The Great Debate: ORIGINS OF VIOLENCE (OFFICIAL) - (Part 1/2)

well the best is here now what a night we have planned for you five years ago today actually we inaugurated the origins project here in this very auditorium we just with an experiment first we decided to ask the question could we bring together 80 of the world's greatest scientists scholars public intellectuals whose fields span almost every area of human inquiry and bring them together to discuss foundational questions but in a meaningful way and inform each other and then we decided to ask the question since these are the same questions from the origin of the universe the origins of life the origins of humanity since these questions are the same questions everyone asks themselves could we fill a three thousand seat auditorium with members of the public who are willing to listen to science now it's fair to say I think that most people thought the answer to both those questions was no but here we are five years later thanks to you we're continuing and it's appropriate tonight to celebrate our fifth anniversary by bringing together two truly remarkable panels to discuss issues that are really hit to the heart of the mission of the origins project that mission is changing our future by understanding our origins now after the break we're going to have a panel that's going to talk about the future from synthetic biology medicine evolution health technology and machine intelligence but before the break we're going to have a panel this remarkable panel that's going to deal with a question that's really central to our existence violence violence seems to have been a part of human history from its beginning and that we need ask some question why is that the case is the present different than the past will it persist into the future those are the kind of issues that we've actually been discussing at a workshop that the people here represent a workshop that's been going on for the last two days here at the University now to put together a panel dealing with that issue required a remarkable individual and we went to a person I personally think is one of the most significant intellects and intellectuals of our present generation he's also a friend of origins he was here in September 2009 to inaugurate the event he's been here since then he knew what we wanted to achieve and he's a a man with a remarkable dream CV he's a leader in cognitive psychology a chaired professor at Harvard he's had three books on the New York Times bestseller list and he is a public intellectual in the true sense he is also one of the nicest people I know and I'm very proud and happy to introduce you to my friend Steven Pinker murder war riots terrorism insurrections that I hope got your attention ever since we go back this ever since Cain slew Abel people have deplored celebrated moralized and above all been fascinated by violence violence has been explained as a form of entertainment for sadistic puppeteers on high as a depraved and sinful human choice and as a glorious expression of manly heroism and self-sacrifice but until recently there's been little scientific knowledge of the facts of violence and little scientific understanding of the causes of violence the origins project has brought together over this weekend a diverse group of scholars studying the nature of violence in all of its manifestations by asking for a scientific understanding of violence this does not necessarily mean a search for biological factors like genes for violence or areas of the brain responsible for violence though it does embrace that as well but rather an evidence-based understanding of violence what are the facts of the different categories of human aggression a search for an explanation a lack of satisfaction with the answer well that's just the way it is and always has been and the desire to test possible explanations with empirical data I'm going to get right to it are the topic of origins of violence implies that we should not be satisfied with merely the human origins of violence but the origins of violence before our species walk the earth and there is no one better to discuss that than Richard Wrangham one of the world's great primatologists the Ruth Moore professor of biological anthropology at Harvard and the author of demonic males Apes and the origin of human violence Richard I'm going to ask you two questions which is which are to chimpanzees have to fight over and what overlap do you think there is between the kind of violence that you have observed in chimpanzees and the kind of violence that you have observed in human beings chimpanzees fight over ultimately land but approximately they don't fight over anything one of the extraordinary things about what we see from their behavior in a variety of study sites across Africa is that you don't have to have them provoked by competition over a resource competition over anything to have them excited by the prospect of being violent in a warlike context and when I say they let's just be clear we're talking about males to almost complete extent so a coalition of males half a dozen will leave the center of their range go to the edge of their range and look for individuals on their own in neighboring groups they will penetrate into the territory of the neighboring group and humped and if they successfully catch them dangerously harm and likely kill that member of a neighboring group so we're seeing something astonishingly like what is sometimes seen in humans and if I may this is rather similar to what we see in some hunters and gatherers nomadic hunters and gatherers are of course a wonderful model for