a society in stages was seen as being ethnocentric, particularly by Margaret Mead, Franz Boas, Benedict Ruth, and authors mentioned in footnote 5, and so forth, the effect of which being that the idea of seeing stages of development as progress was faded out. Instead of a linear line of progression, we find a fizzy-line of scratches in the historic progression model, or else we find an arrow that goes the opposite of progression, each step closer towards civility leads closer to destruction, the model I argue against.

While Jared Diamond argues for basing society on a more the traditional model, which is the size of the group and the level of centralization occuring, Robert Wright argues for a different course, but they are both pretty much the same. Our first level is what we call a clan. Generally, a clan would have no more than twelve people to it, such as the Fuegians. It was a group that was composed of immediate family members, another one being the Shoshone of the Great Plains.

The argument over the disparity of equality among the Wealth of Nations has been argued by various people. Charles Darwin attributed the differences between people to their harsh climate, and hoped to change it. Speaking of the Fuegians, a group he wasn't particularly enamored with, he wrote in his Beagle diary for February 24, 1834:

Their country is a broken mass of wild rocks, lofty hills and useless forests, and these are viewed through mists and endless storms.... How little can the higher powers of the mind come into play: what is there for imagination to paint, for reason to compare, for judgment to decide upon? To knock a limpet from the rock does not even require cunning, that lowest power of the mind.... Although essentially the same creature, how little must the mind of one of these beings resemble that of an educated man. What a scale of improvement is comprehended between the faculties of a Fuegian savage and a Sir Isaac Newton!

Charles Darwin elaborated on his ideas from the works of David Hume and Adam Smith, who he quoted frequently in "The Descent of Man". Taking from their work, he reasoned that loving the fellow man, benevolence, affection, and other virtues espounded upon by said philosophers was generated by coevolvement with proto-human environments, based upon their natural selection. Darwin reasoned that the "all-important emotion of sympathy" would have been "increased through natural selection; for those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring." (See footnote 16 for more clarification).

Current anthropology took from a different field of insights, those by Hegel and Kant. Kant had insight into humankind's "asocial sociability", which is that human cooperation is driven in many instances by the need to compete with and often fight other human beings. Hegel argued that war is an essential part of our progress, as it is the stimulus for our modern institutions. (Before maligning Hegel, this doesn't mean he praised war as a virtue). The philosopher Adam Ferguson published an Essay on the History of Civil Society, in which he writes that "Mankind not only find in their condition the sources of variance and dissension: they appear to have in their minds the seeds of animosity, and to embrace the occasions of mutual opposition, with alacrity and pleasure." The basic cause of war is simple "rivalship." Ferguson predates Wright and Bloom in attributing some positive values in it, such as our vainglory also causes civic unity, virtue, organization, and in fact may be an essential condition for the very existence of civilization.

Robert Wright and Jared Diamond share Darwin's belief in the evolution of the proto-human communities as being naturally geared towards competitive cooperation, that society develops through an interaction of non-zero-sum games, by which the sphere of reciprocal interest is broadened. Where Wright and Diamond differ with Darwin is over the issue of how much this affects current day people, with Robert Wright writing in The Moral Animal, p. 5 that people were still claiming "the uniquely malleable human mind, together with the unique force of culture, has severed our behavior from its evolutionary roots... there is no inherent human nature driving events...our essential nature is to be driven." E. O. Wilson and Wright claimed different, that "The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool."

In Robert Wright's classification, social complexity and types of collective-action problems which need to be solved are what determines a society. While Jared Diamond tends to favor an exogenous approach to the subject, (though hardly a hardline approach to it), Robert Wright tends to see everything as happening as allowed to the extent that competition among them will produce innovation and change. Diamond tends to see it as being relative to the environment, not the level of competition.

The first groups were what we call a clan. Generally, a clan would have no more than twelve people to it. Later, this developed into a tribe, which was a group of clans united. Our evolutionary spectrum has made it so that we are biologically supportive of the people who are most related to us, and least lovable to those who are distant from us. A clan was typically just one family, all biologically related, and thus friendly.  There is one interesting find which supports this hypothesis.  The human brain seems able to handle about 150 people in close-relation.  That is, know who they are intimately.  This would be the size of a family of four-generations in an ancestoral environment.  Whenever a group of families are brought together, problems start arising.

So long as the group size is small enough to contain everyone, there isn't a problem. If a dispute breaks out, someone knows both people involved, and can calm it down. However, once this is surpassed, infighting becomes a problem. If Bill and Todd get into a fight, and John knows Bill but not Todd, he's going to help Bill, particularly if he's related to him. Then the friends/relatives of Todd are going to join in the fight. Before long, you'll have dead people and family wars.

Even among the smallest units, you tend to have the "big man", someone whom everyone values the opinion of. You won't know this person by what he/she wears, or anything external, but at any tribal meeting, this person has the most weight in what he/she says. Most likely, larger tribes noting the need for cohesion elected the "big man", (or else this person nominated themselves, as they tend to be more proactive than other villagers), this person was pushed to a new position at the top. This person became the professional mediator of all disputes. While some claimed the big man had nothing distinguishing him, he did usually have one thing.  Numerous wives.  Since the point of evolution revolves around descendants and generations, this overlooked prospect lead to a belief in equality which was not true. 

Here, we are again getting to the problem of centralization. In your early nomadic societies, children were spaced about four years apart, because that's how long it took them to become proficient at moving on their own without their mothers carrying them. (Most) of the North American Indians, the natives of Peru, the Chittagong Hill tribes of India, the Borneans, and South Sea Islanders are some examples of this type of community. At what point, however, does a tribe composed of several clans become a state? Lester Ward has written that: "The state as distinct from the tribal organization begins with the conquest of one race by another." In regards to tribal units, here's what is said about them, (this is from Major Steven C. Calhoun's report in Military Review, Jul/Aug2000, p. 32).

The mentality of our people is still very patriarchal. Here the knife, revenge and a tribal (plemenski) system exist as nowhere else. The whole country is interconnected and almost everyone knows everyone else. Montenegro is nothing but a large family--all of this augurs nothing good.

Mihajlo Dedejic

The fact that Montenegrin political demarcations occur not only along ethnic lines but also along tribal lines highlights the need for military planners to understand these tribes and their traditional territories....

Branko Banjevic, President of Matica, the Montenegrin Cultural Association, says that although local tribes changed with history, they always bore the responsibility for government in a unified Montenegro. He says attempts to use historical tribal traditions of brotherhood to divide Montenegro at some gatherings are degrading. Indeed, historically tribes did not go to war for political or ideological reasons. Most conflicts between tribes were over matters such as pasturage, livestock, water and honor. Clans and sometimes whole tribes resolved these conflicts through the vendetta.

Vendetta killings, or blood revenge, followed strict traditional rules. The blood feud was not necessarily an exchange of a life for a life. The killing sometimes started over a perceived slight to a man's honor or hospitality. The man who felt slighted might immediately or after a time murder the man who insulted him or another of his clan. This clan orientation of the vendetta is an aspect of the blood feud in both Montenegro and northern Albania. According to tradition, the wronged individual need not take his blood revenge on the one who insulted him. It is sufficient to murder another male of the wrongdoers clan, even if that person was not present when the offense took place. In this way, one can see how blood revenge could quickly escalate between clans and sometimes tribes. Still blood feuds usually remained limited in scope and although the death toll in these ongoing revenge killings could go quite high, they usually did not result in open warfare.As late as the early 20th century, Milovan Djilas punctuated how compelling the need to take revenge could be to Montenegrins when he wrote:

"Vengeance--this is a breath of life one shares from the cradle with one's fellow clansmen, in both good fortune and bad, vengeance from eternity. Vengeance was the debt we paid for the love and sacrifice our forebears and fellow clansmen bore for us. It was the defense of our honor and good name and the guarantee of our maidens. It was our pride before others; our blood was not water that anyone could spill. It was, moreover, our pastures and springs--more beautiful than anyone else's--our family feasts and births. It was the glow in our eyes, the flame in our cheeks, the pounding in our temples, the word that turned to stone in our throats on hearing that our blood had been shed. It was centuries of manly pride and heroism, survival, a mother's milk and a sister's vow, bereaved parents and children in black, joy and songs turned into silence and wailing. It was all, all."

Conflicts in the 20th century involving Montenegro have tended to cut across tribal lines. The conflict over unification between the greens and the whites following World War I split loyalties within tribes and clans. World War II and the three-way civil war in Yugoslavia between the Ustase, Chetniks and Partisans also cut across tribal boundaries. Some popular myths tend to portray these ideological struggles in a tribal vein, for instance that the Vasojevic tribe was "altogether Chetnik."The current confrontation between Montenegro and Serbia has already begun to split tribal loyalties. According to one report from the city of Kolasin, northeast of Podgorica, there are divisions between the "tribal assembly" and the "tribal forum" of the Rovci. Apparently, one part of the tribe supports Bulatovic while the other is firmly for Djukanovic. This indicates that the political support of a tribe may not be monolithic.

