[mabbo]

2000 years of warfare between males is more than enough time for natural selection to start taking place. I wonder if the resulting human male is one less prone to aggression and warfare?

Maybe the reason civilization is even possible today is that the majority of our potential ancestors who couldn't deal with civilized life wiped each other out. Or alternatively, the males who survived were really good at warfare and surviving warfare.

[corey_moncure]

Wouldn't the result be the human male that is the most adept at warfare?

[Jare]

Rather, the result would have the males less likely to die in war, which may include those most adept, those completely unable to partake, and those smart enough to find a way to skip it.

[haihaibye]

What happens to the men left at home of a conquered tribe?

[barry-cotter]

Many would be killed, some would be spared as useful, skilled labour like smiths, some would be spared. All would drop substantially in social status and likelihood of leaving descendants, bar skilled labour, if that.

[ggggtez]

It's more correct to say that the "society" is the most adept at warfare, because warfare is largely when two groups compete, not individuals.

And yes, societies which are better at warfare tend to also have better agriculture, tools, etc, to support their military machine.

[d0lph]

Is it? Were males not the primary fighters? Men are more built for combat (higher testosterone, more muscle mass, endurance etc.).

[Spooky23]

You had a caste system in these civilizations. Warrior/hunters, farmers, priests, etc.

Neolithic civilization wasn’t just a band of 50 and a few yurts. There were complex societies, but they had scale limits due to technology and knowledge constraints.

[woodandsteel]

ggggtez is not disagreeing with that. He is saying that when one society beats others at warfare, it is not because its males had more testosterone and larger muscles, rather because it had better agriculture and so on.

[d0lph]

That is not how I read it.

> And yes, societies which are better at warfare tend to also have better agriculture, tools, etc, to support their military machine.

He states that there tends to be a correlation, but not causation.

[ggggtez]

It's an argument of semantics at this point. I'm saying war isn't won by bigger muscles alone. If you can't feed your troops, or equip them with more efficient weapons and armor, and train them with better tactics, then you'll lose at "war" to a society which can.

[arkis22]

There's also the possibility that the human male who is less prone to aggression and warfare is the most adept at warfare.

An interesting parallel would be Starcraft AI. It excels at micro, but fails at macro, like tricking the opponent into building the wrong units.

[rangibaby]

I read a book on survival techniques when I was a teenager and it had a chapter on street fighting. It was prefaced with something like: the best way to win a fight is to not have one; pay attention to your surroundings and avoid getting into a situation where you have to fight. Run away if you can.

[TangoTrotFox]

I'd expect mostly the latter. In war to the victor go the spoils, and that would have included the women. Consider Genghis Khan - it's been estimated that he has about 16 million living descendents today.

But beyond the warfare stuff, another key selector would have been intelligence. Give two groups of people sticks and stones and I'm betting on the smarter. You don't need much strength to kill with even those weapons, and all the strength in the world isn't going to help you when you get hit. Perhaps it's the case that we still some of this today as it relates to Genghis Khan as the mongoloid group of peoples tend to have some of the highest average visual/spatial IQs on the planet.

[TomMckenny]

Just as possible would be selection for _reduction_ in intelligence that reduces skepticism and limits thinking up objections to agitating emotion based calls for violence.

Likewise, lower intelligence might reduce personality differences and increased coordination. Individual troops with less foresight may be more careless of their own safety and thus more fierce on the battle field. In the manner of bees. Also, in a warrior society, obedience maybe favored over independent thinking.

Also, in an pre-agricultural societys everyone is a generalist: everyone must be smart enough to know how to do everything. Less true in agricultural societies.

So it's just as possible agriculture made people dumber but more dense population centers and thus more effective militarily.

