Why do humans go to war?

why do people fight how is it proven possible over millennia for nations to send out great armies of young men to fight great armies of young men from other nations over and over again is there something innate in human nature that makes this possible why does young men just say stop this I'm going home to read a book that's all right by you but and yet they don't they don't so that's what I'm going to try to get to grips with in this video we've just been sponsored by the great courses plus thank you to them but more of that later now aiding me in my quest is the fact that I've read the book oh yes the whole book why we fight by Mike Martin so it says on the cover I think the publishers being a bit informal there I think I would have called him dr. Michael Martin so who's either well he went to Oxford University got a degree in biology joined the army served in Afghanistan came back got a doctorate in war and stuff and now he's a researcher at King's College London in the department of war studies so I think it's reasonable to imagine that he knows his stuff and he takes a particular approach which I rather approve of I think it's right to look at this from the angle of biology what in human biology makes this possible now word of warning here if you are the sort of person who is thoroughly convinced that all of humanity was created in one instant by a divine being who created it in a puff of logic then you may have a tough time agreeing with what I'm going to be saying from now on but if on the other hand you're someone who finds it easy to accept the idea that we are animals we are part of the animal kingdom we are related to the other great apes and that we evolved over many many generations then you're going to have an easier time of it you also have to believe that there is such a thing as human nature which I am completely convinced that this is the case tribesmen all around the world no matter how isolated they laugh when they find something funny they cry when they're miserable their basic instincts are the same as ours and just as cats are different from dogs and we don't teach cats how to be feline and dogs how to be canine they're just like that that's their in it nature well I think that humans are born with an innate nature of course not your place of role but there is such a thing as human nature human instinct so what do people fight there are loads of things that are put forward oh they fight for religion they fight for money and and so forth but it seems that when you peer behind the curtain and boil it all down and otherwise mix your metaphors it comes down to just two things status and group membership or belonging if you prefer now what status status is good if your male status you could say is good for everyone but if you're male in evolutionary terms it's super good now 80% of all the women who have ever lived contributed to the current gene pool so looking at it very broadly if you're female then regardless of your status you're probably going to breed but if you were male it's not so easy at all in fact only 40 percent of all the men who have ever lived have contributed to the current gene pool most men died childless most men failed in the basic evolutionary mission of passing on genes so men really have to struggle to breed and the main thing which defines how likely a man is to breed is status high status men bred a lot and low status men usually didn't breed at all so status is vital for men so it is therefore entirely understandable that they would devolve instincts which make them seek status status doesn't just give you access to mates it gives you loads more things it gives you security gives you access to resources like food and it means that you're definitely a group member because if your high status within a group he's definitely one of us and he might even be the leader of the group which defines the group so no one can say he's not one of us he's the flippin leader of the group so status if you're male is terrific and when you say right we're gonna have a war then we're going to attack those guys over there you might as a lofty high status leaders say and the reason we're doing it is for a lofty ideal which I'm going to describe tomorrow but for the moment let's go on attack it could be the reason you're actually starting this war as a leader is for your own status reasons you're trying to boost your own status and perhaps you're trying to defeat an enemy leader and how can you defeat an enemy leader how can you that rival without the help of your whole tribe you can't you can't do it on your own but you can motivate your whole tribe to create a war and then you can defeat the top all that other leader and yeah will your status rocket and that will be good so it's fairly easy to explain why a leader might want to go to war for status reasons but for the followers it's a lot harder why do groups go to war why does the ordinary trooper go to war for status well yes you can raise your status that's true if you go to war you might prove that you're definitely a member of the group by because well if he served alongside us fighting against our enemies he must be one of us right so yeah that's one way to prove that you're a member of the group and become a mighty warrior and you can score victories and so forth and you might captures resources so yeah there are various benefits you can get from going to war but you've got to look at what biologist is called Fitness fitness is your ability to contribute long term to the gene pool pass on genes how can you survive and reproduce how can you become fitter by going to war do you become fitter by going to war well if you're an ordinary trooper the answer is no you don't the main way you can reproduce if you're male is to stay with your family with your girlfriend with your wife and with your support group back home and breed with that and raise kids that's the way to do it don't go off to war away from your main opportunity for breeding yeah you might get a captive girl pregnant but probably not and yeah it doesn't outweigh the advantages of just doing it the main way and if you go to war you're very likely to die and don't forget that if you're going to war you're probably young which means you probably don't have kids yet so if you die before you've ever had kids that's that's your fitness reduced to zero and if you get badly wounded that's also good I'm sorry but that's also going to badly affect your ability to pass on genes raise kids in the long term be attractive to two future mates so don't go to war because the drawbacks the lowering of Fitness from being away from your your main breeding opportunities from risking injury and death those could significantly outweigh the increase in Fitness that I've already described so we would then most certainly evolve the instinct not to go to war wouldn't we if you're a lower status guy you would not want to go to war because that is going to lower your fitness your ability to reproduce even more and yet that's not what we observe do we in fact at the beginning of World War one in 1914 the rush for conscription across all classes was so great that the British Army was turning away it was turning away everyone under six foot and just think people were shorter in those days now of course later on in the war they were getting short of manpower and they even raised Banton regiments who ironically so this had proved particularly suited to trench warfare but anyway at first everyone wanted to be on the action all the remember--the were chucking where their jobs and running down the road to the recruiting station Society didn't have to persuade men to join up if anything it's have to persuade men to not join up by putting the limiting limitation on the height thing so it seems that there is a drive men want to go to war