Clark Rumrill, who served in the US State Department for 25 years, writes in a revealing article for Christian Science Monitor, 7/17/96, p. 19:

In the past 20 years, millions more people have been killed in tribal conflicts than by AIDS.... Tribal conflict also drew us into a major role in Bosnia....

For these purposes, a "tribe" is defined as a self-conscious ethnic, religious, language, racial, cultural, or clan group. While tribalism is not a subject taught in American schools, and though it doesn't get much mention in political speeches, such conflict has brought much suffering to the world in this generation. The following list of current and recent tribal feuds is illustrative but excludes many examples, such as those in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

Inside of a state, a diverse amount of groups are reconciled under one autonomy. Or perhaps more appropriately, they are "tried" to be reconciled under one autonomy. This is because custom is more important than law. Custom is from within the people themselves, not something established by a ruler. Custom is the natural selection process by which the things which have insured the survival of a group are cherished.

In the system of Hammurabi, Moses, and the infamous Lex Talionis, an eye for an eye was called for, nothing less would suffice. As this developed, family fueds arose, as alluded to earlier, where it simply became tremendous bloodshed and a threat to order when it continued. Thus, the courts started having systems of monitary punishment instead of direct retribution. The custom would decide how much money was given for a lost eye, a lost arm, death, rape, etc. Generally though, excluding the Brahmins of India, the amount of suffering one incured depended upon what class you belonged to, age, sex, whether you were a native of the ruling group or a foreign tributary, free man or slave, and whom you wronged based upon the same criteria.

If the state is a bad thing, then we first would do best to examine the tribe, where collective-action first begins. The Native Americans of the Northwest Coast, along with the Natufians in the Levant (13,400 - 10,500 BCE), the Jomon in Japan (10,000-300 BCE), and the Calusa in Florida (CE 800–1600) are all socially complex hunter-gatherer societies. The Northwestern coast was filled with various species of fish, and the salmon were an especially important breed, and it also had various mammals on sea and land, along with dense, edible foliage. The Native Americans of western Oregon were burning areas to encourage the growth of good deer forage and oak groves for acorns. Likewise, the Native Americans to the North were burning to maintain berry patches, along with weeding to increase the density of forest food. They even had storage facilities to keep things safe from rodents.

So, why am I mentioning this? In one of Tani Jantsang's very speculative articles, available here, http://www.geocities.com./satanicreds/all-tod.html, she believes that the root cause of wall-building, food-protection, and so forth, were all related to the introduction of agriculture. In reality, none of that is true. For example:

"How many slaves had to starve, suffer, die to make a tomb for a crazed Pharaoh? And what for? So he could "rise from the dead? Wherefrom in nature would any normal human get the notion that a dead thing could wake up and walk around again? NOT from seeing people sleep. Primitives would also see people "sleeping" then start to rot and stink. They'd have a clear understanding of death. They, like any other animal, would come to accept death as a normal part of life."

This is certainly not true. Various sites such as Blue Jackets Creek, Boardwalk, Namu, and Pender Island, in British Columbia, have places where people buried their dead for hundreds of years, along with Natufian and Jomon cemeteries. The pyramids were simply a larger scale adaption of what Theodore Reik discusses:

'The many small pebbles form a substitute for the one big boulder. It is as though the survivor who had visited the grave of a relative and so exhibits his piety to the dead, protects himself from their envy or hostility by putting those stones in their abode, preventing the dead from escaping.' (Pagan Rites in Judaism, pp. 44, 48.)

Likewise, Ian Tattersoll reports in Becoming Human, p. 12 that: "Richness of personal adornment in life often reflects social status, and this in turn often mirrored by the objects taken to the grave.  Some Cro-Magnons were bureid with an extraordinary abundance of artifacts of various kinds; others were more simply interred. "Her misunderstanding seems to stem from early Eurocentric ideas about the tribe. For example, Gluckman's book on tribes in Zambia, called Politics, Law and Ritual, p. 15, describes a tribe as this:

Basic to a tribal society is the egalitarian economy, with relatively simple tools to produce and primary goods to consume. The powerful and wealthy use their might and goods to support dependants; for they are unable to raise their own standard of living with the materials available.

This definition is simple, but misses an important point.  As Mark Levene explains in an article:

"Mark Cocker, recently writing of the turn-of-the-century German annihilation of the Herero in South-West Africa (Namibia), has noted how 'paradoxically the critical factor driving them towards a genocidal policy was a concern that these tribal peoples had shown a potential well beyond their allotted station'. This has been exactly the story with the jumma. Far from behaving according to a supposed 'passive' tribal type, they have not only absorbed and adapted the language and tools of modernity in order to make good their perceived ancestral claim to the CHT but, where this has clearly been a losing battle against greater odds, have tenaciously struggled, sometimes violently, to impede the state and dominant community's political, cultural and demographic penetration of it. Indeed, the struggle of the jumma is directly comparable with that of the Mayan Indians of Guatemala, the Kurds in Iraq, the Tibetans, the peoples of East Timor and Irian Jaya (West Papua) as well as, looking back a century, that of the remaining unsubdued Indian tribes in the USA. All these societies, whether we would describe them as 'third world' or 'fourth world,' have, historically or contemporaneously a commonality in their evolving sense of collective peoplehood and identity forged in the crucible of another more dominant society's state and nation-building programmes. The demands of each for national recognition or even national self-determination on the territory which they inhabit have thus not simply collided with the state's assumption as to its primacy but with its very definition of what constitutes the 'nation'. In none of these instances, we may note, did the state set out to exterminate these people simply on the grounds of their ethnic difference or 'otherness'. That they have increasingly done so, in part bears witness to these communities' obdurate refusal to be coerced into the national mainstream on terms determined by the state, combined with their coherent political and political-military resistance to deny it hegemonic control over the land and resources which they consider to be theirs. It is this state-community dynamic which has led, in each instance, through a series of state strategies characterised here as a 'genocidal process', to their culmination, at some stage, in the actuality of genocide. In the case of the jummas, the only distinction lies in the fact that this actuality is difficult to isolate to a single sequence of events. This is why I have called it a case of 'creeping genocide'. In all other respects, the critical preconditions and characteristics of genocide are evident, regardless of the victim groups' 'tribal' background.

The small groups, far from being stationed independantly in time as postmodernists believe, are very adaptable to a wide variety of stimuli, as Diamond/Wright surmise, humans are inherently adaptable creatures. If tribal groups can so easily adapt to situations, then the argument for the prehistoric past of glory seems all the more implausible. We also find the myth of egaliterianism prominate. While some hunter-gatherers could fit this mode, current data from archaeology makes this more implausible.

Darwin had theorized that egaliterianism had failed because certain individuals would simply sit around and benefit off the work of others, and then a society in which possessions were valued would take place. Loskiel confirmed this by examining various Indian tribes, and found that in many tribes, whole groups of people would rely upon their more devoted, hard-working counterparts in order to furnish them with goods. Egaliterianism tends to fade out as centralism becomes more important to survival. Among mobile hunter-gatherers, the leaders have little direct power over group members, their power is extended through manipulation, persuasion, begging, social bonds and debts, but not by force. In more complex, stationary hunter-gather modes, permanent levels of power are developed, not just of individuals but of groups.

Evidence seems to indicate the Northwest Coast Native Americans had a distinct elite class by about 500 BCE. This is known through burial items, such as wear marks on the teeth which have lip plugs, along with copper items. In addition, centralization is not necessarily identifiable with fortifications, as the Calusa army has no evidence of such wall-building.

By the 18th and 19th century, the NW Coast had two classes, the free and the slave. Free people had three classes, the chiefs, the high class, and the commoners. The Natufian burials show multigenerational kin groups with territorial claims. Let's, however, get even goofier with this already confounded model. Let's suppose that only certain these centralized hunter-gatherer groups had warfare, and exclude any mobile hunter-gatherer groups. We still have even more evidence to explain away. (For a full discussion, see Anthropological Quarterly, January 2000, pp. 20-35):

"According to one comparative study (Keeley 1996: 109-110), territory changed hands among hunter-gatherers up to a rate of 5 to 10 percent per generation. Things were further complicated in instances where the vital concentrations of game were geographically mobile rather than more or less static. Buffalo herds' migration routes on the North American Great Plains were changing and difficult to predict. Hunting in other tribes' territories thus became necessary from time to time, often resulting in warfare (Newcomb 1950: 325; Biolsi 1984: 148-150). Upper Palaeolithic hunters of large game in Europe, from France to the Ukraine, may have exhibited similar patterns as the Buffalo hunters.

The main point of all this is that resource competition and conflict existed in most hunter-gatherer societies."