our pre agricultural tasks prior to ten thousand years ago and what is so fascinating is that if you reduce the complexity of understanding the hunters and gatherers by taking away those hunters and gatherers that are neighbored by farmers or state societies and you look only at the conditions where they have other hunters and gatherers as their neighbours you see an astonishingly similar system to what chimpanzees do which we can call cowardly killing chimps never get into a context of a fight with the neighbouring group where they risk getting wounded the astonishing thing is that chimpanzees in these small groups are attacking an individual who is three or four times as strong as a human is fighting for his life and yet none of the attackers will get a wound at all and you get a very similar system with nomadic hunters and gatherers where the aim of the attacking party is to make a deep raid into a neighbouring group of a different ethno-linguistic society people who speak a different language and quickly find individuals kill and get out of there before there's a chance that they are going to get hurt and in that we see apparently evidence of natural selection operating on the evolutionary psychological architecture of our species because if chimpanzees are showing this system where clearly there's nothing like the cultural evolution of humans it's important and if humans show a very similar system then it's clear that natural selection should be at the base of what we see in humans now in the last 20 years we've been able to get sufficient data on chimpanzees in different places to look at was there human disturbance that could have been correlated with these attacks and the answer now is we know that the pattern of aggression is related to the number of males in the group and the population density of the chimpanzees but not to any factors of human disturbance so thinking then about what this means for the larger issues of of the origins human violence there's one big difference between humans and chimpanzees that we've seen in this hunter-gatherer chimpanzee comparison and that is that the hunters and gatherers are more likely to die than the chimpanzees are when they are being the attackers and that is because they take bigger risks and the evidence that we've assembled is that the reason they take those bigger risks is not because of anything hereand in human biology it's because a cultural system emerges where you get great rewards for doing something really daring in war and in that we think we see the origins of the socialization for military behavior that ultimately becomes really devastating once we cross the military horizon thank you Richard the your allusion to hunters and gatherers parks back to an ancient debate one that several centuries old namely what kind of violence do we see in humans in the absence of the contaminating factor of the of a government of the Leviathan a special Authority with a monopoly on the use of force which clearly doesn't give us a clear picture of people's natural tendencies to war and peace several hundred years ago Thomas Hobbes famously speculated that before there was an authority to keep people from each other's throats the life of man consisted of constant war a war of every man against every man and in such condition the life of man was solitary poor nasty brutish and short a hundred years later jean-jacques Rousseau countered that nothing can be more peaceful than man in his primitive State the so-called doctrine of the noble or peaceful savage now neither Hobbes nor Rousseau had any idea what what they were talking about they were speculating from the armchair but as Richard alluded to more recently there have been studies of the kinds and causes of violence in people who are not under the control of the state that brings us to our second speaker Sara Mathieu assistant professor in the school of human evolution and social change here at Arizona State University the local representative of an extraordinary collection of people here at ASU who study violence and human nature in many manifestations now Sara you don't study hunter-gatherers but you do stay the pastoralists people who keep livestock and I live largely out of the control of Central State my questions for you are who are the Turkana the people that you study what do they fight over and what lessons if any do they hold for the evolution of human violence and so the Turkana are pastoralists in East Africa and they are raiding other tribes for cows but I want to make a counterintuitive argument today that these resources the cows are not really the evolutionary explanation for their warfare and this is because in every animal species a group of individuals can group together and wage war against another group and take resources from the other group and this would be beneficial but such warfare is extremely rare in other animals and this is because warfare is a form of cooperation individuals have to risk their personal fitness in order to benefit the group and natural selection typically doesn't favor this kind of behavior what the Turkana warfare tell us is that human warfare is an evolutionary novel phenomenon even in the absence of the Leviathan as is the case in the Turkana humans are able to put together really large war parties the Turkana put together war parties of a thousand warriors and 99% of these warriors are not genetically related to each other that means the genes in a particular warrior has have nothing to gain from the success of another warrior on the battlefield yet the Turkana are taking tremendous risks in warfare 40% of the adult