why the camerado yeah yeah yeah you could see that that's that's part of it but maybe there's a bit more to it than that and Mike Martin himself reports this this tremendous drive that he felt in fact he even says that the biggest rush of his life that he ever had the biggest high the biggest yes he ever felt was when he was finally in contact with the enemy something him and his mates had all been craving they wanted contact with the enemy and there they were amongst their mates they got a great team together camerado the feeling of fellowship was so intense and every second was intense said that the hormones were rushing around their bodies our hearts were pumping things were happening this we're gonna do this that was the biggest high of his life and yet it's a taboo for him to say that what he's supposed to say is that the greatest moment of his life was when his first child was born when he got married or he met woman who was dreams or got his PhD or something else he's not supposed to say yeah I was killing people he was great I had a big gun you're not it's a bit of a taboo to say that you get such a rush from fighting and yet that's what he reported so that was presumably in his innate nature society hasn't told him to feel good when killing people he just did feel that tremendous rush when you don't if it actually he killed anyone but but his he was in action society and if anything brought him up not to feel good about that sort of thing and yet he did suggesting very strongly this it it was part of his innate instinctive nature to feel that way when he was doing that so why do they want to be a member of that team doing that dangerous job well one reason perhaps is that we copy our neighbors now if you have a society let people living together and you just give everyone the instruction copy the guy next to you then most of the time that's gonna work isn't it I mean if you lived your life with that as your default behavior you're probably going to do all right you look around and there's a society which is functioning people have got houses and the food is getting grown and so forth or so if you just copy what other people are doing then it's probably gonna work because society appears to be working um now of course if everybody does nothing but copy the person next to them then if anything changes that'll be a disaster you need about 15 percent of the population to be Mavericks if you like they're the ones who will adapt who will try new things invent the next improvement and so forth and you need someone who'll say hang on the king is in the altogether you need someone to do that but if most about 85% of people it seems just the sheep who just copy the people around them and you need about 15% of Mavericks to to make sure that the whole thing doesn't spiral into disaster so then it would be it would be expected wouldn't it for humans to evolve an instinct to want to fit in and it seems that we have it is part of most people's innate nature to not want to be the odd one out they want to be normal they want to be like everyone else they want to wear the same clothes why do we always aim sort of close all the time well we copy our neighbors and this considered actually taboo to wear outlandishly different clues dresses because they are a clue to the fact that you'll be or perhaps not one of us one of the group and playing the game and obeying the rules of society so yes most of us want to fit in and if you would design you are a god designing a human to designing a creature to live in large communities in towns and so forth you would perhaps program into that species the desire to fit in to be normal to copy those around so if loads of people joining up for war then maybe you should that's that's one reason you just just a copying idea but it's not enough van explanation on its own because why for stuff why are those other people joining up why is it the norm to join up and it does seem to be the norm in in world war one if you didn't join up and do your bit you're quite likely to be handed a feather or white feather to show that you were a coward and the person handing you that fare that was very likely to be a woman it might be your own mother so ashamed for her son was not playing his part in his society not doing his bit for the society the greater society the people around her that she wishes to call everyone else his sons are going to war but my son is not going to war go to war a mother might actually lower the reproductive fitness of our own son and try to shame him into going and risking his life on the front in World War one even knowing how dangerous it is she might feel such shame that she wants to be normal so much that she will to fit in with her friends whose sons were all at the front some of who have died she will do that to her own son so that's how normal it was right the way across society not just amongst young men but a grade the way across society took her to send young men to war so as in vengeance his vengeance fire did you could say that vengeance is a bad thing but actually does vengeance increase or decrease the amount of violence in the world you might think well surely it increases it I mean vengeance can actually manifest as violence and violence itself can be a manifestation of vengeance so yeah vengeance increases the amount of violence in the world but does it think of guerrillas now a lot of people will tell you that the guerrillas are so peaceful they want to think that so that's what they tell you that that's what they tell themselves guerrillas are so peaceful and they hardly ever fight and that's true guerrillas hardly ever fight the reason guerrillas hardly ever fight is that the male silverback gorillas are phenomenally violent if you live in a group of gorillas and one of whom is a male silverback you are one mistake away from being charged by an incredibly big incredibly angry and strong thing but this almost never happens it almost never happens because all the other gorillas in the group they know that that's what would happen if they stepped out of line and the male silverback is phenomenally strong and dangerous so they don't so male gorillas are so phenomenally violent that they almost never fight vengeance often comes from anger and anger is and emotion and emotions control us to a degree so if I think with my theory of mind that someone else if I did such and such a thing would get really angry and then perhaps go out of control and despite his rational nature end up punching me repeatedly in the face I won't do the thing so his potential for anger and potential for vengeance means that I don't do the thing so in fact there is no violence the more potential we have for vengeance the less violence there is in the world and the emotion of anger helps this it goes with the grain because anger puts us out of control we cannot be rational fools we have to be emotional acting beings because our emotions sometimes take over and knowing that we don't transgress no no no that's just going to get him annoyed and when he gets annoyed he becomes dangerous and unpredictable so I won't do that there are other apparently negative emotions that also have this advantage notice its advantage for group living if we all lived solitary lives as hermit vengeance wouldn't be part of our lives at all we would never have never have anything to be vengeful for but we don't we live in groups don't we we humans and we have negative emotions like guilt and shame well guilt guilt is the feeling inside of who I've done a thing I shouldn't have done that thing what if other people find out that I've done that thing they'll cast me out they'll cast me out in the wilderness they won't accept me as one of them anymore I will be alone oh oh I should not have done that thing right so you never do that thing again do you you never repeat