As to how many are dying:

"The correlation of male violent death and women's scarcity was been first pointed out by Warner in his study of the north Australian Murngin (1930-1931, 1937), and later independently re-discovered and greatly elaborated by Divale and Harris (1976). During a period of twenty years Warner (1937: 157-158) estimated the death rate for the Murngin was 200 men out of a total population of 3000 of both sexes, of whom approximately 700 were adult males. This amounts to a range of 30 percent of the adult males. Violent mortality among the women and children is not mentioned. Pilling's estimate of at least 10 percent killed among the Tiwi adult males in one decade comes within the same range (1968: 158). The Plains Indians showed a deficit of 50 percent for the adult males in the Blackfoot tribe in 1805 and 33 percent deficit in 1858, while during the reservation period the sex ratio rapidly approached 50-50 (Livingstone 1967: 9). Among the Eskimo of the central Canadian arctic, who lacked group warfare, violent death, in so-called blood feuds and homicide, was estimated by one authority at one person per thousand per year, ten times the 1990 USA rate (Symons 1979: 145; Knauft 1987: 458; Briggs 1994: 156). The !Kung of the Kalahari Desert are popularly known as the "harmless people." Richard Lee who contributed to the creation of this impression, nevertheless reports (1979: 398; 1982: 44) that in his study area in the period 1963-1969, there were 22 cases of homicide; 19 of the victims were males, as were all of the 25 killers. This amounts to a rate of 0.29 person per thousand per year, and had been 0.42 before the coming of firm state authority.

The somewhat better data for primitive agriculturalists basically tell the same story as those for the hunter-gatherers. Among the Yanomamo about 15 percent of the adults died as a result of inter- and intra-group violence: 24 percent of the males and 7 percent of the females (Dickemann 1979: 364). The Waorani (Auca) of the Ecuadorian Amazon hold the registered world record: more than 60% percent of adult deaths over five generations were caused by feuding and warfare (Yost 1981; Robarchek and Robarchek 1992). In highland New Guinea independent estimates are again very similar: among the Dani, 28.5 percent of the men and 2.4 percent of the women have been reckoned to have died violently (Heider 1970: 128). Among the Enga, 34.8 percent of the adult males have been estimated to have met the same fate (Meggitt 1977: 13-14, 110). Among the Goilala, whose total population was barely over 150, there were 29 (predominantly men) killed during a period of 35 years (Hallpike 1977: 54, 202). Among the Lowland Gebusi, 35.2 percent of the adult males and 29.3 of the adult females fell victim to homicide. The high rate for the females may be explained by the fact that killing was mainly related to failure to reciprocate in sister exchange marriage (Knauft 1987: 462-3, 470, 477-478). In tribal Montenegro violent death among adult males was estimated at 25 percent (Boehm 1984: 177). Archaeology unearths similar finds. In the late prehistoric site of Madisonville, Ohio, 22 percent of the adult male skulls had wounds and 8 percent were fractured (Livingstone 1967: 9)."

Surveys of ethnographic data show that only 10-13 percent of primitive societies never or rarely engaged in war or raiding; the others engaged in conflict either continuously or at less than yearly intervals. Closer examination of the peaceful cases shows that they were frequently refugee populations driven into remote locations by prior warfare or groups protected by a more advanced society. In short, any theories which wax mythopoetic about our ancestors and a glorious 'state of nature' are simply trying to ignore contrary evidence to those claims.

So, what causes humans to behave like this? It all goes back to your selfish genes. Daly and Wilson showed that humans level of protection is paramount to their genetic structure. In your early stages, loyalty to your parents is what promotes your good health. As you age and they become less important to your genetic survival, and you have kids, the ability to pass your genes along becomes more important. With each generation removed from your genetic structure, (siblings are more important than cousins, children are more important than siblings, and so forth), you lose a level of reciprocal interest. Not only does who you protect matter, but who you enlist for help as well. Montesquieu remarked that murder is largely a family business. Indeed, most crimes involving multiple offenders, and particularly murder, are done by people who are related to each other.

In classic liberalism, philosophers like Hobbes, Montesquieu, Hume, Smith, and so forth all believed that the early state was one of war, of family against family. Roughly 25% of murders are committed by non-related people living with each other, (in-laws, step-parents, spouses). This correlates the findings, a large portion of child abuse is also related to non-family members taking care of people not related to them. Darwin wrote that "a savage will risk his own life to save that of a member of the same community” but the “tribes inhabiting adjacent districts are almost always at war with each other.”

We thus have come full circle. Our study has shown us that the natural state of man is one of war, and this state is not only natural in human genes, but in our ancestoral gene pool as well. There is no reason to despise the "state", as the state is the only thing which is keeping war from spilling out. Even if the state were evil, our study has further shown us that it is a natural progression without need for elaborate explanation, it occurs naturally. If it were evil, it would necessarily happen anyway. (17) Fortunately, the progression of human spirit demands that human rights in greater circles expand.  This happens in liberalized countries, but it can go backwards.  Why?

The next great myth, humans as natural conservationists, commentary by Malthus:

Many people hope that our ancestors were great conservationists.  That would again show that social ills are caused only by society.  Unfortunately, they are not.  Understanding that humans are not great at declining our genetic impulse to procreate and to consume resources and compete against each other helps illuminate many problems.  For example, people say that with abortion and infantcide being practiced, people deny the genetic impulse.  Yet this fails to address many problems.  One, this is only seen in highly capitalistic places, where delayed childbirth increases later pay-offs.  If you have a child when you are rich, the child has a better chance of inheriting it.  This is called "K" type selection.  In the roots of this, child mortality is a great problem.  The early life of an infant is full of dangers, and each child that is not likely to succeed means a massive drain on resources from the parents.  Parent might be more likely, usually the person responsible for the child, if not in royal or high ranking status, was unknown, and the brother of the sister actually raised the child.  This lead to a two-fold development that Judith Rich Harris discusses at length in her book The Nurture Myth.  One was that men had low opinions of a specific woman, (they didn't raise the child), and two, children were not regarded as real people until they were past a certain age.

For the first case, Nathaniel Branden tells a story about Dr. Audrey Richards, an anthropologist who worked with the Bemba of Northern Rhodesia in the 1930s. Richards told a story to them about a knight who wanted the hand of a maiden he loved. He climbed glass mountains, fought dragons, and faced impossible odds. The tribe sat silent until an old chief spoke up. “Why not take another girl?”

For the second, before the age of seven children weren't considered real people. They were sent off to wet nurses to live, and the high rate of death meant that until that age their life couldn’t be insured. Phillipe Aries puts it “the general feeling was… that one had several children in order to keep just a few. People could not allow themselves to become too attached to something that was regarded as a probable loss.” 

With this, killing children to increase the survival of other children is not a totally worthless idea in genetics.  Things like this were what lead Dawkins to say that if you want a good society, be careful about using genetics as a force of how people should develop.  (The often quoted Naturalistic Fallacy.)  If selection occurs on the genetic level, then it's only a matter of how to propogate genes, not an issue of how moral the means are used to propogate them.  If this wasn't the case, the problems with rape, violence, and other problems would go away, but likely too would the human race. 

Another problem is the concept of revenge.  Revenge makes sense from a genetic level.  If humans were purely rational, the idea of exploitation would happen easily, as in the society of hawks and doves.  The concept is pretty simple.  Imagine a society of doves exists, which are completely altruistic.  Then introduce a hawk into the group, which is purely selfish.  It would thrive and soon you'd have a society of hawks and doves.  From there, the doves that survived would have to learn how to spot selfish behavior, and probably develop their own selfish behavior.  If humans were purely rational, a cool, calculating hawk could figure out how much he could do before a dove would attack him.  Yet, if revenge exists, the desire to annihilate someone else no matter what the consequences, a person would not be able to easily exploit others, not knowing how they would react to the offense. 

In many cases where children are killed, there is a breakup between parents.  Abuse usually occurs amongst step-relatives rather than genetic relatives.  I know a case right now in Lousiana, where a local drug-dealer beat his stepson nearly to death, and he was two.  The mother approved, she hated the real father.  The grandmother covered up the abuse with make-up and other cosmetics, even though the child was only the size and weight of a seven-month old baby.  The child is now viewed as a burden upon the parents, rather than as an asset.  For someone with no genetic interest in a child, only the person's humanity can be staked on the fate of the child.  If the other parent has no interest in the child either, the fate is generally grim.   

Now, turn towards world history again.  Look at recent conflicts in the past decades:   Indonesia, Haiti, Rwanda, the Gaza Strip, Algeria, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Kashmir, the Solomon Islands, etc.  Most have had population explosions followed by a huge growth of the youth and a dwindling resource base. Such was anticipated by Thomas Robert Malthus, in An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers.

Malthus' idea was pretty simple.  Human population explodes expotentially.  Human resources increase algebraically.  Given this, there would eventually be great resource competition between groups and people.  Critics have pointed out numerous flaws in his methodology.  For example, technology increases allow an expotential growth in resources.  Also, people can move to areas which are not under resource strain.  This happened also.  Yet, those reviews miss the point.  The people in tribal societies cannot move anywhere.  Nor can they afford technology to get more products, and even if they could, many of them live in places already under massive strain with current production levels.  This also misses many industrial conflicts which proceeded the same way:  the English Revolution of 1640, the French Revolution of 1789, the European Revolts of 1848, tons of anthropological evidence, and rebellions in China, India, the Middle East, and the Ottoman empire occurred against a background of high population growth met with food shortages.  In ancient times, this happened in the late Neolithic period around 5500 BCE, the area around Israel and Lebanon suddenly dropped in population from food shortages. There may be an additional interest in the bulge of youth.

