War And The Imperfect Nature Of Man By Marcus Epstein

There have been thousands of books on military tactics and the history of warfare, as well as philosophical tracts as to what constitutes a just war. Yet few books address the question of why, despite the horrors of war, human beings continually kill each other on a mass scale.

David Livingstone Smith, who teaches philosophy at the University of New England, attempts to do this in The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War. Smith uses the field of evolutionary psychology—the science of looking at social behavior and psychological traits through the lens of natural selection—to figure out why humans are capable of war.

Firstly, Smith disposes of the Rousseauian view that humans are naturally peaceful creatures who have been corrupted by modern society. He notes that anthropological evidence has found evidence of war as far back as we have found human remains, and that our closest related species—chimpanzees—engage in a form of territorial warfare themselves.

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