Sex and War

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

De: Malcom Potts, Thomas Hayden

Narrado por: Dennis Holland

Human beings have been battling one another since time immemorial. But why war and terrorism? Why are men almost always the killers, and why are war and sex so inextricably linked? Why do we kill members of our own species intentionally, when few other animals do so?

Sex and War traces the cultural and biological evolution of warfare from its prehuman origins through to our own times. In the spirit of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Potts and Hayden pull together insights from history, archaeology, psychology and biology to produce a clarifying new understanding of human history and current events.

Combining exhaustive research and rich personal experience, Sex and War shows that war, terrorism, slavery, and the subjugation of women have common roots deep in our biological history. Evolution is not destiny, however, and the authors, with the crucial contributions of Martha Campbell, show how relatively simple strategies can help the biology of peace win out over the biology of war. In doing so, they lay out a rational roadmap to make war less likely in the future, and less brutal when it does occur.

©2008 Malcom Potts and Thomas Hayden (P)2010 Audible, Inc.

Insightful and thought provoking

The way to Peace is right in front of us, if we would only think. At the crux is women's ability to choose when and how many children she should have. This should be on every Congressman, Politician, Religious Leader's list. Actually everyone would benefit by this thoughtful presentation.

New Perspective

It was a new perspective for me to link sex and war to evolution. It provides another avenue for hope about peace since it is no longer an evolutionary positive trait. How we overcome our caveman responses to events seems like the next step.

very convincing and thought-provoking hypothesis

The main hypothesis of the book is that humans evolved by selecting males that killed most successfully non-related humans from other groups ("outgroups"), while at the same time were most supportive and emphatic towards members of their own group ("ingroup"), which gave them a reproductive advantage.

This theory is well documented by hard data from biology, archeology, sociology and gives a concise picture of human behavior, which is applied to recent political events, such as the response to 9/11.

The authors promote the idea that empowering woman by allowing them to control the number of their children through access of contraceptives is the most effective way of war prevention.
Although their theory cannot be fully proven like models in physics or molecular biology, it is worth considering, as it explains so many aspects of human behavior.
One aspect that could have been investigated in more detail is "paternity fraud", where a woman gives a man the false impression that he is the father of her child. Several studies estimate this number to be around 10% (but there are studies with a higher and lower rate). This suggests that woman developed a strategy to escape strict male dominance and genetic traits underpinning this 'cheating' strategy will be in our current gene pool. Thus even if contraception reduces the number of humans on earth and their fight for resources, this world might not be as peaceful as the authors hope.

This book was very well written and narrated, enjoyed listening/reading to it and fully recommend it.

The violent primal drive in us all

In this book the author argues that our primal instincts of violence, dominance, spirituality, and propensity to gather into in groups with hatred for all others leads killing of our own species and the drive for war. It is in our genes but the author points our how we can evolve beyond those base impulses to strive for peace.

Important and fascinating

The biological science explained here provides important insights into human behavior and offers hope that a species for whom to be combative offered an evolutionary advantage may nevertheless succeed in overcoming those innate characteristics and achieving peace.