The Stone-Age SlaughterBench of History and the Evolution of Males:

Of our evolutionary relatives, only the bonobos seem to have an effective solution to the problem of war and aggression, regulated through intense bisexual bonds and a female hierarchy.  It's unclear whether the practice of massaging a male's genitals to appease his aggressive urges will work for men in human societies.  Damien Wayne's solution of "Dick-o-derm", a patch that induces orgasms whenever  a male is feeling aggressive, may be more effective than the comedian realized. 

Yet, the bonobo's solution only seems to be the same one psychology and sociobiology demonstrates.  A need for a strict hierarchy, along with subliminization achieved by redirecting aggressive tendencies with sexual tendencies.  Since both aggression and sexual impulses derive from the same area of the brain, it's a possible solution, but one that is impractical.  (I can bet these paltry two paragraphs will be misquoted.)  Still, this discussion has so far only talked about modern-day humans in tribal areas.  What of our ancestors?

The first recognizable archaeological features found that suggested warfare were overlooked.  For example, sites where ancient people lived had high outer walls, were situated in places away from valleys, had low-walls and other obstacles preventing entry into the main part of the society, and were generally situated in places that would not have been maximal for living.  Why would people build up all these obstacles and not live in places that would have made life easier?  With buildings high up in the mountains, an attack is easier to see.  With walls and low-lying hurdles, an enemy cannot attack in a large group, they have to move piecemeal up to attack.  Historians and archaeologists tended to overlook war and its consequences, except for a few like Keeley, who has written dozens of books and articles on the subject and hence has an eye specifically trained for it.  The prevailing view, handed down from Boaz's influential school and his prime pupil Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict was that this was inconsequential for the development of society.

The first direct clue of ancient human warfare came from the skeleton of an Ice man named Otzi, discovered in 1991.  He was armed to the teeth, with a bow, a quiver of arrows, a stone dagger, and a hatchet with a copper blade.  The blade was unusual because copper was assumed to have derived from a later date than Otzi was around, his skeleton is dated at about 5,000 years old.  Archaeologists assumed he had died in the cold.  A 2001 x-ray revealed that he had died from an arrowhead still lodged in his chest.  (Constant Battles, p. 4)  It should seem obvious, considering the massive amount of weaponry he was carrying. Another human called Skhul IX, recovered from a cave in Israel has presered damage to the bones, showing that he was speared in the legs and pelvis.  The most likely form of death was immobilization in the legs, and then bludgeoned to death in the head.  Interestingly, many forms of human sacrifice take place in a manner similar to this.  It's also worth noting in relation to resource competition that one of the main ways of disposing enemies killed like this was cannibalism.  

Steven LeBlanc points out that another area of research that changed was the drawings on early cave man dwellings.  Sticklike human figures are shown pierced with spears.  Why they fight should be obvious as well at this point.  Scarcity of resources or overabundance of resources tends to promote fighting.  While it may seem paradoxical that overabundance of resources should promote fighting, it does so for the same reason that a scarcity of resources does.  When a group is gaining power, they want to corner the market on it.  This is old news in observing animals.  Eliot Howard noted in 1920 that in many species of birds, the male must show its ability to establish and protect a certain area before it willl be recognized as a suitable mate.  So too did a lizard termed "the tyrant".

(He) pre-empted the right to trespass upon the footage of any other male that dwelled upon the wall. If he encountered any sign of opposition as he crossed a territorial boundary, he merely opened his jaws threateningly and passed on while his lesser rivals crawled down into the crevices until he had passed. The “tyrant’s” nearest neighbors on the wall possessed the same right of trespass to a very much more limited degree. They never passed over the “tyrant’s” holding, which was located at the highest point of the wall, at the north corner, even though it was the closest to the food supply.

All members of the colony fed, unmolested by the “tyrant”upon bean seedlings in the nearby field and drank from the nearby stream. Each individual actually possessed no more ‘territory’ than the narrow strip of wall that extended halfway between his lookout rock and that of his neighbors on either side of him. This small footage was defended against encroachment by all except the ‘tyrant’ himself, and on rare occasions by a male who held a footage on the wall next to that of the ‘tyrant.’ All lesser males in the hierarchy respected on another’s territorial rights and were never observed to trespass.” (Auffenberg, 1978, p. 309,  p. 104 in MacLean's book).

A quick change in which location has the most food would quickly bring about a power change as well.  In human studies, this was noted by Alexis de Tocqueville first.  he wrote of the French Revolution that "in none of the decades immediately following the Revolution did our national prosperity make such rapid forward strides as in the two preceding it.  This steadily increasing prosperity, far from tranquilizing the population, everwhere promoted a spirit of unrest."  The term for this has varied, "rising expectations", "unequal modernization", etc.  The basic theorum can be stated as such, using Patrick E. Kennan's theory of "implicit promises".   In every endeavor, there is an implicit promise that certain expectations will be met.  Kennan believes there are four sets of rules that determine the damage caused by breaking an implicit promise:

  1. The power of the group affected.
  2. The number of people in the group affected.
  3. the amount of damage done to their perceived interests.
  4. The availability of non-political means for correcting the damage. (p. 181)

From this, he deduces four general categories of what happens: 

  1. "Decremental Deprivation", a group loses its capacities but has the same expectations.
  2. "Aspirational Deprivation", a group gains new expectations but the capacities remain the same.
  3. "Progressive Deprivation", both capacities and expectations have been growing, but the capacities suddenly drop.
  4. "Accelerated Deprivation", in which the expectations of a group rises above that of the capacities, which is also rising.

Historic examples abound of any case.  For example, progressive deprivation can be seen in the collapse of the Roman empire.  The original Roman policy towards its conquered subjects was light taxes and little administration.  Towards the end of it, the empire put more stress on the outside colonies, which were then willing to allow German invaders to take over their land and 'free" them from Roman rule.  Accelerated Deprivation is probably the case in Iraq and America right now, as the Iraqi's have new hopes for the future, their capacity to meet those new hopes do not seem to be there.  Aspirational Deprivation can be seen in countries which converted to Communism and turned back into Fascism, the promise that communism brought never came about.  Finally, Decremental Deprivation can be seen in most peasant revolts, which featured sudden increases in taxes on their land.  However, if everyone loses equally, the effects are usually not bad.  Darwin noted that "As all men desire their own happiness, praise or blame is bestowed on actions and motives, according as they lead to this end."  (The Descent of Man).  Robert Wright notes that if you lower the status of everyone equally in a group, no one gets upset. 

Within groups, the status of sex leads frequently to warfare.  The origin of the best man lies in this tradition.  The best man is literally your strongest man available, so if you kidnap a bride, he is the one expected to help you fight off the family that comes looking for her.  So too the tradition of the bride standing to the left, it was to leave the sword-arm available for attack.  Certain Indian tribes had so many women from kidnapped tribs that the men and women spoke different languages.  Among the Ache in South America, the best hunters have more extramarital affairs and have more offspring.  Their offspring survive better as well, they receive better treatment from others.  So too do the Aka pygmies of central Africa, whose kombeti, (the big man, usually a skilled hunter),gets more women, food, and offspring.  (Wright, The Moral Animal, p. 237-238).  David Hume noted that the belief in human equality was an illusion in An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748:

“Should a traveler, returning from a far country, bring us an account of men… wholly different from any with whom we were ever acquainted.. Who were entirely divested of avarice, ambition, or revenge; who knew no pleasure but friendship, generosity, and public spirit; we should immediately, from the circumstances, detect the falsehood, and prove him a liar, with the same certainty as if he had stuffed his narration with stories of centaurs and dragons, miracles and prodigies.”

Human and animal societies both involve the gaining of status through a certain sequence of events.  It is dangerous to repeatedly fight in a battle that cannot be won.  Thus, hens have the famous "pecking order" in which the highest ranking hen eats first, then the next, and so forth.  If the fights were repeated over and over again, the result would be death and a loss of the species fairly soon.  However, certain situations can change the game.  Pumping a hen full of testosterone will change his odds of winning.   This new hen will attack and mount the top of the hierarchy.

How can that be achieved naturally?  The easiest way is risky behavior.  There seems to be an odd correlate for testosterone and serotonin.  Serotonin has the strongest link to impulsive behaviors, by which I mean skipping school, abusing drugs and alcohol, committing violent acts, and other destructive acts.  Specifically, low levels of serotonin correlate high to this effect.  Testosterone does in some amounts, but there are compounding problems.  Low serotonin seems mainly to stem from a bad hereditary and bad social environment.  (The Neurobiology of Violence: by Jan Volavka, second edition, goes through a full range of studies on the problems).  This makes sense in an evolutionary perspective.  For a male born of low status, as Machiavelli says, the easiest way to gain access to a high-rank is through military prowess.  Being overly aggressive helps that prospect.  If this didn't happen, I suspect that the social hierarchies in most tribal areas would never change.  The kids born to the dads with the best genes for dexterity and strength would dominate the groups perpetually.  With humans evolving for individual competition, this would be social suicide.  It's probably worth noting that many males who leave cults do so because the single male leader in charge takes possession of all females in breeding age. 