that and having felt guilt of because you did one bad thing you don't know what it's like to feel that guilt and you do not want to feel that guilt again so something else you don't even do it once because you know that you would feel incredibly guilty were you to do it so you don't transgress which is good for the society as a whole because of everyone is holding themselves back from doing wrong doing things that would anger those around them then society ends up more peaceful so hooray for guilt and shame or this shame other than a sort of public manifestation of guilty of showing guilt to to those around you can you imagine if you didn't show shame so everybody knows you've done the thing the thing that was bad that has annoyed everybody and you show no contrition whatsoever people say good lord he's completely shameless right he's got to go cast him out send him out he takes the long walk so shame guilt anger vengeance these things actually in the long term keep groups together rather than breaking them apart and emotions tend to be contagious if somebody's showing fear they become fearful as well and that's actually again long term for a group living creature contagion of emotion is it's quite useful thing if one person spots some danger everyone is then alert to this potential danger now if you gain status and group belonging these are really good again long-term advantages now I can give you some food and you could be really good hunter you can go and shoot a deer bring it back and then a week later the food's been eaten or stolen or as gone rotten it's gone that resource has been used up but status and group membership they are probably lifetime things you get if you win the VC the the medal the Victoria Cross the highest medal for gallantry that Britain can can award that outranks everything you put that letter in front of all you can get a degree you can become a fellow of the Royal Society FRS you can become a member of the Order of the British Empire OBE but though ball has let us come after vc-1 the BC it's you are so to so-and-so VC and then all the other various letters after your name all the other honours and no matter what you do this is the rule no matter what you do you can never have a VC stripped from you you can have a you can be stripped of a knighthood you can be thrown out of the Royal Society but if you want a VC doesn't matter how many crimes you commit after that you get caught and convicted for you are still till your dying day somebody somebody VC so it's really worth doing a lot to win a VC because that is a permanent status that will be benefit to you for the rest of your life so by baubles our men LED or something like that said said Napoleon um perhaps that that goes a long way towards explaining why that be the case why are people doing such outrageous things sometimes apparently to win a medal that's just bonkers oh no actually evolutionary terms know that can pay off now humans are die or die morphic species dimorphism is the the difference in shape and size of between one sex and another so with some birds for instance even an expert ornithologist cannot tell you if that's a male or a female just by looking at it from the outside but with the other species the difference between the males and the female is cool awesome and with humans it's fairly significant males look fairly different from females and are quite a bit bigger and stronger a man is in manual strength about double the strength of a woman and upper-body strength at least about one and a half times stronger and here's an interesting thought experiment if you get average man and a hundred women of the same age chosen at random how many of the women would you expect to be stronger than the man he's an average man remember an average man most people if you ask them this they say of three two something like that the answer is actually none about one woman in a thousand is as strong as the average man so there's really quite a big difference between men and women in fighting ability and if that's the case then there's like a cast iron law in biology that you know that you're dealing with the species where one male will mate with multiple females and other males do not mate at all so males have evolved to fight other males that's why they're big and strong females of species tend to be the optimum size for the life that they live for the environment they live in for the food they eat and so forth and males tend to be a little bit too big it means that a lot of them die off of various causes they're more vulnerable to diseases and to getting cold or too hot or whatever but they need to be big and strong because they're optimized for fighting other males and humans to a degree are about that way we're about 15% taller than females so that's that explains why humans are dimorphic and we learned something about it okay right so we're dimorphic then this is probably in our nature and there are of course plenty of poly gynae societies but these tend to be very small societies tiny tribes living on an island somewhere might still be polygons us and poly gynae societies have a much higher murder rate much more violence and that's easy to understand isn't it because in the polygon of society one guy gets several wives so there are a lot of guys at the bottom who has stand no chance of getting a wife at all they will never breed unless they do something to change this situation their low status what can they do violence breaks out if there's one woman who's available to all the low status guys they're all going to be fighting each other really really strongly for that that one and that that vital resource for breeding so there's actually there was a study done this is chilling stat for you this is really chilling you may be aware that because of the China's one-child policy coupled unfortunately before it there with its cultural bias towards males because of their particular inheritance laws well people have looked at China there's a massive Empire okay it's not homogenous so they've looked at communities living around different bits of China and they've done the maths and have found that if you increase the male to female ratio by naught point naught 1% this correlates with a 3 percent rise in the murder rate yes now unless a three percent rate rise in the road right if it goes from from naught to naught point naught one expirations that doesn't mean you get a three percent murder rate and then you could do it again it doesn't work because imagine if you had a 1% rise that would be a 300% murder rate so everyone in the population would be killed three times over now it doesn't work like that you've got a very small number which gets bigger by 3% to become a slightly bigger very small number but even so even so naught point naught 1% increase in the ratio of males to females leads to a 3% increase in the murder rate yikes so we know then that we can I think we can be fairly confident that the violence in males can be traced back to the fact that the most but males don't breed and that there is there's a finite number of females available and what do men actually kill each other over here I'm talking more about murder rather than the war here so what why do men murder each other well murderers we can look at England England has extremely good stats on this because we have an unbroken series of court records and think this might be unique in the world actually going all the way back to 1300 so we can look at all the murder cases that go right the way back to there have been recorded and have survived so since 1300 95% of murders in England have been committed by men yeah that probably doesn't surprise you does it and 80% of those murdered were also men again not a lot of surprise there men tend to kill other men and it's usually young men killing other young men so of course one of