men have suffered bullet injuries and one out of five of the male children who are born are going to die in warfare so how did the Turkana manage this costly form of cooperation they do this through Moral Sentiments they do this through a moral psychology that has evolved in humans that makes us feel moral punitive sentiments towards those who harm members of our group so for example cowards laggards and deserters on Turkana raids face these moral punitive sentiments they face the moral wrath of their community members and this is what makes them risk their lives in combat and interestingly the scale of this moral psychology is such that it extends up to the cultural group boundary up to the tribe cultural tribe so for instance the Turkana think that it's a great thing to go to another tribe and raid their cattle but they think it's extremely wrong for warriors to go and read another Turkana territory even if that territory is hundreds of miles away and inhabited by Turkana that they may never see again and have never seen before so and this this particular scale of the moral psychology has a profound impact on how the Turkana live and die so most adult Turkana men walk around with firearms and there are plenty of opportunities for disputes to arise between these men yet only 1% of adult male mortality in Turkana is due to one Turkana killing the other another Turkana and 50% is due to inter tribal warfare so I want to conclude by saying that the cows are not the answer to Turkana warfare just as resources do not provide an adequate or satisfactory explanation for the prevalence of warfare in other animal species so to understand the origins and scale of violence we need to understand the origins and scale of human cooperation and in humans this cooperation evolved to be supported by a moral psychology that extends to include members of our cultural tribe even if they comprise a million people or more and it comes at the expense for self-interest and unfortunately it also comes at the expense of people who live beyond this cultural boundary I wanted to interrupt for a second the flow to remind you that we're actually going to do things slightly differently tonight from your point of view you have a different homework assignment than normal I hope that what you've heard already has begun to provoke your questioning and because of the nature of the two panels I want you to start thinking about your questions and write them down when we're finished up here in real time we'll stay up here we're going to ask you to have your questions pass down while we're on stage and we're going to spend three or four minutes going through them and then answer your question so think of questions while the speakers are ours are talking and feel free to write them down and also by the way I was told you were told not to tweet but feel free to tweet okay good anyone who is interested in understanding violence from a biological perspective is often accused of implying that humans are saddled with a violent brain or genes for aggression and that this is a fatalistic view and therefore something that we must hope and pray is not true let us hope that violence is just a cultural construction let's hope that it's just a practice like driving on the right or driving on the left that we could change if we wanted to but I've always thought that this is just a bad way to construct the understanding of the biology of violence that I think there is some reason to believe and we've heard some evidence from from Richard and Sarah that we that humans left to their own devices I do have impulses that can result in acts of aggression on the other hand the human brain is a complicated system and that even if it does harbour urges for violence that's not all it harbours there was an old cartoon image of a devil on one shoulder and an angel on another and a person always veering between the impulses toward violence and inhibitions against us there may be some evidence from the study of the brain that that cartoon wasn't completely off the mark and that leads us to our third speaker Adrian rein Richard Perry University professor of criminology and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and author of anatomy of violence the biological roots of crime Adrian does among other things scans of brain activity in criminals and other people I think this is the first paper in neuroscience that I've ever read where it says control group non murderers so Adrian what has your research shown about the different areas of the brain that both impel us toward and inhibit us from violence yes you know the origins of violence and here in my work and the work of other people it's you know we're not saying that you know everyone as you say is propelled towards violence for a biological reason but not all of us are violent and so the question that I've been looking at is you know what discriminate or what difference is there between somebody who will take a life and somebody who's relatively normal so what you see here is results of a brain imaging study where we brain scan 41 murderers and compare them to 41 normal controls so if you look at this you've got you're looking down on the brain here oh don't don't look down on me too much if you put it on there we go you looking down on the brain here and this is an example of a normal individual this is the front of the brain the back and the red colors and yellow indicate high glucose metabolism or high brain functioning but what we found in our group of 41 murderers is that there was a distinct lack of activity in the prefrontal cortex so the question yes the origin