Yet, though violence is inherent in our nature, it seems only to come out in certain times, the resource stress periods.  The resource stress periods are brought about by the human want for maximum domination of resources.  Whenever that need is perceived or is felt as being not met, violence will probably ensue quickly.  For example, the story of the Illiad is fictional, but the reality is the book may have more history behind it than thought.  While Troy (currently Hisarlik in Turkey), may not have been sacked by the Greeks, it is nowhere near the sea as described in the Illiad.  Why?  Through hillside farming, denuded landscapes, and overgrazing, the silted erosion has changed the location, and is seen by archaeological studies of pollen and charcoal which show different plants that used to live there.  So too, the "fertile crescent', the home of most civilization, was originally a gigantic forest, eroded by the same problems.  The same problems occurred again in Virginia from the use of tobacco and cotton plantation.  The settlers would simply move westward whenever the crops could not grow anymore, thus denuding the landscape.

With the inherent animism that is seen in human mental models, primitive religions confuse anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians. The worship of the buffalo by the Native Americans lead many to assert that they only killed what they needed.  Yet, it was difficult to kill buffalo single-handed.  They have thick skin, travel in packs, and are built for strength.  The most common way of killing buffalo and other animals in human history was mass stampeding, chasing the buffalo or animal of choice off a cliff.  This is a massive waste of resources, only a small percentage can be used for food.  Yet, when the choices are "stampede buffalo or starve to death", I think the preferred option can be readily inferred.

Situations from the outside can change stable populations.  In Chaos and Complexity Science, it is known that a stable condition can persist for an indeterminate period of time before a single critical event will push it over.  (Thus, a single butterflys wings flapping can cause a tornado half the globe away, although usually, a million butterflies flapping their wings nearby will do nothing.)  As one historic example, whenever the Pilgrims arrived, they landed in an abandoned Wampanoag Indian village on the coast of Massachusetts.  Why was it abandoned?  The villagers had all died from disease.  The Pilgrams were welcomed not because of the generosity of the Native Americans souls, but through a recognition that the new people had technology, cloth, steel, and weapons that were invaluable. 

However, sixty years later, while the Native American population continued to be reduced, the North Americans were growing.  The Indians didn't have enough resources left to help themselves, (they sold off their land in exchange for the goods mentioned above), and this lead to King Philip's War.  The growth of the New Englander's population was the point that pushed the system to a "critical mass", and the old system toppled. 

Howard Bloom notes that the same proclivities that lead to male violence lead to female violence, namely, insuring the success of future generations of one's own genes and social group.  He uses some interesting studies and examples.  MacLean noted that in monkey troops, when a male monkey (squirrel monkey) is introduced, if he does not act submissive in fifteen seconds, the males and females will attack the newcomer.  In a more fascinating example, he says that:

In one established colony there was a female that would foment a struggle in the following way: If a male was introduced into the colony and followed the protective protocol of remaining quiet with its head bowed, she would rush up to him and pull him so that he would be thrown off balance. The slight movement required to regain his balance was sufficient to trigger an attack by the resident males.” p. 170

Yet, violence is mostly a male business.  To test the theory of social status and male crimes, I checked out H.J. Eysenck's book on it.  The female percentages of arrest are noted, the missing percentages are male crimes.

1965:

In 1977

It seems that most cirmes of impulsiveness and status-seeking behaviors are domianted by men.  This leads to another development.  Why do men even exist?  This question would never cross the mind of a creationist, but it has some central importance amongst biologists and evolutionary psychologists.  The most common answer given is that men help spread the gene pool out by ensuring crosses come into play.  By that, I mean that most beneficial genes are a mix of male and female genes.  Yet this seems something that developed later than the early evolution of males.  If gene-mixing were so needed, why do many plants and animals exist as single sexes? 

The Tangled Web points out that we know that a sexual species may soon displace asexual competitors, as has happened with geckos in the Hawaiian and Fijian islands. Males of the sexual species are larger and more aggressive than the asexual females, who withdraw from the best insect-hunting grounds when the sexual males appear.  An asexual species has a couple of problems.  Namely, the rearing of a child in species which take long periods of time, (an ancient Greek drew the concept of evolution from the observation that a human takes too long to raise to have been successful in the wild), means that this species has to both hunt and guard the child.  This is pretty risky.  In species with genetic bonds, one of the parents could be counted on to guard the baby while the other goes off hunting.  However, in an asexual species, another member would be needed to guard the baby,  as the baby is a protein-rich catch for any other animal.  Since infantcide is pretty common amongst animals, it's likely that another asexual animal of the same species would eat it. 

If males evolved, the problem of genetic bonding would be solved.  So too would another problem.  Competition amongst members of the same species promotes interesting changes.  For example, penis and testicle size is related to sperm competition.  If a female sleeps with multiple males in rapid succession, the species will begin to grow bigger penises and testes regardless of body weight.  The reason why is that a larger penis puts the sperm nearer the egg, while bigger testis allow a larger dose of sperm to reach the ovum.  With competition for female resources, a fundamental shift would occur.  Men would get bigger.  This is called the MPI, (Mutual Parental Investment.)  Basically, how much investment either parent puts into the child will determine the size of that animal.  In some species, like certain birds, the male guards the eggs while the female hunts.  In these species, the female is larger than the male, since he is the resource competed over. 

In regards to the human species, it's pretty obvious which species competed, or is currently competing, for the other species.  Which one buys fast cars, big houses, and spends extravagant amounts of money impressing other people with resources it doesn't possess?  This transition carries over into various other areas as well.  There's two common ways to mark an area in human social grounds.  One common form is phallic symbols, found in primitive cultures throughout the worlds.  They are stone monuments with huge penesis erect, and are used as territorial boundaries, giving a visual, urogential substitute for olfactory, urinary, territorial markings of modern man. Many Gods follow this cue, with Pan, Priapus, Amon, Min, and in asia minor the phallic images identified with priapus were placed at vantage points for the protections of orchards. (p. 13, New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, 1968, quoted by Paul MacLean.)

Gajdusek, in an article on Stone Age man, notes that there are display behavior between a squirrel monkey and certain rituals of Melanesian tribes. He says: “I have noted a quite similar presentation and display in both spontaneous and socially ritualized behavior in some New Guinea groups. It is similarly used to express both aggression and dominance.. When frightened, excited, elated, or surprised, groups of Asmat men and boys spontaneously meet the precipitating event by a penile display dance, which involves much the same sequence as the presentation display of the squirrel monkey.” Likewise, they use phallocrypts characteric of western and central New Guinea. Eibl-Eibesfeldt has also shown cinematographic documentation of gential display and thigh-spreading among Bushmen adolescence.

The other common way of marking territory is by using skulls, bones, and defeated enemies to mark the ground and occassion.  In France, excavators found the bones of roughly a thousand warriors dating to about 200 BCE.  The display of bones and other skeletal remains like this is common throughout the world.  Whenever the subliminal signal of phallic displays is not enough, a direct threat of what can happen is more helpful.

These markers were used to set off limits in "No Man's Land', a place inbetween two different settlements.  The problem is that as human societies grow, now or then, they begin to encroach upon their neighbors territory.  If the two grow at proportional rates to each other, each will be competing for the same slot of land.  The result is predictable. 

What about the natural conservational mode of primitives?  In order for this to work, there would have to be a self-sustaining cycle which would have a natural balance.  None have ever been found, even in human groups such as the Maring of highland New Guinea that used methods of conservation to limit their population.  The other problem posed by that is that certain modes of existence tend to naturally limit human growth and population.  For example, the Inuits hunt caribou and whales for most of their meals.  If their hunting cuts down on the caribou and whale population, the next generation will starve.  The starvation of humans will cause an increase in the whale and caribou population.  This same cycle exists in most places between the rabbits and wolves in an area.  Neither humans or foxes are inherently conserving anything, their available capabilities limits how many rabbits or caribou they can eat.

Another problem is that whenever a group moves, the area that is denuded can recover if the group is small enough in size and low enough in technology to only destroy to a certain point.  The Yanomama do this.  After an area has no more resources, they move onto another area, and the area they left redevelops.  This is a far cry from actually practicing any form of conservation.  In Jared Diamon's fascinating account of how some societies came to dominate the world scene, he disproves the conservationist argument.  He says that one of the main benefits to any developing population base is to have large animals that can perform human functions, e.g. can till fields or move large amounts of equipment from various locations.  Virtually every continent had some form of indigenous animal like this, why didn't they all develop them? 