the reasons that they were young was that it was the medieval period and people were younger on average back then so they tended to be poor they tended to be unmarried and they were murdering almost entirely people who were unrelated to them now around the world insane people sometimes kill people women sometimes kill people there that there are various rare groups like that who will commit the occasional murder but almost all the variation is in young men so there is a base rate that is pretty much uniform across the world for insane people and women and women killing people but some countries the young men are killing loads of other young men and in some countries and not so much and the the rate at which they do this seems to be correlated quite strongly with the size of the society I'll get onto that later actually so and why are they killing each other I want to get back to that they're killing each other what the actual trigger is usually phenomenally trivial you might say oh this guy was bragging and someone had to put him in his place he cheated at cards he looked at my wife funny there there are little triggers like that that that send people over the edge and cause them to burst into violence and to stab someone in the local tavern or whatever but actually and it's reasonable isn't it to say that there's an underlying cause they were actually murdering that guy for some other reason and it seems to be to gain status or to protect what status you have women on the other hand murder it seems for different reasons women murder in self-defense to protect their children it's pretty obvious why evolution would favor those behaviors and sometimes they murder over competition for mates they might kill a woman might kill the woman for stealing her man but they're not killing for religious purposes or for money and it seems that women don't kill the status because they don't have to so that's a perfectly good reason not to so men and I said it's mostly young men committed don't forget in a lot of a lot of the past a lot of men didn't live past 30 and not that many lived past 40 so in your 20s you are establishing a reputation and if you don't establish a reputation as a man in your 20s you're probably never going to breed that's the time when you've got to write the the hit album or get the really good job or get recruited by the really good football team and become the center for the score lots of goals whatever you've got to do the thing whatever it is to establish your reputation of course one way to establish your reputation is you can you can fight other guys successfully so it seems that guys in their 20s are really trying to prove themselves in their 20s and that is one of the reasons again why they might go to war you can prove yourself and establish your rep you're someone with whom to be reckoned now leaders as I was saying oh that it's easier for leaders they can it's easy to understand what I mean it's easy to understand why a leader might want to start a war because as I'm saying it's his way to defeat another leader so Cameron for instance when when Cameron was in power that was when Gaddafi was falling and a lot of people this is described get this is spread out of here Qaddafi was yeah well Cameron was saying to people we're gonna get Gaddafi and a lot of military people listening to him scratching their heads and feeling a bit worried alarm bells were going off sorry is this a personal thing for you David that you David want to kill Gaddafi is that what you see is the mission here because we're military people and we're not we're not into doing assassination and we're looking at a looking at this problem rather differently but it a load of people got the impression that what do you really want to do what David Cameron really wanted was to kill give a feed get Gadhafi it becomes personal one two one one leader gets another that's going to establish my rep I'm going to beat that guy and people often personify the enemy as an individual how many pictures have you seen of someone painting package for mr. Hitler on a bomb that they're going to stick on a on a bomber in World War two or stitch this fritz now Fritz isn't isn't any specific German but the whole of Germany becomes Fritz this is this one individual we and in our minds we tend to anthropomorphize the whole of the enemy into a single person the single identity and it seems a camera and wanted to just get Gadhafi banned if of course he got his victory that would boost his popularity at home he might feel it's very often said for instance that Margaret Thatcher and don't forget the Margret Thatcher was actually not a very successful or popular politician before the Falklands crisis but then when the Argentinians captured the Falklands that are the enemy has been the aggressor nobody could blame her for what the the fascist the hunter in Argentina did she could then approve the sending of a task force down there win a victory and it did a huge apparently it is huge because it used boost to her popularity at home and she won another election so a lot of people were really glad that she was in charge and not Michael foot what would he have done so the leader benefits at home as well the leader doesn't just benefit by conquering another another leader and knocking out a rival or perhaps capturing that rivals tribe and and increasing his domain but also are you gonna boost within the group for for a victory so yeah it did explaining leaders is easy now when large groups fight each other depends partly on helping the group is so since 1400 looking at all the wars that have been fought measure and measuring them in size by looking at the number of casualties of course some Wars we can't be very sure so you have to make guesses or some wars you leave out because you just don't know but where you can be reasonably sure of how many people became casualties during the war that's one way of measuring the size of a war so how does that correlate with how often those wars appear well if a war is ten times bigger it is 2.6 times rarer I know that's a rather strange way of putting it but the basic point is as Wars get bigger they get spaced out more in time so the bigger the society the bigger the war it can create but it does so less and less often small groups of people living the living next to each other have little small Wars very commonly and bigger and bigger and bigger groups have fewer and fewer and fewer fights and internally they're more peaceful as well so it's not exactly one to one race you have to multiply by ten to get the time to space out by 2.6 but there's still very definite ratio and here's the interesting thing it's constant regardless of the size so that's not just true of big Wars over the centuries it's it's war it's true of very very small skirmishes between a few right the way down to one bloke stabbing another bloke in a pub it works at every scale and overtime and over a number of casualties and if that's the case then the big explanations break down if you say our wars are fought by religions is to really what this huge area here is all this religion and very seldom fights this other area of a different religion and yet all these other people within it they're all the same religion yet they fight each other quite commonly now it doesn't seem to be religion that's causing these guys to fight it's not it's not the that group fighting another group something else is involved here no and I want to talk to you about testosterone now you've probably heard this it's the whole that makes a man a man if you like it responsible for instance for this beard so you can't say that testosterone is bad because it's responsible for beards and beards are good and that's a fact and you can't argue with science now testosterone you probably know makes people more aggressive trouble is that's actually