My point is that barring actual measurement, we can conceive a great many possibilities and at this point no measurements indicate intelligence change over that period

[TangoTrotFox]

I think this view is from a stereotyped but not really accurate view of warfare and it's reasons and execution. Warfare generally has very little to do with emotion. Even today, as always, it tends to be the same thing - one side has something and another side wants it. And in cases where you're not the side doing the taking, you need to be equally capable in war to defend what you have. Even things like religious warfare were more of a convenient casus belli for taking things than the cause entirely in and of themselves. This was a real risk all the way up until the 20th century. The thing that really changed the game was nukes which makes military dominance basically impossible, for now...

Similarly, throughout history it's invariably the more intelligent side that wins in war - at least in the longrun. The Mongols ended up wiping out a huge percent of the entire earth's population with an army that, for instance, when invading Europe only numbered in the low tens of thousands and were very lightly armored compared to the forces they were fighting. But they were smart in war and strategy and had relatively advanced technology in their composite bows. That the Mongoloid group of peoples to this day still have a substantially higher IQ than average I think is at least a reasonably strong correlation in support of selection for intelligence.

[TomMckenny]

Neanderthals had larger brains than we do. If intelligence was the determining factor in out-competing rivals, we would expect all species to evolve greater intelligence at the cost of other adaptations. This is clearly not the case: only one species invented the gun, all others went with sharper teeth. Even now there are more sharks than dolphins, more reptiles than mammals, more insect than reptiles.

But in humans, the very idea that "we" fight to gain "their" requires creating an "us vs them" dichotomy. But all humans are the same species, and persons on national borders are invariably more closely related than on opposite sides of the same country.

Essentially every border is an accident of history: Romans building a wall, Charlemagne having so many heirs, monarchs marring one person vs another, religious boundaries becoming national ones, the treaty of Versailles drawing straight lines through deserts.

To convince people that a particular "us vs them" dichotomy is real requires the listener to have a certain kind of thinking processes. Especially to convince them to kill and die for it.

And because every population falls for this, any individual population that smartens up and notices it's absurd will likely be wiped out by those who still have the "us vs them" delusion. Thus the species is kept in a sub-optimal state.

[TomMckenny]

>the Mongoloid group of peoples to this day still have a substantially higher IQ than average

You're claiming haplogroup C3 has substantially higher IQ scores than other groups. Do you have evidence of this?

[haihaibye]

He didn't claim that. Mongoloid means East Asian, not the Mongolian people.

[TomMckenny]

That 19th century definition of Mongoloid is nonsensically arbitrary, so instead I was interpreting it in as generous a way as possible: residents of Mongolia or Haplogroup C3

The closest relatives of Genghis Khan, whom he claims is the source of superior intelligence, live overwhelmingly in modern day Mongolia and Kazakhstan. They are more related to Navajos than to modern Chinese, Japanese, Koreans or whoever else fits in that 19th century definition of "Mongoloid".

[haihaibye]

A good example of Humans being selected for less intelligence are "hobbits" who had chimp sized brains:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis

[haihaibye]

It's easy to see selection for slaughter in man's body, why not his mind?

[philipodonnell]

Guns, Germs and Steel had an interesting theory that as societies increased in complexity and size, warfare became more likely to take place away from the main population centers and therefore less damaging. Two tribes go to war its pretty easy to end up destroying every piece of infrastructure from both so there wasn't a ton of investment in it when we were just tribes.

So not so much surviving warfare as much as an increasing capability to control it so it took place away from the productive infrastructure. A pattern we see to this day.

[duxup]

Inversely a historian once explained to me that generally through history in order to take an area, you took the local village, or even city and there was a great deal less focus until later on specific borders or a campaign where your goal was tracts of land. Effectively if you took the city state, you generally had obtained the local surrounding land as well.... and if you didn't plan to keep the village or city, you destroyed it and the next nearest city or village was effectively the point of control.

[mcguire]

The early historic record is replete with stories of capturing cities, pillaging, resettling or killing the population, and burning the city.

A bit unbelievable, given that the cities get back in business quickly, but population centers have apparently always been centers for conflict.