the core was I mean why is it that if you lack that activity in the prefrontal cortex why'd you have a poor functioning prefrontal cortex why are you more likely to kill will you go back to what the prefrontal cortex does and amongst other things it's involved in checking our impulsive behavior it's involved in regulating our emotional feelings so we all get angry at times don't we what stops us from lashing out it's that guardian angel on behavior that Steven was mentioning it's the prefrontal cortex whose which is keeping a lid on our runaway emotions but if that angel is asleep if the prefrontal cortex is not working too well then the devil can come out and people can get killed now that's jolly one piece of a much bigger jigsaw puzzle when we get to the brain basis to violence you've been hearing about the moral psychology and there's a brain area called the amygdala which generates in part that sense of moral feeling of what's right and wrong and what we've been finding in a way is that psychopathic individuals those who lack conscience lack remorse lack guilt they have a shrunken amygdala and we know that the amygdala is very important for giving us in part that sense of what is right and wrong so one of those intriguing questions I have is if these murderers and Psychopaths are not responsible for poor brain functioning whether it's in the emotional amygdala or the guardian angel in the prefrontal cortex here then one question is how moral is it overs to punish these offenders as harshly as we do I was involved in a defense of a man who brutally raped and murdered a woman in Denver Colorado I had in brain scanned and this is again you're looking down on the brain this is a group of normal controls showing good activation in the prefrontal cortex but this is the scan of the murderer here who raped and murdered this young woman and you see a distinct lack of activation in the prefrontal cortex I argued that it was a constellation of this neurobiological risk factor combined with a really dreadful home environment that conspired to propel this individual to be more likely to be criminal and violent the three-judge panel bought the biosocial argument that this social and biological conspiracy constrained this individual's freedom of will and he was spared the death penalty but I think one of the big questions in my mind is is that the right way to go I'm sort of a jekyll-and-hyde the dr. Jekyll inside of me says let's get to the origins of violence let's understand it and with understanding comes mercy but the mr. Hyde inside of me says buy into that argument and you know where goes justice where goes responsibility is that just going to be a brain excuse to let violent offenders off the hook is that just a slippery slope down to Armageddon and a lawless society so that's just one of those questions that I'm really tall with and then what are we going to do about it how are we going to change the brain to change violent criminal behavior that's a deep question you know but if this is going to sound fishy but fish all given to prisoners in two randomized controlled trials has been shown to reduce serous offending in the prison by around 34 percent fish oil contains Amiga 3 which is critical for brain structure and function so you know it's sound you know nobody likes to hear eat more fish fish for felons you know come on but I challenge laughable and there's no simple solution to the causes of crime but could that be one of the components and what would be so wrong about giving better nutrition not just to felons but what about the next generation of young kids who may be through having social risk factors and biological risk factors need early intervention and prevention against future crime so big questions you know if there is a brain basis to violence what does this mean about punishment what does it mean to us about preventing how are we going to change the brain to reduce violent behavior and these are just two of the thorny questions which amongst other things dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde inside of me wrestles with from day to day Thank You Adrian the fact that the brain has multiple centers that can ramp up or clamp down on violence opens up a number of ways in which the actual incidence of violent behavior could be changed and we can we know that we can change the brain not just by feeding at fish oil but because areas of the brain are connected to the eyes and ears and we live in a social environment that allows the brain to process information about the norms and expectations and values of other people and that's another route by which the we can change the brain my invocation of the angel and the devil is a little bit self-serving because I have written a book called the better angels of our nature i expression taken from Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address to reinforce the idea that a brain has an human nature has multiple components some of which Adrian literally displayed on that slide opening up the possibility that changes in our society can alter the temptations and inhibitions to violence that brings us to our fourth speaker Erica Chenoweth who is associate professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and the co-author of Y civil resistance works the strategic logic of non-violent conflict a book that it can I can fairly say has electrified the field of political science it has already won several prizes because of its surprising conclusion which challenges a certain conventional wisdom now most educated people know that sometimes civil resistance works can we have the slide please