not true testosterone actually doesn't make people more aggressive but we do find it in men far more than in women and men are definitely a lot more physically aggressive than women a man has about seven to eight times as much testosterone flowing through his veins oh yeah you may have come across the figure twenty times as much there is a confusion here men produce about twenty times as much testosterone as women there is some testosterone in women but not so much but because they are using it up so much faster than women the level in their blood is about seven to eight times the testosterone level of a woman anyway if you inject someone with load of testosterone you might make him very very Randy very very lustful if you like Americans say horny and this also explains why the name Randy is not popular as a Christian name in Britain the the but it doesn't make him aggressive or her aggressive testosterone makes you want to seek status which is a very male behavior and it also makes you a very keen to defend what status you have makes you perhaps a bit more touchy about your status there's a huge remember this made the news there was a huge study done I think wasn't Italy doing a really big football match and some massive Cup final somewhere and they they got people they sample people going in and they tell that ball coming out I think they were spitting slider into a pot and it was pretty easy for the researchers to work out which side someone was a supporter of because he'll be wearing the scarf have the face paint and the shirt and all the rest of it yeah okay didn't even have to ask you just record which side they were supporter of and then get the sample given number and then do the analysis later and they found unexpected as you would expect on the way in everyone had roughly equal overall so the two sides the two of the two different football teams supporters had roughly equal testosterone levels but coming out the winning side and the losing side on average had radically different testosterone levels but what which side had the greater the losing side not the winning side the winning side didn't have anything to prove they were just happy yay my team won now let's just go to the purple get drunk and go yeah with my mates it's fine the losing side had just had a big threat to their their status they were supporting the losers and they were not necessarily more aggressive but they were more more keen on asserting what status they had asserting that they hadn't lost status and that they were still men to be reckoned with so whilst they wouldn't necessarily kick off initiate some violence maybe if a load of drunken supporters from the winning side got a little bit too too boisterous and were bragging too much and teasing too much and just pushed it a little bit much and maybe won one guy accidentally fell on someone else that got misinterpreted then the much more touchy and testosterone-fueled losing side supporters might then kick something off so it doesn't make you more aggressive it makes you want to seek status that more that much more and now the prefrontal cortex of the brain is that part of the brain which deals with complicated social problems and it doesn't fully develop until the age of about 25 so if you are a young man and you're don't have a fully functioning prefrontal cortex yet it's people people are sorting out the nuances of how to behave and usually in their teens that that the big social problems the sort the sorting them out in their teens and throughout the teens and I haven't really sussed it until about 25 so yeah all the people are on some matters actually wiser if you've got a problem and you're related that low status man you're not all that bright maybe you're going to use violence as a way of solving that problem as the Machiavellian brain the the way of solving these problems without anyone's having to fight that you haven't learned that skill yet so that's one explanation for why young men fight they just don't have the brain capacity to solve problems any other way which is rather unfortunate now groups are safer than safer places to beat than being alone if you get cast out of a group you have no one else to defend no allies no one to advise you you've got you you you're responsible for everything now you are on your own now in the environment in which humans evolve the EEA the environment of evolutionary adaption to be cast out of a group of hunter-gatherers in say it might have been in Pleistocene Africa or there are loads of wool tie inners and tigers about sorry not tigers lions and because it's africa that's really dangerous to survive on your own you've now got to have all the survival skills just you you've got you gotta be able to do everything for yourself now maybe somebody else always lit the fires maybe somebody else always made the boughs maybe maybe you don't have all the skills necessary cuz you were living in the groups you didn't need all the skills necessary but now you're on your own and you have no support and you are fundamentally a social animal and if you find another group are they gonna trust you you've been cast out of one group why should they trust you you're presumably an untrustworthy person because that's why that's the most obvious explanation for why you were cast out of another group and for a man to be cast out is super dangerous he's very unlikely to be trusted by another group so if you're a man and you get cast out of the group as a hunter-gatherer you're probably never going to reproduce that's probably and you are now an evolutionary cul-de-sac probably so men are going to be terrified of being cast out from the group so they'll evolve instincts which are going to keep them in the group most of the time how can you prove that you you are definitely a member of a group well if you fight for that group that's that's pretty much proof oh he served alongside Assad we were storming that castle I saw what he did or no he's one of us you can definitely prove you are now the group by fighting with that group so that's another reason again it's to do with group belonging group membership now not only is it safer in a group because of the environment because of the the weather and and food supply that you have to deal with wild animals but it's also safer because groups sometimes fight other groups and the bigger the group the more likely it is to win a fight yes sometimes the smaller group will win but generally a larger group they might just having more bodies and it is going to win but also larger groups have a bigger pool to pick from to get a good leader and then more the more likely to be richer and therefore to have better resources and weapons and all the rest of it big groups over the millennia tended to beat small groups that's not difficult to understand so the general tendency in evolution is to want to be in a big group so there was a study done on hunter-gatherers which said that if you double the size of a group of hunter-gatherers it became about 15% more efficient you can imagine that one guy might be the best at four skills in a small group and when he's doing skill number four then he's not doing skills one two or three and nobody else can do them as well as he can but in a larger group you can you can divide you can you can division of labor can because so much more efficient the guys who are good at the various different skills because you've got so many more people who have got those skills can then all be doing at the same time everything becomes much more efficient if one person goes out and fails to catch anything that day in a larger group someone will have caught something and if it's a big deer that'll feed everyone hunter-gatherer groups get fifteen percent more efficient every time they double in size so so testosterone makes you seek status I think I've explained