David P Barash writes:

The most serious problem with [the American anthropologist Napoleon] Chagnon’s influence on our understanding of human nature [through his study of the Yanomami people of the Venezuelan/Brazilian Amazon] is one familiar to many branches of science: generalising from one data set — however intensive — to a wider universe of phenomena. Academic psychologists, for example, are still reeling from a 2010 study by the University of British Columbia which found that the majority of psychological research derives from college students who are ‘Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic’ — in short, WEIRD. Similarly, the Yanomami are only one of a large number of very different, tribal human societies. Given the immense diversity of human cultural traditions, any single group of Homo sapiens must be considered profoundly unrepresentative of the species as a whole.

Just as the Yanomami can legitimately be cited as notably violence-prone — at both the individual and group level — many other comparable tribal peoples do not engage in anything remotely resembling warfare. These include the Batek of Malaysia, the Hadza of Tanzania, the Martu of Australia, a half-dozen or more indigenous South Indian forager societies, and numerous others, each of whom are no less human than those regularly trotted out to ‘prove’ our inherent war-proneness.

In the Dark Ages of biology, taxonomists used to identify a ‘type species’ thought to represent each genus, but the idea no longer has any currency in biology. The great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr effectively demonstrated that statistical and population thinking trumps the idea of a Platonic concept of ‘types’, independent of the actual diversity of living things, not least Homo sapiens. Yet anthropologists (and biologists, who should know better) seem to have fallen into the trap of seizing upon a few human societies, and generalising them as representative of Homo sapiens as a whole. Regrettably, this tendency to identify ‘type societies’ has been especially acute when it comes to establishing the supposed prevalence of human warfare.

In his justly admired book The Better Angels of our Nature (2011), the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker made a powerful case that human violence — interpersonal as well as warring — has diminished substantially in recent times. But in his eagerness to emphasise the ameliorating effects of historically recent social norms, Pinker exaggerated our pre-existing ‘natural’ level of war-proneness, claiming that ‘chronic raiding and feuding characterised life in a state of nature’. The truth is otherwise. As recent studies by the anthropologist Douglas Fry and others have shown, the overwhelmingly predominant way of life for most of our evolutionary history — in fact, pretty much the only one prior to the Neolithic revolution — was that of nomadic hunter-gatherers. And although such people engage in their share of interpersonal violence, warfare in the sense of group-based lethal violence directed at other groups is almost non-existent, having emerged only with early agricultural surpluses and the elaboration of larger-scale, tribal organisation, complete with a warrior ethos and proto-military leadership. [Continue reading…]