that ah not that one that one that there have been conspicuous episodes in recent history in which the power of nonviolent resistance has changed societies but most educated people will tell you well of course that works in civilized parts of the world like Britain and its former colonies like the United States but it's naive and romantic and idealistic to think that civil resistance can be a force for political change worldwide Erica can you tell us why you what your research has shown about that conventional wisdom and why it should be true that you obtained the surprising results you did sure and I should start by saying that I was one of those people at the outset of this study who thought that advancing the notion that civil resistance could work was naive idealistic and perhaps even dangerous but in my own experience I want to first just say what I mean when I say civil resistance civil resistance is a method of conflict not necessarily an ideology about conflict but it's a method of conflict in which unarmed civilians use a variety of coordinated tactics like strikes protests boycotts and other methods of action without directly harming or even threatening to physically harm their opponent and I was first introduced to this topic a number of years ago when I attended a workshop where a lot of the people there were making the claim that civil resistance could be in some sense of functional equivalent to armed struggle that is that it could be as effective or even more effective than waging armed struggle to achieve major political outcomes like removing an incumbent leader from power even a dictator or creating an independent territory so I was provoked and bothered by this claim which I thought didn't have very much empirical support and over the next couple of years a colleague Maria Stephan and I collected data on all known major nonviolent and violent campaigns from 1900 to 2006 and we looked at campaigns where there at least a thousand observed participants meaning they were already fairly mature in terms of their size and we looked at these popular movements that we're trying to either remove an incumbent government or create an independent territory now the reason we chose those two types of outcomes was because precisely of my skepticism because I thought that maybe nonviolent resistance could work if you're trying to establish you know greater rights you're trying to expand your rights establish labor rights and things like this but it probably couldn't work if you're up against very powerful authoritarian regimes for example so the ultimate outcome of this data collection yielded well over 300 nonviolent and violent campaigns for those types of outcomes and the the shocking finding is this that from 1900 to 2006 non-violent campaigns were more than twice as effective as violent insurgencies in achieving their aims and that in especially the last 40 years this trend is actually increased over time such that nonviolent campaigns are becoming increasingly effective and quite a lot more frequent whereas violent insurgencies are becoming increasingly rare and increasingly unsuccessful that is they're going out of style and in a major way so the reason for this we think is because of people power itself what we found when we drilled into these cases was that the nonviolent campaigns were on average four times larger than the average violent campaign and if you looked at them as a proportion of the overall population there were something like 11 times larger and they feature a much more inclusive civic spirit so that way more people are involved that means women children the elderly population people with disabilities are able to become involved in things like non-cooperation which can involve ledge lower risk to physical repression and it allows many more people to to be activated now the reason size matters is because once very large proportions of the population are involved they start to change the the risk calculations and the interests of say the security force is who might be willing to shoot at a single person standing in a square but when they look out over a sea of a hundred thousand people and by the way recognize their neighbors or children they might just pretend they didn't hear the order to shoot and once the security forces or economic elites or business elites or civilian bureaucrats withdraw their cooperation from the regime opponent it's only a matter of time until these movements succeed the last thing I want to mention about this is that we've also found that the way that these movements carry themselves out the way they fight really affects what these societies have looked like in the longer term so societies that are emerging from a civil resistance campaign even a failed one are far more likely to emerge with democratic institutions within the next five to ten years then campaigns where violent resistance was waged and there were also about 15 percent less likely to experience relapse into civil war within the next decade so we would never argue that civil resistance always works but it certainly works a lot more than its detractors would have you believe and it certainly works a lot better than its violent alternatives both in terms of the short and longer term thank you a remarkable story yes income combined with some of the other speakers at the weekend conference who showed that contrary to another bit of conventional wisdom terrorism doesn't work the failure rate of terrorist movements is spectacular their success rate is 3% at most and that may be an exaggeration if some of these results were printed on postcards and dropped