why that's the case living in groups is a lot safer I think I've explained why that's the case now why would you live in a large group what's the what's the hormonal mechanism that makes you want to well one of them is oxytocin this is another hormone perhaps you've heard of this and perhaps you've heard it described as the nice hormone it's sometimes referred to as the cuddling hormone oh when when the mother has has a baby she finds the baby so just wants to cuddle it and she gets a release of oxytocin and that's what makes them want to cut lists then she does cuddly and now she's cuddling her baby and that causes her body to release more oxytocin so you get a a feedback loop so oxytocin is the is the the hormone which greatly facilitates that bonding between parent and child and it extends beyond that as well as the the bonding in all sorts of groups so your your comrades in an army might be bonded together to some degree because of oxytocin the people that you see a lot of times in your local club doing that hobby that you love and you might have a degree of bonding with them through oxytocin it makes you feel comfortable in their and their company in their company and that is clearly a good thing for a group living creature so if you live in a big society oxytocin yeah that's going to facilitate that however I just like to point out that there is a flip side to oxytocin which perhaps you're not aware of you may have heard of it that it's the cuddling and the bonding and all things good lovely lovely lovely hormone but it's also the hormone that makes you distrustful of outsiders we are us they are not giving me an oxytocin hit I see my friends they are every time I see them I get a little bit's my friend haven't seen her for ages are yeah I get a little oxytocin boost I see those people I don't get it why don't I get it are they bad people I don't trust them oxytocin is what can be so effective that it can cause people to launch pre-emptive strikes those people haven't done anything bad yet but you launch a preemptive strike against them just in case they try anything bad and yes it's possible that you will end up one day having your head stoved in by someone who's just pumped up with oxytocin the cuddling hormone so not so flippin cuddly now perhaps so there's a flip side to it and tests have shown for instance that people will behave more dishonestly in support of their own group or against a group of who are perceived as outsiders if they have a higher level of oxytocin in them yeah so oxytocin the cuddling chemical and is the distrust the xenophobia chemical as well well I talk about groups what group what groups will people actually die for well it's not brilliantly clear-cut it seems that possibly some people will die for their nation whatever that is your nation might be or your tribe some people might maybe die for their race but I find that a little bit iffy or in the concept of races we now understand it's bit of a recent invention anyways it's so vague family yeah definitely we can be very confident that there are people who will die for their family or others like perhaps the other men in their own section who have become like a family and they will die for a family and if something can take the role of a family like that one section which is about eight men in the British British platoon that you live and serve and eat with that can become your family so maybe you would die for those and maybe a terrorist cell could possibly become like a surrogate family so maybe you could be persuaded to die for that family in recent centuries maybe there are people who have died for a political party but that's about it people don't die for their tennis club or their local library other other things that create an identifiable groups don't seem to move people to to kill or to die but sometimes an identity that's not particularly important to you maybe you might even openly declare its of no importance suddenly becomes extremely important when the proverbial hits the proverbial there's a sudden threat to groups of a certain nature in your area and you are now going to have to decide of which group of my remember we saw this horribly when the the former Yugoslavia collapsed so there were people who had been living alongside other communities Muslims and Christians and Serbs and Croats and COSO burns and so forth had been living alongside even that intermarried quite happily for generate and then suddenly when that society broke down they found that they had to pick a side and okay I'm gonna be I need a group to hide amongst for my own safety because if I'm on my own they think and a lot of those people come along and they think I'm with that group I know I'm going to die so I got a rush over there to those people who are hold my people i think well actually those people in the room and my sister know my under go to that group so you then remember that group or rather you were amongst that group but how do they know that you're really in that group how can you prove it well oh here's a Kalashnikov go and shoot those people who used to be your neighbors oh okay right yeah I suppose I'm really really with this group now so your your identity can suddenly be if you like activated from a state of dormancy and you have to choose a side which is which is pretty horrible and because big groups tend to beat small groups what happens is violence leads to bigger and bigger groups so one group beats this one absorb it shows what it can do and then it's powerful and then attracts more powerful allies er then team up with it groups become bigger and bigger groups will tend to beat smaller groups of this process goes on so groups get bigger and bigger and as groups get bigger and bigger they fight less and less often and they have less and less internal conflict and so what you get is less and less fighting so violence leads to bigger groups bigger groups lead to peace so violence leads to peace how do I got that right is that right I have to come back this cuz I think it's high time frankly that I talk to you about my sponsor my sponsor being the great courses Plus now what's the great courses plus oh come on you know the great courses class is a massive online resource it's an on-demand video streaming service with loads and loads of lecture courses and all sorts of topics as how to do this that near the cooking Photography and so forth a lot some more academically things like science and and history and if you're watching one of these videos you're probably interested in history in fact you might mean to know that there's a course on the psychology it's a human behavior College of human behavior is called and Ethan has a lecture on on war and family and food actually they've lumped food in with that one which is a little bit odd but anyway war family and food and that's one of the lecture courses that you could try possibly even for free because if you were to go to www.thegrape.com stroke Lindy page then you will find there details of a free trial offer if you're not already a member and you could take advantage of that or if you don't want to type in all that you could just go to the description of this video and click on the link which is much easier so why not you just do what do that do that and then you can go to the site and see all these amazing courses lecture to you but by August academics from around the country who are members of all sorts of high prestige universities and the like although actually this explains to people read the word professor is used very differently in Britain and in the USA in the USA if you lecture at the University you're a professor but in in Britain professor is a is the highest rank of academic it's it's much more than just university lecturer in fact most university departments in Britain do not have a single professor they may