Consider another common example.  People have claimed that the Indians used every part of a buffalo, and that this is an example of their inherent conservationist behavior.  Yet, they primarily needed hides and meat.  They never stopped hunting buffalo just because they didn't have a use for the tail or any other part. (p. 30, Constant Battles, LeBlanc).  The lack of resources often promoted groups to leave their homeland and find others.  The defeated Germans invaded and encroached the Roman empire, Eric the Red went to Greenland to find land and trees after the Icelandic forest was stripped by them. 

Another example is given by Jared Diamond, p. 47.  "The discovery of numerous skeletons of mammoths with Clovis spearpoints between their ribs suggests that this agreement of dates is not coincidence. Hunters expanding southward through the Americas, encountering big animals that had never seen humans before, may have found those American animals easy to kill and may have exterminated them."  The Clovis settlers, as Diamond calls them, expanding very rapidly.  I imagine that the meat from big game such as this helped expand the rate at which they could grow.  Diamond estimates that with 100 people growing by 1.1 percent per year, the population could reach 10 million in a thousand years.  Rates of growth as high as 3.4 percent per year have been reached in places like Pitcairn Island.  (ibid, 45.)

Another example may be surmised from what French archaeologist Jean Clottes noted.  "Dangerous" animals in Cro-Magnon artwork declines over time.  In the Aurignacian period, images of lions, rhinoceroses, mammoths, etc. account for 50 percent of artwork.  By the Magdalenian era, they compose only 5 percent of the artwork.  It's possible this reflects a better amount of technology to deal with the threat of these animals.  (Ian Tattersoll, Becoming Human, p. 27).  Likewise, Diamond also points out that giant kangaroos, rhinolike marsupials called "diprotodonts" and another called a "leopard" existed, along with gigantic reptiles.  They all went extinct after humans came along. (p. 42)  Diamond hypothesis is that these animals never evolved with humans, and never learned to fear them.  He calls this the overkill hypothesis.

The problem of altruism:

The funny thing about the study of evil, (if such a subject can ever be called "funny"), is that it originates in what is considered the most noble of human emotions.  Altruism. There are three basic forms of altruism.  The first is kin-selection altruism.  This is the altruism shown towards members of the same family or group in general.  People can identify their military brothers and sisters in the same way as a family, or members of the same religion which frequently call each other these titles.  (Early Romans confused Christians as an incest cult because they called each other "brother" and "sister").    The second is reciprocal altruism, or the altruism of friendship.  This was suggested by Robert Trivers, and seen in certain species such as bats that share food with other bats, who do it in turn.  In social animals, the ones that do not share are ostracized against.  In humans, as groups grew too large to be accounted for, organizations developed to help promote this form of altruism.  Robert Wright suggests that this lead to the development of the third form of altruism, "blind altruism", as I call it.  We feel bad for people who have nothing, so we give.  Wright suggests that we feel worse for certain people because a small bit of help in the right place can have big rewards later on.   

A point needs to be addressed here.  Different relatives, and relatives of different needs, are distinguished. Friends are treated individually. There is no evidence for indiscriminate, species or population wide altruism in any organism, nor is there any evidence for unlearned recognition of family. Yet, there is a way to get animals to kill their own kin.  Howard Bloom uses the following example.  Put a piece of cheese behind a glass where a rat cannot reach it, but can see it.  The rat will become enraged.  Put his nephew next to him, and the rat will gore him to pieces.  The brilliant neurologist Panksepp showed that the middle part of the hypothalamus causes emotional attacks, the kind with growls, hisses, arches in the back, and where fur stand up on the end. The lateral hypothalamus causes the predatory attack of cool and calculating effects. The midbrain between the hypothalamus and spinal cord shows that the hypothalamus controls the attack with or without rage. The impulse rage effects go to the upper part of the central gray. The sidestream neurons go to the lower central gray for the predatory attacks.

Panksepp showed that rats will stimulate themselves if they have an electrode in that region, due to the sidestream location next to the river of brain reward. Rats will turn off the part of their brain located near the anger sequence. Cats also have this same impulse to kill rats, even well-fed ones will work hard for a chance to kill a rat. Thus there seems to be two parts of aggression, the hateful and revengeful one that is responsible for massive attacks and destruction, and the controlled one that serves for preservation of the species.  LeDoux put it that “since different emotions are involved with different survival functions -- defending against danger, finding food and mates, caring for offspring, and so on -- each may well involve different brain systems that evolved for different reasons. As a result, there may be not one emotional system in the brain but many” (in Gazzaniga et al. 1998, p. 516, Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of Mind).

Konrad Lorenz was one of the first to point out that violence towards prey is a different type of aggression than violence towards inter-species.

“The motivation of the hunter is basically different from that of the fighter. The buffalo which the lion fells provokes his aggression as little as the appetizing turkey which I have just seen hanging in the larder provokes mine. The differences in these inner drives can clearly be seen in the expressive movements of the animal: A dog about to catch a hunted rabbit has the same kind of excitedly happy expression as he has when he greets his master or awaits some longed-for treat. From many excellent photographs it can be seen that the lion, in the dramatic movement before he springs, is in no way angry. Growling, laying the ears back, and other well-known expression movements of fighting are seen in predatory animals only when they are very afraid of a wildly resisting prey, and even then the expressions are only suggested."

Lorenz didn't believe that this shift was caused by carnivorous tendencies, rather, he believed it evolved for the following reason:

“The inhibitions controlling aggression in various social animals, preventing it from injuring or killing fellow members of the species, are most important and consequently most highly differentiated in those animals which are capable of killing living creatures of about their own size. A raven can peck out the eye of another with one thrust of its beak, a wolf can rip the jugular vein of another with a single bite. There would be no more ravens and no more wolves if reliable inhibitions did not prevent such actions. Neither a dove nor a hare nor even a chimpanzee is able to kill its own kind with a singel peck or bite. Since there rarely is, in Nature, the possibility of such an animal seriously injuring one of its own kind, there is no selection pressure at work to breed inhibitions against killing. One can only deplore the fact that man has definitely not got a carnivorous mentality! All the trouble arises from his being a basically harmless, omnivorous creature, lacking in nature weapons with which to kill big prey, and, therefore, also devoid of the built-in safety devices which prevent ‘professional’ carnivores from abusing their killing power to destroy fellow-members of their own species. No selection pressure arose in the prehistory of mankind to breed inhibitory mechanisms preventing the killing of con-specifics until, all of a sudden, the invention of artificial weapons upset the equilibrium of killing potential and social inhibitions. When it did, man’s position was very nearly that of a dove which, by some unnatural trick of Nature, has suddenly acquired the beak of a raven. Whatever his innate norms of social behavior may have been, they were bound to be thrown out of gear by the invention of weapons."

There are some holes in this argument, but basically, the argument can be stated that man’s instincts and intellect fell out of step. The invention of weapons and tools was an intellectual creation, combining dexterity of the fingers with creative powers of the mind and learning new methods for development. Yet the instinctual usage of these weapons were dependent on the motivational drives, instinct and emotion. The old brain lacked the inhibitions to deal with the new power, or inadequate growth between old and new structures of the brain. We can see this clearly in looking at anthropological evidence.  Heavy taboos were placed upon the killing of one’s own group or members of a tribe. However, no such laws were made against people outside the tribe. It was not individual aggression which got out of hand, but devotion to the narrow social group with which the individual identified himself to the hostile exclusion of all other groups.

Language is another curse when it comes to the aggression of mankind. Ironically, the authors' of Liars, Lovers, and Heroes show this when they mention reciprocal trust can be built by face-to-face meetings and talking. Without communication, people will opt for less reciprocal measures. To quote Lorenz again:

“It is no daring speculation to assume that the first human beings who really represented our species, those of Cro Magnon, had roughly the same instincts and inclinations as we have ourselves. Nor it it illegitimate to assume that the structure of their societies and their tribal warfare was roughly the same as can still be found in certain tribes of Papuans and in central New Guinea. Every one of their tiny settlements is permanently at war with neighboring villages; their relationship is described by Margaret Mead as one of mild reciprocal head-hunting, ‘mild’ meaning that there are no organized raids for the pupose of removing the treasured heads of neighboring warriors, but only the occasional taking of the heads of women and children encountered in the woods.

As Mead put it, there were only two words for people. For one's own tribe, they were people.  The rest were "meat".  This process of demonization occurs in tribes, cities, and countries throughout the world.  Calling Iran part of the "Axis of Evil" and Iran calling us "the Great Satan" helps to legitimize acts of violence taken against people. As conditions in the world continue to accelerate crowding, this problem will continue to develop.  In studies of monkeys and other animals in crowded zoo conditions, they are more violent and have greater amounts of neurological disorders than their free counterparts.  Part of the reason is the unnatural crowding.  This resource competition leads to the same problems in zoos as it does in the human world.  Violence can be expected.