from airplanes and balloons all over the world it could change history because it is often believed that violence is deplorable awful evil but we have no choice without a little violence you don't get what you want and that just may be factually incorrect ah in the better angels of our nature I began by saying this may be the most peaceful era in our species existence knowing that this is a highly counterintuitive claim I was emboldened to make it because I had a number of scholars of crime and war who had my back and among them is our last speaker John Mueller the Woody Hayes professor of national security studies at the merchants center of Ohio State University and the author of many books including overblown how politicians in the terrorism industry inflate national security threats and why we believe them and retreat from doomsday the obsolescence of major war John predicted the end of the Cold War before it happened it said that most political scientists can't even predict events after they've happened John's colleagues thought he was stark raving mad when he made this prediction and history has shown that in this and in many other regards he has proved to be correct I first became acquainted with John when he sent me a paper whose title was war has almost ceased to exist my question is John can you explain what you meant by that title what is the evidence behind that rather startling and counterintuitive claim and how did it happen well it's a very interesting process the title of the symposium is transcending our origins and I actually wasn't there at the origins but at this workshop we've got several people who either were at the origins or act like they were and what they what they tell me is that warfare was there right at the beginning and we may be at a position into which for least somewhat formal word affair is becoming obsolete by far the most important statistic it seems to me in the history of warfare is zero or near zero which is the number of wars that have taken place since 1945 between developed countries major country I call it major war this is really an amazing development it's centered of course on the developed world which itself is centered is young Europe and Europe used to be one of the most warlike it used to be the most warlike continent in the world and it's now slumped into this long period of basic peace it's a couple of countries they're fairly well known our France and Germany and both of them are filled with extremely clever people who are extremely good over several hundred years of getting into wars with each other there is really brilliant achievement in some respects they've now slumped into peace overall to the point where it isn't even something that's considered I use I've used the phrase sort of rationally unthinkable and sub rationally unthinkable Oh that may coming through now rationally unthinkable and sub irrationally unthinkable something is rationally unthinkable means you think about it and you said well the costs really outweigh the benefits are I'm not going to do it sub rationally unthinkable means you don't even think about it it doesn't even concern you consider you don't even sitter for example in case of dueling which is once very common you still have young men of the same test testosterone level and so forth they still get into arguments but it never occurs to them to challenge the other guy to a duel you could have legal - like with boxing gloves but it doesn't really even come up and a war between France and Germany seems to fit in fit into that if you one economist has calculated how far back in history do you have to go before you find an equal period in which the Rhine River which separates Germany and France remained uncrossed by armies with hostile intent you have to go back more than two thousand years before you find out Europe is rather different place in those days so we've had this is really a major achievement after World War Two there was lots of predictions that there would be World War three would be happening in another twenty years or so and it obviously hasn't happened in addition now over particularly over the last twenty years or thirty years there's been a considerable decline in the number of international wars as usually defined in fact since the end of the Cold War 1989 to the present date there's really only been one war of Sirte the old-fashioned variety in which two countries go at it over a condition like for example of a border dispute and that is between irit riah and ethiopia between 1998 and 2000 so even those wars there's they still exist but are really quite infrequent and there haven't been that many of them for the last sense really since the 70s in many respect finally a third kind of war is civil war and there have a lot of those however since it since the 1990s since the early 1990s where they sort of reached a peak when there's something like 30 of them 20 to 30 of them going on there's been a gradual decline to the point where there's maybe four or five at any one time now they said four or five too many but it really is a remarkably low level more and more over that relatively low level has persisted throughout this entire century it doesn't seem to be just a blip that we're going to bounce off of and go back up so that the news generally is pretty comforting in that area war is not obsolete it's still we still know how to do it we obviously don't have a world government that can keep it from happening again but it has slumped very substantially into a period of substantial disuse great thank you well the theme was transcending human origins and we've gone from our