have many lecturers or all doctors but there might not be a professor a professor has what's called a chair at a university and occasionally very occasionally create a new chair so someone else can join the ranks of professor but yeah most departments in most universities do not have a single professor it's a really really high ranks it's almost called professor and they're British you should go oh and if they're American and they're called professor but not not it's not quite anyway beside track wasn't it oh yes the great courses plus so and III like the great courses plus partly because it's in - because it's a great fit for my channel and I've had quite a few quite some time quite touching emails from people saying oh yeah thanks for putting me on to the great courses placer I've really enjoyed the lectures but also it's about knowledge I approve of knowledge knowledge is good definitely prefer it to ignorance so the great corsets + click on the link and give it a whirl right now if a society is to be big and to last and to function it has five problems to solve you might think wow cat ma it's got to be more than five there must be a myriad problems for a society to solve and think that the drainage in the lower field and the fact one of our barns burnt down last week and the people who live over there are constantly complaining that they have proper access to the river ah there's such pains well yeah you do have a myriad of problems to solve but most of those problems are not going to be solved or don't have to be solved by the society as a whole that drainage in the lower field for instance the people who know about drainage and who are going to be working on the problem themselves they can do that we can we can let them get on with that society that problem will be solved for this society by people in that society but the society as a whole has these five problems to solve if it doesn't solve these five it won't be a society first problem is identity who are we what defines the group us and one reason you might need to define identity for example is that maybe your society as almost all societies do they look after the weak the infirm they when people are ill you need someone to look after them because we know they're gonna get better again when people are old they need a little bit more help how are we going to look after those people what we can we can organize it amongst ourselves but there's a cost involved and if someone from another society is not part of the group comes in amongst us and says oh yeah I want all that help thank you that'll be great are we gonna be helping that person because we're in your little tribe somewhere we're not responsible surely for all the weak and the poor and the infirm all around the entire world who who actually deserves to get the benefits of our labors and in this so who's who exactly is us it's important we need to know next one is hierarchy okay who's in charge who's in charge because if we don't solve this problem they're gonna get loads of people saying that they're in charge and that people say oh you're not the boss of me who put you in charge you're not and it's just the society is gonna collapse unless we actually know who's running things okay so you need you need to know who we are and who's in charge you can see that the society would breakdown if you couldn't answer those two basic questions next thing in in this book he calls it disease I'm not sure that's the word that I would have used for this category but anyway this is how do we behave so that we can all get on it's like what is the etiquette how do we prevent outbreaks of disease happening for instance so for it could everyone use that the loos are over there okay the loser over there please do not anyone go where we're really sick it's happened again someone shat in the woods okay there is no there's no in the woods okay that the loser over there they're clearly marked could everyone please obey the rules and just go there for the good of everyone because if they're going people gonna be here there and everywhere this society is going to break down because there's just anarchy frankly so maybe we'll have a taboo that's it we'll have a taboo okay from now on it's taboo to do that okay in fact I want you all to bring up your kids so that they are disgusted they they grew up with this idea that it is just disgusting to do that in the woods frankly and this has another benefit because if ever you meet someone who doesn't seem disgusted about the idea of going in the woods well then they're probably not one of us you've probably just detected an outsider so it's a it serves a dual purpose there okay so disgust is a good thing it'll keep everyone clean it means that people will go in the correct place there won't be the smell what with the disease and we're all getting on there won't be arguments okay so this one covers all the manners how do you greet people how do you treat older people younger people somebody else's children they're all the various manners that we have to all observe so that we can all get on what are the basic rules okay what else a trade trade is the fourth one we people got to trade fairly people who understand what weights and measures mean what a deal is how to honor a deal and so for you can see that the society that can't trade and come to agreements between people that's not going to stick together along and in this catching comes marriage as well which you could talk about as a as a trade between families within the society if people don't all agree on which way the dowry payment goes and how much the dowry payment should be and what happens in case of inheritance if one parent dies and then there are lots of kids and which family has to look after the kids unless we've got all that marriage stuff sorted out this society is going to fall apart so trade okay so that's identity and disease and trade and and hierarchy great and last but not least punishment okay so who has the authority to deal out punishment what is a fair punishment if people are just taking the law into their own hands Willie nearly left right in the center we're going to have all sorts of feuds erupting and it's going to cause all sorts of splits in society we're all going to fall apart so no we're going to have some form of trial some sort of punishment viral Authority only certain people are allowed to dish out certain types of punishment under certain circumstances to other people otherwise this society is going to fall apart so those are the five problems that any society has to solve and in order to solve them you can have mechanisms like for example religion maybe religions do well do they thrive if they solve those five problems fairly convincingly so God decides who's in charge we are us because we all worship God in the correct way and other people who don't worship God in the correct way they are them we can have a load of laws on on marriage and trade and so forth as there'll be weddings it'll be blessed by the church and we will trade yeah we'll best the market cross or something and punishment oh yeah you have religions love that so so this is one possible function of religions they are for making groups stay together that are quite big and if that's the case then a group that's really quite big is also an effective military power so if it's an effective military power people I'm going to take it on so it's stable because it has solve the five problems by various means perhaps a religion helping perhaps not and because it and stable it lasts a long time and nobody takes it on because it's too powerful and it does seem that the bigger a group is the more seldom someone does take it on because without saying earlier so there are problems though aren't there so a little bit of Europeans have a meeting in a nice palace somewhere and somebody draws