References and footnotes:

1.) On the discussion of Ages in Vedic literature, I went digging around for some sources. Accoring to one source, the Vedics had no concept of time because everything was as a "blink in the Eye of Brahma". To verify this, I went looking to peer-reviewed literature by published authors in the field of Hinduism. They didn't agree with his assessment. (Roy Perrett, History & Theory, October 99, p. 307)

"It is certainly true that many have claimed that there was no history in ancient India, and it is also true that people have been saying this for quite some time. (It is notable too that some of the most influential of these persons are philosophers convinced of the truth of some kind of philosophical explanation for the phenomenon.) One of the earliest written sources for the claim is the work of the great Muslim traveller Alburuni (Muhammad al-Biruni). Reporting on his visit to India in about 1020 CE, he noted: "Unfortunately the Hindus do not pay much attention to the historical order of things, they are very careless in relating the chronological succession of their kings, and when they are pressed for information and are at a loss, not knowing what to say, they invariably take to tale-telling."

A much later, but far more influential, source is James Mill's The History of British India. Unlike Alburuni, Mill never visited India; moreover he was entirely ignorant of any Indian languages. Indeed Mill boasts of both of these facts as special qualifications for the task of writing a history of India, for his is a "critical history" and his total lack of Orientalist credentials is supposed to guarantee his impartiality. Unhampered by the "fond credulity" such firsthand knowledge might otherwise have inspired, Mill argued for the gross inferiority of Indian (particularly Hindu) civilization to that of the West, hence justifying British rule. The absence of history among the Hindus is offered as evidence of their cultural inferiority:

As soon as reason begins to have considerable influence in the direction of human affairs, no use of letters is deemed more important than that of preserving an accurate record of those events and actions by which the interests of the nation have been promoted or impaired. But the human mind must have a certain degree of culture, before such a memorial is perceived. . . . All rude nations, even those to whom the use of letters has long been familiar, neglect history, and are gratified with the production of the mythologists and the poets.

It is allowed on all hands that no historical composition existed in the literature of the Hindus; they had not reached that point of intellectual maturity, at which the value of a record of the past for the guidance of the future begins to be understood. . . .'

At the courts of the ancient Indian kings careful records were kept of events important to the realm, even if these are now lost to us. The ancient texts also allude respectfully to a class of literature called "itihasa," a term with a rather wider scope than "history" but nevertheless overlapping with it. In the twelfth century CE the poet Kalhana composed the Rajatarangani, a history of his native Kashmir. The earliest parts of the Mahavamsa, the Pali chronicle of Sri Lanka which relates the history of Buddhism on the island, date from the sixth century CE. To be sure, these latter writings are not fully works of critical history in the modern sense, but (as already noted) this is unsurprising since similar shortcomings are to be found in the works of the Greek and Roman historians. Moreover, whatever the limits of his own historical work, Kalhana explicitly requires that the historian cultivate personal detachment and consult at first hand the relevant archival and epigraphic records. It is not strictly correct, then, to assert that there was no history in ancient India, nor that the ancient Hindus lacked all historical sense........

Second, Mohanty's explanans does not do full justice to the ethical import of the Hindu theory of the cycles of cosmic history. According to this theory the vast cycles of the world historical process are divided into four recurring ages or yugas. In the first age (the krta-yuga) virtue (dharma) reigns. In the succeeding ages (the treta-and dvapara-yugas) it progressively declines until in the fourth age (the kali-yuga) it disappears. Then the world is destroyed and the cosmic cycle begins again. (The Buddhists accept a similar four-ages cosmology and the Jainas accept a reduced two-ages version.) This cyclical succession of world ages, however, is not purely mechanical; it also has an ethical significance. It reflects the rise and fall of the moral order (dharma) due to the actions of human agents. The precise duration of the ages depends upon the actions and character of the people, on how well they perform their dharma.

Save for the short-lived school of Carvaka materialists, the classical Indian philosophers all agreed liberation (moksa) to be the supreme value. But the orthodox Hindu philosophers were also all committed to the recognition of the value of dharma. However, since dharma with its concern with right action is so obviously a temporal value and moksa is apparently an atemporal ideal, there seems at least a prima facie tension between them. In fact the Hindu philosophers espouse a variety of positions on this issue of the relation of dharma to moksa. The oldest tradition (present in the Dharmasastra and the Epics) claims an essential continuity between dharma and moksa: selfless performance of one's dharma leads ineluctably to moksa. A different tradition (particularly associated with Samkara and other Vedantins) insists on a sharp opposition between dharma and moksa. But even then the cultivation of dharma is considered a prerequisite for the moral development of the adhikarin, the qualified aspirant to moksa. Thus the timeless ideal of moksa cannot be so easily separated from the temporal ideal of dharma, and the latter concept is very much part of the Hindu theory of cosmic cycles. In this sense the Hindu philosophers, through their commitment to this background theory of cosmic history, effectively do temporalize consciousness rather more than Mohanty admits. Thus it is unclear that the contrast his philosophical explanans requires really exists."

2.) Francis Fukuyama, Foreign Affairs, Sep/Oct 1998, pp. 24-40

3.) Carpenter; `Aggressive Behavioral Systems', in Primate Aggression, Territoriality, and Xenophobia. Ed. R. L. Holloway, pp. 459-96.
Hausfater and Hrdy; Infanticide: Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives.
Huntingford and Turner, Animal Conflict
Van Hooff , `Intergroup Competition and Conflict in Animals and Man', in Sociobiology and Conflict. Ed. Dennen and Falger, pp. 23-54.

4.) The debate still rages on today. For example, one often maligned character, specifically thanks to Stephen Jay Gould, a more prominate and well-educated advocate of social-constructionism, is Cyril Burt. Cyril Burt was accused post-humously of faking work which showed the inheritability of intelligence, and Burt himself worked his whole life to seperate factors like malnutrition and injury from inherent differences. After he died, it was declared that he faked all of his evidence. Two biographers, Robert B. Joynson and Ronald Fletcher, independant of each other, show that this was not the case.

To specifically cite Gould's misinformation, he blames the Holocaust on the I.Q. testing spectrum. His claim is that early IQ testers claimed Jews as a group scored low on their tests. From here, it was deduced that they should pass the Immigration Act of 1924, under which Jewish refugees were denied entry in the 1930s. Gould even claims that Henry H. Goddard in 1917 and Carl C. Brigham in 1923 labeled four-fifths of Jewish immigrants as ``feeble-minded... morons.''

Gould was twice wrong. Goddard was testing to see if the standard Binet test identified what were then called ``high-grade defectives'', as well among immigrants as it did among native-born Americans. He never makes any assertion that 80 per cent of Russians, Jews, or any immigrant group in general were feeble-minded. For more in-depth debunking, the historian of psychology Franz Samelson demonstrated this to be false in 1975, through his journal "Social Forces". This was shown again in Mark Snyderman and the late Richard Herrnstein's article in "The American Psychologist", 1983. They show that Congress took virtually no notice of intelligence testing in framing the legislation.

Indeed, as one critic points out, (Malcolm Muggeridge, "Human Life Review", Winter97, Vol. 23 Issue 1, p. 98)

"In this sick environment, the notion of mercy-killing was put forward in 1920 in a book entitled The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value by Alfred Hoche, a reputable psychiatrist, and Karl Binding, a jurist. The authors advocated killing off "absolutely worthless human beings," pointing out that the money spent on keeping them alive thus saved could be used to better purpose for instance, on helping a young married couple to set up house. Frederick Wertham, in his scholarly and deeply disturbing book, A Sign For Cain, says that the Hoche-Binding book influenced, or at least crystalized the thinking of a whole generation.

From these beginnings, a program of mercy-killing developed which was initiated, directed and supported by doctors and psychiatrists, some of them of considerable eminence--all this when the Nazi movement was still at an embryonic stage, and Hitler had barely been heard of. Initially, the holocaust was aimed, not against Jews or Slavs, but against handicapped Aryan Germans, and was justified, not by racial theories, but by Hegelian utilitarianism, whereby what is useful is per se good, without any consideration being given to Judeo-Christian values, or, indeed to any concept whatsoever of Good and Evil."

When Himmler was taken before the Nuremburg Trials, and asked why he did what he did, he used Kant to justify it, on the basis of the ontological argument.  Do every deed as if everyone should do it.  He had the "common man" interpretation of Kant.  Kant made a special provision that man can never be used as a means-to-an-end.  What he meant can be illustrated by example.  For Kant, man's supreme function was the intellect, which set man apart from the animals.  Anything which violated the intellect or Reason was a charge against man.  Thus, Kant would approve of selling a good to be bought by another, it does not violate free will or Reason.  However, if you put a gun to a man's head, the person no longer is able to use reason in buying the product, he has become a means-to-an-end.  Still, the laymen's concept of utilitarianism and deontological arguments is a scary thing, particularly when used to justify horrible killings.  On Judeo-Christian ethics, Hugo Grotius used a verse in Psalms, "Let thy heart rejoice in dashing babies against rocks", to justify killing babies in war.  For the record as well, Hegel was deeply influenced by Christianity, as even the most precursory glance at his writings can show.  Rather, it shows how the problem that Dawkins addressed in The Extended Phenotype can quickly surface, that certain udeas are almost willfully distorted as soon as they are heard.  