chimpanzee ancestors through tribal warfare to the brain and to some modern developments that are showing that we can we can transcend some aspects of our origins thanks to our own ingenuity and our own ability to hold out violence no longer as a contest to be won but rather as a problem to be solved that is itself is a gift of the human capacity for cognition for understanding for treating problems based on our understanding and which i think is one of the fruits that we can continue to expect from a scientific understanding of the origins and control of violence okay well thank you Steven I thank the panel for provocative and counterintuitive arguments which have the virtue of being empirically correct apparently and what I'd like to do now is while you're writing down questions I have one or two questions give you a chance to write down and then and then as I said we'll take a break and a short break will be trained here and then we'll answer your questions there's I think - I'll ask given the time that we began a little bit late Erica I want to ask you a question because in the meeting you said give us statistic that I found very striking which is that movements that had 3.5 percent of the population or more were a hundred percent effective in making change okay but it may cause me to think about the issue of given especially in in the first world the rolls of mass media and the and in some sense the control of mass media by a smaller and smaller group of people does that mean that it's more likely that you'll be able to that the people who want to buy buy change will be able to do that I don't think so I'm a little more optimistic and part of the reason is because civil resistance is costly action so it's we're not talking about people who decide that they'll go to their computer and click on a button and say yes I support this particular activity or this activism we're talking about people you know chaining themselves to to hardware and things like that and taking real risks so the the the movement from being complacent to being willing to do something to actually going out and prosecuting a conflict using high-risk civil disobedience I think is a major leap for many people which is why these campaigns the frequent are by no means the rule in terms of human activity I think that that means that even though the threshold for participation seems to be about three point five percent of the population tipping them over into success it still means that that would constitute 11 some million people in the United States and I just don't see that many people doing real civil disobedience unless it was a pretty serious issue well that gives me hope that the tea party won't anyway um but uh there's another comment I'm John I want to ask you it because I'm contractually obliged to ask this question so Star Trek imagines a future where we're in some sense war is over that some in some sense humanity has that's a phase do you think that's up it since we're going to go to the Future after the break do you think that's a possible future yeah I think it's it's perfectly plausible obviously you've had this is a remarkable change in Europe and in the developed world which has lasted you know it can't be a fluke it's lasted extremely long time and the decline of civil order is also really interesting essentially the pattern is worse is an idea you don't have to do it and the parallel I would draw is with slavery it was about is about at the end of the 18th century a bunch of people start jumping up and down and saying let's not do slavery anymore and they're taught to be totally crazy within a hundred years slavery one of the master institutions of the human race what it was eradicated basically substantially certainly from what was then known as Christendom the developed world and something could similarly similarly could be happening to you to to war about the idea that war is a really bad idea goes back a long way but the idea that war an organized movement to stop war is really quite recent about a hundred forty years about 1889 and started and it may be fallen they also talked about we got rid of slavery now we can get rid of war and I think it's substantially that's done it is not that people can't do war but they are just don't want to do it any more than they want to duel it just doesn't enter their calculations so I think the trajectory looks pretty good I obviously wouldn't say it's certain by any means but but slavery hasn't come back I mean there's forms of it and so forth but form of slavery and go to New Orleans and buy somebody just you know it's just inconceivable essentially so now if that's been gone a long time great ok with that hopeful view we'll see if you buy that and if you could bring down the questions if you have them well and I think we put on some music so you have something to entertain you and and we'll sit up here and in in four or five minutes we'll begin with what we'll spend about 15 minutes answer your questions before an intermission you

Channel: ShirleyFilms

Views: 168,231

Rating: 4.8523154 out of 5

Keywords: ASU, ORIGINS, ASU Origins, Initiative, Project, 5 year, anniversary, Great Debate, Transcending our Origins, Violence, Humanity, The Future, Lawrence M. Krauss (Author), Richard Dawkins (Author), Steven Pinker (Author), richard wrangham, Erica Chenoweth, Adrian Raine, John Mueller, Sarah Methew, Craig Venter (Author), Kim Stanley Robinson, Esther Dyson (Author), Eric Horvitz, George Poste, Randolgh Nesse, Black Chalk Productions

Id: vxMP4IAkgpU

Length: 47min 14sec (2834 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 15 2014