a nice straight line on the map of the Middle East or Africa and this divides the territory between one European power and another in the 19th century but oh dear you know the problem there don't year there will be tribes and that straddle that border and so immediately you've created an identity problem for that group that group was stable that group was happy but now Oh who's us now we are they then now because some of my cousins are the other side of the border and I was going to visit them next year we'd agreed so ah and they're subject of different laws now Oh their inheritance laws are different because the laws of that other country are different and now I don't get what I was going to get when when when my uncle dies who's living on hurt you destabilize a society by dividing it up like that so that's a that's a problem for for our identity another thing with identity is it's got to be costly there's a weird thing and similarly with a lot of a lot of religions worshipping the religion has got to be very costly so that it's not worth faking if you have to give up loads of food and pray so many times a day and build a cathedral and pay a tithe and do all these really really costly things then you'd better be flippin committed to that and simply if you were to be a member of a group and show that you're a member of a group you've got to have the tattoo obey the laws learn all the manners learned the language languages are really complicated why are human language is so flippin copper-kidd you bought one major reason perhaps even the most major reason is that they are deliberately complicated so that we solve the spotting the household outside a problem is so difficult to convincingly become fluent in another language such that people can't tell that you're a foreigner that the language is a functioning barrier to keep people out of your group if they can't say the word Shibboleth properly they are them not us and you can have sacred values like that not in the woods thing it becomes a sacred value if you've grown up with it and if it's a sacred value - it's fundamentally in your nature you actually feel physical disgust at the idea of someone doing that then that's something you can't just trade away you can't just charge just for a yeah okay I'll find out I'll accept that just for the sake of a quiet life you can't trade it away because it becomes a sacred value it becomes a cost and it becomes unthinkable if if something is unthinkable or phenomenally difficult to fake eg being able to speak another language so fluently the people can't tell you're a foreigner then it works as a functioning barrier to a society now bigger groups are less violent and the trend has been overly over the years over the centuries for groups to increase in size now you can look at the size of right Europe in 1300 and I'm sorry in 1450 in 1450 in Europe there were 5000 statelets and I call them a polities political units capable of at least reasonably independent foreign policy if you like so not nation-states as we now understand them fully but something a bit like that there were about 5000 of them all these little principalities all these little dukedoms was scattered across Europe but 200 years later in 1650 there are only a tenth of that they were down to 500 by 1815 and the public wars have ended they're having a massive conference and they managed to get it down to 200 at that point and today there are about 50 states in Europe actually the the bottom of the graph is not today at 1953 was the very lowest point for a number of states in Europe a places like Latvia Estonia and Lithuania they were all part of the Soviet empire the the Warsaw Pact and everyone in the West was terrible a terribly frightened event so though they're the big the Warsaw Pact and and NATO and these were the big threats to each other so people banded together and kept their units big but now alton across yugoslavia has has exploded since then and czech republic is now separate from slovakia and so forth no longer part of chickens pocket right so the threat of the cold war it seems was one of the reasons that there were fewer states then and over that period the amount of violence has gone down a lot so in britain we have these court records that go back to 1300 and we can look at the murder rate and the murder rate in england in 1300 was 23 per 100,000 just to put that in perspective that's somewhere around the murder rate today in Mexico or Columbia so by modern British standards eeeek but actually by other standards you might say well actually not so bad although I should say that 10 and modern El Salvador is way way higher than that two or three times out at least and in medieval Europe the murder rate was way higher than it was in England but anyway in England we can say with Femina confidence that murder rate was about 23 and 1300 by 1600 it was down to 10 and today it's down to 1 so England's become much much much safer place to be over that time and of course the unit's that we're living in people used to regard that their world used to be their village and then after a while it made them I thought in terms of their county was their world and now we think of Britain or even thanks to the internet and cheap flights we think of ourselves as global players now half my facebook friends and not British so as the groups get bigger they get less violent internally and they fight other groups less and less often the world is getting constantly safer so how often did people go to war and become casualties is another way of looking at the same problem the study was done in this there was the worst offenders with the Cato tribe and they had the incredible rate 1,500 casualties per year per 100,000 people that's three percent three percent a year over becoming war casualties which is quite staggering this put that in perspective the average for a state since about 1800 is I've got it written down on a piece of paper where is it I wrote it down the average is oh come on 524 there it is now for ancient Rome to study in perspective HRM was about 250 the USA in the 20th century it was 3.7 and at the height of the war on terror in 2007 it was not point three four so from noir point three four other big modern state the USA up to a small tribe 1500 so it's quite clear that over time you know societies get bigger and violence goes down and the violence of the biggest society goes down the fastest so it seems that we are now if you like a domestic at species we have to live in groups if we were all evolved to live as Hermits we would have a completely different set of instincts but we don't we crave group membership we don't want to be cast out and if your tribe is going to go to war you have to defend that tribe and if you're not going to do your bit then you might get thrown out so you fight in order to stay in the group that is why young men fight belonging and that is what goes with the grain of human instinct and it seems that we have if you like self domesticated through an evolutionary process where the oxytocin hits we get and the way we can get those oxytocin hits by members of becoming members of online little groups and getting little a little little likes and so forth a little head of oxytocin we we have evolved a craving to be approved by those around us and to be one of the one of the gang and to live in a larger society and a safe society that will look after us we have become a domesticated species and in terms of safety why seems to be working because there are now loads of us [Music] you

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 645,709

Keywords: war, fight, human, men, man, mankind, nature, instinct, biology, evolve, evolution, people, warfare, battle, join up, recruit, reason

Id: DytBlcScGNk

Length: 66min 41sec (4001 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 31 2020