Title: Why war? /
Authors: Coker, Christopher
Year: 2021
Subjects: War and society
Abstract: What are humanity's biological origins? What are the mechanisms, including culture, that continue to drive it? And what are humanity's functions--how does it survive and thrive by exploiting the features that definite it as a species? These are the four questions of the Tinbergen Method for explaining animal behavior, developed by the Nobel Prize-winning Dutch ethologist Niko Tinbergen. This book contends that applying this method to war--which is unique to humans--can help us better understand why conflict is so resilient. Christopher Coker explores these four questions of our past and present, and looks at our post-human future, assessing how far scientific advances in gene-editing, robotics and AI systems will de-center human agency. He concludes that we won't witness war's end until it has exhausted its evolutionary possibilities--meaning that, well into the future, war is likely to remain what Thucydides first called it: 'the human thing.' From the Ancients to Artificial Intelligence, 'Why War?' is an exhilarating tour d'horizon of humankind's propensity to warfare and its behavioral underpinnings, offering new ways of thinking about our species' unique and deadly preoccupation.
Contents: Introduction. The man who watched seagulls -- Ad hominem -- Why war? -- Origins. -- Why we don't live on the Planet of the Apes -- From prey to predator -- Talking ourselves to death -- The myth of the noble savage -- One small sacrifice -- The artificial ape -- Men behaving badly -- Cultural mechanisms. -- Krishna's answers -- Storytelling -- The myths we live by -- The historian's craft -- Barbarous philosophers -- Ways of seeing -- Holding onto reality -- Ontogeny. The father of everything -- A small talent for war -- Breaking bad : a brief cultural history -- A wrinkle in time? -- Functions. Memes : the search for glory -- Sportive monsters -- War and the religious appetites -- A warning to the curious -- On the edge of tomorrow. -- Man-machine hybrids -- Taming the terminators? -- AI awakenings -- Envoi.