Back to Gould and the general claim, others have refuted it as well.  Historian Carl N. Degler, 1991, In Search of Human Nature, Daniel Seligman, again, in A Question of Intelligence. Finally, Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in their book, The Bell Curve, also highlighted the issue in a special boxed section. The historian Joachim Remak, editor of The Nazi Years: A Documentary History, and a long article by Stephen B. Saetz called "Eugenics and the Third Reich", in The Eugenics Bulletin, also debunk this.

Gould references those sources, but never points out the evidence contrary to his statements, or even attempts to answer it. Stephen Jay Gould was a Socialist himself, and his theory of punctuated equilibrium was based upon that, thus, to acknowledge evidence to the contrary was to destroy his whole argument, and consequently, his career. Concerning the actual amount of biology or Darwin ideas used in Nazism, the noted psychologist Dr. Robert Lifton reports in The Nazi Doctors that: "The regime actually rejected much of Darwinism; since evolutionary theory is more or less democratic in its assumption of a common beginning of all races, it is therefore at odds with the Nazi principle of inherent Aryan racial virtue."  Further, Himmler, one of the main pundits for the racism of Nazism, had his own theory of creation.  The perfect Aryan man was preserved in ice, transported to Earth, and bred from there.  Like the Turks in the Ottoman empire, "which alleged a prehistoric mythic unity among Turanian peoples based on racial origin" (ibid, 476), the Germans found a prehistoric beginning with racial creation very useful. 

Darwinian theory pressed to the fullest would suggest that if a difference exists in two people of different genotypes, the difference would be explained based upon the adaptive value of each in their own climate.  Thus, there would be no inherently "good" race.  This theory is presented most eloquently in Sarich and Miele's book, Race.

5.) Much of this material is from two articles that can be found on the web via a search engine, (they have changed since I used them):

To examine this issue further, we shall look at one of the most important founders of Communism, Moses Hess, the "father of German socialism" who played the major part in winning Marx and Engels to communism. He left religion from a Rabbi, and tried for the rest of his life trying to get away from religion. Yet, in his own words, he was never successful. In his diary, he writes:

"I worked without rest to rediscover my God, whom I had lost.... Nor could I remain a skeptic for the rest of my life. I had to have a God--and I did find him, after a long search, after a terrible fight--in my own heart."

His new faith of choice was Communism. According to him, Christians invest their hopes "in the image of...heavenly joy.... We, on the other hand, want this heaven on earth."

Hess's socialism was of a piece with other new ideas flooding out of German universities in the early 1800', and Isaiah Berlin tells us that this was "to find in art or science the path to individual or national salvation which the orthodox Christian churches seemed no longer capable of providing for critical minds."

During the French Revolution, the Christian calendar was temporarily replaced by one in which the days, months, and seasons were renamed for plants and animals and types of weather. The Cathedral of Notre Dame was renamed the Temple of Reason. Yet, Will and Ariel Durant note, "a thousand superstitions survived side by side with the rising enlightenment." Superstitious pseudo-religions and movements popped-up, a crass mix of enlightenment and nonsense. (An example from Britain is the church-like Halls of Science who held Sunday meetings.)

Diderot, whose Encyclopedia was the flagship of the Enlightenment, confessed that he could not watch religious processions "without tears coming to my eyes." Edmund O. Wilson said in his speech upon receiving the 1999 Humanist of the Year Award that:

There is no doubt that spirituality and religious behavior of some kind are extremely powerful and, it appears, necessary parts of the human condition.... The inability of secular humanist thinkers to satisfy this instinct, even when evidence and reason are on their side, is surely part of the reason that there are only 5,300 members of the American Humanist Association and 16 million members of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Marx shares the history of the Bible perfectly. It's a tale of redemption that divided time into three epochs: a distant past of primitive contentment, a present of suffering and struggle, and a future of harmony and bliss. It linked mankind's salvation to a downtrodden class.

This begs the question though. Wasn't Marx a rabid atheist? No, he wasn't. In his play, OULANEM, Marx admits that there is an eternal life, except it is an eternal life of hatred. The chief object of Marx's hatred was made clear in the "poem," "Invocation of One in Despair":

"I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above." As no one can hate, or desire revenge, against someone he claims to believe does not even exist, Marx's suppressed writings clearly indicate that he really believed two things about religion: 1. Marx believed in God. 2. Marx hated God.

There's more to it than that. In early youth, Marx was a Christian. The first of Marx's known works was entitled, "Unity of believers in Christ according to the Gospel of John 15:1-14: Unity's meaning, unconditional necessity, and influence." He writes:

"Union with Christ is found in a close and living fellowship with Him and in the fact that we always have Him before our eyes and in our hearts. And at the same time that we are possessed by the greatest love of Him, we direct our hearts to our brothers, with whom He bound us closely, and for whom He sacrificed Himself."

He continues:

"Therefore, unity with Christ internally exalts, comforts in trials, and makes the heart open to love people, not because of our pride or thirst for fame, but because of Christ."

He writes in his work entitled: "Thoughts of a young man before choosing a profession":

"Religion teaches us the Ideal to Whom we all aspire. He has sacrificed Himself for all mankind. Who will dare to deny such assertions? If we have chosen a profession at which we may give our best to mankind, then we won't falter under its burden, because it is a sacrifice for all."

His high school diploma had it written that he knew a great deal about christianity and its history. Captain Reese, who visited the Marx house, looked for someone to talk to about Marx. He found a servant who said: "He was a man with the fear of God. When he was very ill, he used to pray alone in his room before burning candles, wound round his head was something like tape."

Marx was heavily religious, Communism is really a disguised religion, Marx could never hope to reconcile the contradictions between theology and secular sciences, but perhaps by instead of making them seperate, making them into one coherant unit, a new religion could be born, called "Communism".

Norman Birnbaum, a sociologist, put it best: "Socialism in all its forms was itself a religion of redemption." In an atheist magazine called Truth Seeker, August 20, 1904, made the point well in comparing the relation of socialism to religion and Christianity:

A religion cannot be build upon the known, it must place its heaven far off, beyond the ken of man, and beyond the possibility of its being brought within his ken.  So with socialism.  When one says to a socialist that hte conditions here are all awry, that our officiials are nearly all tyrants, that our courts do not do justice, that a man elevated to office imagines himself a tin god set up to rule over thsoe who delegate power to him, the socialist says, Oh, that will all be regulated when socialism comes.  He says this just as a Christian says to a sufferer, be patient, resign yourself to the will of God, and in his good time all will be well.  The how, why or wherefore of these things is left to the imagination.  The Christians have implicit faith in their God, the same faith socialists have in the state.  (Quoted in Freethinkers, by Susan Jacoby, p. 231)

To show what I mean, let's look at Francis Fukuyama's End of History and the Last Man, p. 373, f:2-3:

'Ernest Gellner, (Nations and Nationalism p. 1) "Nationalism as a sentiment or as a movement, can best be defined in terms of this principle [, that the political and national unit should be congruent]. Nationalist sentiment is the feeling of anger aroused by the violation of the principle, or the feeling of satisfaction aroused by its fulfillment. A nationalist movement is one actuated by a sentiment of this kind."

This footnote corresponds to p. 214:

"The desire for recognition is also the psychological seat of two extremely powerful passions -- religion and nationalism. By this I do not mean that religion and nationalism can be reduced to the desire for recognition; but the rootedness of these passions in thymos is what gives them their great power. The religious believer assigns dignity to whatever his religion holds sacred -- a set of moral laws, a way of life, or particular objects of worship. He grows angry when the dignity of what he holds sacred is violated."

6.) Literary critic Catherine Gallagher writes that most of the new social studies are hybrids of feminism and Marxism which 'can be said to possess a remarkable continuity with certain cultural assumptions of the New Left', and the popularity of Marxism among feminist scholars such as Judith Lowder Newton and E. Ann Kaplan, along with Marxist theories from Louis Althusser, Claude Levi-Strauss, and his modern followers such as Marshall Sahlins, are modern-day variants of the social-constructionist viewpoint. Some are dependant upon Marxist theories, being ex-Marxists, but reject the metanarrative continuity of Marxism, those being people like Jean Frarcois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. There are also neo-Freudian feminists, and philosophers such as Richard Tarnas who go along in this same vein. The list would be too long to put in full here.

7.) See, "The Unconscious Civilization", pp. 15-16

8.) In an article, Richard Dawkins was going through a website looking for references to his word "meme", which is a word he invented to describe behavior through adaptation to others, or basically, learned behavior by mimicing. He posited that this meme would have mutations as time went on, so that ideas that once started out would be far different from when they reached someone else who is receiving it X generations from now. He found a website called "Church of the Virus" dedicated to his meme/viral infection idea. He was disturbed by the reference to himself as "St. Dawkins", and calling Charles Darwin "St. Darwin" and him "St. Dawkins" are both plays on his reaction. Dawkins is something the opposite of Gould, Dawkins is a genetic-influenist, (awkward term I made for those who believe that genes play a major role in how people believe), and his the