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Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

Book by Malcolm Potts · 21 quotes · Violence, Aggression, Evolution

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Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World Quotes

“People who can see their neighbors with air-conditioning and cars, but who themselves live in shacks and often lack sewage disposal or a reliable water supply, have little to lose, and may find violence a rational option.”

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“...killing other members of our own species -a rarity in the animal kingdom- is a male behavior that evolved early in our history, because those individuals who manifested such a predisposition were more likely to transmit their genes to the next generation than those who didn't. War and violence, then, are indelibly linked to sex and reproduction.”

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“Systematic rape is one of the most hideous, and most explicitly male, expressions of warfare, but it is hardly the only one. All wars are extraordinarily costly in material terms and grotesquely painful in human terms. Yet wars are so much a part of the human experience that we don't always pause to realize that one of the most astonishing aspects of war is the very fact that we so regularly go out and deliberately kill members of our own species.”

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“In short, controlling more resources means you are likely to have more progeny surviving to future generations: Team aggression is one way that both chimpanzees and humans have hit upon to reap that evolutionary reward.”

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“After World War II, Marxist archaeologists argued that Stone Age societies were economically self-sufficient and therefore incapable of warfare -that is until they excavated skeletons with flint arrows embedded in them.”

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“The transition that we make with age reflects not only our growing experience and shifting philosophies, but also a changing willingness to engage in or condone violence. Young men are the revolutionaries, the superstar computer programmers, the best athletes, the most courageous soldiers, the bravest mountaineers, and the most creative musicians, but they are also the most vicious gang members and nearly all the suicidal terrorists.”

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“Abandoned weapons and corpses may be washed away, removed by animals, dismembered by the victors as trophies, or buried, burned, or otherwise disposed of by the vanquished after defeat. It is reasonable to expect that direct archaeological evidence of warfare will be limited, and that it will actually tend to underestimate the frequency and bloody nature of past conflicts.”

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“For history and biology also show that even if we are a violent species, in which males have an inborn predisposition to engage in team aggression, the specific conditions of our environment, culture, economic well-being, and demographic structure can have dramatic impacts on how our most fundamental impulses are expressed.”

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“Rare is the Stalin-like individual, who lacks empathy and who seems to take pleasure in inflicting pain or watching pain inflicted to others; common is the -virtuous citizen acting in the name of righteous causes-.”

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“A few people -and a few chimpanzees- are just frankly antisocial. Presumably, such cases are the result of something going grievously wrong in a brain that has been built by a particular combination of genes and then submitted to a particular set of environmental pressures, so that it places almost everyone in an outgroup. When such individuals act alone, they are antisocial. But when they gain control over groups or even whole nations, they join the ranks of history’s greatest villains.”

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“We humans are a frightening animal. Throughout our species existence, we have used each new technology we have developed to boost the destructive power of our ancient predisposition for killing members of our own species.”

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